Joshua Marshall's latest series on the Italian connection to the Niger forgeries is must-read material. Right now, I'm wondering about the role played by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
The La Repubblica investigators seem to favor a "blame Berlusconi" scenario. Allegedly, he hoped to make Italy a world player again, and thus had Nicolo Pollari, the head of SISMI (the Italian CIA) shop the fakes to Britain, France, and the U.S. The hoax had but one goal: War.
But now Berlusconi says he begged Bush not to go to war. Ex-post-facto fanny-coverage? Perhaps.
Or perhaps Pollari did what he did at the behest of someone other than Berlusconi. I suggest that readers take another look at the second La Repubblica story; scroll down to the section on Ledeen. I believe that the parties who might now claim to be the victims of disinformation had actually ordered up the hoax, much as you or I might order a pizza.
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Bush, who will also meet Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Monday, is seeking to rebound from one of the toughest weeks of his presidency.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2005-10-31T011554Z_01_KRA104512_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-COURT.xml
Some more background on Ledeen
"Before popping up in the middle of the Iran-Contra scandal, Ledeen had built up a reputation concocting or spreading major disinformation themes"
More here.Excerpt:
"In 1980 Ledeen was also in high gear, allegedly again with assistance from Pazienza, as a propagandist for the notion of a terrorist threat requiring a beefed-up U.S. intelligence response. Given access in 1980 to a Czech defector from twelve years earlier (Jan Seina), Ledeen elicited from him the information, which Seina had never volunteered in his extensive CIA debriefing, that the Soviet Union maintained a network of terrorist training camps as part of its plan for global domination. According to Herman and Brodhead, Ledeen had Seina reaffirm the contents of a purported document on Soviet sponsorship of terrorism which Seina had willingly claimed to be authentic a decade earlier, and which was in fact a CIA forgery shown to Seina for the purposes of testing his credibility.
This document and corroboration then became central to the case built by Ledeen and his friend Claire Sterling to show that the KGB and Bulgarian drug traffickers had plotted to have the Turkish fascist Mehmet Agca kill the Pope. This story was of course augmented by the "confession" of the assassin, whose testimony was later discounted as not credible. This confession now appears to have been generated by P-2 SISMI agents linked to Ledeen, among whom may or may not have been Pazienza.'
What inspired Michael Ledeen's zeal on behalf of Reagan and the shadow network? European journalists have suggested that an unspecified "huge payoff" to the SISMI P-2 organizers of Billygate was followed by a payment of at least $120,000 plus expenses from SISMI to Ledeen in 1980-81, after Ledeen "sold old U.S. intelligence reports to SISMI at stiff prices." But there are indications that Ledeen had an affiliation, not just with SISMI, but (like his ally Pazienza) with P-2..."
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