More on NigerGate: Truth Behind the Lies

From Mick Smith at the Times Online (UK) (a lot here; you probably want to read it in full while this is but a longish snippet):

The revelations in today’s Sunday Times that two employees of the Niger embassy in Rome forged documents apparently proving Niger was selling uranium to Iraq are unlikely to end the conspiracy theories that swirl around the Niger Affair, and not just because the investigation into the Plamegate affair will run and run. There are still a number of minor mysteries that require further investigation, particularly two burglaries in Rome, one at the Niger embassy over the 2001 New Year’s holiday and one at the home of the Niger consul on January 31, 2001. Both break-ins baffled the Italian police, not least because the burglar didn’t seem to be interested in taking any money.

Then there is the fact that some of the alleged Martino documents published in the Italian press appear to be different in a number of respects to the ones that were passed to the US embassy in Rome and eventually to the International Atomic Energy Authority which denounced them as fakes. How could this be? It makes you wonder whether, with the intelligence market drying up for the freelance peddlers of information, they have found an alternative market among elements of the Italian press.

But there might be something more sinister at work. Certainly the Italian authorities appear to think so, briefing darkly to their relatively few friends in the Italian press that the French are deliberately muddying the waters, implicating Italian intelligence officers in the affair to draw attention away from the fact that it was their agent, Rocco Martino, who put the documents into circulation in the first place. Martino was a French spy, run by the French secret service station in Brussels and paid a retainer of between 1,500 and 2,000 Euros a month for his services. If any intelligence service was responsible for the appearance of the forged Niger documents, so the argument goes, it was the French intelligence service, the DGSE.

I have always found the “blame the French argument” suspicious. It has been put to me on a number of occasions and I have never used it, or indeed believed it. Certainly the break-ins took place long before any of the controversy over Iraqi WMD. Bush was barely in office in January 2001. But my research into the Niger affair has uncovered a number of strange facts that suggest there may be more to the French involvement in the affair than I previously believed. An investigation of the various documents that appeared in the Italian press has apparently found that a number of them were faxed from French fax numbers, others were tracked in emails sent via a French server.

Then there is the source of a series of articles in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica critical of the Italian intelligence services. A lot of the information in the articles does not match the evidence I have obtained from very reliable sources, some of whom have a track record of persistently contradicting the pre-war intelligence long before it was discredited, and others who were involved in the leaking of the Downing Street Memos. I am sure the two La Repubblica journalists accurately reported what their sources said. But all sources have motives and not all of them are well-intentioned. The two La Repubblica journalists have just published a book called Il Mercato della Paura (The Market in Fear), which includes their account of the Niger story and cites their source as Martino.