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
The alternative explanation is that they weren't forgeries, and that they were early exposure of French and Nigerienne uranium contraband operation that we now know did exist.
But if they were bogus, then you can't get around the apparent fact that the French commissioned them, and the Niger embassy created them. Then it was a French member of the IAEA that publicly exposed them as fakes once they were in US hands.
And yet the underlying story turns out to be very true.
If memory serves, it was Blix and Kofi in tandem who immediately knew it was an obsolete Nigerian Seal. Blix is a Swede and Kofi ain't French. Was there some one else?