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Did Scooter Libby, Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff, lie to a grand jury about Valerie Plame and the leaking of her name to the press? If he did, was it retaliation aimed at her husband, Joseph Wilson, who wrote in the New York Times that the allegation that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Niger was false – based, it turned out, on forged documents passed on to Washington and London by the Italian military intelligence service, SISMI? How did it happen that the intelligence services of the US and the UK got the story of Iraq’s WMD so badly wrong? Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo provide some clues in three articles in La Repubblica published between 24 and 26 October.

They have a source who claims that a former SISMI agent (who was paid a retainer by French intelligence) learned that the French suspected a clandestine trade in uranium in Niger, where a French company controls the uranium mines. He sensed an opportunity to make some money and asked an old colleague, responsible at SISMI for WMD counter-proliferation in Africa and the Middle East, to help. They staged a break-in at the Niger Embassy over New Year 2001 and took some headed notepaper and seals.

SISMI still has in its archives copies of intercepted Niger documents from the 1980s when Iraq really did buy uranium from Niger. So it was easy to fabricate documents by putting the old information on the modern headed notepaper. The bundle was spurned by French intelligence. The events of 11 September presented a fresh opportunity to offer it to MI6 and the CIA.

It’s a good story but it seems to me to be an attempt by SISMI to distance itself from the forgeries. I don’t think the Niger Embassy break-in had anything to do with French intelligence. It is much more likely that SISMI, having intercepted a communication from the Niger Foreign Ministry informing Rome that Wissam al-Zahawie, Iraq’s ambassador to the Vatican, was going to visit Niger in 1999, arranged the break-in to find hard evidence of that letter, which it realised might well be important. After all, why was an Iraqi ambassador visiting Niger? After 11 September, the letter served as the basis for the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger; the other documents were forged by SISMI to strengthen the case.

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