The Washington Post has a great 4-pager by Peter Eisner up, How Bogus Letter Became a Case for War, which delves into the origin of that Niger uranium story. It details how Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba first received an odd tip in from Rocco Martino October, 2002.
They met at a restaurant in Rome on Oct. 7, where Martino showed Burba a folder filled with documents, most of them in French. One of the documents was purportedly sent by the president of Niger to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, confirming a deal to sell 500 tons of uranium to Iraq annually. This was the smoking gun in the package, claiming to show the formal approval of Niger's president to supply Iraq with a commodity that would in all likelihood only be used for a nuclear weapons program: Iraq had no nuclear power plants.
Burba talked to her editors about it, thinking she wanted to follow this up, ask a few questions in Niamey, perhaps. But she also paid a visit to the US embassy in Rome, where she laid out what she knew. She hoped they'd be able to confirm for her. Or, it might be of interest to them, at least.
CIA Head of Station, though, didn't want to have anything to do with her. But not for the reasons you might think:
One person who refused to meet with Burba was the CIA chief of station. A few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, Sismi, the Italian intelligence agency, had sent along information about the alleged sale of uranium to Iraq. The station chief asked for more information and would later consider it far-fetched.
On Oct. 15, 2001, the CIA reports officer at the embassy wrote a brief summary based on the Sismi intelligence, signed and dated it, and routed it to CIA's Operations Directorate in Langley, with copies going to the clandestine service's European and Near East divisions. The reports officer had limited its distribution because the intelligence was uncorroborated; she was aware of Sismi's questionable track record and did not believe the report merited wider dissemination.
That's right—a year earlier, CIA had looked at this same story and concluded it was nonsense.
Much of this has been documented elsewhere, but i recommend giving the article a look. Now that Libby's verdict has come in, it seems that some journalists are getting the go-ahead to dig further.¹
It's really late and i have to hit the sack. If anyone wants to diary this up in a better fashion, be my guest. But here's one last taste:
The interviews also showed that France, berated by the Bush administration for opposing the Iraq war, honored a U.S. intelligence request to investigate the uranium claim. It determined that its former colony had not sold uranium to Iraq.
Freedom's not just another word, eh?
¹ Yeah, yeah: those so-and-so "journalists" should have been covering all this from the get-go. Whatever. I don't want to hear it. There were good reasons for watching how Fitzgerald's investigation was going.