Many times here on the pages of DailyKos, the name
Michael Ledeen has come up in connection with the forged Niger documents.
Ian Masters, host of Background Briefing, in Los Angeles, interviewed Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of Counterterrorism operations at the CIA. Cannistraro came close to naming the man who forged the Niger documents. When Masters asked, "If I said `Michael Ledeen'?" Vincent Cannistraro replied, "You'd be very close."
So how close was Ledeen to the documents? Very close....he was a "contributer" the Italian magazine Panorama - the magazine who first reported on the documents. Oh, we knew he was involved. Just knew it.
Remember the Niger Dox? Remember what was in them?
The bogus documents became the basis for the infamous sixteen words in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address, in which he detailed his case for war. Their origin has been one of the most persistent mysteries in how American intelligence on Iraq was so wrong.
Ledeen has given a conflicting and vague timeframe regarding his association with Panorama:
From Raw Story:
"I have no current relationship with Panorama," Ledeen said. "For a year or two I wrote an occasional column for Panorama, I would guess on average twice a month."
"That ended when the editor, Carlo Rossella, became a TV star," he added.
-snip
While Ledeen admits to writing for Panorama, he explained that the work had been in the past, saying, "That would be a couple of years ago."
But "a couple of years ago" would be right around the time when the forgeries were delivered to Burba or sent from the U.S. embassy in Rome via backchannels to the U.S. State Department, bypassing the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Boom.
A little background:
By late 2003, the trail of the documents had been partially uncovered. They were obtained by a "security consultant" (and former agent of the precursor agency to SISMI, the SID), Rocco Martino, from Italian military intelligence (SISMI). An article in The Times (London) quoted Martino as having received the documents from a woman on the staff of the Niger embassy, after a meeting was arranged by a serving SISMI agent. ("Tracked down," by Nicholas Rufford and Nick Fielding, Sunday Times (London), Aug. 1, 2004.) Martino later recanted and said he had been misquoted, and that SISMI had not facilitated the meeting where he obtained the documents. It was later revealed that Martino had been invited to serve as the conduit for the documents by Col. Antonio Nucera of SISMI, the head of the counterintelligence and WMD proliferations sections of SISMI's Rome operations center.
Martino, in turn, offered them to Italian journalist Elizabetta Burba. On instructions from her editor at Panorama, Burba offered them to the U.S. Embassy in Rome in October, 2002. Burba was dissuaded by the editors of the Berlusconi-owned Panorama from investigating the source of the forgeries.
It is as yet unknown how Italian intelligence came by the documents and why they were not given directly to the U.S. In 2005, Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA and the intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, expressed the opinion that the documents had been produced in the United States and funneled through the Italians: "The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein ...." [11]
Also, it's important to remember that Stephen Hadley met with the chief of Italy's intelligence agency(SISMI), Nicolo Pollari, on September 9th, 2002 - right before the information in the documents became public.
Here's a bit more information on Ledeen. Speaking to Brent Scowcrof's warning about the folly of invading Iraq, Ledeen said:
He fears that if we attack Iraq "I think we could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a caldron and destroy the War on Terror." One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists. That's our mission in the war against terror.