The Niger forgeries and the CIA

Remember the forged "yellowcake" documents? The ones that started the war? The ones that Bush used to "prove" that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase uranium from the country of Niger? They were crude forgeries, immediately spotted as such by the IAEA when it got hold of the things in March of 2003.

emptywheel at the Next Hurrah, who is following the Libby trial in exquisite detail, brings our attention to this document, which arose from that trial. She alludes to, but does not quote in full, the most interesting paragraph:

In October 2002, an Italian journalist passed purported copies of a Niger-Iraq agreement of July 2000 for the purchase of uranium to Embassy Rome. These documents, which were sent to Washington via both CIA and Department channels, were not adequately analyzed until much later and were judged to be fraudulent. However, they appear to have added new life to the Niger/Iraq story. These documents appear to be related to, if not the actual basis of, the February 2002 foreign liaison service report that sparked original concerns about a Niger/Iraq deal.

emptywheel comments:

This is really big news. The CIA got the forgeries. But all this time, they've been saying CIA only got the forgeries through State.

Nope. They had their own copies. And still didn't analyze them until after it was too late.

Much of this was already reported in a Washington Post story published as far back as July of 2003 -- although, as emptywheel correctly notes, the original story held that the CIA got the documents from State.

Now, "big news" may be an overstatement. Still: Why would anyone fib about such a thing?

We should remind ourselves who the "Italian journalist" in question was: The frog-like Renato Farina -- code-named "Birch" -- about whom we have written previously. Farina wasn't just a journalist -- he was an Italian intelligence agent working domestically under journalistic cover. He later tried to pretend that the French were responsible for the forgeries, a claim soon blasted out of the water.

Here's where it gets intriguing.

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

The CIA, as you know, got into some trouble when it kidnapped an Italian citizen named Abu Omar. A magistrate named Armando Spataro led the investigation into the CIA men involved with this affair. Farina the "journalist" appears to have spied on him, using the pretext of an interview.

Spying on a magistrate is no small matter in Italy. Most observers presume that Farina did it on behalf of SISMI, the Italian spy agency. But Farina could just as easily have operated on behalf of the CIA. After all, the investigation targeted CIA personnel. One would be surprised if the Agency did not try to find out everything it could about Spataro.

If Farina functioned as CIA contact in the Spataro business, then we may fairly ask: Was he also an Agency contact at the time the forgeries made their way to CIA headquarters? Did CIA get the docs from him directly, and did the Agency claim otherwise to hide its link to Farina? Who paid Farina to write that inane "blame the Frogs" canard? (As you may recall, the lads at the Free Republic immediately received and publicized a translation of that piece.)

Here we butt our heads against the same wall we've encountered many times before.

Farina is clearly part of the neocon network. Only the neocons would be bold enough to try to base a war on such an obviously bogus piece of evidence. The neocons have frequently voiced disdain for the CIA -- they set up their own spook shop at the Pentagon to bypass those reality-biased pests at the Company -- yet some of them clearly have Agency-linked backgrounds.

What was the CIA's true role in the run-up to war?

I suppose that we must always recall that the Agency is not a monolith. Field operatives -- or former operatives, or their associates -- may construct grand schemes to spread lies and foment conflict, while analysts always insist on separating the real from the fabricated.

And yet the analysts did not do that job in this case -- at least, not in a timely manner. Why didn't the CIA tag the documents as forgeries? The IAEA was able to do so in less than 48 hours.

To state the matter more plainly: Did George Tenet and John McLaughlin know about (or approve of) the concoction of evidence in the run-up to war?

It should be noted here that in July of 2006, Justin Raimondo wrote that an (unnamed) source told him that the documents were forged by "CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf." However, the famed La Repubblica investigation insisted that the actual forgery was not done by any CIA personnel. (See also here.)

It's frustrating. After all this time, we still don't know Tenet's precise role in the origin story of the Iraq morass.