Iraq Book: 'The Italian Letter'

Bogus Document Provided Basis for Iraq-Niger Uranium Claim

It was 3 a.m. in Italy on Jan. 29, 2003, when President Bush in Washington began reading his State of the Union address that included the now famous -- later retracted -- 16 words: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush administration disregarded key information available at the time showing that the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable.

Washington Post D.C. government editor Peter Eisner was online to discuss his new book -- cowritten with Knut Royce and released today -- "The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq."

Excerpts: How Bogus Letter Became a Case for War (Post, April 3)

The transcript follows.

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Peter Eisner: Hello everyone, sorry for being a bit late. There are lots of questions and I'm happy to be talking to you

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Maryland: Good afternoon Peter. Simple question: Isn't all this known information and too late to have any significant impact to the GOP? On another issue, since the recent elections placed the Democrats in control of the House and Senate, is it a coincidence that the number of terror threat audio and video tapes have decreased from bin Laden and his second in command?

Peter Eisner: Hard to say what impact it will have on the GOP. But there are significant new bits of information here, for instance the fact that CIA had information on Feb. 5 that could have shown the extent of the fraudulent information and passed it on to the administration.

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Newark, Del.: With Democrats the majority in the Congress now, why are they not pushing for a bipartisan inquiry by respected names from the past about how we got into this war? Our politicians and our country owe it to us.

Peter Eisner: A fine question. Henry Waxman in the House is in fact asking Condoleezza Rice to provide information on the Niger story. There is still a lot to be told. Waxman has asked her to appear before the committee and so far hasn't answered.

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Memphis, Tenn.: Mr. Eisner, I look forward to reading your book. Is it possible that an obscure intelligence agent contrived the idea, then manufactured documents that became then a principal source and case for this war? All this for money, then he or she planted this arrangement throughout Europe with other sources? Comments?

Peter Eisner: No, I don't think that Rocco Martino forged the documents. It seems likely that other elements, perhaps close to Italian intelligence, pulled old material out of dusty files and adapted them to use. The reason? Perhaps for money, and perhaps to help Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, provide good offices to the Bush administration

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Vienna, Va.: This information have being circulation around for a long time -- why wasn't The Washington Post aware of it? Or did The Post choose to ignore it?

Peter Eisner: Pieces of the information have been out there and published. One key point is that we actually were able to track the trail of the documents from their delivery to Elisabetta Burba, the Milan journalist, to Washington. And comparing versions, one finds glaring errors.

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Washington, D.C.: I'm curious why your piece left out any mention of what British intelligence was up to during the relevant time period -- after all, the allegations were attributed to the British government. What do they say about the allegations? Also, is it not the case that Wilson's infamous piece in the New York Times ultimately was discredited? Please respond ... we deserve the complete story, not just the convenient parts.

Peter Eisner: The excerpt only gave us so much space. In the book, we deal with the fact that the British claimed to have their own sources. Most intelligence sources we spoke to said that it was highly unlikely that Britain would have intelligence that was not available to the United States, and especially to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Britain is required to provide such information to the IAEA.

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Vienna, Va.: Why is there no mention to the break-in at the Nigerian Embassy in Italy a month before?

Peter Eisner: We discuss the break-in at the Niger embassy in Rome, which took place a year earlier. It had all the signs of an inside job, and possibly was intended to divert attention from the real intelligence operation that was going on elsewhere. Seems unlikely that Niger officials participated in the fraud.

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Chicago: Have you seen any evidence or heard that the President was briefed on this issue, and if so exactly what was the date? Is there a "smoking gun" to use an age old Washington expression?

Peter Eisner: It's an important question, but it's hard to say what President Bush knew about this. It's clear that the White House blocked CIA vetting of the State of the Union message in 2003 until the last possible minute. CIA Director Tenet had blocked the use of the Africa uranium charge in a speech by the president three months earlier.

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Spring, Tex.: How soon was Stephen Hadley, as Condi Rice's assistant, provided with copies of these documents?

Peter Eisner: A good question. While the CIA, State Department Intelligence and others received the documents in October 2002, a week or so after Elisabetta Burba turned them over, I don't know when they were vetted by the National Security Council.

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Detroit: I read your piece in The Washington Post. Though it is interesting from a historical perspective, do you think it would have mattered if these documents not been given to the U.S. embassy in Italy? I think most people now realize that Bush was looking for any excuse to go into Iraq -- thus had these documents not existed, the end result would have been the same.

Peter Eisner: A good question. The false documents -- pointing at an attempt at the purchase of uranium -- helped the administration build up the atmosphere for war. This was part of a sales effort to convince both Congress and the American public that Saddam Hussein and Iraq presented a clear and present danger. In the fall of 2002, the rhetoric turned to warnings of "mushroom clouds" on the horizon.

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Mons, Belgium: Did it even make sense in the first place for Saddam to seek yellowcake in Niger? I think I read that there was local yellowcake in Iraq.

Peter Eisner: A key point. The CIA first put down the idea out of hand -- Iraq had its own stock of uranium and didn't need to purchase any on its own. True, the stock was nominally under U.N. seal, but it wouldn't have been very difficult to open the door and start using the material. Hence, many intelligence analysts scoffed at the purchase from the beginning.

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Arlington, Va.: Has Rocco Martino not also been on the payroll of the French intelligence services as an asset? Some have speculated that the forgeries came from them in a hope that the CIA immediately would spot them as frauds and end the story right there.

Peter Eisner: Rocco Martino was in fact selling information to France, among others. As we mention in the book, some Italian officials used that fact to try to divert attention from their own intelligence services to a claim there was a French plot to make Italy look bad. It didn't fly.

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Richmond: I had been under the impression that Rocco was behind the forgery but reading this in the story today made me start wondering: "It remains unclear who fabricated the documents. Intelligence officials say most likely it was rogue elements in SISMI who wanted to make money selling them."

There is at least one intelligence officer with another idea: Vincent Cannistraro. Digging around to refresh my memory I stumbled across this transcript of an interview he did in 2005 on KPFK:

"Q: Do we know who produced those documents? Because there's some suspicion...

"A: I think I do, but I'd rather not speak about it right now, because I don't think it's a proven case...

"Q: If I said "Michael Ledeen"?

"A: You'd be very close..."

What do you make of the theory that Ledeen or people associated with the Pentagon OSP group might have fed forgeries to SISMI?

Peter Eisner: I'm familiar with the material about Michael Ledeen, and we do in fact mention and even quote Ledeen in the book. Ledeen's name has been mentioned frequently on blogs I've seen, but I'm unaware of any substance behind claims about him at all in connection with this case.

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Arlington, Va.: Mr. Eisner I enjoyed your piece and it did fill in a few blanks in the story that had previously been reported by the Financial Times. It would, however, appear that the chief fault here lies with the CIA and demonstrable incompetence in dealing with these claims, and explains why Richard Armitage was a little more than angry that the CIA chose to pretty much ignore INR's far better analysis. Do you agree?

Peter Eisner: I think it goes beyond that. The Intelligence Community was under tremendous pressure from within the Bush administration to produce information to back up claims about weapons of mass destruction. We don't focus on all the other areas -- biological weapons charges all debunked, for instance, based on Curveball, the totally discredited source. Some of his claims ended up in Colin Powell's February 2003 speech at the United Nations.

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Vienna, Va.: You wrote: "CIA Director Tenet had blocked the use of the Africa uranium charge in a speech by the president three months earlier." But even though CIA review of the State of the Union address was last minute, didn't Tenet acquiesce in the charge's inclusion in that speech?

Peter Eisner: Tenet apparently didn't see the claim in the State of the Union until the president spoke. The White House did check with Alan Foley, the head of WINPAC, the CIA Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control, and got an okay. Tenet to my knowledge was not informed.

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Philadelphia: you state that Joe Wilson's trip was based on a request made of the CIA by Cheney after a "separate" DIA report. In fact, if you had bothered to check your information, you would know that Cheney already was aware of the Feb. 5 intelligence and had requested more information from the CIA, because the briefing based on the DIA report was done on Feb. 13, 2002 ( see this PDF) and the memo requesting more info was sent the next day, while Val Wilson's e-mail about Joe Wilson is dated Feb. 12. How credible should we consider this article, given this glaring error?

Peter Eisner: Don't see the problem here. CIA got the "verbatim text" from SISMI on Feb. 5. CIA didn't check the material, but produced a document that had all sorts of caveats and warnings about the information on Iraq-Niger purchases. DIA then ran a separate report that juiced up the same information, without the CIA caveats, and gave it to Cheney.

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Fairfax, Va.: Peter, in your opinion, did the Bush administration knowingly twist the facts and/or omit facts they knew to be true to take the U.S. to a war they already had decided we were going to have? If you answered yes, is it safe to assume our Congress feels the same way, and if so, why aren't they talking impeachment?

Peter Eisner: I can only go with my reporting. The Bush administration, President Bush and Vice President Cheney, have said repeatedly that they were victims of the intelligence they received. That's not true. A full sweep of the intelligence showed glaring errors in the case for WMD. The administration, as the phrase goes, "cherry-picked" what it wanted from the intel to make the strongest case for war that it could. I think many in Congress have a clear view of this.

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Seattle: Isn't it true the original Niger claims emerged a year before the Italian letter (SSCI report). Isn't it also true that there were reports of Iraq seeking yellowcake from the Democratic Republic of Congo (a country also in Africa) and that the Congo is under investigation by the IAEA for its lax controls on Uranium

Peter Eisner: Yes, the first word of the Niger claims came to the CIA Rome station a few days after 9/11. The first report to CIA headquarters was sent on Oct. 15, and additional material was enhanced, even altered several times after that. There were claims about Congo and other attempts in Africa at uranium purchases, but the sourcing was so weak as not to be deemed credible.

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Tampa: What was the role of the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon on getting the White House to believe this stuff? Will Congress hold hearings on the Office of Special Plans?

Peter Eisner: The Office of Special Plans played a key role in the story, and we write about it quite a bit in the book. Simply stated, the Office of Special Plans was designed to produce information that promoted the concept that Saddam Hussein and Iraq posed a mortal threat to the United States. It was a propaganda operation

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Washington, D.C.: One of things that I really liked about your article was your explicitly stating that the Wilson trip to Niger was arranged by the CIA as a response to the VP's questions. Hopefully, the editors at the newspaper will take notice. The other thing that I wanted to ask you is that, if I remember correctly, the content of your article was reported exhaustively in the Italian newspapers in 2004-2005. They had pointed out a couple of administration people involved in it. Do you have some information on that?

Peter Eisner: Many aspects of this story have been reported in Italy, especially by my friend Carlo Bonini at La Repubblica. Our focuses have differed on obvious grounds. We're looking at how the documents were used in Washington, while he and his colleagues have looked at the internal workings of the Italian intelligence service. One of our key new points is that the CIA had the chance with its verbatim text to debunk the entire claim. Another is tracking how the CIA was pummeled into going along with the weak case for WMD.

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Minneapolis: Really looking forward to reading the whole book. Two questions: Which document exactly was the one whose "verbatim text" made it into the February 2002 CIA report, and do you provide that verbatim text in the book? Also, Walter Pincus reported last April that the infamous language from October 2002 about Iraq's vigorous pursuit of uranium in Africa came from an intelligence report Cheney read in early 2002. Does that mean the actual language used in the NIE came directly from the DIA report that caught Cheney's eye in 2002, which you describe in the article?

Peter Eisner: Good question, if a bit detailed. The "verbatim text" was dated Oct. 10, 2000, under the name of the "Conseil Militair Supreme," Supreme Military Council, which didn't exist on that date. The document also makes reference to Niger's "State Court" which also no longer existed -- it had been renamed the "Supreme Court." A number of mistakes in the document also make it clear that no Niger diplomat could have produced the document, forged or not.

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Peter Eisner: That's about the time we have. I was overwhelmed by the number of questions and tried to get to as many as I could. Thanks to all.

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