SpyTalk

Rob Richer, the former CIA official at the center of  sensational charges that the White House ordered the spy agency to fabricate a document tying Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, repeated today that author Ron Suskind gravely misrepresented their interview on the subject.

The legitimacy of a web site that popped up Saturday, Aug. 8,  with Richer's formal statement denying Suskind's charges, has come under attack in recent days as possibly a fabrication itself.

But in a brief telephone interview today, Richer reaffirmed that the statement on the controversial Web site, headlined "Richer Response," was indeed his.

"It's mine," he said. 

But the Web site, he said, wasn't.

"I did not create the Web site," he said, joking "I wouldn't know how."

Richer said he didn't know who created the Web site, guessing that it was someone who wanted to give wider circulation to his categorical denials earlier in the week that statements and views attributed to him by Suskind in his book, The Way of the World, were false.

Close observers of the controversy have grown increasingly skeptical of the accuracy of  Suskind's interviews with CIA officials, who are portrayed as telling the author that the White House ordered the CIA to fabricate a "captured document" that would show former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein conspiring with al Qaeda and importing uranium from Africa.

Adding to the mystery, the document did surface in a number of stories in conservative media outlets in  Dec. 2003, but U.S. intelligence officials dismissed it as a forgery.