Yellowcake Follies: An Interview with Carlo Bonini

By now, many Americans are aware that George W. Bush's famous "sixteen words"--that is, his claim that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger--were based on forged documents. Few know the intricate history of that bogus dossier. But now Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D'Avanzo, whom Michael Isikoff has called "the Woodward and Bernstein of Italian journalism," have chronicled the whole scam in Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror (Melville House). In a conversation with Netscape's James Marcus, Bonini laid out the farcical facts. He began by discussing Rocco Martino, the shady Italian operator who originally put the yellowcake dossier into play.

Carlo Bonini: Rocco Martino was a former police officer. He had worked for the Italian intelligence services back in the 1970s and 1980s, and it was a disaster--he was thrown out due to his unreliability. To give you one example: in 1985, he was caught up in a failed bank robbery. He wore a fake beard and pretended to be a communist militant.

Marcus: This took place while he was still employed by Italian intelligence?

Bonini: That's right. And when he was finally forced out of the Italian intelligence community, he still remained in the field. Basically he was a sort of freelance agent--you can find many of them in the shadowy world of espionage. He traveled back and forth between the Cote d'Azur, Rome, London, Brussels, and Paris.

Marcus: So he was a man of many clients.

Bonini: Exactly. He was selling the information he gathered to the highest bidder, whether it was true or false. Almost everybody in the European intelligence community knew him well. You might ask why such a man had any standing with these people. The fact is that almost every intelligence agency thought that Martino could give them good information about his other clients. In any case, he turned out to be the perfect man in the perfect place for the yellowcake story.

Marcus: How did that unfold? And what was the role of SISMI, which is Italy's equivalent of the CIA?

Bonini: Martino had a handler at SISMI named Antonio Nucera. At some point in 1999 or 2000, Nucera introduced him to Laura Montini, who worked as a SISMI mole at the Nigerien embassy in Rome. And soon the two of them began cooking up some documents.

Marcus: In Collusion, you argue that Martino and Montini manufactured the yellowcake dossier as a fairly innocuous swindle. Then, after the September 11 attacks, the documents took on a new and urgent life of their own.

Bonini: That's what we discovered. September 11 was an extraordinary opportunity for Rocco--but also for SISMI and for Silvio Berlusconi (below), who had just come into power. Berlusconi was desperately seeking a privileged relationship with the White House. At the same time, George W. Bush was trying to prove that Saddam Hussein was a clear and present danger not only to American interests but to the world as a whole. The yellowcake dossier fit the bill perfectly. So SISMI decided to share the contents of those documents with U.S. intelligence--first in September 2001, then on several other occasions. They shared them with the British, too.



Marcus: There was an amazing convergence of interests here, in other words, which nobody could have anticipated.

Bonini: Absolutely.

Marcus: You and Giuseppe D'Avanzo were the first journalists to break this story in any detail. When did you start covering it?

Bonini: We started covering it July 2003. At that point both Seymour Hersh and the Los Angeles Times began reporting that the yellowcake intelligence was apparently based on forged documents. There was some indication that U.S. intelligence had shared some information with Italian intelligence. It was a very interesting lead, and when we finally got hold of the actual documents and got some SISMI sources talking to us on background, the story began to take off. As you can imagine, it didn't unfold immediately.

Marcus: There are layers within layers there.

Bonini: There are. At a certain point SISMI got defensive about this information, and tried to divert attention from the story, or to put all the blame on French intelligence. "It was Rocco who passed the documents to the French," they said, "and it was French intelligence that passed them on to the British and the Americans." But unfortunately for SISMI, that wasn't true.

Marcus: Were you and your partner ever discouraged from following up on the story?

Bonini: We were under enormous pressure at times. The right-wing press started attacking us, saying that we had personal motives--or worse, that we were reporting on behalf of some mysterious U.S. intelligence officers. Four years later, I still can't understand what sort of argument they were trying to make. It probably reflected the fact that SISMI was afraid of being blamed for the whole mess by the CIA. So yes, there were moments when we felt alone. "Either we're nuts," we told ourselves, "or we're right." I mean, it was hard to believe that Rocco Martino's phony documents ended up in the White House. But that's what happened!

Marcus: Nigergate is the first intelligence screw-up you describe in Collusion. The next chapter is about the famous aluminum tubes, which the Bush Administration claimed were parts for Iraqi centrifuges. Yet the Italians always knew otherwise, didn't they?

Bonini: Of course. The Iraqis had definitely bought huge numbers of aluminum tubes. But those tubes were designed for a conventional missile system that Iraq had developed with the Italians back in the 1980s. The system we're talking about is called the Medusa 81, and the rockets required exactly that sort of aluminum tube, with very particular specifications. And SISMI as well aware of this.

Marcus: Did SISMI pass along that information to the Americans?

Bonini: When the U.S. intelligence community first began discussing the tubes, they asked the Italians to weigh in. And the Italians said nothing. Only 14 months after the invasion of Iraq did they tell the Americans what they had always known.

Marcus: You and Giuseppe D'Avanzo write a great deal about the practice of "competitive intelligence" in this book. Could you say a few words about that?

Bonini: Competitive intelligence is a well known disinformation technique. It's a way to disorient your enemy by giving credence to false information. The yellowcake dossier is a perfect example. You basically steer a piece of rogue intelligence through official channels, until it's incorporated into a white paper. At this point, policy makers read the white paper and ask for further intelligence. Then the vicious circle begins: since the original dossier has already been shared with agencies in other countries, it can be "confirmed" by outside sources. It's like an echo chamber.

Marcus: Part of Collusion is about the efforts of the Berlusconi government to became a player in America's War on Terrorism. But there are also some damning chapters on Italy's domestic efforts. Perhaps you could talk a little about the supposed poison gas attacks on the American and British Embassies in Rome.

Bonini: We were told that there was a group of Moroccans planning to poison the water pipes leading into the British and U.S. Embassies in Rome. It's interesting, because these arrests always follows the same pattern. You need the complicity of the press, and the general sense of fear. If the public is scared, and trapped in a fearful vision of reality, it will believe anything.

Marcus: But as you report, the case against the Moroccans fell to pieces in court. Almost all the evidence was bogus, and the suspects were all declared innocent.

Bonini: That's right, and nobody in the press covered the outcome of the trial. There were big headlines when the Moroccans were arrested. After that, the story disappeared.

Marcus: Europe and America have had a bumpy partnership in the War on Terror--sometimes productive, sometimes less so. Yet the two partners seem to have very different attitudes toward extraordinary rendition.


Bonini: Right now, the rendition issue is a clear dividing line between the European and American approaches to the War on Terror. Rendition is unacceptable to a large majority of the public in many European countries. On the other hand, there is no doubt that these operations--like the kidnapping of Abu Omar from the streets of Milan--were carried out with the full knowledge of the European governments. And probably the U.S. administration thought that was good enough.

Marcus: You're suggesting an additional split here, between public opinion and the governments themselves.

Bonini: Right. So I can understand why the White House felt betrayed. But it seems that public opinion in the United States may be shifting as well.

Marcus: When you began this book, did you anticipate that so many of the dramatis personae would be jailed or indicted by the time you were finished? Nicolò Pollari, for example, was fired as head of SISMI in November 2006 and will be tried for kidnapping in June.

Bonini: I would never have imagined that Scooter Libby (to take another example) would face trial and be sentenced. And Nicolò Pollari--he was considered one of the most powerful men in Italy.

Marcus: How are the mighty fallen!

Bonini: Well, it means that we were right. Let me say it again, though: I have nothing personal against any of these people. What we did was to gather information from everybody, then match it all up. Pollari himself spoke to us three times.

Marcus: One final question. In 2006, the American electorate seemed to repudiate President Bush and much of his agenda. Will that change the sort of intelligence practices you describe in this book? Or will it essentially be business as usual?

Bonini: The U.S. intelligence community is only now just recovering from the run-up to the Iraqi invasion. I don't think they will repeat the same mistakes. That doesn't mean we won't see similar stories in the future, but I don't think we'll see anything quite on this level.

[Note: James Marcus translated Collusion into English. However, he has no prior acquaintance with the authors, nor any financial interest in the book.]