Who is Cannistararo?
Wilsongate: Motive, Means, and Opportunity
Seymour Hersh reported that Vince Cannistraro had learned about the forgeries a few months after October 2002 through an inside source at CIA: “Vincent Cannistraro. . .told me that copies of the Burba documents were given to the American Embassy, which passed them on to the C.I.A.'s chief of station in Rome, who forwarded them to Washington. Months later, he said, he telephoned a contact at C.I.A. headquarters and was told that ‘the jury was still out on this’--that is, on the authenticity of the documents.”
Cannistraro is a former CIA operative who was a big bug in Afghanistan. He was generally ignorant of what the Afghan-Arabs and such leaders as Azzam, Bin Laden and Zawahiri were up to in Peshawar. He generally admits his ignorance and correctly states that the Arabs were handled by the Pakistani ISI (military intelligence).