He does not. He mentions that claim as one of several which had been proposed to him. Read the article. I linked it in post #118 (I hope I did so on this thread. If not ping me).
He does not. He mentions that claim as one of several which had been proposed to him.
Quoting:
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.
“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’ ” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’ ”
End quote.
Thanks for the link. As I said, I consider this to be a bit outlandish, but this is according to Hersch's CIA source. His source seems to be pretty proud of it. So we have three versions. French intel commissioned them, Italian intel produced them, Niger officials produced them or merely handed them along... and now this, disgrunted WMD people did it.
In any case, this does not change the fact that rumors surfaced of Iraqi intent to do business. Genuine documents to that effect were given to French intelligence. Then fake ones were produced and handed to the Americans. The genuine ones were left unmentioned during the firestorm that followed.