****Wayne Masden Report****

April 9, 2006 -- The Sunday Times of London, a Rupert Murdoch-owned publication, is running a report today that states that the infamous Niger yellowcake uranium documents used by the Bush administration to justify the attack on Iraq were forged by Niger's consul in Rome, Adam Maiga Zakariaou, and the Nigerien ambassador's personal secretary, Laura Montini, code named La Signora and said to be an agent of the Italian SISMI intelligence service. The Times spins the story that Zakariaou and Montini forged the documents for money, thus diverting attention from the obvious political reasons behind the forgery.

The Times' report also repeats the allegation, denied by ex-French DGSE intelligence agents like Alain Chouet and Jacques Nadal, that ex-SISMI middleman Rocco Martino, the person who passed on the documents to an unnamed "intelligence organization," was actually an agent for French intelligence. This allegation, like the recent one about the forgeries being the work of a Nigerien diplomat, have been repeated in several well-known neo-con media outlets, including neo-con web sites. It is also a clear attempt by the neo-cons, who never miss a chance to display their racist colors, to blame the forgeries on a black African. It was this same mindset that was used by the neo-cons, including George W. Bush, to suggest that Saddam Hussein was conspiring with Africans to obtain a nuclear weapon. And it is the same "plantation mindset," egged on by the neo-con commentators, authors, pundits, that pervades the Republicans on Capitol Hill who treat some African American members of Congress as hired help who are supposed to identify themselves before gaining admittance to the "white clubhouse." In the neo-con playbook, black and brown people are bad, Muslims are evil, whites of two of the three Abrahamic tradition religious sects are good. It's that simple and don't dare disagree with it.

The disinformation being pumped out by the neo-cons is no surprise to Cold War-era U.S. intelligence agents who tracked similar Soviet disinformation campaigns -- some involving the very same characters involved in the current neo-con disinformation antics. Leonid Shabarshin, the head of the First Chief Directorate (Foreign Intelligence) of the KGB, stated that the purpose of the Soviet disinformation program was to compromise political figures and organs of the press.

Today's neo-cons learned well from their one-time Soviet colleagues -- active and ex-KGB agents who emigrated to Israel and the United States during the 1970s and 80s and who subsequently penetrated the Mossad, the Pentagon, and neo-con think tanks in the United States, Britain, Italy, and other countries. These disinformation specialists continue to ply their trade in purveying lies and train other up-and-comers in the same art in pursuit of the neo-con cause.

Forged documents like the Niger "yellowcake" papers are the norm, not the exception, in an Africa rife with forged documents and international criminal cartels involved in uranium, diamond, gold, weapons, and currency smuggling

During the recent American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) meeting in Washington, a similar disinformation campaign began. Several neo-con outlets reported that two colleagues of outed CIA covert agent Valerie Plame Wilson listed her non official cover firm, Brewster Jennings and Associates, on their on-line resumes. This was clearly an attempt to once again spin the falsehood that "everyone knew" Plame's covert status, as well as the mission of her cover company. It was no coincidence that the AIPAC meeting brought together most of the key members of Scooter Libby's Defense Fund, which has an interest in downplaying the damage caused by the Plame/Brewster Jennings revelations.

WMR reported on the disinformation background to the Niger and the less-reported Congolese forgeries last October:

The neo-cons who are behind the Niger forgeries that were used as justification for the war in Iraq have been aided by former KGB officers who honed their African forgery trade during the Cold War. A number of these KGB officers are now Israeli citizens who are working closely with a special activities unit in Ariel Sharon's office. The former KGB agents, having left the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s when a neo-con cell first nested in Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson's office and then migrated to the Pentagon under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, now work for Likud and specialize in creating forgeries, especially those attributed to African countries. These Israeli former KGB agents work closely with neocon units in Rome, Washington, and London. The State Department once maintained a full-time office dedicated to proving Soviet generated documents as forgeries. The documents were always easy to detect since the forgeries were crude and the information contained within them was capricious.

Some of these KGB agents now work for the neo-cons in Israel and the United States.

The Congo forgeries were overshadowed by the Niger forgeries

Although the focus is on the Niger forgeries, there was another case in which forgeries "proving" Iraq's nuclear ambitions were shopped by the neocons. It received little or no attention.

In July 2002, documents on CIA letterhead were "discovered" in a Nairobi hotel room. They described attempts by Mai Mai guerrillas in Bukavu in the DRC to negotiate the sale of uranium to Saddam Hussein's government. The discovery of the documents in Nairobi came after Wilson, CIA weapons of mass destruction experts -- including Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson -- the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the US ambassador to Niger, and the US European Command in Stuttgart concluded that there was no evidence to support the allegation that Iraq was shopping for nuclear materials in Africa -- a charge later leveled by President Bush in his January 2003 State of the Union address.

The "discovery" of the CIA documents -- clearly forgeries like the Niger documents -- were leaked to the press, including Le Soir in Belgium. Their leak was followed by the release of a British government dossier describing Iraq's attempts to obtain uranium in Africa. The DRC government later produced photocopies of original false Bukavu documents -- on which the bogus CIA documents were based -- offering Iraq (or any other high bidder) 9 kilograms of "superior quality" uranium from Mai Mai units in the eastern DRC. U.S. intelligence sources maintain that the Nairobi and Bukavu documents were crude forgeries produced after then-Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner III met with Rwandan President Paul Kagame in Kigali on January 15, 2002. The plan was to blame the DRC for providing uranium to Iraq in an attempt to destabilize Kabila and justify the continued presence of Rwandan troops in eastern DRC. Iraq's complicity in obtaining uranium in DRC would then be bolstered by the Niger "evidence" lending credence to Saddam's nuclear "ambitions."

Kansteiner was assisted in the operation by his deputy, Charles Snyder, a former US Special Forces officer who was involved in covert operations in Sierra Leone and is tied to the neo-conservative elements within the Pentagon. Kagame relies heavily on Israeli and Pentagon security advisers in his eastern Congo military operations.

Former KGB disinformation and forgery experts have also been behind illegal forgery operations tied to the Russian-Israeli Mafia's weapons, diamond, gold, platinum, uranium, and plutonium smuggling operations in other African countries, including Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Mozambique, Liberia, Congo (Brazzaville), and Benin.