Yellowcake Follies: An Interview with Carlo Bonini

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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.

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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.

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http://blog.netscape.com/2007/04/20/yellowcake-follies-an-interview-with-carlo-bonini/