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Who produced the fake Niger papers?
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We now know the answer to this one.

Apparently, an Italian Agent working for the French government did that. His name is Rocco Martino and the details are published by the London Telegraph.

See here :

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/19/wniger19.xml

The Italian businessman at the centre of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear bombs has admitted that he was in the pay of France.

The man, identified by an Italian news agency as Rocco Martino, was the subject of a Telegraph article earlier this month in which he was referred to by his intelligence codename, "Giacomo".

His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirms suggestions that - by commissioning "Giacomo" to procure and circulate documents - France was responsible for some of the information later used by Britain and the United States to promote the case for war with Iraq.

Italian diplomats have claimed that, by disseminating bogus documents stating that Iraq was trying to buy low-grade "yellowcake" uranium from Niger, France was trying to "set up" Britain and America in the hope that when the mistake was revealed it would undermine the case for war, which it wanted to prevent.

Depends on what you mean by "produced"...Rocco just received the documents, he did not forge them. Read on:

Jacqueline, (Wilson's 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. It has been reported that she was a "cultural counselor" for the French Embassy, which some say is code for she was doing undercover work.

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.

IOW, he didn't lie in his first statement...he saw the documents.

And Fedora has contributed this:

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;

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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

Wuli also just posted a timeline thread asking the question about how Joe Wilson saw the documents before they were turned over to the CIA and other questions. It also validates the theory that he saw them in advance:

Joe Wilson's Lies, A Timeline - Who Forged the Documents?

Then if you connect the dots between the article,Was the Joe Wilson Valerie Plame Affair a CIA Plot?and the article New York Times: CIA Leaked Plame's Name, you come away with all the makings of French/CIA coup attempt. George Tenet was Novak's first source, he was the administration official that was described as "no partisan gunslinger" by Novak.

It also validates the article by Seymour Hersch (who we normally dismiss as a leftie moonbat):

“Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that [the Italian intelligence service] Sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.

“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.”

Source

The stranger that approached Novak? Larry Johnson, Ex-CIA. And if my theory is correct, Vincent Cannistraro, another ex-CIA agent, who is a security consultant to the Vatican in Rome, engineered the break-in at the Niger Embassy there, where the letterhead and seals were stolen for the forgeries.

I just hope Fitzgerald is following the path. The final nail...it was kind of funny that I have been "warned" that I should not pursue this research by someone in a private freepmail. Too bad...I ain't skeered... : )