THE Sunday Times has tracked down a mysterious middleman who was a key figure in the notorious Niger uranium hoax before the Iraq war, writes Nicholas Rufford.

Speaking to a reporter in a cafe in Brussels last week, he claimed he had been an unwitting dupe in the scam, which embarrassed both Tony Blair and George W Bush over Saddam Hussein’s phantom weapons of mass destruction.

The middleman, an Italian who uses the name Giacomo, is a small-time tipster said to have worked for Italy’s armed forces and intelligence services. He says Sismi, the Italian foreign intelligence service, used him to disseminate fake documents purporting to show Saddam had tried to buy uranium for nuclear bombs from Niger.

“I received a call from a former colleague in Sismi,” Giacomo said. “I was told a woman in the Niger embassy in Rome had a gift for me. I met her and she gave me documents. Sismi wanted me to pass on the documents but they didn’t want anyone to know they had been involved.”

He came into possession of a bundle of telexes, letters and contracts that appeared to show Saddam had struck a deal with Niger for 500 tons of uranium ore, enough when refined to make several weapons.

Giacomo said he regretted the hoax but had believed the documents were genuine when he passed them to intelligence contacts and a journalist. The hoax had far-reaching effects. Presenting his dossier on Iraq’s weapons in September 2002, Blair accused Saddam of seeking “significant quantities of uranium from Africa”.

Bush reiterated the charge in his state of the union speech. When Giacomo’s documents were discredited by the International Atomic Energy Agency last year, George Tenet, then director of the CIA, apologised.

The British government and MI6 claim, however, they have independent evidence of Iraq’s “Niger connection”.

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