As a public service, my alter ego, Mr. de Gondi, has granted me permission to cross-post his diary on recent developments in the Nigergate caper. Updates and new diaries on the subject will continue to be first posted at Eurotrib.
Giuseppe d’Avanzo and Carlo Bonini have just published this morning, October 24th, in la Repubblica the first installment of a detailed reconstruction of the false Niger yellowcake caper. D’Avanzo and Bonini were the first reporters to reveal the yellowcake scandal. The article in Italian is now available on line.
Here is a synthesis of the scoop for those who do not speak Italian.
The first instalment gives a detailed account of the origins of the documents (or most of them, my note) up to the autumn of 2001when Nicolò Pollari passed the false SISMI dossier to Rome CIA station chief, Jeff Castelli. In a previous diary I had alluded to the possible role of Castelli in the Nigergate scandal. Castelli wrote a report and forwarded it to the Greg Thielmann’s Bureau of Intelligence which eventually dismissed this first report as unfounded.
But let’s start at the beginning. The original false dossier was put together by Rocco Martino with the help of an old friend who still worked in the SISMI, Antonio Nucera. Rocco Martino is a failed cop. He worked in the Secret Services (then known as the SID)as a captain of political-military intelligence in 1976-77 before being fired for misconduct. In 1985 he was arrested for extortion and again in Germany in 1993 for stolen checks. According to sources within the Minister of Defence, he continued to used by the SISMI as an informant until 1999. He was apparently known as a double agent.
Rocco Martino set up an agency in Luxembourg, the “Security development organization office (sic)” in 3 di Rue Hoehl, Sandweiler, where he passed Italian intelligence to the French and vice versa. In 1999 he discovered that the French were concerned about suspicious activity in an abandoned Uranium mine in Niger. They fear there might be a case of clandestine commerce. Martino felt there could be some money to be made and contacted his old friend, Antonio Nucera, vice-director of the Sismi office in Viale Pasteur in Rome.
In the early eighties, Nucera had worked for the 1° and 8° division of the SISMI, which dealt with arms and technology traffic in Africa and the Mideast. The division had had some success in contrasting Saddam’s agents in Africa. According to an agent, the division had managed to get their hands on the Niger cipher book and a telex from the Niger ambassador in Rome Adamou Chékou announcing the mission of Wissam Al Zahawie, Iraqi ambassador to the Holy See, as a representative of Saddam Hussein.
At the same time in the port of Trieste authorities confiscated a shipment of marangin steel which could be used in the construction of centrifuges for the separation of Uranium.
Martino insisted on having whatever he could get to put together a dossier to sell to the French. Nucera passed on the few documents the SISMI had and arranged a contact with an informant who worked in the Niger embassy, a sixty year-old woman with a French accent. Together with the Embassy attaché, Zakaria Yaou Maiga, the three conspire to fabricate the false dossier to sell to the French. In order to do so Maiga stages a burglary over the New Year’s holidays within the Embassy, in order to subtract documents, stationary and seals. The burglary was denounced by the assistant secretary for administrative affairs, Arfou Mounkaila, to the police without furnishing details of what was missing.
Together the three put together the first false dossier and sold it to the French Services, Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (Dgse), apparently making a substantial profit. The dossier was immediately trashed by the French for obvious reasons.
After September 11th, the SISMI reactivated its old team. However, many officers were new. Nicolò Pollari had just been named director of the SISMI, as well as Colonel Alberto Manenti, who was put in charge of the WMD division. Manenti was a chronic yes-man who would do anything to please his superiors. Unfortunately, he asked Nucera to stay on as a collaborator. At the same time Berlusconi was putting pressure on Pollari to come up with something so that Italy could make a good showing as a protagonist on the world stage in the war on terrorism. On the other side of the Atlantic, the CIA was under pressure from the White House- and especially Dick Cheney- to come up with anything on Iraq and WMDs. The Rome station chief apparently solicited Pollari at the time for any possible leads.
According to Martino’s previous testimony, the dossier was passed on to M16 by the SISMI itself. In his version it is only natural that the SISMI deny this, as any agency would, especially after its disastrous consequences.
However, according to D’Avanzo and Bonini, Rocco Martino is lying. It was Rocco Martino who passed the documents to M16, and not the SISMI. Pollari has declared that Martino was constantly under surveillance by the SISMI while in London and has offered photographic evidence that it was Martino who passed the dossier to the British.
Yet this leaves many unanswered questions open. Why did the SISMI then pass the documents on to Castelli? And why didn’t the SISMI immediately denounce Rocco Martino to the various agencies?
“Autumn 2001. Pollari’s SISMI has a crack-pot dossier put together by Rocco Martino and Antonio Nucera. He shows it to the CIA while Rocco Martino passes it on to Richard Dearlove of the M16 in London. It’s only the beginning of the Great Italian Deceit.”
We’ll look forward to tomorrow’s follow-up.
