My money says that Ottaviani was taken behind closed doors and ordered to retract the statement, or else something bad would happen. 

Maybe someone had something to hold over his head.  (Not necessarily sex, it could be money.  Those two things explain a LOT of shenanigans that go on in the world.  And if you scratch the surface of almost all divorces, you'll come up with one or both of these things.  Think about it.)

I always smell BS whenever someone makes a statement along one line of reasoning, then retracts what they've previously asserted.

In the passages previously cited from Michael Davies' Pope Paul's New Mass, Jean Madiran publicly accuses Ottaviani's secretary (Mgr. Augostino, a supporter of the NOM) of committing a public felony by fraudulently obtaining the blind Ottaviani's signature allegedly retracting his earlier criticisms of the NOM, then sending it off to Fr. Lafond.

Madiran challenges Augustino to appear in the ecclesiastical courts to settle the matter, but Agustoni does not take him up on it.

Shortly thereafter, Augustino relinquishes his position as Ottaviani's secretary.

Which is all to say that it is much more doubtful that Ottaviani repented of his position in the Brief Critical Study, than it is that he actually knowingly endorsed the contents of the letter to Mr. Lafond.

.

I tend to be skeptical of stories of this nature. Secretaries don't typically go around forging their boss's signatures, in general. I think such an assertion would need serious evidence that it happened. Normally it should be assumed that someone's signature is legitimate.

    From Pope Paul's New Mass (p. 490), quoting Jean Madiran: "Compare the signature at the foot of the letter to Dom Lafond ith other signatures of Cardinal Ottaviani, and with that at the foot of the ltter to Paul VI in 1969.  You will perceive the difference."

Secondly, Cardinal Ottaviani trusted this person as his secretary, probably the highest position of trust of anyone in his life. If we're saying this secretary forged Ottaviani's signature, we're saying at the same time that Ottaviani was a complete idiot for placing such a high level of trust in someone who would commit such a grotesque and heinous fraud. Not likely at all.

    Soon after this happened, Agostino relinquished his position as Ottaviani's secretary.  It seems the trust was destroyed.

Lastly, and most importantly, it doesn't appear that Cardinal Ottaviani ever retracted this statement, as he would have been gravely obliged to do if it had been a fraud. He lived another whole decade after this docuмent was published, and we are to believe that he never found out in all that time that this docuмent was circulating under his name, and with his signature? He never ran into anyone in the curia at a dinner party or even just in the hallway, who said to him, "Hey Your Eminence, what about that retraction you made of the Ottaviani Intervention? What made you change your mind?" How could such a thing have been kept secret from him for an entire decade until his death? It makes no sense.

    You can't retract a statement you never made, however, Jean Madiran reveals: "More than a month after the letter to Dom Lafond, I receved a personal assurance from Cardinal Ottaviani that the authorization  [of his letter to Pope Paul VI denouncing the new Mass] was authentic, real, not revoked..." (p.491).  In other words, if the letter was authentic, then why is Ottaviani explicitl denying it a month later to Jean Madiran?

Then, if you say he did know but didn't bother to denounce the hoax, that is the last plausible of all if you are saying it was a hoax. Because then you are saying he was complicit in the hoax, making him responsible. Think about it ... if someone published a heretical tract under your name without your consent, unbeknownst to you, and everyone who read it believed it had really come from you and thought you had apostatized, and you then learned of the existence of this tract, wouldn't you be obliged under pain of mortal sin to make a public statement denouncing the tract as a fraud? Of course you would. So why wouldn't Ottaviani have done so if it had been a fraud?

    This objection is negated by the previous response above.

Sadly, this sort of idea always strikes me as wishful thinking.

Lastly, and most importantly, it doesn't appear that Cardinal Ottaviani ever retracted this statement, as he would have been gravely obliged to do if it had been a fraud. He lived another whole decade after this docuмent was published, and we are to believe that he never found out in all that time that this docuмent was circulating under his name, and with his signature? He never ran into anyone in the curia at a dinner party or even just in the hallway, who said to him, "Hey Your Eminence, what about that retraction you made of the Ottaviani Intervention? What made you change your mind?" How could such a thing have been kept secret from him for an entire decade until his death? It makes no sense.

Lastly, and most importantly, it doesn't appear that Cardinal Ottaviani ever retracted this statement, as he would have been gravely obliged to do if it had been a fraud. He lived another whole decade after this docuмent was published, and we are to believe that he never found out in all that time that this docuмent was circulating under his name, and with his signature? He never ran into anyone in the curia at a dinner party or even just in the hallway, who said to him, "Hey Your Eminence, what about that retraction you made of the Ottaviani Intervention? What made you change your mind?" How could such a thing have been kept secret from him for an entire decade until his death? It makes no sense.

    You can't retract a statement you never made, however, Jean Madiran reveals: "More than a month after the letter to Dom Lafond, I receved a personal assurance from Cardinal Ottaviani that the authorization  [of his letter to Pope Paul VI denouncing the new Mass] was authentic, real, not revoked..." (p.491).  In other words, if the letter was authentic, then why is Ottaviani explicitl denying it a month later to Jean Madiran?