Last week on this page, I suggested that the U.S. government has never seriously investigated the origin of the so-called Niger forgeries — the documents that are the whodunit at the center of all the hullabaloo about Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, Karl Rove and everything else related to the president’s notorious “16 words” from the 2003 State of the Union address. And I backed up those suspicions with a good deal of evidence — most notably the fact that the FBI — the lead investigative agency on the case — has failed to interview key players in the drama.

This week, let me discuss another dangling thread of evidence the U.S. government seems less than interested in pulling: the role of the Italian military-intelligence service SISMI.

As most of you know, the Bush administration was first alerted to alleged traffic in uranium between Niger and Iraq by a series of intelligence reports that came in to Washington in the final months of 2001. These were the reports that got Vice President Cheney interested in a possible Niger-Iraq tie. And they were thus also the ones that eventually led the CIA to dispatch retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson on his fact-finding mission to Niger.

All of that took place in late 2001 and the first three months of 2002. It was only much later, in October 2002, that the Niger forgeries themselves surfaced in Rome and made their way into U.S. government hands. That happened when an Italian journalist, Elisabetta Burba, dropped them off at the U.S. Embassy in Rome.

That much is clear from the public record. But that version of events leaves out details that are key to picking apart the mystery of where the documents came from.

The first detail is that the intelligence reports that came in to Washington in late 2001 were from Italian military intelligence, SISMI. The other detail, according to intelligence sources I’ve spoken to, is that those reports turned out to be text transcriptions of Niger forgeries that didn’t surface in Rome until almost a year later.

The Bush administration has long sought to diminish the importance of the Niger forgeries as the source of its suspicions about uranium sales between Niger and Iraq. Thus, while it is true, as the administration claims, that the documents only came into the possession of the U.S. government in late 2002, long after the first alarms were raised, it is true only in the narrowest sense. The reports that got the whole ball running were in fact based on the same phony documents. And those reports came from Italian intelligence.

So those are two pieces of the puzzle. From the very beginning, American suspicions about a Niger-Iraq trade in uranium were based on what turned out to be the forged documents. And the text transcriptions of those documents came in from Italian intelligence.

Now for the third piece of the puzzle.

Burba, the Italian journalist who eventually brought the forgeries to the U.S. Embassy in Rome, got them from an unnamed Italian “security consultant.” His name turns out to be Rocco Martino, a retired SISMI operative. And as I mentioned last week, last summer, my colleagues and I conducted a series of in-person interviews with him.

It has sometimes been suggested in the Italian press that Martino himself is the forger. But he told us a different story — one that was corroborated by another participant in the handling of the documents. Martino told us that the documents came from a still-serving SISMI colonel, whom he named.

As you can see, Italian intelligence seems to come up quite a bit in this story. It was Italian intelligence that first got the United States atwitter over possible uranium sales from Niger to Iraq. And those reports were written transcriptions of the forgeries — strongly suggesting that the Italians had either come into possession of copies of the forgeries or were being fed information by their author. The documents surfaced in Rome when an Italian journalist delivered copies of them to the U.S. Embassy. And the man who tried to sell her those documents says his copies came from a SISMI agent.

If you weren’t aware of all these different ties pointing back to Italian intelligence as a prime source of information about the origins of the forgeries, don’t feel bad. Few of them appear in the public record. But if and when we actually get serious about getting to the bottom of this mystery, Italian intelligence should be one of the first places we go to ask questions.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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