it appears that
Mr. Fitzgerald may be on the verge of asking the Grand Jury to indict Dick
Cheney and Stephen Hadley. Karl Rove is no dummy and would be derelict and
incompetent to not prepare for this contingency. He know that if Fitz drops a new
legal bomb before the November elections on someone in the Administration
that the Republican ship of state will sunder.

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. [13]

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. [14] Burba was dissuaded by the editors of the Berlusconi-owned Panorama from investigating the source of the forgeries.

An August 2004 Financial Times article indicated French officials may have had a role in the forged documents coming to light. The article states:

According to senior European officials, in 1999 [Rocco Martino] provided French officials with genuine documents which revealed Iraq may have been planning to expand 'trade' with Niger. This trade was assumed to be in uranium, which is Niger's main export. It was then that Mr Martino first became aware of the value of documents relating to Niger's uranium exports. He was then asked by French officials to provide more information, which led to a flourishing 'market' in documents. He subsequently provided France with more documents, which turned out to have been forged when they were handed to the International Atomic Energy Agency by US diplomats.

The Times article also stated that "French officials have not said whether they know Mr Martino, and are unlikely to either confirm or deny that he is a source."[15]

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 ...." [16]

According to a 2003 article in The New Yorker by Seymour Hersh, the forgery may have been a deliberate entrapment by current and former CIA officers to settle a score against Cheney and other neoconservatives. Hersh recounts how a former officer told him that "somebody deliberately let something false get in there." [17] Hersh continues:

He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

"The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney," the former officer said. "They said, 'O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.'" My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. "Everyone was bragging about it—'Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.'" These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.

In an interview published April 7, 2005, Cannistraro was asked by Ian Masters what he would say if it was asserted that the source of the forgery was former National Security Council and State Department consultant Michael Ledeen. (Ledeen had also allegedly been a liaison between the American Intelligence Community and SISMI two decades earlier.) Cannistraro answered by saying: "you'd be very close." [18] Ledeen has denied this - see [19] - an article which mentions, though, that he has worked for the aforementioned Panorama magazine.

In an interview on July 26, 2005, Cannistraro's business partner and columnist for the "American Conservative" magazine, former CIA counter terrorism officer Philip Giraldi, confirmed to Scott Horton that the forgeries were produced by "a couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy." When Horton said that must be Ledeen, he confirmed it, and added that the ex-CIA officers, "also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing." [20]

In a second interview with Horton, Giraldi elaborated to say that Ledeen and his former CIA friends worked with Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. "These people did it probably for a couple of reasons, but one of the reasons was that these people were involved, through the neoconservatives, with the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi and had a financial interest in cranking up the pressure against Saddam Hussein and potentially going to war with him." [21]

The suggestion of a plot by CIA officers is countered by an explosive series of articles [22] in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.[23][24][25] Investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.

Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. What may be most significant to American observers, however, is La Repubblica's allegation that the Italians sent the bogus intelligence about Niger and Iraq not only through traditional allied channels such as the CIA, but seemingly directly into the White House. That direct White House channel amplifies questions about the 16-word reference to the uranium from Africa in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address -- which remained in the speech despite warnings from the CIA and the State Department that the allegation was not substantiated.

Wilson told The Washington Post anonymously in June 2003 that he had concluded that the intelligence about the Niger uranium was based on the forged documents because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." The relevant papers were not in CIA hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip. Wilson had to backtrack and said he may have "misspoken" on this.[12] The Senate intelligence committee, which examined pre-Iraq war intelligence, reported that Wilson "had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports."

he Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released results of his analysis of the documents. Reportedly, it took IAEA officials only a matter of hours to determine that these documents were fake. Using little more than a Google search, IAEA experts discovered indications of a crude forgery, such as the use of incorrect names of Nigerian officials. As a result, the IAEA reported to the U.N. Security Council that the documents were "in fact not authentic." The U.N. spokesman wrote:

The I.A.E.A. was able to review correspondence coming from various bodies of the government of Niger and to compare the form, format, contents and signature of that correspondence with those of the alleged procurement-related documentation. Based on thorough analysis, the I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents, which formed the basis for the reports of recent uranium transaction between Iraq and Niger, are in fact not authentic. We have therefore concluded that these specific allegations are unfounded.[10

Retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson wrote a critical op-ed in The New York Times in which he explained the nature of the documents and the government's prior knowledge of their unreliability for use in a case for war. Shortly after Wilson's op-ed, in a column by Robert Novak, the identity of Wilson's wife, undercover CIA analyst Valerie Plame, was revealed. The Senate Intelligence Committee report and other sources seem to confirm that Plame gave her husband a positive recommendation. However, they also confirm that she did not personally authorize the trip (and in fact did not have any authority to do so).

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report also claimed that when Wilson briefed the CIA on his trip to Niger, CIA analysts felt the claim that Iraq sought WMD from Africa was further substantiated, though the State Department thought Wilson's findings refuted the claim.^{[citation needed]} But the CIA had warned the President in March 2002 that Wilson's trip had concluded the claims were unsubstantiated.[1]

The "Plame affair" (aka. "CIA leak scandal"), which ensued as a result of the unauthorized disclosure of Plame's identity, is an ongoing political scandal and criminal investigation into the source of the leak which "outed" Plame, and whether or not that person committed a crime.

The actual words President Bush spoke: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" suggests that his source was British intelligence and not the forged documents.[2]

However, the Administration has admitted that the claim was "a mistake."

During the 2003 State of the Union speech, U.S. President George W. Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The British claim could not be substantiated with evidence. The Butler Report is believed to be the source for the claim and the British Government continues to believe it is accurate.

Critics claim the statement in the speech was a reference to the documents.

The term Yellowcake Forgery refers to falsified classified documents initially "uncovered" by Italian intelligence which depicted an attempt by Iraq's Saddam Hussein regime to purchase yellowcake uranium from the country of Niger during the Iraq disarmament crisis.

On the basis of these documents and other indicators, the United States and United Kingdom governments asserted that Iraq had attempted to procure nuclear material for the purpose of creating "weapons of mass destruction", in defiance of United Nations sanctions.

This claim was one of the political justifications for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and led to considerable embarrassment when discredited.

Yellowcake, a mixture of different uranium oxides and other uranium compounds, is an intermediary stage in the production of enriched uranium for use in a nuclear reactor or a nuclear weapon.