The secret society and the Niger forgeries (revised)

Josh Marshall has done remarkable, ground-breaking work on the Niger forgeries and their movement through the murky world of Italian parapolitics. Yet he doesn't give his readers some necessary history.

In his latest look at the controversy, he draws from a recent (as-yet untranslated) article in La Repubblica on the forgeries. Marhsall correctly identifies the piece as a limited hang-out (although he does not use that term). Marshall:

And this one says the culprits are Rocco Martino, the Italian woman who works in the Niger embassy in Rome and the SISMI operative Martino named as his ultimate source. The motive, says Repubblica, was money.

I've never named the SISMI colonel whom Martino said he (indirectly) got the documents from. But now Repubblica has. So I will too: his name is Antonio Nucera...

My experience with this case, going back almost two years now, is that whenever damaging new information was about to come out on the forgery mystery, the Italian government-cum-intelligence agencies put out substantial new information about what happened mixed with disinformation aimed at throwing people off their trail. And when I say 'their trail', I mean the complicity of Italian intelligence in the documents hoax itself.

We must also discuss the complicity of Michael Ledeen, who has long-standing ties to the ultra-right "Super-SISMI" faction within Italian intelligence. "Super-SISMI" grew out of the fascist secret society P2.

Italian media magante and prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was, like Michael Ledeen, a member of P2.

From the excellent Wikipedia entry:

...in 1981 a scandal arose on the discovery by the police of Licio Gelli's secret freemasonry lodge (Propaganda Due, or P2) aiming to move the Italian political system in an authoritarian direction to oppose communism. A list of names was found of adherents of P2, which included members of the secret services and some prominent personalities from the political, industrial, military and press elite, among which Silvio Berlusconi, who was just starting to gain popularity as the founder and owner of "Canale 5" TV network. The P2 lodge was dissolved by the Italian parliament in December 1981 and a law was passed declaring similar organizations illegal, but no specific crimes were alleged to individual members of P2. Berlusconi later (1989) sued for libel three journalists who had written an article hinting at his involvement in financiary crimes and in this occasion he declared in court that he had joined the P2 lodge "only a very short time before the scandal broke" and "he had not even paid the entry fee". Such statements, however, conflicted with the findings of the parliamentary commission appointed to investigate the lodge's activity, with material evidence, and even with previous testimony of Berlusconi, all of which showing that he had actually been a member of P2 since 1978 and had indeed paid a 100,000 Italian liras entry fee. Because of this he was indicted for perjury, but the crime was extinguished by the 1989 amnesty.

Despite the dissolution order, the old P2 ties still bind. We can't expect accurate reporting on the forgeries from a journal financially tied to the very network that produced the forgeries.

Joshua Marshall avoids discussing this strange milieu for understandable reasons: The books and articles exposing P2 have largely faded from memory. Most moderate-minded Americans do the sigh-and-eye-roll routine whenever anyone mentions the words "secret society." In order to maintain credibility, today's writers must pretend not to have read the material published in the 1980s.

The La Repubblica partial hangout comes after former CIA operatives Larry Johnson and Vince Cannistraro disclosed the existence of an Italian Parliamentary Commission report on the authorship of the forgeries. Fitzgerald, we are told, has read this report. According to this story, the forgers were Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf of the CIA, aided by Michael Ledeen.

(A side note: Can we classify Ledeen as CIA? His resume suggests that he -- like Valerie Plame/Wilson -- may have functioned as an NOC officer. He certainly has long-standing ties both to P2 and to various players in the "rogue CIA" netowrk discussed by Joseph Trento in Prelude to Terror.)

I strongly urge readers to study both Justin Raimondo's piece on the forgeries, as well as Xymphora's recent take.

I can't agree with some of what Mr. X says. He refers to "the CIA" as though that organization were not internally factionalized. He also views Ledeen as "fundamentally an idiot." That's not my take on the man.

However, Xymphora echoes a point I've previously made when he suggests that someone within CIA (John McLaughlin? Just a guess...) set the Wilson affair into motion. X:

The CIA could have sent anybody they liked to Niger to investigate the situation. While Wilson was a logical choice, there were many other logical choices. If they were so deeply concerned about the undercover status of his wife, isn't it odd that they picked Wilson?

...Why didn't Tenet object to the sixteen words? He signed off on the State of the Union address, after complaining about similar words in Bush's Cincinnati speech only a few months earlier. Did he just get tired of hitting his head against the wall? Or was he very happy to see the sixteen words?

To which I'll add one further point: Why (assuming Raimondo's information is correct) did pros like Clarridge and Wolf countenance such a bad forgery?

Some might speculate that the Niger forgeries represented a variation on the gambit played on Dan Rather. Perhaps a group within CIA hoped to avert war by tricking Bush into accepting evidence later proven false.

Although I remain unpersuaded by that scenario, the idea does have a certain appeal.

Note: I wrote an earlier version of this story under the impression that Berlusconi owned La Repubblica. I remembered having read that he had purchased the larger concern which owned the newspaper. But I forgot the most important part of the story: The editorial staff successfully revolted against him. The paper is now the leading critical voice against Berlusconi.

There's an old Russian proverb: Memory is a crazy old woman who picks up scattered bits of discarded cloth while ignoring diamonds. My memory usually isn't that bad, thank god. Now, however, I must beg the readers' forgiveness for a serious lapse. I've had several significant "memory errors" since I started blogging, but this one is the most absurd and humiliating.