Niger ambassador, Joseph Diatta
“I know [Wilson] very well also,” said Diatta. “And you know, something very strange—when he went to Niger in February 2002, I was myself in Niger and we had a meeting in my house and we spoke about this matter. So, it was not a secret mission.
Wilson went through the Niger Embassy to get a visa to Niger. The current Ambassador is Joseph Diatta, whom Wilson has known since the early 1970's and his first FSO posting. He got an ordinary visa quickly.
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July 20, 2003
FORGED DOCUMENTS UPDATE....So who was it that forged those Nigerien documents that started this whole mess? It's a bit of a sideshow, to be sure, but today we get a step closer to the answer. Apparently they came from an Italian journalist named Elisabetta Burba, although her ultimate source is still unclear:
Corriere della Sera, an Italian daily, quoted Elisabetta Burba as saying her source "in the past proved to be reliable." Burba, who writes for the weekly Panorama, refused to reveal her source.
"I realized that this could be a worldwide scoop, but that's exactly why I was very worried," Burba was quoted as saying. "If it turned out to be a hoax and I published it, I would have ended my career."
....Corriere della Sera quoted the journalist as saying she went to Niger to try to check out the authenticity of the documents. Burba told the paper that she was suspicious because the documents spoke of such a large amount of uranium — 500 tons — and were short on details on how it would be transported and arrangements for final delivery.
On her return, she said, she told Panorama's top editor that "the story seemed fake to me." After discussions at the magazine, which is owned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Burba brought the documents to the U.S. Embassy.
"I went by myself and give them the dossier. No one said anything more to me, and in any case the decision not to publish it was already taken — with no further way to check out the reliability of those papers, we chose not to risk" it, she said.
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September 23, 2004 by MSNBC
The Story That Didn’t Run
Here’s the Piece that ‘60 Minutes’ Killed for Its Report on the Bush Guard Documents
by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
snip
A team of “60 Minutes” correspondents and consulting reporters spent more than six months investigating the Niger uranium documents fraud, CBS sources tell NEWSWEEK. The group landed the first ever on-camera interview with Elisabetta Burba, the Italian journalist who first obtained the phony documents, as well as her elusive source, Rocco Martino, a mysterious Roman businessman with longstanding ties to European intelligence agencies.
Although the edited piece never ended up identifying Martino by name, the story, narrated by “60 Minutes” correspondent Ed Bradley, asked tough questions about how the White House came to embrace the fraudulent documents and why administration officials chose to include a 16-word reference to the questionable uranium purchase in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech.
But just hours before the piece was set to air on the evening of Sept. 8, the reporters and producers on the CBS team were stunned to learn the story was being scrapped to make room for a seemingly sensational story about new documents showing that Bush ignored a direct order to take a flight physical while serving in the National Guard more than 30 years ago.
"This is like living in a Kafka novel,” said Joshua Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly contributing writer and a Web blogger who had been collaborating with “60 Minutes” producers on the uranium story. “Here we had a very important, well-reported story about forged documents that helped lead the country to war. And then it gets bumped by another story that relied on forged documents.”
Some CBS reporters, as well as one of the network’s key sources, fear that the Niger uranium story may never run, at least not any time soon, on the grounds that the network can now not credibly air a report questioning how the Bush administration could have gotten taken in by phony documents. The network would “be a laughingstock,” said one source intimately familiar with the story.
The delay of the CBS report comes at a time when there have been significant new developments in the case—although virtually none of them have been reported in the United States. According to Italian and British press reports, Martino—the Rome middleman at the center of the case—was questioned last week by an Italian investigating magistrate for two hours about the circumstances surrounding his acquisition of the documents. Martino could not be reached for comment, but his lawyer is reportedly planning a press conference in the next few days.
Burba, the Italian journalist, confirmed to NEWSWEEK this week that Martino is the previously mysterious “Mr. X” who contacted her with the potentially explosive documents in early October 2002—just as Congress was debating whether to authorize President Bush to wage war against Iraq. The documents, consisting of telexes, letters and contracts, purported to show that Iraq had negotiated an agreement to purchase 500 tons of “yellowcake uranium from Niger, material that could be used to make a nuclear bomb. (A U.S. intelligence official told NEWSWEEK that Martino is in fact believed to have been the distributor of the documents.)
Burba—under instructions from her editor at Panarama, a newsmagazine owned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi—then provided the documents to the U.S. Embassy in Rome in an effort to authenticate them. The embassy soon passed the material on to Washington where some Bush administration officials viewed it as hard evidence to support its case that Saddam Hussein’s regime was actively engaged in a program to assemble nuclear weapons.
But the Niger component of the White House case for war quickly imploded. Asked for evidence to support President Bush’s contention in his State of the Union speech that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa, the administration turned over the Niger documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Within two hours, using the Google search engine, IAEA officials in Vienna determined the documents to be a crude forgery. At the urging of Sen. Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the FBI launched an investigation into the Niger documents in an effort to determine if the United States government had been duped by a deliberate “disinformation” campaign organized by a foreign intelligence agency or others with a political agenda relating to Iraq.
So far, the bureau appears to have made little progress in unraveling the case. “The senator is frustrated by the slow pace of the investigation,” said Wendy Morigi, the press secretary for Senator Rockefeller, who was recently briefed on the status of the FBI probe.
One striking aspect of the FBI’s investigation is that, at least as of this week, Martino has told associates he has never even been interviewed by the bureau—despite the fact that he was publicly identified by the Financial Times of London as the source of the documents more than six weeks ago and was subsequently flown to New York City by CBS to be interviewed for the “60 Minutes” report.
A U.S. law-enforcement official said the FBI is seeking to interview Martino, but has not yet received permission to do so from the Italian government. The official declined to comment on other aspects of the investigation.
The case has taken on additional intrigue because of mounting indications that Martino has longstanding relationships with European intelligence agencies. Martino recently told the Sunday Times of London that he had previously worked for SISMI, the Italian military-intelligence agency, a potentially noteworthy part of his resume given that the conservative Italian government of Berlasconi was a strong supporter of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. A French government official told NEWSWEEK that Martino also had a relationship with French intelligence agencies. But the French official rejected suggestions from U.S. and British officials that French intelligence may have played a role in creating the documents in order to embarrass Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The French never disseminated the documents because they could not establish their authenticity, the French official said.
Martino has told Burba and others that he obtained the phony documents from an Italian woman who worked in the Niger Embassy in Rome. He was in turn put in touch with the woman by yet another middleman who, according to Burba’s account, had directed Martino to provide the documents to “the Eygptians.” Some press reports have suggested the still unidentified middleman who put Martino in touch with his Niger Embassy source was in fact a SISMI officer himself.
Burba, who has twice been interviewed by the FBI but never gave up Martino’s name, said she had been cooperating with the CBS team on the story in hopes of getting to the bottom of the matter. But now, with the “60 Minutes” broadcast postponed, she is no longer confident that can ever happen. Meanwhile, she said she is fed up with Martino who has “lied” to her and provided contradictory accounts to other journalists.
“I’m disappointed,” she told NEWSWEEK. “In this story, you don’t know who’s lying and who’s telling the truth. The sources have been both discredited and discredited themselves.
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In 2005, Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA and the intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, when asked by Ian Masters if Ledeen was the source of the forged memo that claimed that Iraq had sought to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger replied "you'd be very close."[2]
In an interview on July 26, 2005, Cannistraro's business partner and columnist for the American Conservative magazine, former CIA counter terrorism officer Philip Giraldi, confirmed to Scott Horton that the forgeries were produced by "a couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy." When Horton guessed whether that was Ledeen, Giraldi confirmed it and added that the ex-CIA officers, "also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing."[3]
Burba, the Italian journalist who eventually brought the forgeries to the U.S. Embassy in Rome, got them from an unnamed Italian “security consultant.” His name turns out to be Rocco Martino, a retired SISMI operative.
It has sometimes been suggested in the Italian press that Martino himself is the forger. But he told us a different story — one that was corroborated by another participant in the handling of the documents. Martino told us that the documents came from a still-serving SISMI colonel, whom he named..."
Former CIA agent Larry Johnson has strongly implied that Ledeen is the one.
Another former CIA agent, former head of counter-terrorism under Reagan, Vincent Cannistraro, has answered the question of whether Ledeen was involved with, "You'd be very close."
The Berlusconi weekly "Panorama" published an article by Elisabetta Burba in which she tells her version of how she got the Niger documents, realized they were false, and on advice from her editor-in-chief, turned copies over to the US Embassy in Rome in October 2002. She asserts that she received seventeen pages of documents and a Niger codebook from 1967
Attached are copies of the forged Nigerien documents published in Italy 27 July 2003.
http://www.dcpages.com/forums/index.php?act=Attach&type=post&id=10923
When Burba met with the man, he showed her the Niger documents and offered to sell them to her for about ten thousand dollars.
The documents he gave her were photocopies. There were twenty-two pages, mostly in French, some with the letterhead of the Niger government or Embassy, and two on the stationery of the Iraqi Embassy to the Holy See. There were also telexes. When Burba asked how the documents could be authenticated, the man produced what appeared to be a photocopy of the codebook from the Niger Embassy, along with other items. “What I was sure of was that he had access,” Burba said. “He didn’t receive the documents from the moon.”
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A British Telegraph journalist in Niger recently reported that the former U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Herman Cohen, had told Niger’s president to stay quiet on the uranium issue. Diatta is quick to address the potentially damaging media report, pointing out that Cohen is also a lobbyist for the Nigerien government and frequently travels to Niger to brief the government on his work in Washington.
“I know Ambassador Cohen very well,” Diatta said. “Ambassador Cohen went as a private person, not as an official of the U.S. government. It is normal for him to go to Niger and speak about his job with my government.”
The former U.S. ambassador to Gabon, Joseph Wilson, is another key player who helped debunk the claim that Niger sold uranium to Iraq. In 2002, he was sent by the U.S. government to check out the uranium allegations, and he reported back that it was highly unlikely that any such transaction had taken place—a fact apparently not absorbed by the White House until after the president’s State of the Union address.
“I know [Wilson] very well also,” said Diatta. “And you know, something very strange—when he went to Niger in February 2002, I was myself in Niger and we had a meeting in my house and we spoke about this matter. So, it was not a secret mission. Everyone spoke about this secret CIA mission. I don’t understand why there is so much noise about this visit to Niger.
“Ambassador Wilson was requested by the CIA to go to Niger, yes, but he accomplished this for his government without any problem. He told everyone that he was sent by the U.S. government on the uranium issue, without any secrecy,” Diatta said.
“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
To clarify, these items were from the burglary in January 2001 of the Niger Embassy in Rome. Cannistraro's argument that it was Ledeen falls apart because the Italians (SISME) did not forge the documents and that is backed up by Martino's statements that he was employed by the French. Ledeen also issued a public denial and asked for an apology from Cannistraro. Also, one premise of Cannistraro's argument is that Ledeen was in Rome in Dec 2001. Well, Cannistraro was in Rome in Nov 2001, so doesn't that make him just as suspect? Then there is the curious factor about how the two people Cannistraro fingered for the actual forgeries...both of them, Alan Wolf and Duane Clarridge, worked with Aldrich Ames, the guy who outed Plame in the 90's. Coincidence? I think not. I have suspected Cannistraro for a long time, just a bad feeling I have about him, he's trying waaay too hard to point the finger in the wrong direction...unfortunately for him, he has three fingers pointing right back at himself.