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.
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]