Posted on 07/31/2004 6:19:44 PM PDT by Shermy
THE Sunday Times has tracked down a mysterious middleman who was a key figure in the notorious Niger uranium hoax before the Iraq war, writes Nicholas Rufford.
Speaking to a reporter in a cafe in Brussels last week, he claimed he had been an unwitting dupe in the scam, which embarrassed both Tony Blair and George W Bush over Saddam Hussein’s phantom weapons of mass destruction.
The middleman, an Italian who uses the name Giacomo, is a small-time tipster said to have worked for Italy’s armed forces and intelligence services. He says Sismi, the Italian foreign intelligence service, used him to disseminate fake documents purporting to show Saddam had tried to buy uranium for nuclear bombs from Niger.
“I received a call from a former colleague in Sismi,” Giacomo said. “I was told a woman in the Niger embassy in Rome had a gift for me. I met her and she gave me documents. Sismi wanted me to pass on the documents but they didn’t want anyone to know they had been involved.”
He came into possession of a bundle of telexes, letters and contracts that appeared to show Saddam had struck a deal with Niger for 500 tons of uranium ore, enough when refined to make several weapons.
Giacomo said he regretted the hoax but had believed the documents were genuine when he passed them to intelligence contacts and a journalist. The hoax had far-reaching effects. Presenting his dossier on Iraq’s weapons in September 2002, Blair accused Saddam of seeking “significant quantities of uranium from Africa”.
Bush reiterated the charge in his state of the union speech. When Giacomo’s documents were discredited by the International Atomic Energy Agency last year, George Tenet, then director of the CIA, apologised.
The British government and MI6 claim, however, they have independent evidence of Iraq’s “Niger connection”.
Haven't we read this before, a LONG, LONG time ago?
someone under a false name.
"small-time tipster"
said to have worked (past tense)......
The Press Poodles will believe just about any flimsy thing if it fits with their DNC-supplied story line. What saps.
an anti-coalition newspaper interviews a nearly-anonymous
person (who goes by a single-name alias), and THIS is
proof the coalition lied?
The MSM will love it
The fact that forged documents existed does not diminish the credibility of the original story. It was a fairly common practice by the KGB to mask and discredit legitimate issues by releasing forged documents. In some ways this actually bolsters the case.
This is not the latest at all. This is an old, old story, reheated and served up as a new story.
This was around, when they first said Bush lied about the Niger story, that it was debunked by the time he said it in the SOTU.
But apart from this, there has been a lot of OTHER evidence substantiating that Saddam did indeed try to buy uranium from Africa, including Niger.
Irrelevent and unnecessary data found to be even less useful. This is not a story really. BFD.
And one is supposed to assume that several other 'small-time tipsters' confirmed and provided second sources for this same bogus information?
Sorry, been there, the best and most desired intelligence in the world has not a chance unless it can be verified and NOT traced to the same source. Even a similar or sometimes colateral source should leave it suspect.
Note: "suspect" would not deny its being acted on, but it would not be quoted in a speech intended to be heard around the world.
“No, no. I don’t think so,” Diatta said. “Our prime minister said to a journalist from the British Telegraph that it was impossible that the forgery was made in our embassy in Rome,” he added, referring to the Embassy of Niger in Rome, which has been mentioned as a suspect because the first page of the forged documents appears to be a genuine letter from the embassy advising Niger’s government of a visit to the country by the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican. --- "Uranium Controversy Raises Niger’s Profile," by Sean O’Driscoll, Sept 2003, http://www.washdiplomat.com/03-09/a2_03_09.html as retrieved on Jun 14, 2004 10:48:06 GMT by Google
Interesting comments, thanks.
"As usual they bury the lead:"
Naturally! They've been doing that pretty consistently with this whole African uranium story. In fact in a way the story itself has been created by burying the lead, in terms of the press insisting that Blair and Bush's African uranium references referred to the documents Wilson keeps harping on.
Good point. Curiously (considering the forgeries' Italian connection), there was a historical case of something like that in the Italian OSS/CIA with the Vessel forgery case, which might make for a good case study to compare/contrast with the present case:
ARTIFICE: James Angleton and X-2 Operations In Italy
The rough outlines of the VESSEL case are well known to students of the OSS.91 In the fall of 1944, Col. Vincent Scamporino, the head of the Secret Intelligence Branch (SI) of the OSS in the Mediterranean, began to receive reports from a man who purported to be in touch with an information service in the Vatican. The reports drew the interest of policymakers in Washington, among whom was President Franklin d. Roosevelt, who took the reports to be reproductions of actual Vatican documents. When the documents turned out to be fabrications, the OSS suffered some humiliation.
What is less well known is that this humiliation might have been avoided had bureaucratic politics not prevented James Angleton from assuming control of this operation from the start. Shortly after Scamporino had brought his first Vatican reports, James Angleton began to receive nearly identical reports from his own cut-out, or intermediary, Fillippo Setaccioli, alias DUSTY.
[SNIP]
If accurate that might fit with the theory that the forgery was intended to discredit some genuine information.
Yes, this looks like they're reconstituting an oldie but moldie story, some of which (if memory serves) was been discredited.
Such as appears to still be missing no matter what they say about cooperation between the agencies.
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