Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi visited President Bush at the White House on Monday. But mum was definitely the word. The two held no joint press conference. Nor did they take questions from reporters when they appeared briefly before the press.

There was no shortage of things the two men did not want to talk about publicly in each other’s presence. Just before leaving Italy, for instance, Berlusconi told an interviewer that he had always been against the decision to go to war in Iraq and had tried to dissuade Bush from going to war in the first place. Still higher on the list of topics to avoid, though, was likely the series that ran last week in the Italian daily La Repubblica, which claimed that the head of Italian intelligence, Nicolo Pollari, played a key role in foisting the notorious forged “Niger uranium” documents on the United States.

Whether all the La Repubblica allegations are true remains to be seen. But in his effort to knock back the renewed scrutiny into a potential Italian role in the Niger hoax, Berlusconi told a big whopper at a briefing for the Italian press later on Monday.

“Bush himself confirmed to me,” said the Italian PM, “that the U.S.A. did not have any information [about alleged uranium sales from Niger to Iraq] from Italian [intelligence] agencies.”

Whether or not President Bush really said that, the underlying claim is most certainly false. Almost all of the U.S. information on Iraq and Niger came from Italy.

So with the Senate apparently finally ready to get serious about looking into Iraq WMD, let’s review what we already know about the Italian role in promoting the Iraq-Niger canard.

I started reporting on this story in early 2004. And I soon learned that there was a good deal more tying Italy to the forgeries story than the mere fact that the forgeries themselves had first surfaced in Rome in October 2002.

A year earlier, U.S. suspicions about an illicit uranium trade between Iraq and Niger began with intelligence reports from Italy. On Oct. 15, 2001, the Italian military-intelligence agency SISMI sent its first report to the U.S. government including details of an alleged Iraqi purchase of 500 tons of lightly processed uranium ore from Niger.

Details of this and a subsequent SISMI report formed the basis of a reference to alleged Iraq-Niger uranium sales that was included in a CIA briefing Vice President Cheney received in early 2002. It was that briefing that prompted Cheney’s request for more information on the Iraq-Niger sale. And that request led, in turn, to the CIA’s decision to dispatch Joe Wilson on his trip to Niger. The Italian reports had set the whole process in motion.

But there was another key detail: The reports out of Italy were not a separate source of intelligence from the forgeries. They were the forgeries. To be precise, the intelligence reports from Italy were actually transcriptions and summaries of the forged documents. The reports from Italy and the forgeries were one and the same. The distinction is rather like saying you haven’t seen the PDF of a letter, only the text from the letter that someone copied down from the PDF.

Just what that meant for Italy’s role wasn’t clear. Indeed, it still isn’t entirely clear. What was quite clear, however, was that the Italian government would be a key place to start to get to the bottom of the forgeries’ mystery.

Other clues tying Italy to the mystery also exist.

Soon after I began reporting on the forgeries story, I learned of the existence of a joint State Department-CIA inspectors-general report on the “16 words” and the Niger forgeries that was produced in the fall of 2003. Much of the report detailed information later revealed in the Senate Intelligence Committee report. But there were other briefly noted but intriguing details.

For instance, the State-CIA report briefly noted a murky story about contacts between SISMI and the CIA in the summer of 2002. That summer, SISMI had approached the CIA about an operation it intended to run against the station chief of Iraqi intelligence in Rome. The plan was to send disinformation about the Iraqi station chief to Baghdad via a third country. And the subject of the disinformation was to be trade between Iraq and Niger. (The Americans did not object but declined to participate.)

According to U.S. government sources, when the forgeries arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Rome in October 2002, the first reaction of the CIA station chief was to wonder whether this wasn’t the same story the Italians had suggested using against the Iraqis only months before.

If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard more about Italy’s role in the Niger uranium story, you might want to ask Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), since his Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report from July of last year went to such great lengths to obscure it. Hopefully, the long-promised phase two of the report will help Sen. Roberts begin to set the record straight.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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