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Posted on 09/18/2004 5:24:14 PM PDT by MadIvan
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.
Some of our intel did come from the Italian Sismi- but it was't the intel later provided through Giacomo through the French.
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self-ping
Giancomo wasn't in Europe. He was working part time at a Kinko's in Texas. What scum. The French fake documents, the Democrats fake documents, the only difference is that the Dems have better technology. They use Microsoft 1972 and the French use a person. Of course, their deception lasted longer than two hours.
This has been all over the networks in the two weeks since you saw this in the Telegraph. Just like the oil for food scandal.
I'm a bit out of touch. I don't have a television at the moment, as I'm on assignment in Arizona on the Navajo reservation. The location I'm at doesn't even have local tv service, lol.
No, we didn't rely on the fakes. But the MSM and the Democrats sure as hell did for their propaganda campaign. It was a scorched earth campaign and extremely effective. Just about everyone in the country believed it.
We've seen a lot of orchestrated propaganda campaigns the last couple of years among the media and the Democrats. Interesting that the French seem to be involved as well. You can bet they worked with the DNC in setting this up and breaking the story.
You fixin to move to Texas Ivan? You're picking up on the lingo there pardner.
:-)
Ouch! That must hurt. The French managed forgeries that were better than the Dems. How ever will they live this down?
If the Dems cannot even surpass the French, they have no business applying to lead this country against the terrorists.
The joke of it all is that Iraq's trade mission to Niger was not a secret, so I don't know why Bush bothered to credit British intel for information that is essentially public.
In 1999 Iraq sent Ambassador Zahawie to Niger to hold conversations. Zahawie is famous for advocating the development of nuclear weapons by Arab states. Since Niger is not known for many exports aside from uranium, since Iraq has previously bought uranium from Niger, its not difficult to draw conclusions.
Wilson claimed at one point that Baghdad Bob also made a trip to Niger, and Nigerien officials also claimed that they had been contacted by Iraqi businessmen.
Wilson, and Niger, claimed though that neither Niger nor France would ever be involved in illicit sales of uranium.
But of course, since Libya has given up its nuclear program, we now know that they were buying their uranium from Niger, and hence, France.
Why would France be investigating uranium sales they themselves would be involved in? The idea that they would be plugging leaks makes sense. The fake documents were handed over to the US by France, and then exposed as fakes by a French member of the IAEA. This had the effect of discrediting a story that was not only true but public. And it very nearly brought down Bush at a time that he was preparing a war that France very much wished to derail.
It doesn't take a long memory to recall that France had maybe a hundred billion dollars on the line in Iraq's oil industry, and most of the high tech weaponry our guys came up against was French built and of recent vintage, some of it shipped immediately prior to the invasion.
France is not our friend.
Well done.
Why isn't Kofi criticizing this complicity/coverup in nuclear proliferation and is instead ragging on Bush for removing Saddam? Oh, yeah...
Thanks for the ping!
So, this appears to confirm that the intelligence Italy did provide earlier about Iraq and Niger was separate- as advertised - not related to these documents at all.
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