THEN READ UP ON IT

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that Senator Obama is finally getting national security briefings, reading up on the dangers in the world by reading 4yr old books about 20yr old subjects. I’m really thrilled. I’d of course prefer he read MY BOOKS, but maybe he’ll get around to it. More than anything, I really would have loved-I MEAN LOVED(!!!!) to have been a fly on the wall at the first NatSec briefing of his cabinet appointees. Oh MAN that had to be a conundrum!

“We have to leave Iraq 18 months from now per the campaign pledge, but the DoD says they can’t do it logistically. Hillary Clinton at State says it’d ’cause chaos and force a third invasion of Iraq (OUCH, tough sell to the DNC base!). Intel guys are saying that 1) AQ was in Iraq before the invasion, 2) AQ chose to make Iraq the central front in the gwot (not Bush), 3) AQ is being decimated by Bush’s Surge so leaving now let’s AQ revive in an oil-rich/money rich country. They also tell me that Iran’s gonna be making 40+nukes a month starting in January, India is moving troops to border w Pakistan & both sides are on their bi-annual brink-of-nuclear-war escapade. Oh, and despite the speech in Germany…ain’t nobody in the world gonna stop the anarchy in Africa or SE Asia.”

WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE!

Suggestion: Appoint Dennis Kucinich to form a Dept of Peace and abolish the DoD. Yeah, that’s the ticket!

Poor Obama. He honestly had no clue & actually believed the leftist rhetoric. He followed Kos and Huffpo instead of the Milblogs and Flopping Aces. If he HAD been reading FA, then he wouldn’t need to be such a “voracious” reader of dated books. I’m only shocked he’s not skipping to the Cliff’s Notes.

One, the US unwisely trusted Pakistan to patrol its border. Two, NATO allies objected to the use of “GATOR” mines, which are dropped from planes and could have sealed up the Tora Bora area. But mostly, Fury says the decision to let Afghan allies form “the tip of the spear” was the biggest mistake. “The idea worked like a charm when we faced a common foe, the oppressive Taliban . . . but they were fighting Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden . . . we might as well have been asking for them to fight the Almighty Prophet Mohammed himself.”

In all my reading, research, conversations, etc., I have never heard about NATO blocking the use of GATOR mines. That would have been a great way to prevent Osama Bin Laden’s escape, but America’s allies let them down at every turn in 2001. I believe it, but I doubt we’ll hear Obama talk about how relying on allies isn’t as useful as it was 60yrs ago.

Similarly, I doubt that we’ll see anyone on the political left recognize that Germany and France are looking to pull out of Afghanistan rather than send more troops and do more fighting as the Obama campaign expects (according to Sen Obama, he’ll encourage them to do this by offering more foreign aid, but in the VP debate Sen Biden admitted that the very first thing a President Obama will do is CUT foreign aid.)

How do you know things are going really well in Iraq? The State Department doesn’t have to threaten to draft employees to fill positions in Iraq anymore. All 300 jobs are now filled with willing volunteers.

Recall how in Kenneth Timmerman’s The Shadow Warriors, the author describes how State Department officials, as well a some in the CIA and political appointees held over from the Clinton Administration, have worked to undermine the Bush Administration out of political partisanship over professionalism and patriotism.

FP: Shed some light for us on the shadow warriors at the State Department. How much have they hurt Bush administration policies?

Timmerman: Let me answer with an anecdote I describe in the book. After President Bush was elected to a second term in November 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell called a town meeting at the State Department in Washington . Faced with a sea of Kerry-Edwards stickers in the parking lot, Powell decided to confront the problem head on. “We live in a democracy,” he said. “As Americans, we have to respect the results of elections.” He went on to tell his employees that President Bush had received the most votes of any president in U.S. history, and that they were constitutionally obligated to serve him.

One of Powell’s subordinates, an assistant secretary of state, became increasingly agitated. Once Powell had dismissed everyone, she returned to her office suite, shut the door, and held a mini town meeting of her own. After indignantly recounting Powell’s remarks, she commented: “Well, Senator Kerry receive the second highest number of votes of any presidential candidate in history. If just one state had gone differently, Sen. Kerry would be President Kerry today.” Her staff owed no allegiance to the president of the United States , especially not to policies they knew were wrong, she said. If it was legal, and it would slow down the Bush juggernaut, they should do it, she told them.

Here was an open call to insubordination, and, I might add, it was not an isolated incident.

This video puts her comments into perspective with a little bit of historical review.

Wednesday, Feith enjoyed a 3 hour interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show (Pt1, 2, 3. Transcript here).

Friday, I bought the book from Borders bookstore in Westwood. Check out the website for the book. There are important documents to peruse through, there.

Douglas Feith’s website (check out the documents and myths vs. facts pages).

Also blogging:
American Power
Hugh Hewitt

The man running the site was an Iraqi general, identified in the Company X report as PEAIR/13. According to the Eastern Europeans who had worked with him, he was “not young, but looked younger then he was.” He wore a military uniform “with no indication of rank on it; he was also a senior member of the Baath party who often traveled by helicopter.” Later the Eastern European project manager identified him as “Saddam’s cousin.”

By early June 2004, they were ready to make a foray to the area. Traveling with LYHUNT/101, they drove in through Turkey to Mosul, where they were met by another Company X associate, a number of Iraqi shooters from Baghdad, and a contingent of Kurdish peshmergas. By now, security had become an issue throughout Iraq.

The first surprise when they reached the site was the chemical plant in the valley on the far side of the Jebel Makhoul. It didn’t fit with the description of the facilities they had heard from other engineers who had worked in the area in the 1980s, until they realized it had been built later. After the 2003 war, it had been looted right down to the rebar.

When they reached the hillside overlooking the Tigris, they found what appeared to be a large cistern. “It had some interesting features,” the former CIA officer said. “It was fed by a 24-inch pipe that drew water from five miles up the river.”

They thought the cistern might be camouflaging the entry to the underground site, but they had no excavation equipment to test their hypothesis. It was serviced by a double-paved macadam road – the only paved road in the area – thick enough to accommodate 20-ton trucks. Nearby they found a Soviet-designed power station large enough to provide power to a town of 30,000 people, although there was no town of that size nearby. But uranium enrichment required huge amounts of power, and large supplies of fresh water as coolant, to disguise the plant from heat-sensing satellites. The power station had also been looted.

That was when they saw the spoils from digging. “They weren’t piled, but spread over a very wide area, so satellites wouldn’t pick up signs of excavation,” the former CIA officer said. They later estimated the Vietnamese had hauled up the equivalent of 5,000 truckloads of dirt and ground rock from below the surface. Whatever they had built, it was enormous.

After that unsuccessful attempt to find the entry shaft to the underground site, the former operations officer reported his findings to U.S. military intelligence and to a top ranking officer at CIA. The CIA was “not responsive,” he said. But the military intelligence officer jumped at the information – at first. He sent representatives to debrief one of the former Eastern European engineers, but then let it drop. When asked, he said he had “no command authority” to pursue the investigation.

The former operations officer had a long-established relationship with Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin, a legendary figure in the special operations community who was now deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Boykin also jumped at the information at first, and gave the order to send in a SEAL team specialized in WMD sites to hunt for the hidden access shaft. “Then we got a call from Jacoby” – that would be Admiral Jacoby, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “He said, ‘Don’t go to Baghdad, it’s too dangerous.’”

This was the same Jacoby who, other Pentagon sources told me, “was too busy working on his third star” through politicking in Washington to take an active interest in what was going on in Iraq.

Finding the entry shaft to a suspected WMD site hidden in a ten square mile area that was covered with rubble and ruined buildings was no mean feat. It was going to require significant excavation work. But before that, they had to narrow down the area to search, and the DIA made it clear they were not going to help.

Not long after this, a left-wing think tank, the Center for Public Integrity, released an “investigation” alleging that the wife of a top Company X executive involved in tracking down Site 555 had improperly used her position as a deputy assistant secretary of defense to steer Iraq reconstruction contracts his way. “She stayed clear of this,” the former operations officer said, referring to their investigation and other operations in Iraq. “This was just a smear aimed at sabotaging our efforts.”

Returning to Baghdad on his own dime in September 2004, the former operations officer decided to brief U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, whom he had known from Iran-Contra day in Honduras. “His people said we were full of shit,” he told me. “But remember, this was when the ISG was coming out with their final report. They wanted no waves, no loose ends.”

The Iraq Survey Group “inspectors” rarely left their compound near the Baghdad international airport because of the danger of IEDs and insurgent attacks. Their rare sorties mainly involved trips to the airport stockade, where top officials from Saddam’s regime were being held. “The big shots knew about the program, but they didn’t know the details,” the former operations officer said. Details such as the precise grid coordinates of the underground facility beneath Site 555.

The more Hoekstra learned about Site 555, the angrier he got. He had encouraged the former operations officer to return to Iraq several times in 2005, and again in 2006. By now, they had narrowed down the area to search for the hidden entry tunnel, and believed they had located what appeared to be ventilation shafts for the underground production halls. But still the DIA refused to help.

Hoekstra pounded on the table, and sent House intelligence committee staff members repeatedly to DIA headquarters. He wanted them to send in a team with handheld underground anomaly detectors, but the DIA refused. So did General Boykin’s boss, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone.

Finally, Hoekstra went to the White House and met with Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington, and suggested that he request a copy of the Company X report from General Boykin’s office at the Pentagon. Boykin eventually sent it over – minus the pictures, site diagrams, and key pages. What you guys are doing is history, one of Boykin’s aides said. We’re not interested in history.

Didn’t anybody get it? If they could locate an underground nuclear weapons site that had eluded the UN investigators and where uranium enrichment work had continued undetected for years, it would provide dramatic proof that Saddam Hussein had never abandoned his WMD programs, as the CIA, the Democrats, and the United Nations claimed.

Sometimes Hoekstra felt he was the only one who cared any longer to learn the truth about Saddam’s weapons programs.

To this day there had never been a concerted effort to follow up on this underground facility. Even to find out if it exists at all. Why not? If it exists it can be added to many other examples of evidence found that indicate Saddam was most assuredly in possession of WMD and had aspirations for the big one, nuclear.

• UN Inspectors found 11 empty chemical warheads in excellent condition prior to the invasion. They were illegal and supposed to be destroyed.
• Marines Reported two missiles tipped with sarin and mustard, and fourteen barrels of chemical agent. I already cited USA Today but…
• a cache of BM-21 missiles loaded with sarin were found and ready to fire.
• Polish troops find 17 shells of sarin and mustard gas
• 500 tons of uranium(enough for 142 bombs) found at an Iraqi nuclear facility. 1.8 tons were enriched, they found centrifuges (for enrichment) at the site, all was illegal.
• two separate attacks with ieds show one was filled with sarin, the other mustard. Both shells were tied to a cache Saddam supposedly destroyed.
• Dozens of soldiers, a CNN cameraman, a Knight Ridder reporter, and two Iraqi pow’s were all treated for exposure to nerve agents after finding a mobile labratory containing several chemical weapons including sarin, tabun and lewisite.
• we learn that 500 sarin and mustard gas shells were discovered in Iraq. They are not new, but very deadly and useful as wmds according to the US Report on the weapons.
• The fourth Infantry found a stockpile of .55 gal drums of cyclosarin…a nerve agent. Nearby were missiles, lab and chemical gear.
• It’s reported the Saddam government contacts Finnish government with regard to anthrax decontamination. Why would they need to know about anthrax decontamination? We certainly weren’t going to be using bioweapons.

The most intriguing evidence of hidden Iraqi WMD stockpiles, however, did not come from any of these sources. It came from a source that Hoekstra had developed all on his own: a former top CIA operations officer, who had returned to Iraq after the war and stumbled onto information pointing to a vast and previously unknown site, buried deep beneath a hillside north of Baghdad, where former Iraqi officials alleged Saddam had pursued nuclear weapons wrok in the utmost secrecy.

After a business trip to Iraq in February 2004, the former operations officer was contacted by an engineer, working for a company in a former Eastern European country, who had worked on infrastructure projects under Saddam. The engineer and his company were hoping to win new contracts in Iraq, and had also traveled to Baghdad. On their way back to Turkey, on of the Eastern Europeans pointed to a hilltop east of the Baghdad-Mosul highway, on the far side of the Jebel Makhoul, along the Tigris. He had always been told that the hilltop disguised an underground weapons plant, he said.

Some of the engineers traveling with them offered that they had worked on a nearby infrastructure project. As they got to talking, they mentioned that they had always whispered among themselves that the underground site housed a secret centrifuge uranium-enrichment plant.

When he first heard this story, the former operations officer felt it had the ring of authenticity. “These guys had been there for thirteen or fourteen years,” he told me. “They would get drunk with the Iraqis and learn things about the WMD programs they were not supposed to know.”

Along with a business partner, he began tracking down the Eastern European engineers who had worked in Iraq and interviewing them. “We found five or six independent sources who all noted that they had seen eighteen-wheel trucks pass through an entrance into the hill area we were looking at,” the former operations officer said. What the trucks did once they entered the hillside, nobody knew. The entire area was a military zone, ringed with several rows of barbed wire.

In his reports to Hoekstra, the former operations officer referred to himself and his partners as “Company X of McLean, Virginia” (where the CIA is located), and encrypted the names of sources in CIA-style diagraphs. He and his associates interviewed thirty-one engineers and workers from a former Soviet-block country who had never been debriefed by any U.S. or UN agency before. One of the engineers, identified as LYHUNT/103, had been in Iraq from September 1984 until April 1994 “with a short interruption for the Gulf War.” He returned to Iraq several times a year after that until 2000.

LYHUNT/103 and his colleagues worked directly with TECO, the Technical Corps for Special Projects, project manager for “Iraq’s highest priority weapons projects.” TECO was headquarted with the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, and “reported directly to Saddam’s household,” the former operations officer said. Among TECO’s responsibilities were Iraq’s clandestine nuclear weapons, its long-range ballistic missile programs, and the Super Gun that was being built by the former American ballistics genius Gerald Bull. LYHUNT/103 and other colleagues agreed to talk to the former CIA operations officer on condition that they not be identified in any way. They were well aware that their activities in Iraq after 1991 were in violation of international sanctions, U.S. law, and the laws of their own country. They risked serious jail time if they were identified. But they said they were willing to share their knowledge, because they now understood the full import of the highly compartmented project where they had worked, and it scared them. They referred to it as Site 555.

Site 555, also known as the al-Fajr facility, was “intended to be an electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS) uranium-enrichment facility,” the former CIA operative told Hoekstra. Bombed and partially destroyed during the Gulf War, it was leveled in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 687 in 1991. According to Iraq’s declarations to the UN, the al-Fajr facility was a “duplicate” of an EMIS plant in Tarmiya, but uranium-enrichment equipment was never installed. Once the buildings were leveled, the site was no longer inspected.

But there was much more at the site then the UN inspectors ever saw, the Eastern European engineers said. Hidden beneath a nearby hill was an underground structure about 600 meters deep not related to any mineral quarry. Another East European source, LYHUNT/101, commented that it would have taken only minimal effort to level the entry to the shaft and cover it with sand, leaving the deep underground installations hidden, the former CIA operative told Hoekstra.

In April 2004, the Eastern European engineers drove together down from Mosul to Baghdad, and LYHUNT/103 pointed to a series of low hills beyond the road. “That’s where the shaft is,” he said. But upon further questioning, the former agency officer realized that neither LYHUNT/103 or his colleagues had ever seen the actual opening or visited the underground site itself. They had worked on a water purification plant and other engineering works on the surface.

Bit by bit, as Company X debriefed more of the Eastern Europeans who had worked in the area, they got a better idea of where to look for the underground site.

“The debriefings indicated that the underground facilities had been dug by 2,500 Vietnamese laborers during the mid-1980s, who toiled for $4 per month,” the former CIA officer said. “They dug at night to avoid infrared signatures. It was done by drill and blast, without heavy machinery.” To the trained eye, these were all telltale signs of Iraq’s intent to camouflage the work from satellite surveillance.

The former operative informed Hoekstra of information he had learned from another of the East European engineers:

Per LYHUNT/105’s knowledge and his recollection of documentation that had been available to him, the factories at Site 555 were installations for the enrichment of uranium and nuclear chemistry, with one production building having a large internal movable horizontal crane for some kind of assembly, and a single airstrip runway at the bottom of the hill near the cave. The cave represented the entry to a major underground structure, with horizontal elements (tunnels or pathways), but LYHUNT/105 did not know how many tunnels or how deep the structure was. The location of the entry to the underground structure was by the end of the airstrip towards the bottom of the hill.

What was found and what was done with it in Part 2 here.

Carl Levin understood that no president could govern effectively without putting his own highly skilled political appointees into key government positions. Although their numbers were small – the congressional “Plum Book” that was published every time a new president came into office listed just 7,000 in the year 2000 – they were critical. These were the men and women who gave direction to the unwieldy federal bureaucracy. Effective political appointees were essential for any president to transform his political vision into action. Without them, a president was like a cork bobbing in the ocean, swept by the wind and the currents.

Levin and other top Democrats in the U.S. Senate were determined to prevent George W. Bush from getting the people he wanted into positions of power. Since all top nominees had to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, that gave the Democrats – who held a 50-49-1 majority once Vermont Republican James Jeffords quit the Republican party unexpectedly in May 2001 – powerful tools.

Senate confirmation has always been a contentious process. Since the Nixon years, Senators Edward Kennedy and Joseph Biden have held conservative judges hostage to a litmus test on abortion and other left-wing causes. But at the start of the Bush administration, the Democrats took aim not at judges (that would come later) but at the president’s counter-terrorism and national security team.

For nearly seven months, Levin and this Democratic teammates prevented confirmation hearings of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s top advisor’s – Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, Assistant Secretary of Defense fo International Security Programs J.D. Crouch, and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Peter W. Rodman. “While Levin was holding up their appointments, the incoming Pentagon policy team had no legal or political authority to do their vital jobs – a fact that helps explain why it took eight months for the Bush administration to draw up a strategic operational plan to destroy al-Qaeda,” wrote J. Michale Waller, a defense and intelligence policy specialist at the Institute of World Politics.

The joke around the building was that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz the only political appointees who had cleared the Senate, “it was Home Alone 3,” one appointee said.

The sabotage continued via Clinton “holdovers,” people such as Peter F. Verga, Clinton’s deputy undersecretary of defense for policy integration, a major intelligence post. While “Verga made himself useful to the Rumsfeld team, he beavered to curry favor at the top, in part by snipping and playing bureaucratic games to make life difficult for the incoming defense policy team, Waller wrote.

Ken deGraffenreid was the administration’s pick to replace Verga. A former White House hand from the Nixon days, he had been writing about intelligence reform for years, so Rumsfeld decided to give him an opportunity to put his theories to work. By the time his appointment finally cleared the Senate, it was already July. But even then, the bureaucratic fencing continued.

“Verga just stayed in place,” deGraffenreid recalls. “I arrived – I had put my company out of business – and this guy wouldn’t leave his job. He had big office and I was put in the back room, next to the refrigerator, the copying machine, and the coffee-maker.”

That wasn’t the worst, deGraffenreid said. “I’m an old Navy pilot. I’ve lived in a hangar, so that part didn’t bother me. But then I went to Doug [Feith], and to use an old Navy term, I said, ‘What the f—?” Verga had used the six months he was alone in his office with only Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz above him to ingratiate himself with his new bosses. “He made them feel they owed him something, so they kept him in place,” deGraffenreid said.

It reminded him of Cook County, Illinois, where he had grown up. “If you wanted your street paved, you went to Mayor Daley. The Pentagon in July 2001 was like Cook Country in 1962. The Clintonistas were the Mayor Daley who ran the place. It took me six months to get rid of the son of a bitch,” he said of Verga. “I’m not sure that Rumsfeld and his undersecretaries ever recovered from that situation.”

Feith’s reputation as someone who refused to confront the partisan Democrats in the bureaucracy who was undercutting his own employees became legendary over the next five years. “They asked us to stick out our necks for this president,” another appointee who worked with Feith told me in confidence. “And then they chopped them off.”

While any new administration needs the benefit of experience of career diplomats, military officers, and intelligence experts, since the September 11 attacks these positions became critical in a way that only happens in times of war.

Richard Clarke was just the sort of person a new administration would want to have around as it crafted its approach to the terrorist threat from al-Qaeda. As counterterrorism “czar” during most of the eight Clinton years, he arguably knew more about al-Qaeda then any other American official.

But as Clarke’s strident and highly personal denunciation of the president and his top advisor’s during his March 2004 testimony before the 9/11 Commission showed, that experience could become a double-edged sword. Clarke’s self-serving account of how the Bush team failed to grapple with the al-Qaeda threat during the first eight months in office conveniently left out the failures of eight years of the Clinton administration, when the United States was attacked five times by al-Qaeda and did almost nothing in response. Clarke also neglected to mention in his public testimony that until just two months before the September 11 attacks, “nearly all the senior counterterrorism and intelligence officials on duty at the time were holdovers from the Clinton administration,” Waller noted.

“We were really quite taken aback by Clarke’s public testimony,” 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman told me the day after Clarke appeared before the Commission. “It differed dramatically with the fifteen hours of detailed, dispassionate testimony he gave in closed session, which was much more of an indictment of the eight Clinton years then the eight months of Bush. There was just a lot more policy to criticize. There wasn’t a lot of policy to criticize under Bush because the administration didn’t have its people in place for most of the eight months. Hell hath no fury like a bureaucratic scorned.” Lehman believed Clarke was bitter because the Bush White House hadn’t recognized his talents and given him the same power he had under Clinton, when he was treated as a member of the cabinet.

It appears those eight months of sabotage done by the Democrats worked quite well, and it continued for many years. To this day we live with the Democrat burrowers who have dug themselves into the State Department and never left. Hell, out of the 270 political appointee positions at the Pentagon, almost every single one was held by a holdover for the first five years of Bush’s presidency.

More on that in the next post.

Fool me twice, shame on us

Yeah, I know it’s a month late (maybe more), but it’s time to talk about what’s gonna happen in Iraq over the next year (2/08-2/09). In September of 2007 (almost half a year ago), President Bush concurred with General Petraeus and gave the order to begin withdrawing US forces from Iraq. A few weeks later, the first units packed up. Thousands made it home before Christmas. Tens of thousands more will be home before the November election in 2008. Lately, there’s been talk of a pause in the withdrawal schedule so that gains and momentum in the field wouldn’t be lost, but it is just a pause-not an end, and further troop level reductions are expected to follow.

So, what happens in 2009? Well, if Senator McCain is elected, the withdrawals will continue depending on the conditions on the ground. If Senator Obama is elected, he says he’s going to order the withdrawal of U.S. forces (ignoring the fact that it had already started for over a year), but that the rate of withdrawal will continue depending on conditions on the ground. If Senator Clinton is elected, she’s promised to end the war immediately and order the withdrawal of U.S. forces (which started last September), but that the rate and level of withdrawal will depend on the conditions on the ground. All three candidates have basically the same position on what they will do in Iraq if elected, but the Democrats market themselves daily as promising to end the war in Iraq. Why? Because that’s how Democrats took power in November 2006, and the liberal, anti-war, “peace movement” base of the DNC will believe anything that is anti-war. Truth is irrelevant.

One wonders if the American people will look at the Republican and Democratic party plans for Iraq in 2009+ and say, “fool me once, shame on you, but fool me twice, shame on us”?

Link to Obama and Clinton misleading statements about their plans to end the war in Iraq

Later some would allege that this handful of words was critical to the decision that led the nation to war. Contemporaneous evidence doesn’t support that, but just try convincing people of that today.

But as Timmerman notes:

The real question is not whether the administration “lied” about the prewar intelligence. The Robb-Silberman Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, which delivered a 610-page report on the subject in March 2005, stated categorically that the CIA continued to believe in the authenticity of the Niger documents when Bush made the sppech, and that “no one in the Intelligence Community had asked that the line [the famous sixteen words] be removed.” The CIA continued to claim that it never actually looked at the documents until after the scandal broke, because they had other sources for the conclusion that Saddam Hussein was seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

A later Senate Select intelligence committee report, issued May 25, 2007, revealed that “the Intelligence community used or cleared the Niger-Iraq uranium intelligence fifteen times before the President’s State of the Union address and four times after, saying in several papers that Iraq was “vigorously pursuing uranium from Africa” [emphasis in the original]. According to Richard Perle, Sire Richard Dearlove, who was head of British intelligence at the time, insisted over breakfast in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in early 2007 that he still stood by the original story. “Dearlove told me that the basis he used for the assessment that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger had nothing to do with the bogus documents,” Perle told me.

The real question was whether the Niger documents were a plant, and elaborate sting operation by the President’s enemies aimed at leading him into an error they would later claim he had known about all along.

It all started with a former Italian policeman named Rocco Martino whom the French intelligence codenamed Giacomo.

…he had worked for Egyptian intelligence and the Italian military, and in 1996 became a paid informer for the French Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieur (DGSE). In 1999, he provided his French intelligence clients with genuine documents that revealed how Niger planned to expand trade with Iraq, apparently through clandestine uranium sales.

The French continued to express interest in Niger, so Martino looked for more documents. Through an old contact at Italy’s military intelligence agency, Colonel Antonia Nucera, he hooked up with a sixty-year old Italian secretary at the Niger embassy. She was on the books of SISMI (Servizio per la Informazione e la Sicurezza Militare) as a paid informer, code-named La Signora.

“I limited myself to supplying Martino with copies of embassy documents in which there were traces of Niger agreements, in particular with Iraq,” she later told Rome judge Franco Ionta.

In 2001 there was a break-in to the Niger embassy and the place was ransacked. At the time they believed nothing of value had been stolen but soon after the breakin the fake Niger documents began to appear.

Some accounts say Martino forged them while others say SISMI did and had Martino peddle them.

“I began to have my suspicions about Rocco Martino after the theft in the embassy in 2001,” said La Signora. What tipped her off was Martino’s insistence on having a copy of a Niger-Iraq uranium contract that didn’t exit. “Martino always told me that if ever he got hold of an eventual contract between the two parties he would have gained a considerable sum from a certain intelligence company in Brussel to which he belonged.” Everyone understood she was referring to French intelligence, the DGSE.

In the summer of 2001 Martino handed the forged document to the DGSE after which the French told the US State Department that they had information that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from Niger and the rest is history.

But all that is not the real story here. The real story is how people inside our own government conspired to keep the fact that these were forgeries a secret.

On October 15, 2001, the day Berlusconi finally met with Bush in the Oval Office, the new head of SISMI, Nicolo Pollari, briefed the CIA Rome station chief on the alleged Niger-Iraq uranium deal. Pollari knew he had to play his cards close to the vest, because signatures and named had been altered on the Niger documents. So rather then give the doctored documents to CIA station chief Jeff Castelli, he let him look through them and scribble a few hasty notes on their content.

Castelli’s report to Langley formed the basis for the first intelligence reports on the Niger deal which was picked up by Castelli’s division chief Tyler Drumheller who later put it into the daily Senior Executive Intelligence Brief on October 18, 2001.

Pollari went back to Castelli three days later with a page and a half note, explaining that the “information comes from a credible source,” a reference to the SISMI informant, La Signora.

Castelli forwarded three reports on three seperate occasions to Drumheller. After he retired from the Agency in February 2005, Drumheller became an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, and claimed that Castelli considered the Niger reports “bullshit.”

Neither Castelli nor Drumheller ever tried to expose them as forgeries, however. On the contrary: their reporting helped to validate the forged Niger documents, as the Robb-Silberman Commission investigating U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s WMD program later found.

It was an extraordinary accomplishment by the shadow warriors. They had taken fakes and laundered them through the system, all the while claiming their innocence.

Meanwhile, Rocco Martino went to London, where he delivered a copy of the Niger documents to MI6. British intelligence contributed its own reports to Washington based at least in part on the faked documents. These reports also flowed through the CIA’s European division chief, Tyler Drumheller. This created the illusion of multiple, independent reporting streams on the alleged deal. Bush ultimately relied on the British reports, summarized in a public dossier released by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office in September 2002, for the basis of the sixteen words on Iraq’s uranium procurement efforts that made its way into his State of the Union message in January 2003.

Later, the Director of the Office of Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), Greg Thielman, would tell reporters that he had seen through the scam from the start. Italian reporters asked him what SISMI’s role in the whole thing was:

“SISMI, like the CIA and the entire Anglo-Saxon intelligence community, is ready and willing to satisy the hawks in the U.S. administration.”

But Thielman’s description didn’t fit the likes of CIA officers Jeff Castelli or Tyler Drumheller, who opposed the “hawks of the U.S. administration.” It was another careful piece of subterfuge by the shadow warriors.

After leaving INR in September 2002, Thielman revealed his true colors, going to work for the Democratic staff of the Senate intelligence committee. By this point, [Carl] Levin was gearing up to spring his trap. And all the while this extraordinary intelligence coup against the President by CIA and State Department intelligence officers and their accomplices in Congress was being set in motion, no one pursued the very real contacts between Saddam’s nuclear advisor, Wissam al-Zahawie, and the Niger government.

More to come.