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Break-in at Niger Embassy took the lid off forged documents
New York, July 21: The behind the scenes story of the bogus documents outlining Iraqi President Saddam Hussein`s attempts to buy uranium in Africa started with a January 2001 break-in at the Niger Embassy in Rome, a media report claimed today.
New York, July 21: The behind the scenes story of the bogus documents outlining Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's attempts to buy uranium in Africa started with a January 2001 break-in at the Niger Embassy in Rome, a media report claimed today.
The documents, a series of letters dated from July to October 2000, were actually crude forgeries, a report in a news magazine said adding they referred to Niger agencies that no longer existed and bore the signature of a foreign minister who had not served in the post for over a decade.
The break-in, the magazine says, set off a chain reaction that has erupted into a full-fledged Washington summer scandal, serious enough to shake President George W Bush's poll ratings.
Italian investigators have theorised that the thieves who broke into the Niger Embassy had come looking for letterhead stationary and official seals that could be copied to create bogus documents, it said.
Some months later, the Italian intelligence service, the Sisme, obtained a stack of official-looking documents signed by officials of the government of Niger, outlining attempts by agents of Saddam Hussein to buy from the African nation 500 tons of pure "yellowcake" uranium, an ingredient that can be used to build nuclear bombs.
The report from Sisme made it into the october 2002 national intelligence estimate. But the magazine report says that the CIA did not bother to first examine the documents. An Italian journalist turned the papers over to the American Embassy in Rome that same month, but the CIA station chief there apparently tossed them out, rather then send them to analysts at Langley.
Italian reporter, Elisabetta Burba, who worked for a conservative weekly magazine owned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, went to Niger and checked out the documents, but declined to use them because she feared they were "bufala" - fraudulent - and she would lose her job.
It wasn't until February that the CIA finally obtained the Italian documents from the State Department, whose warnings that the intelligence on Niger was "highly dubious" seem to have gone unheeded by the White House and unread by Bush, the magazine reports.
The State Department also turned over the Italian documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which had been pressing the United States to back up its claims about Iraq's nuclear program.
"Within two hours they figured out they were forgeries by running the name of the Niger foreign minister through the Internet search engine 'Google' and discovered that he was not in office at the time the document was signed," an IAEA official told the magazine.
Bureau Report
The break-in, the magazine says, set off a chain reaction that has erupted into a full-fledged Washington summer scandal, serious enough to shake President George W Bush's poll ratings.
Italian investigators have theorised that the thieves who broke into the Niger Embassy had come looking for letterhead stationary and official seals that could be copied to create bogus documents, it said.
Some months later, the Italian intelligence service, the Sisme, obtained a stack of official-looking documents signed by officials of the government of Niger, outlining attempts by agents of Saddam Hussein to buy from the African nation 500 tons of pure "yellowcake" uranium, an ingredient that can be used to build nuclear bombs.
The report from Sisme made it into the october 2002 national intelligence estimate. But the magazine report says that the CIA did not bother to first examine the documents. An Italian journalist turned the papers over to the American Embassy in Rome that same month, but the CIA station chief there apparently tossed them out, rather then send them to analysts at Langley.
Italian reporter, Elisabetta Burba, who worked for a conservative weekly magazine owned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, went to Niger and checked out the documents, but declined to use them because she feared they were "bufala" - fraudulent - and she would lose her job.
It wasn't until February that the CIA finally obtained the Italian documents from the State Department, whose warnings that the intelligence on Niger was "highly dubious" seem to have gone unheeded by the White House and unread by Bush, the magazine reports.
The State Department also turned over the Italian documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which had been pressing the United States to back up its claims about Iraq's nuclear program.
"Within two hours they figured out they were forgeries by running the name of the Niger foreign minister through the Internet search engine 'Google' and discovered that he was not in office at the time the document was signed," an IAEA official told the magazine.
Bureau Report