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Everyone has heard about the break-in at the Nigerean embassy in Rome:
This story... begins with a burglary--the fifth-floor apartment in No. 10 Via Antonio Baiamonti in Rome’s Mazzini Quarter. The thick steel-plated door defends the offices of the Embassy of Niger. ... On a night sometime between 29 December 2000 and 1 January 2001, the usual “persons unknown” are frantically searching for something, turning the embassy inside-out. Papers are strewn everywhere and file cabinets have been opened. When early on January 2, the Second Secretary for Administrative Affairs, Arfou Mounkaila, reports the theft to the Carabinieri in the Trionfale precinct...
http://nuralcubicle.blogspot.com/2005/07/niger-yellowcake-story-italian-version.html

But the story of a more serious attack on US Embassy personnel in Niger a few days before the Rome breakin is not widely known:
Stars and Stripes
In December, a Marine assigned to protect the American embassy in Niger was shot in the arm during a robbery in the community. A civilian employee was killed in the attack.
http://ww2.pstripes.osd.mil/01/apr01/ed041501i.html

The Military AttachÃ© to the US Embassy in Niamey Assasinated by Men in Turbans, PANA 23 December 2000
http://www.friendsofniger.org/localnews/NewsArchives.htm

Master Sergeant William W Bultmeier, USA, Ret.Defense Attache Office, Niamey11 February 1949 - 23 December 2000
William W. Bultmeier was killed during a carjacking in Niamey, Niger on 23 December 2000. Bultmeier, a retired U.S. Army master sergeant, was leaving a restaurant with embassy staff members when the attack took place. A U.S. Marine staff sergeant was also wounded in the incident. Mr. Bultmeier had been in Niger since July 2000 serving as the Defense AttachÃ© System (DAS) Operations Coordinator establishing a new Defense AttachÃ© Office in Niger. Officials stated that the attack was not politically motivated and appeared to be a random act of violence aimed at the theft of Bultmeier’s four-wheel-drive vehicle.Sergeant Bultmeier was born in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. He entered the U.S. Army in May 1967 and served as an attack helicopter door gunner in Vietnam. After a break in service to attend St. Francis College in Indiana, he rejoined the U.S. Army in July 1971 and served in a variety of assignments in trouble spots around the world. During the 1980s, Sergeant Bultmeier served as an operations coordinator in U. S. Defense AttachÃ© Offices (USDAOs) in Brazil, Finland, and Mozambique. After retirement in 1990, He served as a civilian with the Department of State at American embassies in Greece, Hungary, and Mauritania. He returned to the DAS in May 1999 as a civilian contractor, and had served at the USDAO in Singapore prior to his untimely death in Niamey.
http://www.dia.mil/history/patriots/biographies.html

The attack occurrred on U.S. embassy staff while en route to the US Embassy in Niamey, Niger. But the articles do not exclude the possibility that the Embassy itself might have been entered. And materials may have been stolen from embassy personnel during the "carjacking".

Also reported by nuralcubicle was that Italian Intelligence was eavesdropping on Niger Ambassador Adamou Chekou, who was in charge at the Embassy when the break-in and forgeries occurred, and Wissam al-Zahawiah, Iraqi Ambassador to the Holy See and it seems they discovered their "hotline". That's why I suspect Vincent Cannistraro's involvement in this, he's a security advisor at the Vatican and a Joe Wilson defender.

In a Seymour Hersch article, Cannistraro and another unnamed agent state the exact route the documents took and Cannistraro actually admits that he called the CIA about the documents before they were proven to be false. This begs the question...just how did Cannistraro know about the documents before they were vetted? Sounds a whole lot like Wilson's slip-up about seeing the documents.

al Zahawie was also apparently clairvoyant:

JANUARY 2003 : (AL ZAHAWIE, "RETIRED IN JORDAN" - IS RECALLED BACK TO BAGHDAD, IRAQ; HE IS TAKEN TO MEET UN WEAPONS INSPECTORS) But last January, al-Zahawie was summoned back to Baghdad for what he had expected would be a request to help Iraq's Foreign Service plan for deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz's planned visit to the Vatican. Instead, upon landing in Baghdad, al-Zahawie was taken to meet with UN weapons inspectors. Five inspectors interviewed him in a 90-minute session, he says.

"They asked why I went [to Niger], why I was chosen, when I left Rome and whether there were any other Iraqi diplomats at the Vatican," he says. "But then they asked who had the seal of the embassy and where I had left it." That's when al-Zahawie got wind of some kind of foul play. Italy had handed over cables from al-Zahawie to the Niger government announcing the trip, and other documents had pointed to his presence in Niger. But the inspectors were particularly interested in a July 6, 2000, document bearing al-Zahawie's signature, concerning a proposed uranium transaction. The inspectors refused to show him the letter, he says, but al-Zahawie was sure he had never written it. "If they had such a letter, it had to have been a forgery," he says. The tell-tale signs of the forgery were quite obvious, he stresses. [* My note: How would he know the 'tell-tale sign' if they refused to show the letters to him? Shades of Joe Wilson's foreknowledge of the docs?]