A year later, the real Niger scandal is beginning to surface. Knight-Ridder’s Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel report on the central role of the Italian intelligence agency SISMI in distributing the forged documents …
Italy’s military intelligence agency, SISMI, and people close to it, repeatedly tried to shop the bogus Niger uranium story to governments in France, Britain and the United States. That created the illusion that multiple sources were confirming the story.
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Sept. 9 – With the White House’s public campaign against Iraq in full swing, Nicolo Pollari, head of SISMI, met with then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley at the White House. Hadley later took the blame for including the false Niger allegation in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech.
National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones said Thursday that the meeting was a 15-minute courtesy call and that no one could recollect talk about yellowcake.
Note the similarity there to other instances of phony WMD intelligence which were planted with various intelligence agencies in order to create the appearance of multiple and overlapping sources of confirmation.
