Update on the Niger Forgeries.

Anti-war.com has possible new information about the Fitzgerald investigation. Seems Fitz has gotten the Italian report that names their findings as to who created the Niger Forgeries. And as I said here , Michael Ledeen appears at the top of the list.

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."

I've got more about Clarridge under the fold.

Duane "Dewey" Clarridge
Division Chief for Latin America,
CIA Directorate of Operations

In 1981, Ronald Reagan appointed William Casey to be the head of the CIA. Over the next years, the Agency greatly expanded its covert activities. One of them was a whole secret war. Former officers of the hated National Guard of Nicaragua's deposed dictator Somoza were hired by the CIA to attack Nicaragua. These were the so-called contras (short for counter-revolutionaries).

In 1982, Casey authorized "Black Eagle"--a secret operation to fund and supply the contras. Casey's plan was to develop a "private" network large enough to secretly arm, finance, and command a whole war--without openly involving official U.S. military forces or intelligence agencies. They called it "The Enterprise"--and it was riddled with "former" CIA officers and agents.

Casey appointed the high-ranking CIA official Duane Clarridge to be the de facto commander-in-chief of the contra war. In August 1981 before the contra war even started, Clarridge flew down to Honduras, the country just north of Nicaragua, which had been selected as the base area for the CIA's contra war.

Clarridge was indicted for lying to investigators about his role in the Iran-Contra affair but was pardoned by Bush Sr. As this website points out:

The crux of the Clarridge indictment was that the European division chief lied when he claimed not to know that the Israeli shipment contained HAWK missiles. Walsh's case was built on two main pillars: testimony from CIA officer Vincent Cannistraro that he and Clarridge had discussed the Iran weapons shipment prior to the Nov. 22 flight, and evidence that a CIA officer in Portugal had notified Clarridge about the HAWKs on Nov. 23, but that the incriminating cable was apparently removed from Clarridge's file and destroyed as part of the cover-up.

Cannistraro testified before a federal grand jury that on Nov. 19, 1985, North asked him to join a meeting with Clarridge at Charley's Place, a famed CIA watering hole in McLean, Virginia. Cannistraro said the trio discussed North's troubles arranging the weapons shipment to Iran through Portugal. With a phone call from the restaurant to deputy national security adviser John Poindexter, North arranged to bring Clarridge officially into the project, Cannistraro remembered. In his book, however, Clarridge continues to insist that the meeting was primarily social and that "Iran did not come up."

Cannistraro's name is vitally important here in relation to Clarridge. In this interview by Ian Masters, he is quoted as saying:

Do we know who produced those documents? Because there’s some suspicion ...

I think I do, but I’d rather not speak about it right now, because I don’t think it’s a proven case ...

If I said “Michael Ledeen” ?

You’d be very close . . .

And in an interview with Scott Horton Cannistraro's business partner and former CIA agent Philip Giraldi, has this to say:

In an interview on July 26, 2005, Cannistraro's business partner and columnist for the "American Conservative" magazine, former CIA counter terrorism officer Philip Giraldi, confirmed to Scott Horton that the forgeries were produced by "a couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy." When Horton said that must be Ledeen, he confirmed it, and added that the ex-CIA officers, "also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing

So the evidence is firming up pretty solidly that we now know the names of the actual forgers and indeed Michael Ledeen aka Kayser Soze, was in charge of the operation.