Agent behind fake uranium documents worked for France

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.

Italian judicial officials confirmed yesterday that Mr Martino had previously been sought for questioning by Rome. Investigating magistrates in the city have opened an inquiry into claims he made previously in the international press that Italy's secret services had been behind the dissemination of false documents, to bolster the US case for war.

According to Ansa, the Italian news agency, which said privately that it had obtained its information from "judicial and other sources", Mr Martino was questioned by an investigating magistrate, Franco Ionta, for two hours. Ansa said Mr Martino told the magistrate that Italy's military intelligence, Sismi, had no role in the procuring or dissemination of the Niger documents.

He was also said to have claimed that he had obtained the documents from an employee at the Niger embassy in Rome, before passing these to French intelligence, on whose payroll he had been since at least 2000.

However, he reportedly also added that he had believed that the documents in question were genuine, and to have never suspected that they had been forged. "Martino has clarified his position and offered to deliver to the magistrates the documents which confirm his declarations," his lawyer, Giuseppe Placidi, told Ansa.

It was not possible to contact Mr Martino through his lawyer yesterday. Contacted by The Telegraph, Mr Ionta politely declined to comment, but did not deny that the questioning had taken place. The Interior Ministry in Rome, which had also expressed keen interest in the Telegraph article, refused to comment on the matter.

Mr Martino is said by diplomats to have come forward of his own accord and contacted authorities in the Italian capital following the earlier article in the Telegraph. They said he had written a letter of resignation to the French DGSE intelligence service last week.

According to an Italian newspaper report yesterday, members of the Digos, Italy's anti-terrorist police, removed documents from Mr Martino's home in a northern suburb of Rome on Friday afternoon.

"After being exposed in the international press, French intelligence can hardly be amused or happy with him," one western diplomat said. "Martino may have thought the safest thing was to hand himself over to the Italians." Investigators in Rome suspect that Mr Martino was first engaged by the French secret services five years ago, when he was asked to investigate rumours of illicit trafficking in uranium from Niger. He is thought to have then been retained the following year to collect more information. It was then that he is suspected of having assembled a dossier containing both real and bogus documents from Niger, the latter apparently forged by a diplomat.

In September 2002 Tony Blair accused Saddam of seeking "significant quantities" of uranium from an undisclosed African country - in fact, Niger. US President George W Bush made a similar claim in his State of the Union address to Congress four months later, using information supplied by MI6.

The International Atomic Energy Agency expressed doubts over some of the documents' authenticity, however, and declared them false in March 2003.

In July, the White House withdrew the president's claim, admitting that it was based on inaccurate information. British officials still say that their intelligence about Iraqi uranium purchases was supported by a second, independent source.

WIlson was also working on a private consulting agenda, taking advantage of the trip to drum up business with other mining clients (Gold, I've read, rather than Uranium).

In re Rocco's documents: documents from a government such as Niger has, are pretty crude by a western government's standards, making forgery-spotting a bit harder. To further confuse the issue, Saddam's boffins WERE buying yellowcake in Africa. Soooo?

As far as outing Valerie, who was about as undercover as Okra Winfrey, Joe Wilson did that on his website, and these two were bounding about the Democrat Convention announcing it to all and sundry. Hell, they published it in "Vanity Fair!" The lying SOS was proud of his old lady's "career" at the CIA. The worthless Clintonoid was using his wife's connections to drum up consulting business!

If only the GOP chiefs had the cojones to sack every damn Democrat when they win an election! Instead, over the years, the entire DC government infrastructure elite has become a Democrat evil elite, from top-to-bottom.

It's what the Communists used to call the "Nomenklatura." They merely lie in wait to destroy the Republicans, who evidently are always ready to prove that we are the party of the stupid, ultimately too stupid to trump the party of the evil.

So apparently their efforts are not totally successful as I am a lot smarter than they think

Those not so blessed have an equal vote. In fact, given the massive vote fraud so far ignored by the GOP, one might say the less gifted have more than an equal vote.

I will never ever vote for a democrat for any office again.

Not all Republicans see their duty that clearly. One hiccup in the economy, whether real, perceived, or manufactured by the MSM, and our control of Congress is gone.

The key difference between the Democrats and the Republicans? The Democrat leaders tell their people what to do, and what to believe, and they obey. The Republicans tell their leaders what needs to be done and our leaders DO NOT BELIEVE, and DO NOT GET IT DONE. IMHO, our Republican leaders are more mindful of Democrat criticism than they are of the wishes of the faithful base that put them were they are.

Not before the gj according to Wilson--he and Plame were separately interviewed early in the investigation.

Here's an interesting tidbit:

Rick Moran had commented on an earlier post of mine that WINPAC would not be happy that Fitzgerald was looking into the Niger documents - because his recollection was they had something to do with the initial confirmation of the Niger Intel. I give Rick credit for a pretty darn good memory - including the tip it was addressed in the Senate investigation report. He was very, very close!

Actually the forged documents were sent to the CIA in early October 2002, but the destination inside the CIA is redacted.

Here the documents stayed unchallenged until January of 2003, when the WINPAC section of the CIA was asked to respond to the Niger government’s December ‘02 claim that they had not made any agreements with Saddam. It was then that WINPAC realized they did not have the documents! It was at this time a new version was sent to WINPAC and the forgeries discovered.

What happened to the documents sent in October of 2002? Well, there is evidence that does point back to the CIA CPD (Valerie Plame’s group at the time of Wilson’s Niger visit 8 months earlier):

On October 16, 2002, INR made copies of the documents available at the NIAG meeting for attendees, including representatives from the CIA, DIA, DOE and NSA. Because the analyst who offered to provide the documents was on leave, the office’s senior analyst provided the documents. She cannot recall how she made the documents available, but analysts from several agencies, including the DIA, NSA and DOE, did pick up copies at that meeting. None of the four CIA representatives recall picking up the documents, however, during the CIA Inspector General’s investigation of this issue, copies of the documents were found in the DO’s CPD vault. It appears that a CPD representative did pick up the documents at the NIAG meeting, but after returning to the office, filed them without any further distribution.

And then there is this final tidbit:

On December 17, 2002, WINPAC analysts produced a paper, U.S. Analysis of Iraq’s Declaration, 7 December 2002. The paper reviewed Iraq’s “Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Disclosure” to the UN of its WMD programs and made only two points regarding the nuclear program - one noted Iraq’s failure to explain its procurement of aluminum tubes the IC assessed could be used in a nuclear program, and the other noted that the declaration “does not acknowledge efforts to procure uranium from Niger, one of the points addressed in the U.K. Dossier.” An e-mail from the INR Iraq nuclear analyst to a DOE analyst on December 23, 2002 indicated that the analyst was surprised that INR’s well known alternative views on both the aluminum tubes and the uranium information were not included in the points before they were transmitted to the NSC. The DOE analyst commented in an e-mail response to INR that, “it is most disturbing that WINPAC is essentially directing foreign policy in this matter. There are some very strong points to be made in respect to Iraq’s arrogant non-compliance with UN sanctions. However, when individuals attempt to convert those “strong statements” into the “knock out” punch, the Administration will ultimately look foolish - i.e. the tubes and Niger!”

http://www.strata-sphere.com/blog/

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