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.
BuMp
The British case was not based on the forged memos. (In spite of the press' best efforts- coached on by people like Ambassador Wilson- to make it seem so.)
So was there really no deal between Saddam and Niger in buying low-grade uranium from them???
The US didn't say there was a deal concluded, though some intel we had received indicated the deal had been concluded, though the intel only indicated the uranium made it as far as Niger's neighbor, Benin. Benin is where uranium from Niger goes to be shipped abroad. You will note that Bush's speech only said the UK had intel that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa. He didn't say Iraq bought uranium, only that it sought it. Even so, this is a concern because one of our arguments for war against Iraq was that it intended to reconstitute its weapons programs the moment sanctions were lifted and the inspectors had given up.
Anyway, our intel we had that indicated Iraq's uranium was sent to Niger mentioned its destination being a warehouse in Benin. The Navy received this intel from a human source, not from any documents. It in turn passed the intel on to the CIA, along with contact information to reach the source for followup. Problem is, for whatever reasons, the CIA never followed up, never contacted the source. Even the much touted award-winning investigator Joseph Wilson didn't contact the source...
This Benin intel predates the forged documents and does not relate to them nor do they relate to it. It may be good intel or maybe it wasn't- either way, no followup occured.
Iraq has worked with Libya in the past on WMD (Libya has it share of Iraqi engineers, BTW... ). It is possible that Iraq may have purchased uranium and had it delivered to Niger in order to avoid the inspector's eyes. We do know that Libya did acquire uranium from Niger, and this is in spite of Wilson's claims that the security was too good for uranium to be smuggled. So why couldn't Iraq obtain it if Libya could? And is it possible that Iraq obtained the uranium, Libya took delivery, and both countries engaged in joint research and processing of it in Libya, out of the eyesight of the UN? Thee are reports that it did that.
Why am I NOT surprised?
This story is getting really interesting.
That tears it. The next time France gets invaded, the conqueror has to KEEP that damned country!
Wilson sheepishly admitted that wasn't true, among many things he said that made him a media celeb briefly.
That's the first rule of foreign policy - never, EVER help the French. The British Empire began to decline as soon as this rule was ignored.
America is still suffering from having ignored this rule in Vietnam, in the form of having to listen to Kerry drone on and on about it.
Regards, Ivan
I can see why Kofi Annan and friends are railing about the US right now...
Wonder what sort of stunt they are going to pull next.
I find myself wondering just when France started playing this game, which makes me curious what picture would emerge from charting a side-by-side correlation of the growth of the US/France rift since the 1950s (and especially since the early 90s) with the growth of French ties to Russia, China, the German left, Iraq, and Islamofascist groups.
What did Dan Rather know, and when did he know it?
Note: this topic was posted 9/18/2004. Thanks MadIvan.
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