Greg Thielmann, after being turned away from Bolton's office, worked with the INR staff on a major review of Iraq's progress in developing W.M.D.s. The review, presented to Secretary of State Powell in December, 2001, echoed the earlier I.A.E.A. findings. According to Thielmann, "It basically said that there is no persuasive evidence that the Iraqi nuclear program is being reconstituted."

Note the timeline: this is after the alleged first batch of documents from SISMI; and note the persons: at this point, Powell and State (minus Bolton) is apparently still not on board.

The next quote will be long but worth it:

In the fall of 2001, soon after the September 11th attacks, the C.I.A. received an intelligence report from ... SISMI, about a public visit that Wissam al-Zahawie, then the Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican, had made to Niger and three other African nations two and a half years earlier, in February, 1999. The visit had been covered at the time by the local press in Niger and by a French press agency. The American Ambassador, Charles O. Cecil, filed a routine report to Washington on the visit, as did British intelligence. There was nothing untoward about the Zahawie visit. "We reported it because his picture appeared in the paper with the President," Cecil, who is now retired, told me. There was no article accompanying the photograph, only the caption, and nothing significant to report...

None of the contemporaneous reports, as far as is known, made any mention of uranium. But now, apparently as part of a larger search for any pertinent information about terrorism, SISMI dug the Zahawie-trip report out of its files and passed it along, with a suggestion that Zahawie's real mission was to arrange the purchase of a form of uranium ore known as "yellowcake."

...Inside the American intelligence community, it was dismissed as amateurish and unsubstantiated. One former senior C.I.A. official told me that the initial report from Italy contained no documents but only a written summary of allegations.

So: were there a previous set of documents at all? Or, is all talk about these documents merely anonymised reference to the above SISMI "information", plus spin?

At any rate, after the neocons pushed the SISMI report,

On January 30th, the C.I.A. published an unclassified report to Congress that stated, "Baghdad may be attempting to acquire materials that could aid in reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program." A week later, Colin Powell told the House International Relations Committee, "With respect to the nuclear program, there is no doubt that the Iraqis are pursuing it."

Note the timeline again: Tenet & Powell on-board now. Enter Wilson:

In late February, the C.I.A. persuaded retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson to fly to Niger to discreetly check out the story of the uranium sale.

...Before his departure, he was summoned to a meeting at the C.I.A. with a group of government experts on Iraq, Niger, and uranium. He was shown no documents but was told, he said, that the C.I.A. "was responding to a report that was recently received of a purported memorandum of agreement" -- between Iraq and Niger -- "that our boys had gotten." He added, "It was never clear to me, or to the people who were briefing me, whether our guys had actually seen the agreement, or the purported text of an agreement."

Now the sentence I put in italic is a mysterious one to me. What does "that our boys had gotten" mean? Does this mean that the foreign report about a purported memorandum was shored up with a copy of the actual memorandum acquired by the CIA? Then why refer to the original report at all? At any rate, the most likely scenario is again that only the wild speculations in the SISMI report were the basis for this. (More stuff from SISMI came probably shortly before the September 2002 British "sexed-up" dossier, if the Butler Report is to be believed.)

Elisabetta Burba ... received a telephone call from an Italian businessman and security consultant whom she believed to have once been connected to Italian intelligence. He told her that he had information connecting Saddam Hussein to the purchase of uranium in Africa. She considered the informant credible. In 1995, when she worked for the magazine Epoca, he had provided her with detailed information, apparently from Western intelligence sources, for articles she published dealing with the peace process in Bosnia and with an Islamic charity that was linked to international terrorism. The information, some of it in English, proved to be accurate.

That is, I think only intelligence insiders could have been behind this, using existing channels.

Carlo Rossella, who is known for his ties to the Berlusconi government, told Burba to turn the documents over to the American Embassy for authentication. Burba dutifully took a copy of the papers to the Embassy on October 9th.

A week later, Burba travelled to Niger. She visited mines and the ports that any exports would pass through, spoke to European businessmen and officials informed about Niger's uranium industry, and found no trace of a sale. She also learned that the transport company and the bank mentioned in the papers were too small and too ill-equipped to handle such a transaction. As Ambassador Wilson had done eight months earlier, she concluded that there was no evidence of a recent sale of yellowcake to Iraq.

Burba's repeat of Wilson's trip is usually left out of the story, tough it would be a good point against those who want to assault Wilson's credibility. (This wasn't left out by the German documentary I mentioned.)

Two former C.I.A. officials provided slightly different accounts of what happened next. "The Embassy was alerted that the papers were coming," the first former official told me, "and it passed them directly to Washington without even vetting them inside the Embassy." Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the C.I.A. to the Pentagon, he said. "Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false--until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed."

In the above version, the documents did reach the CIA! That is, Tenet or some underling stopped the propagation of negative assessment within the CIA, too - or prevented the documents from reaching CIA analysts. (The latter would be CIA spokesman William Harlow's version that the analysts received the report in early 2003, see this other Hersch article.) Here is the second, slightly different version, in line with yours:

The second former official, Vincent Cannistraro, who served as chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis, told me that copies of the Burba documents were given to the American Embassy, which passed them on to the C.I.A.'s chief of station in Rome, who forwarded them to Washington. Months later, he said, he telephoned a contact at C.I.A. headquarters and was told that "the jury was still out on this"--that is, on the authenticity of the documents.

I think William Harlow is a proven liar. He had to say "early 2003" because the IAEA was informed about the documents only in February 2003.

Finally, here is the few old hands version in full, via Sy's informant:

Who produced the fake Niger papers?...

Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, "Somebody deliberately let something false get in there." 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.

"They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go -- to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence," my source said. "They thought it'd be bought at lower levels -- a big bluff." The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. "It got out of control."

However, another CIA source more removed from these claims suggests this may be internal CIA gossip:

a retired clandestine officer told me this summer that the story about a former operations officer faking the documents is making the rounds. "What's telling," he added, "is that the story, whether it's true or not, is believed"

However, the first source tells a further part of the few old hands story which is totally forgotten (including me, as I realised upon re-reading):

The former intelligence official who gave me the account of the forging of the documents told me that his colleagues were also startled by the speech. "They said, `Holy shit, all of a sudden the President is talking about it in the State of the Union address!' They began to panic. Who the hell was going to expose it? They had to build a backfire. The solution was to leak the documents to the I.A.E.A."

But here is how the IAEA official at the centre of it remembers:

On February 4, 2003, while Baute was on a plane bound for New York to attend a United Nations Security Council meeting on the Iraqi weapons dispute, the U.S. Mission in Vienna suddenly briefed members of Baute's team on the Niger papers, but still declined to hand over the documents. "I insisted on seeing the documents myself," Baute said, "and was provided with them upon my arrival in New York."

So, the jury is still out. I'm curious about your misgivings regarding this version, anyway.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}