The British intelligence service MI6 did believe that Saddam was trying to persuade Niger to sell it uranium ore, and as I report in today's Sunday Times, with good reason. Indeed, they still do.

MI6 may really have believed that Saddam had sent Iraqi ambassador Wissam al-Zahawie to Niger on a `shopping expedition' for black market uranium. In fact, there's evidence suggesting that MI6 and other intelligence services, such as Sismi, DGSE and CIA, suspected Zahawie's Niger visit years before the forgeries were created. However, we know now that there is almost no possibility that Zahawie was in Niger to attempt a uranium purchase.

1.    There is ample evidence that Iraq ended its uranium enrichment program in the early 90s and had no plans to reconstitute the program until after sanctions had been lifted. Without an enrichment program, Iraq simply had no need for uranium.

2.    Zahawie was not in Saddam's inner circle and would not have been trusted with such an important mission. His claim that the visit's purpose was to persuade Niger's then-president to travel to Iraq (thus undermining UN sanctions) is plausible.

3.    Using an ambassador to negotiate a uranium sale breaks with how Iraq is known to have operated its clandestine procurement network. Iraq made many procurements outside UN sanctions throughout the 90s (rocket components, for example). However, Iraq always ensured that the procurements' destination was concealed by conducting business through multiple `front' companies - companies that were based all over the world. If Saddam had wanted Nigerien uranium, Niger probably would have been approached by a representative of a company like India's TT SA.

The intelligence they continue to defend, and which was described by the Butler report as "credible", was a letter from Wissam Zahawi, the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican, dated July 6, 2000, specifically talking about obtaining uranium.

Unfortunately, a copy of the alleged Zahawie letter, the Butler Inquiry's "credible" evidence, is not yet publicly available. It's difficult judge whether the document is a forgery or not, unless you have faith in the judgment of the Rt. Hon. Lord Butler. Smith does. (On his blog he refers to the Butler report as the "Bible".) I do not. There is so much we don't know about this letter. It is not known whether MI6 received the letter itself, a photocopy, or simply a transcription of the letter's contents. We don't even know how the Butler Inquiry came to its conclusion.  The single sentence about the "independent" intelligence in the Butler report may be good enough for Smith, but it's not good enough for me.

That said, there are preliminary indications that the Zahawie letter is another forgery. For example, the letter's reported date, July 6, 2000, is the same date the Niger forgeries have the alleged uranium accord being signed in Niamey. It would be an awfully huge coincidence if the Niger documents were forged with the exact same date, persons and circumstances as a `genuine' procurement attempt.

Another indication that the letter may be a forgery comes from an article in Time Magazine. The letter is most likely the same document Time claims the IAEA questioned Zahawie over in early 2003. According to the article, Zahawie's signature and the seal of the Iraqi government appear on the document. However, it was standard diplomatic procedure for letters between ambassadors to be signed but carry no seal. The alleged letter carried both. Although the IAEA took samples of Zahawie's signature, it is unknown whether it matched the signature on the document.

The Zahawi letter was obtained as part of a major DGSE operation to ensure that it did know of any deal. The letter was not in any way evidence of an actual deal, only that Iraq wanted one, and if you read those "16 words" again you'll see that is all the British, and Bush at this brief strangely honest moment in time, were saying.

The use of the term "major DGSE operation" to describe the way the French obtained the July 6 letter is a little misleading. Most of us would assume a `major operation' for an intelligence service would involve spies in black ski masks, bugging devices, armed guards, this-message-will-self-destruct-in-ten-seconds type stuff. I asked Mick to clarify what he meant. He replied that "it was an ongoing operation that started with the increasing reports of possible attempts by Saddam to get uranium that began being exchanged between the DGSE and MI6 in 1999. The French put out the word to any of their agents who might have a handle on it, including Martino."

Zahawie's Niger visit took place in early 1999. As I've described above, we know that DGSE, MI6, Sismi and CIA suspected the visit of being a `shopping expedition' for uranium years before the forgeries were created. So 1999 is likely when the French `operation' began, when the French `put the word out'. Unfortunately, this doesn't help us much, because it just means that DGSE could have obtained the letter any time between 1999 and September, 2002. The implication that the letter was provided by an "agent" doesn't help much either. In the murky world of intelligence, an agent can be working for almost anyone. It would be useful if Smith could clarify if DGSE's agent was an actual officer in the French intelligence service, or if he was a freelance intelligence peddler, like Rocco Martino.

Antonio Nucera, an officer in the Italian intelligence service SISMI, thought he could help out a couple of former agents. One was a former policeman turned freelance spy called Rocco Martino. The other was a woman called Laura Montini, who was the personal assistant to the Niger Ambassador in Rome and had supplied Nucera with Niger's diplomatic ciphers and a number of documents. But when Nucera was moved to another job Montini had been dropped as a source. She needed the money from spying to supplement her salary. Nucera knew Martino was still in the business. He offered to introduce them. What he didn't know was that Martino was now working for the DGSE and being run out of its station in Brussels.

I agree with much of the above. Sismi's Nucera did introduce Rocco Martino, a freelance spy, to Laura Montini, a secretary in Niger's embassy in Rome. Montini did provide Martino with documents that Martino sold to DGSE. I disagree, however, that Nucera did not know of Martino's connection to DGSE. Niger is a French-speaking, former French colony in which the French government is still heavily invested. Who did Nucera think Martino was going to try and sell Nigerien documents to? The Norwegians? It's much more likely that Nucera knew exactly who Martino worked for. Nucera may have been helping out an old friend but introducing Martino to Montini would have had the added bonus of providing Sismi with an intelligence back-channel directly to DGSE.

Montini and a colleague forged the documents, giving them to Martino in October 2000. But when he took them to the DGSE, they rejected the documents as fake. He then tried to sell them to an Italian journalist, who strangely took them to the US embassy to get them authenticated.

In Smith's article for The Sunday Times, he reports that Montini was aided by Maiga Zakariaou, the Nigerien consul. It is unlikely, however, that the Niger documents were forged by Montini or anyone else associated with the Nigerien embassy in Rome, as an examination of the Niger documents reveals.

Docs 3, 4 and 5 are the so-called "1989" documents (for images and translations of the Niger documents plus an explanation of the numbering system, see eRiposte's post on The Left Coaster). The pattern of anachronisms in Docs 3, 4 and 5 suggest they were based on information about Niger that was accurate in 1989.

Doc 3 is supposedly a letter from the president of Niger to the president of Iraq. It references Niger's 1966 constitution, which was suspended in 1991. Doc 4 claims to be a letter from the Nigerien foreign minister to Niger's ambassador in Rome, in which the ambassador is informed of the conclusion of the accord with Iraq. Doc 4 is written on the letterhead of Niger's former military government, the "Conseil Militaire Supreme", which had been abolished in May, 1989. Doc 4 is signed by Allele El Hadj Habibou, Niger's 1989 foreign minister.

Doc 5 is the most interesting of the "1989" documents. Doc 5 purports to be an account of the uranium accord's ratification by Niger's State Court. Like Doc 3, Doc 5 also cites Niger's 1966 constitution. But the document also lists the court members who were supposedly present at the ratification. As this website shows, each of the individuals listed really did serve in Niger's State Court in, you guessed it, 1989. (See also here and here.)

Montini and Zakariaou had access to all of Niger's correspondence with its embassy in Rome (Montini is said to have provided Martino with copies of genuine embassy documents from 2000). If their motivation was money, they would have wanted their forgeries to have been as realistic as possible. Yet they seem to have deliberately based Docs 3, 4 and 5 on documents that were more than a decade old. It makes more sense that Montini and Zakariaou were not the forgers and the Cabal used 1989 documents for Docs 3, 4 and 5 because that was all they had.

The story then gets weirder. An examination of Doc 2 reveals that the forgers eventually did use up-to-date information about Niger. Doc 2 is supposedly another letter from Niger's foreign minister to the ambassador in Rome. Doc 2's letterhead uses the correct name of Niger's government, the "Conseil de Reconciliation Nationale". Importantly, the name of the Nigerien foreign minister has been updated. The letter claims to be signed by Nassirou Sabo, Niger's foreign minister in 2000.

So why would Montini and Zakariaou base Docs 3, 4 and 5 on 1989 documents and use updated information for Doc 2 only? It seems unlikely that the Niger documents were forged all at once in some money making scam. Instead, it seems Doc 2 was forged some time after Docs 3, 4 and 5. It seems the Cabal's knowledge of Niger improved over time.

It's just speculation at the moment but I'd say that the Zahawie letter is from the same `batch' as Doc 2 (or perhaps an even later one). Although Docs 3, 4 and 5 do not mention Zahawie, both Doc 2 and the Zahawie letter do. Also like Doc 2, the Zahawie letter is likely a higher quality forgery than Docs 3, 4 and 5. When the IAEA received the Niger documents from the US State Department in February, 2003, it determined the documents were "inauthentic" within hours. The Zahawie letter, which the IAEA received one month earlier, seems to have escaped detection for much longer.

The early reporting from European intelligence services, including MI6 and SISMI, on possible Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium from Iraq was fragmented and both services stressed in their communications with the CIA that they had no real evidence, only unsubstantiated reports. It was in fact the routine stuff of intelligence exchange. One side providing what it knows and hoping the other side can add more to it, in this case either by standing up the reports or knocking them down.

Smith has underestimated Sismi's role in the dissemination and creation of the forgeries. It is pretty well established that the Sismi reports were summaries and, in some part, direct transcriptions of the Niger documents. However, the evidence suggests that Sismi's reports to CIA in 2001 and 2002 were not "the routine stuff of intelligence exchange." Sismi's actual role seems to have been much more sinister.

The information in the Niger documents lines up pretty nicely with the reports Sismi sent to the CIA. The first Sismi report was sent on October 15, 2001. The report appears to have been based on Docs 3, 4 and 5. However, there was one important difference between Docs 3, 4 and 5 and the first Sismi report. While Doc 4 named Niger's 1989 foreign minister, Allele Habibou, the first Sismi report named Niger's 2002 foreign minister, Nassirou Sabo. It seems likely that Sismi not only knew its reports were based on forgeries, but also corrected for the reports the mistakes in forgeries to mask that fact.

Doc 2 is the first Niger document to implicate Zahawie in the alleged uranium deal. This corresponds with the information Sismi provided the CIA in its second report on February 5, 2002. Doc 2 also seems to have used updated information about Niger. It is known that CIA's reaction to Sismi's initial report was underwhelming. It seems likely that sometime after October, 2001, Sismi provided the Cabal with `feedback' on how to make the forgeries more convincing. Not only did Sismi supply updated Niger information, but also told the Cabal of the international intelligence community's suspicion concerning Zahawie's visit to Niger in 1999.

And so, it appears that Smith's sources are mistaken. The narrative Smith has put together does not accord with the documented facts. It is unlikely that Montini and Zakariaou were the forgers of the Niger documents. Sismi's role in the affair was likely more extensive and, frankly, more sinister than Smith realises. The Cabal is yet to be uncovered.