THE ITALIAN
LETTER
How the Bush
Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in
By Peter Eisner and Knut Royce
Rodale. 268 pp. $24.95
Review
by By Tara McKelvey,
a senior editor at the American Prospect,
and the author of "Monstering:
Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror
War"
Wednesday, July 11, 2007; Page C07
"The Italian
Letter" refers not to a single item but to many documents, including one
with a Niger presidential seal,
that Peter Eisner and Knut Royce say were used by administration officials to
support claims that Saddam Hussein was seeking material to
build a nuclear bomb. On March 7, 2003, 12 days before the Iraq war started,
the International Atomic Energy Agency's director
general, Mohamed ElBaradei,
who later won the Nobel Peace Prize, said the N iger
intelligence was based on forged documents and Hussein was not developing a
nuclear arsenal.
The story of the
letter includes a shadowy figure who peddled state secrets; an ambitious
journalist from an Italian newsweekly who purchased story leads; a source
code-named La Signora. There are clandestine meetings, forged letters,
seduction and, inevitably, betrayal -- in short, all the makings of a spy
novel. To help make sense of it all, Eisner, an award-winning newspaperman who
has served as The Washington Post's deputy foreign editor,
and Royce, an acclaimed investigative reporter, provide a timeline, starting
with an October 1998 IAEA report stating there were "no indications"
of nuclear weapons production in Iraq and ending with Vice President Cheney's November 2005 denial
that President Bush had "distorted" prewar
information.
Along the way,
Eisner and Royce recount how policeman-turned-intelligence-peddler Rocco
Martino ("something of a mixed bag, providing poor intelligence on arms
deals but decent information on Islamic fundamentalism") said he had met
Laura Montini (a.k.a. La Signora), a Niger Embassy
secretary in Rome, at a sculpture exhibit, eventually
obtained the Italian documents from her and tried to sell them for about
$10,000 to an Italian journalist.
The letter, we
discover, was "stamped Confidentia l,"
and it, along with other papers, seemed to have more in common with those Nigerian
"request-for-urgent-business-relationship" e-mails than with an
authentic document from
The authors write
that "
..."The
Italian Letter," [is choked with] subterfuge and "two-bit
hustlers unencumbered by questions of morality..." The book is [filled
with] how documents were [repeatedly] misread by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency)...
..."The
Italian Letter" ...point out, the forgeries alone did not start the
war...but the Italian letter and the accompanying documents played a pivotal
role in the decision to go to war. The forged documents certainly bolstered a
pro-war argument,... In fact, there were multiple
sources of information stating that Hussein had nuclear weapons -- all of
which, of course, were unfounded -- and an array of complex forces that
contributed to the