E-mail a friendPeter Eisner
airdate May 11, 2007
Peter Eisner is The Washington Post's deputy foreign editor and co-author of the new book, The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq. The veteran correspondent previously worked as a foreign editor at Newsday and as a reporter, editor and bureau chief with the Associated Press. Eisner served on the Inter-American Press Association's (IAPA) Freedom of the Press Committee and won an award from IAPA for reporting on drug trafficking in the Americas.
Peter Eisner
Tavis: Peter Eisner is a veteran foreign correspondent who now serves as editor at "The Washington Post". He is the co-author of the new book, "The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for the War in Iraq". Peter, nice to have you on the program.
Peter Eisner: My pleasure. Thank you.
Tavis: I don't know how close that camera can zoom in. On the cover of this book, though, under the title of "The Italian Letter", there's a picture of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush having a conversation.
I don't know what they were talking about in that particular picture, but it certainly makes the case for this fake letter that this group of men used to build the case for going to Iraq. Let me start with some pretty basic questions. What letter are we talking about?
Eisner: This letter was purportedly written by the president of Niger and sent to Saddam Hussein telling him that he had approved the sale of five hundred tons of uranium per year to Iraq and it was endorsing that deal that supposedly had been made in 1999.
Tavis: You say "purportedly" written by the president of Niger because?
Eisner: Because it's a complete fraud and forgery. Even in the letter itself, the president of Niger says that he was making this deal under the Constitution of Niger of 1966 and a simple check on the internet would have shown that the Constitution of 1966 was no longer in effect with the 1990 Constitution which was in effect. You would assume that the president of Niger might know that, but nobody bothered to check.
Tavis: Before I move forward to talk about how this found its way into the Bush administration and how it became used as a piece of evidence, what do we know about where this letter came from? Was it a hoax? I mean, what do we know about the backstory of the letter?
Eisner: That's why we call it "The Italian Letter". It showed up in Milan for the first time in October of 2002 purveyed by a sometimes Intelligence officer who'd been actually cashiered from the Italian police named Rocco Martino, a shady character who delivered it to an Italian journalist named Elizabetta Burba. This letter, with a file of other documents, showed a whole trail that supposed that Iraq was buying this uranium.
Tavis: Had there been any relationship between these two countries? I'm trying to get a sense of why someone would believe that this kind of sale could even take place if there had not been a relationship established between these two gentlemen in two countries heretofore.
Eisner: There'd been some connection eighteen years earlier in the late 1980s when Iraq was pursuing uranium supplies and those supplies were pretty much decommissioned by the first Gulf War. Iraq had diplomatic relations with Niger and part of the dossier that went along with the Italian letter was a claim that the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican had attempted to barter this deal when he went to Niger in 1999, but it was all not true.
Tavis: All not true. Your point notwithstanding earlier about a simple internet check on the Constitution of 1966, that point notwithstanding, are there reasons that a journalist or any person might have reason to believe that the letter was, in fact, authentic?
Eisner: Well, probably not. Before the actual letter was seen, Italian Intelligence got in touch with the CIA a couple of days after 9/11 and said, "We have some information that connects Iraq to trying to buy uranium." The immediate reaction of the CIA, first in Rome and then in Washington, was, A, the source is very questionable because, first of all, Italian Military Intelligence had a history of being questionable.
Second of all, they wouldn't say who they were getting information from. Third of all, Iraq didn't need uranium because they had their own stock of uranium under lock and key in Baghdad already.
Tavis: All right. We all famously know now after the fact the references made by Mr. Powell, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, the president himself, in fact, making references, although disconnected in some ways, to this letter. I want to advance the conversation now. How did this letter find its way into our arsenal or lack thereof of Intelligence that gave them what they needed to invade Iraq?
Eisner: Well, remarkably, the letter arrived rather late because, throughout 2002 until October, the Italian Military Intelligence wasn't providing the actual document and the actual dossier behind it. They were giving verbatim text of some of the material, but they were withholding it.
Finally the text was delivered by this shady character to the Milan journalist, Elizabetta Burba, who in turn gave it over to the United States Embassy in October of 2002. That was the first time that the United States had access to it.
Tavis: Okay. So start to detail for me then the comedy of errors that allows this letter to be used by the president and the White House as part of the rationale for going to Iraq once it arrives here.
Eisner: Well, the CIA, by the time that they actually had the text, was saying, "What do we need the text for because the whole thing is a fraud? It's ridiculous." One of the problems that the CIA had was that they were playing more or less good agent and they didn't expect their reports to be politicized to the degree to which we found later they had been. So the CIA wasn't even doing the detail work to look at the letter and find out that there were basic mistakes in the letter and also basic mistakes in the backup material that you could have found on the internet.
So by October 7 of 2002, two interesting things were happening. One, the actual letter was being delivered to the Italian journalist and the same day already, George Tenet was blocking President Bush from making reference to uranium purchases in a speech that President Bush ended up giving in Cincinnati that day. Two coincidences the same day, so the CIA already knew that there were grave doubts about any attempt to restart a nuclear program in Iraq.
Tavis: Maybe I've missed something here and it could be that it's just me and not the viewer. If the letter, to your point, arrived late in the process, that is to say that the Bush administration already decided they were going to go into Iraq, how then does this subtitle ring true for me that the Bush administration used this fake letter to build the case for the war in Iraq if the letter arrived late in the process after they'd already made their decision that we're going to Iraq anyway? I'm missing something here.
Eisner: Well, they had the information behind it the whole time. The letter was also used to send Joe Wilson to Niger to try to develop more information. But in addition to that, after October 7 when George Tenet blocked the White House's attempt to mention uranium supplies in Africa, the White House responded by not letting George Tenet see any more documents that the White House was preparing about the subject.
Now the material was in the system and the White House was able to say, "We've got more ammunition for the story" and it culminated with President Bush's sixteen words on January 28, 2003 to say that "British Intelligence has found that Iraq has attempted to purchase supplies of uranium in Africa."
Tavis: Let me ask this question and not out of any naiveté at all. But if by the time Bush makes those sixteen words that we all know now, by the time he makes that reference in 2003, the fact that this letter is a fake is well documented at that point, yes? Reasonably documented?
Eisner: Reasonably documented, but being reported in the parlance of United States Intelligence as, you know, cannot be proved, there are questions, it's not certain, but not saying conclusively as it could have that this should not be used. In other words, there were all sorts of caveats.
Tavis: How does something like that happen, though? I mean, to your point now, a simple internet search would reveal. And that wasn't the only thing. You point out some other stuff in this book that I'll let you explain. When you look at the letter and the seal and some of the other things, you can tell the letter is a fake. If you do any amount of reasonable due diligence on this, you can tell the letter is a fake.
I'm trying to understand how that process could have been overlooked, how the parts of this letter that are clearly phony could not have been documented and made clear to the White House so that we're not telling the president, "Well, we can't confirm this" as opposed to saying, "This is an absolute fakery and we can't base anything on it."
Eisner: Well, we could go back to George Tenet and Condoleezza Rice. They had the information in their hands. The reports from CIA officers in various parts of the system saying, "Highly questionable, don't use it, we don't know" and, all of the weapons of mass destruction, they had information doubting all elements of it, but especially the uranium being doubted. The problem was, who would stand up because they were under tremendous pressure. That is, the CIA was getting extraordinary visits by Vice President Cheney.
The CIA was trying to say, "We don't have this evidence", and yet the politicization of the story was so intense that there were a number of people, especially toward the end of 2002, saying, "What can we do? Regardless of what the facts are, they're going to go to war. Let's just let them say what they're going to say." Exactly that happened. They just gave up trying to tell them.
Tavis: All right. We've debated this question a thousand times, but from your perspective, are we to believe that when President Bush into 2003 then used those sixteen words and tried to cast it as British Intelligence, but knowing full well what he was saying, did he believe or the people around him at that point know that this letter or that the source of where that statement was coming from was erroneous?
Eisner: Well, we don't know what President Bush knew and what President Bush didn't know. That's a rough question to ask. But as you suggest, the White House staff, his speechwriter, Condoleezza Rice, who was obviously the National Security Adviser, and people around her knew clearly and had even referenced the fact and had been told by the CIA, "Don't use it." They said, "Well, we forgot." That was the answer.
So they had every reason not to mention it, but they were also at the same time doing a propaganda campaign saying that mushroom clouds on the horizons unless we do something now. This is a clear and present danger. And the nuclear card was the one that was going to make the difference. That was really going to push the lever on the level of fear among the American people and among Congress.
Tavis: Here's the exit question. What do we learn from this? What do we do to make sure that this kind of nonsense doesn't happen again, or is that not possible?
Eisner: Well, in the present system that we're operating, the first thing we have to do is tell the truth. I mean, what we wanted to do is go back to the origin and say, "What's really operating here?" Because if you talk to President Bush or Vice President Cheney right now, they'll say, "Well, we worked in terms of the Intelligence we had at the time."
Well, that's just not true because, if they would have looked at the Intelligence they had at the time, they couldn't have said that there were weapons of mass destruction. So what we learn is that the American people have to say, "At what point do we want to hear the truth?" For journalists, it's very tough because American journalism hasn't figured out how to say, "What do we do when we're hearing lies?" They haven't figured that out yet.
Tavis: Just so we're sure we're on the same page here, I want to close on a point of agreement here. This is critical for me. So we don't know, to your earlier point, what the president knew in 2003 specifically when he stood up and used those sixteen words. We do know, though, to your point now, that they were not operating on all of the Intel that they had.
Eisner: Right. Not only on all the Intel that they had, they were manipulating what they had. There was an operation going on behind the scenes at the Pentagon and amongst some in the CIA that were out of George Tenet's control to allow a group of politicians to push a war that they wanted to take place, and that was the result.
Tavis: If you want to read about the fake letter that was used in part as the basis for building the case for the war in Iraq, pick up the new book co-authored by Peter Eisner, "The Italian Letter". Peter, nice to have you on the program. Good to see you.
Eisner: My pleasure.
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