In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.
Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.
Pollari told the newspaper that since 2001, when he became Sismi's director, the only member of the U.S. administration he has met officially is his former CIA counterpart George Tenet. But the Italian newspaper quotes a high-ranking Italian Sismi source asserting a meeting with Hadley. La Repubblica also quotes a Bush administration official saying, "I can confirm that on September 9, 2002, General Nicolo Pollari met Stephen Hadley."
The paper goes on to note the significance of that date, highlighting the appearance of a little-noticed story in Panorama a weekly magazine owned by Italian Prime Minister and Bush ally Silvio Berlusconi, that was published three days after Pollari's meeting with Hadley. The magazine's September 12, 2002, issue claimed that Iraq's intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, had acquired 500 tons of uranium from Nigeria through a Jordanian intermediary. (While this September 2002 Panorama report mentioned Nigeria, the forgeries another Panorama reporter would be proferred less than a month later purportedly concerned Niger.)
The Sismi chief's previously undisclosed meeting with Hadley, who was promoted earlier this year to national security adviser, occurred one month before a murky series of events culminated in the U.S. government obtaining copies of the Niger forgeries.
The forged documents were cabled from the U.S. embassy in Rome to Washington after being delivered to embassy officials by Elisabetta Burba, a reporter for Panorama. She had received the papers from an Italian middleman named Rocco Martino. Burba never wrote a story about those documents. Instead her editor, Berlusconi favorite Carlo Rossella, ordered her to bring them immediately to the U.S. embassy.
Although Sismi's involvement in promoting the Niger yellowcake tale to U.S. and British intelligence has been previously reported, the series in La Repubblica includes many new details, including the name of a specific Sismi officer, Antonio Nucera, who helped to set the Niger forgeries hoax in motion.
What may be most significant to American observers, however, is the newspaper's allegation that the Italians sent the bogus intelligence about Niger and Iraq not only through traditional allied channels such as the CIA, but seemingly directly into the White House. That direct White House channel amplifies questions about a now-infamous 16-word reference to the Niger uranium in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address -- which remained in the speech despite warnings from the CIA and the State Department that the allegation was not substantiated.
So Italian intelligence first tried to send these documents to the CIA, but the CIA rejected them. So instead, a General Nicolo Pollari met with Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to inform Hadley of the Iraq uranium yellowcake purchase. And even more importantly, this information was never confirmed by U.S. intelligence. Now here's an interesting question--did Pollari know, at the time of the meeting with Hadley, that this intelligence was bogus? Did Italian intelligence report this bogus information to the CIA, or even to Hadley?
Now the question of these documents. First, there is this Italian magazine Panorama that's owned by the Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi, who happens to be a Bush ally. Forged documents of this uranium yellowcake deal was obtained by a Panorama reporter, who was then ordered by an editor of Panorama--who just happened to be a Berlusconi ally--to take them to the U.S. embassy in Rome? Who is this Sismi intelligence officer Nucera, and where does he fit into this picture? Where did this Italian middleman Rocco Martino get these forged documents? Who forged the documents? Who paid for these forged documents? Where did Panorama get this story about Iraq purchasing 500 tons of uranium from Nigeria through a Jordanian intermediary?
I'm sorry, but this is starting to look like a snow job here. Berlusconi was a Bush ally who probably wanted to help Bush's Great War on Terrorism. And since Bush couldn't find any documentation proving that Iraq was aquiring WMDs, someone decided to create "proof" of Iraq's involvement in aquiring nuclear weapons. Hence, this entire scam of Iraq purchasing uranium yellowcake, and the forged documents to prove it. The scam had to come from overseas, where this proof could be fixed through a third party-country's overseas intelligence services. And it had to go through a country who was an ally of Bush, where such an ally could have the power to selectively control these documents moving from the host country's intelligence services to the U.S. intelligence without suspicion. So Italy enters the picture with Prime Minister Berlusconi. The big question now is, who's the mastermind behind this entire scam?
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