In late 2003 there were several different rumors about the origin of the forged Niger documents, and one of the persistent ones was that they were put together by disgruntled CIA agents who expected their obvious fakeness to be uncovered at a time and place that discredited the admnistration toadies to whom spy information from unreliable sources (like Chalabi) was stovepiped. Here is Seymour Hersh describing this in a 10/21/03
New Yorker interview (he also mentioned it in his full "stovepiping" article, which I believe was in the same issue):
http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/?031027on_onlineonly01(snip)
Q: You looked into the question of who actually fabricated the papers. What did you find out?SH: Different people have different theories. When I was in Italy, there were people who thought that the documents might have been written by the Italian military intelligence service, whose acronym is sismi. There have been other suspects, too. But one of the most compelling theories was relayed to me by a former senior C.I.A. official, a very high-level guy. And it goes back to the issue of how broken the intelligence system was, so much so that you couldn’t get at the truth.
What he said represented the frustration and rage felt by many in the intelligence community, the notion that a group of retired officers actually got together and drafted the Niger papers.Q: Why would anybody who had worked for the C.I.A., no matter how disgruntled, forge documents?SH: First, you have to understand that C.I.A. stations around the world, not so much now but during the Cold War, falsified documents all the time. That’s what they did for a living. That’s part of the tradecraft. Second, if you’re in the C.I.A. and it’s last fall, you’re almost frozen, you’re powerless. By March, 2002, the people on the inside knew that the President had decided to go to war in Iraq, and by the summer C.I.A. operations against terrorism around the world—in Central Asia particularly—were shut off because of lack of funds and because any personnel who had good language skills were shoved into the Gulf to get ready for the war. So there was a tremendous sense of frustration.
Q: But wouldn’t these documents have helped the Administration?SH:
No, the documents were written to be exposed. The papers are hopeless, and even the Italian reporter who looked at them, Elisabetta Burba, was able very quickly to determine that they were false. They’re bad forgeries. And I think the idea was simply to embarrass the government internally. Don’t forget, Niger had already been a source of great dispute between the C.I.A. and the Pentagon and the Vice-President’s office. There was this tension. And so the thought was that somebody like Cheney or Rumsfeld and their aides would flash them at a meeting, and then the other side could counterattack. It would be an embarrassment, because the papers were such obvious fakes. Or Rumsfeld or somebody would go public with the papers, not vet them, not analyze them, and the press would go after them. But that didn’t happen. Instead, lo and behold, the President used the Niger story to make the case against Iraq in his State of the Union speech in January.
(snip)
Now in the interview in the current article, the story is that forging was said to be done by the administration itself with the intention of it justifying policy decisions. Quite a different take.
What I think is this: if a group of angry retired CIA officers DID fabricate the poorly forged Niger documents as an intended sting of the administration's pet intelligence toadies, the agency is NOT going to want that to come out. They hate what the administration has done to the agency and to the professional gathering of accurate information, and this would feed the flames of total destruction. For them, as for us, it's vastly preferable to believe that someone within the administration did it. I hope that's true but I wonder if we will ever know.
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