The Italian Job: How Fake Iraq Memos Tripped Up Ex-Spy
Rocco Martino Goes Silent As FBI Probes the Origin Of 'Yellowcake' Scandal
By JAY SOLOMON and GABRIEL KAHN
For much of the past decade, Rocco Martino floated in obscurity on the margins of the global spy game. The silver-haired Italian worked briefly for his country's military-intelligence service, was kicked out but continued to freelance with SISMI, as it is known. He scraped together a living selling intelligence tips under an ever-shifting list of aliases to other agencies or to journalists.
Then he stumbled across something that, in the charged climate following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he thought could be a hot lead: 17 telexes, memos and letters purporting to show how Saddam Hussein had acquired 500 tons of "yellowcake," a processed uranium ore, from the African nation of Niger to build nuclear weapons.
Over dinner at an upscale Roman restaurant in October 2002, Mr. Martino offered them to an Italian journalist for ¤10,000, or nearly $12,000.
He never got the money. The journalist concluded, correctly, that they were fakes. Still, she ended up unwittingly feeding the papers into the international intelligence machine, which turned them into part of the U.S. case for toppling Saddam Hussein.
Now, the 67-year-old Mr. Martino is at the center of a Federal Bureau of Investigation counterespionage probe, according to a senior FBI official. As they seek to determine whether a foreign country intentionally misled the U.S. intelligence community about Saddam's activities, agents are trying to answer these questions: Who created the fake intelligence in the first place, and why? Was Mr. Martino actively trying to aid the case for war? Was he a pawn for others who were?
"Rocco was a set up" for someone else, contends Democratic Congressman Maurice Hinchey of New York, who failed in December to push a resolution through the House of Representatives compelling the White House to release documents related to the Niger case. "We still don't know who [the Italian] was working with."
While Mr. Martino spent much of his career peddling stories to journalists, he now won't talk to the press. He declined repeated interview requests through his Rome lawyer, Giuseppe Placidi. Mr. Placidi says he believes somebody must have forged the documents but that it wasn't Mr. Martino. SISMI also has denied forging or disseminating the dossier.
A native of the southern Italian region of Calabria, Mr. Martino spent the early years of his professional career in the carabinieri, Italy's military police force. His on-again, off-again relationship with SISMI was revealed by the current head of the agency, Gen. Nicolò Pollari, to a closed Italian parliamentary commission last year, according to Italian Sen. Luigi Malabarba, a member of the commission.
People who have had dealings with Mr. Martino describe him as always elegantly dressed, with well-trimmed hair and moustache, a preference for tailored beige suits and the manners of a southern Italian gentleman.
Elisabetta Burba, the journalist who met Mr. Martino that fateful night in October 2002, says she has known him for close to a decade and had received solid information from him in the past, including a scoop about an Islamic charity that had links to terror funding. For some information she paid him, a not-uncommon practice among Italian journalists. She says Mr. Martino had at times described himself as a businessman and security consultant.
His lawyer, Mr. Placidi, says his client has worked recently as a paid operative of France's intelligence service, the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, or DGSE. A spokesman for the DGSE declined repeated requests for comment.
Others who have met him say he worked hard to convey an air of mystery. Carlo Bonini, a reporter with Rome daily La Republica, says he first met Mr. Martino in a Rome cafe in 2003, where he went by the pseudonym Signor Morini. "He tried to give me the impression that he knew a lot more than he could tell," recalls Mr. Bonini.
He also struck some of his acquaintances as being amateurish, even forgetting the combination of the lock for his briefcase on occasions. A business deal he entered in recent years went awry and ended with him being charged with fraud, though he was never convicted, according Mr. Placidi, his lawyer. He also had a scrape with the law when some checks stolen during a robbery in Germany wound up in his hands, the lawyer adds, declining to provide further detail.
According to several people who heard Mr. Martino's account, the bogus Niger documents came into his possession after a tip from his long-time handler at SISMI. The handler introduced Mr. Martino to an Italian woman working at the Niger Embassy in Rome. Mr. Martino called her "the signora." They had their first meeting in February 2000, according to people familiar with Mr. Martino's account. The purported handler couldn't be reached for comment.
The signora, identified in a report by Rome prosecutors as Laura Montini, began regularly passing on tidbits of information, according to Rome prosecutors and others who discussed the matter with Mr. Martino. Mr. Martino has said that the Italian woman eventually began providing telexes and files depicting the sale of uranium yellowcake from Niger to Iraq, according to several people who have interviewed him.
Reached at the Niger Embassy, located in a residential neighborhood in Rome, Ms. Montini said she has never met Mr. Martino and only learned his name from newspapers. She also declined to confirm or deny that she was questioned in relation to the probe conducted by Rome prosecutors, which eventually was dropped.
It wasn't long after receiving the documents that Mr. Martino began seeking to peddle them to potential buyers. He tried to interest France's DGSE, according to his attorney and those who interviewed Mr. Martino. He also traveled to Brussels and tried to pass them on to the British Embassy, according to Gen. Pollari's testimony. Around the same time, he sought out the wider media world, including the Italian journalist, Ms. Burba.
Ms. Burba says she spent weeks trying to verify their authenticity, even traveling as far as Niger. She ultimately concluded that the dossier was a fabrication. Some of the documents were dated prior to the events to which they referred; crucial details were missing; and one piece of correspondence between the Niger and Iraq governments was written, improbably, in Italian. She says Mr. Martino was upset when she refused to pay him and sent a text message to her phone insisting the papers were legitimate.
Even though Ms. Burba herself didn't write about them, she unwittingly put the documents in play. As part of her attempts to corroborate the papers, she delivered the documents to the American Embassy in Rome, according to the journalist and an account of the event described by a report on prewar intelligence by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Embassy officials never commented to Ms. Burba. They did send the documents back to the State Department's intelligence arm in Washington, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR. A week later, on Oct. 16, State Department officials in Washington were distributing copies in a meeting of an interagency task force that included representatives of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency, according to the Senate report.
This wasn't the first time American officials had heard reports that Iraq was pursuing Niger's yellowcake. SISMI had passed on tips to the CIA to that effect in late 2001 and early 2002, according to U.S. intelligence officials. But the Martino-Burba dossier was the first time they had gotten first-hand evidence.
President Bush asserted in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking to procure uranium from Africa. The White House denies it relied on Mr. Martino's documents to make its claims, citing instead a British "white paper" that made a similar claim. Several members of the U.S. intelligence community say they are convinced that all intelligence referring to uranium purchases from Niger were related to Mr. Martino's documents.
"I've never seen anything from the Brits but their White Paper," says Carl Ford, who headed INR during President Bush's first term, when the internal debate over the Niger intelligence raged. "Since there wasn't any separate reporting from them at that time, I assumed the British report was based on the same documents the U.S. had picked up overseas, or they were referring to a country other than Niger."
The International Atomic Energy Agency in March 2003 publicly pronounced the documents to be fakes. After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that same month, the CIA acknowledged that many of the claims concerning uranium purchases in Africa were based on flawed intelligence.
As the intelligence scandal proceeded to grow, and cross continents, Mr. Martino was finding it increasingly difficult to keep his true identity secret, particularly as he touted a new story -- that he had been snookered by SISMI, which used him as part of a plan to discredit Iraq.
In the summer of 2004, the Italian met with reporters for the Sunday Times of London in a cafe at the Brussels train station, where he referred to himself only as "Giacomo." He alleged he had been set up by SISMI, according to the article that ran on Aug. 1, but demanded money for his full story.
"I sell information, I admit," he said, according to the article. Again, Mr. Martino's payday never came. Two British journalists balked at his request for cash, but not before surreptitiously snapping his photograph.
With his photo now public, it wasn't long before others in Italy recognized Mr. Martino and newspapers began to publish his name. In a string of subsequent articles that ran in the summer of 2004, everything from Mr. Martino's work with SISMI to his financial troubles were published in Italian and European publications.
As pressure mounted on him in Europe, Mr. Martino began courting a different set of journalists across the Atlantic: producers from the CBS show "60 Minutes II," who flew him to New York twice during the summer of 2004. The CBS journalists were reporting a story on what role the faked Niger documents may have played in the Bush administration's push for war in Iraq, according to three people who worked on the project.
People who met with the Italian during his two visits describe him as harried by the strain of the public attacks in Europe. "He was being crushed" by circumstance outside his control, says Joshua Micah Marshall, a New York journalist and blogger who cooperated with 60 Minutes II on the investigation and has reported extensively on the Niger affair on his site, talkingpointsmemo.com1. "He didn't know what he was going back to in Italy."
On a Sunday afternoon during his August stay, Mr. Martino went AWOL from his hosts, setting off a frantic search for the Italian across mid-Manhattan. Producers and a translator, ultimately, tracked him down near Columbus Circle in Central Park. The people who found him described him as shaky, crying and despondent that he might lose his livelihood and his family.
To date, CBS has yet to run the program, because of an ongoing debate over whether it is ready to air. Kevin Tedesco, a spokesman for 60 Minutes, says the news program's journalists continue to report the Niger story and that "we won't rule out airing this material in the future."