Needless to say, any information being doled out by an acknowledged spymaster must be accepted only with a high degree of skepticism. Nevertheless, the Dgse has not been ro recently, publicly, and conspicuously wrong as the U.S. "intelligence" services. Hannah K. O'Luthon
Anyway, back to this article, I was very happy to see a French official speak out on the case. It's a point that I think is very important. Of course one can't expect or pretend that a government or an agency respond to innuendo or smear. It's in the norm to ignore the din, which is precisely what the DGSE and the French government has always been doing- and is still doing.
This was what I intended to put up as my lead graph for this piece (modified for Kos):
"Frankly, if you put aside the slanderous aspects of the affirmation, Niger is francophone and we know everything about it. Nobody here would've made the mistake of mixing up ministers," a French DGSE agent laughed in response to the Financial Times. That perhaps was about as close as you would get to an official French statement on the matter.
Now this has changed. In an in-depth article published on December 1st in the Italian daily, la Repubblica, the two authors, Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D'Avanzo, interview the retired Number Two DGSE chief, Alain Chouet, on the case. Bonini and D'Avanzo, by the way, were the first to reveal the Iraq-Niger yellowcake scam.
There is no smoking gun that links the INC to the Niger documents. It may actually have been an opportunistic operation that got out of control and was reigned in as some sort of messy pastiche, smothered in State Secrecy sauce. Damage control.
The Italian position is untenable. The government and the Sismi insist Italy has nothing to do with the story. A small time con artist from Formello ends up in the limelight as a French agent. And Italy applies state secrecy! It's a great script if it weren't for the appalling tragedy it brought on.
