The Italian strategy was to enter the factional conflict on the side of the Cheney-ites. As a liaison to those circles, Defense Minister Antonio Martino recommended "an old friend of Italy," one Michael Ledeen – neoconservative ideologue and veteran of "parallel intelligence" work from his days as broker of the Iran-Contra "arms for hostages" deal. Just as Ledeen acted as the middleman in effecting the transfer of Israeli arms to Iran in exchange for the hostages, so he apparently played a similar role as a go-between in Niger-gate. Using Ledeen as their Washington intermediary, the Italians succeeded in circumventing the CIA and getting the unvetted forgeries to the White House via the good offices of both Condoleezza Rice and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans.

The military intervention in Iraq was justified by two revelations: Saddam Hussein attempted to acquire unprocessed uranium (yellowcake) in Niger (1) for enrichment with centrifuges built with aluminum tubes imported from Europe(2). The fabricators of the twin hoaxes (there was never any trace in Iraq of unprocessed uranium or centrifuges) were the Italian government and Italian military intelligence. La Repubblica has attempted to reconstruct the who, where and why of the manufacture and transfer to British and American intelligence of the dodgy dossier for war.

They are the same two hoaxes that Judith Miller, the reporter who betrayed her newspaper, published (together with Michael Gordon) on September 8, 2002. In a lengthy investigative piece for the New York Times, Miller reported that Saddam could have built an atomic weapon with those aluminum tubes. These were the goods that the hawks in the Bush administration were expecting.