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Just confirmed with a former US intelligence official who was briefed on it at the time that a surprising claim in this Washington Post story tonight is indeed true: that Rocco Martino was a walk-in to the US embassy Rome and tried to sell the Niger forgeries to them, months before the Italian reporter Elisabetta Burba brought them to the embassy at the direction of her editor at her Berlusconi-owned magazine. (My source thought he remembered Martino's walk in occurring in the early spring of 2002, but wasn't positive). The CIA Rome station chief reportedly threw Martino - and the forgeries - out.
In fact I'm a bit chagrined to realize that a source had already told this to me, but I had somehow dismissed it at the time as a slight misunderstanding of how the Niger forgeries got to the US embassy (as they later did from the Italian reporter Elisabetta Burba who was passed the forgeries by the same Rocco Martino). Apparently, when Burba brought the Niger docs in October 2002 to the US embassy in Rome, it was the Resident Security Officer, not the CIA station at the embassy, who met with her.
We know Martino sold the dossier to the French, and to the British. We now learn that he tried to sell them to the Americans directly -- and failed -- that's where the October 2002 attempt to sell them to Burba came in.
But it seems increasingly likely that he must have sold or given them to the Italians as well, likely some time between the October 15 2001 Sismi report to the CIA (which reported on an alleged deal between Iraq and Niger for the sale of uranium without many details), and the more detailed February 2002 Sismi report to the CIA (that described the bogus contract, as well as the communiques surrounding the then-Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican's 1999 trip to Niger, that later turned up verbatim in the forgeries). The whole Niger yellowcake claim was truly the work of this seemingly half-baked operation.
So what does it mean that a senior Sismi officer (Antonio Nucera) set up the ex Sismi officer Rocco Martino with a Sismi mole at the Niger embassy to put the scheme in motion? In the beginning, did Martino come to his friends at Sismi? Or did Sismi come to Martino?