ITALY: Secret meetings. Spies. Forged documents. Government denials. Burglary.
Italy is reliving its own small but significant role in "Niger-Gate", the scandal that surfaced as the Bush administration made its case for war in Iraq.
If all roads lead to Rome, so do the rumours: Washington's current problem with the leak of a CIA officer's identity has tentacles here.
Former US diplomat Joseph Wilson, whose wife was the covert CIA operative whose identity might have been leaked by White House officials, was dispatched in 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from Niger, about the time documents asserting exactly that surfaced in Rome.
The documents were determined to be forgeries, and Wilson said he found little evidence to back the claim. Yet the claim was used in early 2003 by President Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair to illustrate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Who exactly forged the documents, which included letters and purported contracts, remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the affair.
Speculation about how the papers were produced in Rome - and complaints that the Italian government has done little to find out, or to come clean - dominated political debate here this week, especially in the left wing newspaper La Repubblica, which has dedicated page after page of breathless prose to the matter.
Among its claims, La Repubblica has suggested that the head of Italy's military secret service, Nicolo Pollari, disseminated the false information to the Bush administration on orders from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a loyal ally eager to give Bush a helping hand.
La Repubblica reported, and Bush administration officials have confirmed, that Mr Pollari met with then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J Hadley on September 9th, 2002. Mr Hadley later took the blame for including the incorrect claim in Mr Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.
Mr Pollari went directly to Mr Hadley, as well as to other administration neo-conservative contacts, because CIA agents in Rome were rebuffing his overtures, apparently not considering the documents to be credible, La Repubblica reported. Mr Pollari will go before a closed hearing of the Italian parliament next week to explain his role. The Berlusconi government has repeatedly denied that SISMI, as the military intelligence service is known, fabricated the now discredited dossier. - (LA Times/Washington Post Service)