Finally!   Josh Marshall is putting All his reporting on the forged Niger documents at the heart of Plamegate in one place.

Thanks Josh!  He's been out in front on this from the start but has left it up to others to connect the dots in a concise synopsis.

Part I is up now.  I definitely smell the tangy aroma of cordite in the air -- I think we're getting closer to the smoking gun.

I've never put all the reporting in one place; and until now there was still a good bit of information I wasn't at liberty to report. This is the first of a series of installments I'm going to publish here at TPM in which I will lay out the story as I understand it based on my own reporting and research.

This first post is a nice primer to get anyone who hasn't been following the story up to speed.  Here's a sample of what he calls intriguing details:

For instance, the State-CIA IG [Iraqi Group] report briefly noted a murky story about contacts between SISMI [Italy's clandestine service] and the CIA in the summer of 2002. That summer SISMI had approached the CIA about an operation they intended to run against the Station Chief of Iraqi intelligence in Rome. The plan was to send disinformation about the Iraqi Station Chief back 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.)

Matthew Yglesias points to where Josh might be going in his preview of a "feature forthcoming in The American Conservative":

Enter Michael Ledeen, the Office of Special Plans’ man in Rome. Ledeen was paid $30,000 by the Italian Ministry of the Interior in 1978 for a report on terrorism and was well known to senior SISMI officials. Italian sources indicate that [Italian Military Intelligence Chief, Gen. Nicolo] Pollari was eager to engage with the Pentagon hardliners, knowing they were at odds with the CIA and the State Department officials who had slighted him. He turned to Ledeen, who quickly established himself as the liaison between SISMI and Feith’s OSP, where he was a consultant. Ledeen, who had personal access to the National Security Council’s Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley and was also a confidant of Vice President Cheney, was well placed to circumvent the obstruction coming from the CIA and State. . .

. On Sept. 9, 2002, Ledeen set up a secret meeting between Pollari and Deputy National Security Adviser Hadley. Two weeks before the meeting, a group of documents had been offered to journalist Elisabetta Burba of the Italian magazine Panorama for $10,000, but the demand for money was soon dropped and the papers were handed over. The man offering the documents was Rocco Martino, a former SISMI officer who delivered the first WMD dossier to London in October 2002. That Martino quickly dropped his request for money suggests that the approach was a set-up primarily intended to surface the documents.

Panorama, perhaps not coincidentally, is owned by Prime Minister Berlusconi. On Oct. 9, the documents were taken from the magazine to the U.S. Embassy, where they were apparently expected. Instead of going to the CIA Station, which would have been the normal procedure, they were sent straight to Washington where they bypassed the agency’s analysts and went directly to the NSC and the Vice President’s Office. . . .

Guess who's coming to dinner. :-)   While most of the country gets dazzled by the flashbulbs from the paparazzi hyping the state visit by Prince Charles and Kamilla, Berlusconi's visit will not go unnoticed by those of us truly paying attention.

Wanna bet that when the Berlusconi and the Chimperor get together behind closed doors the Prime Minister's first question to Bush will be whether tthey are going to burn Pollari?  At a minimum they'll have a chance to get their stories straight since the SISMI chief looks to be in as much trouble as Libby.

Pollari was to face parliament this week on allegations that he planted forged documents with U.S. and British intelligence agencies on Iraq's alleged attempts to buy uranium from Niger.

The bogus information led to the CIA's appointment of former Ambassador Joe Wilson to investigate the African deal and then to the outing of Wilson's wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, who sent him.

Notice any similarity between Cheney calling Libby "one of the most capable and talented individuals I have ever known," and this statement by Berlusconi:

"I have esteem for Gen. Nicolo Pollari," Berlusconi said, and "I have followed his work with trust."

In case you missed it, or have trouble translating from the Italian, that's called "circling the wagons."

{. . . and why do I keep having this urge to type "LiDDy" instead of Libby?]