More than a decade after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, this investigative report on the Bush administration's march toward war is more relevant than ever. Timely and revealing, The Italian Letter provides explosive, historic insights for a greater understanding of the Iraq War and how the United States got there. This exclusive edition is updated to reflect the most recent developments.
There are few true stories with as much drama, intrigue, and mystery as that of the Italian Letter. Known all along by many in the U.S. intelligence community to have been a forgery, the Bush administration adopted the Italian Letter as a basis for going to war, making it the justification behind the rally for war in George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech.
With unparalleled reporting skills and harrowing analysis, the authors, Eisner, a veteran editor with the Washington Post and Newsday, and Royce, a legendary, Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter in Washington—have produced a groundbreaking, riveting work.
The Italian Letter takes readers from Italy, to Niger, to Iraq and into the Washington offices of the National Security Agency, The Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and inside the White House itself, demonstrating that this was not a case of finding out too late that certain intelligence information was faulty. Rather, with calculation and single-minded purpose, the Bush administration used information it knew was questionable to convince Congress and the American public that Saddam Hussein was seeking materials to make a nuclear bomb.
The book, wrote Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, conveys "the duplicity, subterfuge, propaganda, and outright lies that helped sell many Americans on the need to invade Iraq. Read the book and weep for our democracy."

Praise from Seymour Hersh. “It’s the best account so far of one of the enduring mysteries of the Bush White House and its race to sell the Iraq war to the American public. It’s not just about the 16 words. Everything that would go wrong is telegraphed in this incident.”

Praise from The New Yorker. “Eisner and Royce get past the morass of speculation surrounding the documents to provide an important look at the shabby materials from which the Administration built its case for war. The ineptitude of the forgeries, which were dismissed by experts at every stage, never loses the capacity to astound. The retrieval of these documents “from the intelligence garbage heap,” the authors make clear, could have happened only in a White House in which intelligence had been deliberately politicized.”

Praise from Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer and Polk-prize winning journalist and best-selling author. "The Italian Letter is a spectacular piece of investigative journalism penned by the dynamic ex-Newsday duo of Peter Eisner and Knut Royce, both of whom contributed to Pulitzer Prize-winning projects during the course of their long careers."