The French Connection (Wilson and and a new watergate)

You never know with ouija boards, especially mine, which I bought in one of those kinda ratty antiques-and-esoterica shops in the French Quarter before New Orleans got blown away. I suppose I should be grateful that it works at all, but I had been trying for several days — intermittently, of course — to get to the late James Jesus Angleton, onetime chief of CIA's Counterintelligence Division, and it just wasn't working. So I wasn't even annoyed when, in the middle of the night, it started sparking and flashing, and there he was. Or at least there his voice was, that gravelly near-whisper I knew so well.

ML: Yeah, thanks for returning my calls. Have you seen these stories about the "Italian Connection" to the Niger Documents?

JJA: The ones that say you forged them? I didn't know your French was good enough (odd sound here, couldn't really tell if it was the usual cough or a spectral laugh)...

ML: No, no, not those. Anyway hardly anybody said that, mostly they accused me of schlepping them, not forging them. But I'm talking about a different lot: The ones that say that the Italian intelligence service never transmitted the documents to us.

JJA: Yes, I saw some of that here and there. Both an Italian parliamentary oversight commission and the FBI concluded that the Italian secret service didn't provide the United States with the infamous forged documents. They came through the State Department, do I have that right?

ML: A typical CIA fiasco, it seems. The documents were taken to the U.S. embassy by an Italian journalist (funny how there's always a journalist, isn't it?). One of the Lefties (who has a different version of the story almost every day) thinks the documents were brought to the Embassy by the guy who was peddling them all over the place. CIA people in Rome saw them, but didn't transmit them to Langley, and the agency didn't properly evaluate them until they were exposed as forgeries by the U.N.

JJA: That's the guy whose name sounds like a professional wrestler? Rocco or something?

ML: Yes, Rocco Martino. You're thinking of Antonino Rocca, who was the wrestling champion before WWF was invented. Skinny guy who bounced all over the ring.

JJA: Yes I did, and there's something in there that really tickled me, and I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.

JJA: The French connection is right. Rocco Martino wasn't working for the Italians at all. He had, in the past, but they'd ditched him, and in this little caper he was paid by French intelligence. He got them the contact inside the Nigerien embassy in Rome, and he peddled them all around, to the Brits, to our government, even to CBS News. He swears he didn't forge them. Nobody seems to know who forged them.

JJA: My question is whether the French were running one of their little disinformation stings on the United States.

ML: Well the moonbat Lefties — from Italy to the U.S., often working in tandem — have been saying for months that it was an Italian forgery designed to help President Bush justify the invasion of Iraq, and secondarily to curry favor in Washington for Berlusconi.

JJA: No way. I spent a lot of time in Italy, and believe me if they had decided to forge documents, they'd have fooled most of the world. Instead, the people at the United Nations Atomic Energy Agency figured it out in a day. No, if the documents were forged badly, it's because whoever did it, wanted them to be seen to be forgeries.

JJA: Think like a counterintelligence analyst for once. It's an old-fashioned sting operation. You're Jacques Chirac, okay? You want to embarrass the Americans and protect your buddy Saddam Hussein, right? The Americans are running around trying to find evidence of a covert Iraqi nuclear program. So, first you feed them some crappy information along those lines, hoping that they'll buy it, and then you arrange — through Rocco in Italy — to have these documents surface. The documents "confirm" the disinformation and of course also what the Americans want to believe anyway. The Americans launch their accusations, then it turns out that the documents are forgeries, and bad forgeries at that, and so the Americans look like idiots and the causus belli disappears. In one move, you've helped your friend Saddam and hurt the Americans. Terrific. Chapeau, and all that.

JJA: No, and it wasn't originally designed to stop Bush. It was designed to stop Clinton.

ML: You're kidding, the documents surfaced in the fall of 2002, just a few months before Bush's State of the Union speech.

JJA: True, and I'll get to that in a second. But the documents were forged earlier, almost certainly by 2000.

JJA: Because they weren't needed. Clinton looked like he might have been on the verge of going to war, but he didn't, so the documents got filed away. They were used later, as part of an effort to deny Bush that U.N. vote.

ML: But you think the French were trying to convince us to bite on a Saddam-wanted-uranium-from-Niger scam?

JJA: Look at page 76 of the Silberman-Robb Report. CIA had received three reports from "a liaison intelligence service" in late '01 and early 2002. "One of these reports explained that...during meetings on July 5-6, 2000, Niger and Iraq had signed an agreement for the sale of 500 tons of uranium." And the "liaison service" provided a "verbatim text" of the agreement. Got that? Not the document, but a text. They were keeping the documents to themselves, and they wouldn't tell us the source, because, they said, they were afraid of leaks.

JJA: Silberman-Robb doesn't say that, actually, although that's probably true. Everyone has assumed that the "liaison service" was Italian, but since the Italians did not have those documents in early 2002-nobody except the French and Rocco, the French agent, had them at that time-it wasn't them.

ML: In fact, the New York Times on Saturday quotes the head of the Italian service accusing the French of being behind Rocco and the documents.

JJA: Yeah, and what do the French say? They say the guy's remarks are "scandalous," but they don't deny it. Hah! God, I wish they let us have cigarettes here, I'd blow some smoke rings...

JJA: Haha. I've got eternity, what a ridiculous thing to say. What's the question?

ML: I never understood all the excitement over the forgeries. The president didn't refer to them in the State of the Union, after all. He talked about "British intelligence."

JJA: Bravo! The Brits issued a white paper in September, 2002-remember the documents arrive at the U.S. embassy in Rome a month later — talking about Saddam's quest for uranium in Africa. And they have said repeatedly that their information had nothing to do with the forgeries.

ML: Yes they do. And they also say — and the Butler Commission supports them, and Bush, on this — that the information was good, and the conclusion was, and is, "well founded."

JJA: So now you're going to ask why the whole world believes that we went to war at least in part because we fell for the phony documents.

JJA: It's because the big-time media keep saying it — it's a textbook case of The Big Lie. Say it often enough and eventually a lot of people will believe it — and the White House, amazingly, unaccountably, incredibly, confessed to something they had not done, namely accept the documents as legit, and base policy on them.

JJA: No. In fact, the information the president cited — the British intelligence — was probably accurate. If I had to bet, I'd lay pretty decent odds that the story of Saddam trying to buy uranium in Africa was true. But Ari Fleisher and Steven Hadley confessed that they had swallowed the sting. Hadley even publicly humiliated himself, although if I remember it right, it was about a speech in Cincinnati that Bush had given, not the State of the Union.

JJA: I think they thought they were protecting CIA in some weird way. Who knows? Ask them, why don't you?

I could barely make it out, and the smell of burning insulation was really bad. And I was only getting Angletonian fragments.

And that was it. That's just the way his mind works. Remember that he really hated the French, ever since he caught them breaking into some offices in Washington. Or was it they who caught him breaking into their offices? I can never remember.

For those that aren't aware of the author, Michael Ledeen, he is being smeared by ex-CIA agents who are pointing the finger at him for the forgeries. Too bad for them that they have three fingers pointing right back at themselves. From my files (on-going research):

My theory (#42)is that this was a collaborative effort by the French and CIA coordinated by Wilson. Jacqueline, (Joe's his second wife), was a French diplomat and may have provided the connections for Wilson to see the forged documents that were supplied by the French through the Italians. In other words it is possible that Wilson knew that the docs were forged because he was privy to the information that French wanted to discredit the British info on Saddam shopping for yellowcake and that Wilson's objective was the same. The French just happen to manage the yellowcake production in Niger.

Therefore, Wilson did not lie when he said he saw the documents.

Per a thread by Fedora:

French intelligence soon began a campaign to discredit the US case for war against Iraq. In 1999, French intelligence had begun investigating the security of uranium supplies in Niger, where uranium production was controlled by a consortium led by the French mining company COGEMA, a division of the French state-owned nuclear energy firm AREVA. At that time, Italian businessman Rocco Martino provided French intelligence with genuine documents revealing that Iraq was planning to expand trade with Niger. French intelligence took an interest in the documents and asked Martino to provide more information. In 2000 he used a contact in the Niger embassy in Rome to provide French intelligence with documents purporting that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger. These documents were later exposed as forgeries;

< snip >

Since it is now also known that French intelligence was trying to push Martino’s forgeries on US and British intelligence, as simultaneously the Democratic National Committee was planning to discredit President Bush’s Iraq policy by accusing his administration of manufacturing evidence against Hussein’s regime, heightened suspicion is cast on Wilson’s use of the Niger investigation to discredit the Bush administration’s case for war.

What Wilson Didn’t Say About Africa

Also, Rocco only "procured" the documents, he did not forge them. Fitzgerald went to Italy to investigate the Niger Embassy (in Rome) burglary...where the letterhead and seals for the forgeries were stolen. Ex-CIA agent (and coincidentally, an advisor to the Vatican in Rome),Vincent Cannistraro has stated that Alan Wolf and Duane Clarridge were the actual forgers, but his account is the only one available that I can find on the subject. He has also pointed the finger at Michael Ledeen, but Ledeen has publicly made a statement that he had nothing to do with it and demanded an apology from Cannistraro.

In addition, despite what the MSM is reporting, the Italians released a press report yesterday saying they had nothing to do with the forgeries:

Italy denies role in fake documents on Iraq

This was also backed up by Rocco here

Cannistraro's "theory" falls apart when you consider that he:

1) blamed SISME (the Italians), which has proven to be wrong

2) bases his assumptions on a Dec 2001 Ledeen meeting, when Cannistraro himself was in Rome in Nov 2001, which would make him just as suspect.

I also discovered that Cannistraro worked directly with Clarridge during Iran Contra, so he has alot of nerve bringing that up in connection to Ledeen. Another interesting tidbit (#47) that I discovered is that Wolf and Clarridge worked with Aldrich Ames, who outed Plame to the Russians in the 90's. Coincidence? I think not. Cannistraro trying to kill two birds with one stone to cover his own carcass seems to be the more likely answer. Equally suspicious is the Hersch article, where Cannistraro and another unnamed agent state the exact route the documents took and Cannistraro actually admits that he called the CIA about the documents before they were proven to be false. This begs the question...just how did Cannistraro know about the documents before they were vetted? Sounds a whole lot like Wilson's slip-up about seeing the documents.

Hersch also claims in the above linked article:

Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

A more reliable source, Joe diGenova claims it was a possible CIA coup as well. As does James Lewis in two articles, here and here

Two other names just crept into this...Niger Ambassador Adamou Chekou, who was in charge at the Embassy when the break-in and forgeries occurred and Wissam al-Zahawiah, Iraqi Ambassador to the Holy See. Seems Italian Intelligence was eavesdropping on these two and discovered their "hotline".

Did you read that carefully. Holy See? As in Vatican? Where Vincent Cannistraro is the security advisor?

Also take into consideration:

Wilson (as Ambassador to Gabon) had/has connections to the Gabon Chief of State, Omar Bongo, who was the chief African ally of the French oil company TotalFinaElf, a major beneficiary of the Oil-for-Food bribes. Prior to the Iraq War, they had a contract with Saddam's regime worth an estimated 12.5 to 27.0 billion barrels of oil reserves. Also he had connections via the Middle East Institute and Rock Creek, both of which are Saudi controlled.

Wilson's wife Jacqueline was also apparently a lobbyist for Bongo and it seems Wilson was pretty chummy with Saddam's weapons buyer, having dinner with him on the eve that Kuwait was invaded in 1990. She is now an advisor to Bongo, her picture from a 2005 conference can be found here That makes it very clear that there are connections to oil-for-food. No wonder Wilson can afford his lifestyle.

Source: Posts 21 and 22

piasa just posted this on another thread:

JANUARY 2003 : (AL ZAHAWIE, "RETIRED IN JORDAN" - IS RECALLED BACK TO BAGHDAD, IRAQ; HE IS TAKEN TO MEET UN WEAPONS INSPECTORS) But last January, al-Zahawie was summoned back to Baghdad for what he had expected would be a request to help Iraq's Foreign Service plan for deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz's planned visit to the Vatican. Instead, upon landing in Baghdad, al-Zahawie was taken to meet with UN weapons inspectors. Five inspectors interviewed him in a 90-minute session, he says.
"They asked why I went [to Niger], why I was chosen, when I left Rome and whether there were any other Iraqi diplomats at the Vatican," he says. "But then they asked who had the seal of the embassy and where I had left it." That's when al-Zahawie got wind of some kind of foul play. Italy had handed over cables from al-Zahawie to the Niger government announcing the trip, and other documents had pointed to his presence in Niger. But the inspectors were particularly interested in a July 6, 2000, document bearing al-Zahawie's signature, concerning a proposed uranium transaction. The inspectors refused to show him the letter, he says, but al-Zahawie was sure he had never written it. "If they had such a letter, it had to have been a forgery," he says. The tell-tale signs of the forgery were quite obvious, he stresses. [* My note: How would he know the 'tell-tale sign' if they refused to show the letters to him? Shades of Joe Wilson's foreknowledge of the docs?]

And Cannistraro's as well. Geez...al-Zahwawie (from the Niger Embassy in Rome where the break-in occurred), Wilson and Cannistraro all seem to have knowledge of something they couldn't have possibly seen at the time...coincidence? Or collusion?

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