that's correct, they were essentially the "middleman" between Iraq and Niger - that's why they have the motive (along with the american left) to discredit the story by planting forged documents as a poison pill.
still, I don't think Fitzgerald is going to be able to pull this off and get to the bottom of it all - too many secrets, Miller won't talk (if I were her, I'd have somebody tasting my food if you know what I mean), etc.
I read another article about the WMDs and the oil for food program. The article proposed that perhaps the reason that Saddam didn't expose the fact that he had no weapons of mass destruction was because he didn't want the sanctions to end. That's right, the sanctions were actually working to Saddam's benefit.
By keeping the sanctions going, it made the Iraqi people dependent on Saddam and mistrustful of the Americans, and really was freeing Saddam to spend tons of money the way he wanted and make all sorts of deals with France and Russia, all the while undermining the status of the United States in the eyes of the world.
In September 2002, the British government published a white paper in which it made public British intelligence's belief that Saddam had tried to buy uranium in Africa. A month later, the CIA received from an Italian source documents purporting to show that Niger and Iraq had done a deal. These turned out to be forgeries.
President Bush mentioned the British findings in his State of the Union address in January 2003. In his leaks to Pincus, and earlier to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Wilson claimed Bush knew this was false. The key sentence in Pincus' story is this:
"Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong,' the former U.S. government official said."
Wilson's official role ended when he returned from Niger in March. The CIA didn't get the Italian forgeries until October. Wilson had no access to them. He either was making up what he told Kristof and Pincus, or he had received an unauthorized leak of classified information.