Date: July 31, 2006 5:28:28 AM PDT
Subject: [SPY NEWS] Italy's Watergate
context=viewArticle&code=RAD20060730&articleId=2865
Italy's Watergate
Espionage, secrecy, and corruption: Lessons for the Bush
administration.
by Patrick Radden Keefe
July 30, 2006
slate.com/ - 2006-07-27
When Italian prosecutor Armando Spataro issued arrest warrants for 22
CIA officers last November, for the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian
cleric in Milan, it seemed like a hollow gesture. Spataro claimed
that American operatives had snatched the imam, who is known as Abu
Omar, and transported him to Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured.
But there was no way the United States would extradite its spies, and
it appeared that the Italian investigation of the murky practice of
extraordinary rendition would go the way of similar cases in this
country: nowhere.
But Spataro wasn't hampered by the sort of pervasive official secrecy
that prevails in the United States, and his team turned up revealing
details of the abduction. The more they dug, the more dirt they
found. Before long, the investigation blossomed into a full-blown spy
scandal, replete with domestic wiretapping and the mysterious death
of one of the investigators. By early July, two of Italy's top
spymasters were under arrest.
We haven't heard much about the story on this side of the Atlantic.
(When asked whether he had discussed it at the G8 summit with
President Bush, Italy's new Prime Minister Romano Prodi quipped that
Bush probably doesn't even know "the initials" of Italy's spy agency,
Sismi.) But this is Italy's Watergate. It has already revealed in
unprecedented detail the anatomy of an extraordinary rendition. And
it raises serious doubts about the Bush administration's "just trust
us" insistence that behind the veil of secrecy, espionage is an
honest, upstanding business.
In February 2003, Abu Omar (whose full name is Hasan Mustafa Osama
Nasr) was under surveillance by Italy's special branch police force,
the Digos, on suspicion of recruiting terrorists. Walking to mosque
one day, he was whisked into a CIA van. The Digos didn't witness the
event and wondered why the guy they had been tailing had suddenly
disappeared. CIA officials told them that Omar was headed to the
Balkans, when in fact he was being interrogated in an Egyptian
prison.
When they learned of this deception more than a year later,
prosecutors in Milan were outraged at the CIA's apparent violation of
Italian sovereignty. The Americans had unquestionably strayed a bit
outside their jurisdiction. And they'd carried out the rendition with
a minimum of subtlety. In the weeks surrounding the abduction, they
stayed at fine hotels, including Milan's Principe di Savoia (single
room: $588 a night), eventually racking up $158,000 in room charges.
The Rolling Stones keep a lower profile when they swing through
Milan. The American operatives also used easy-to-tap, unsecure cell
phones to coordinate their plans with headquarters in Langley, Va.
And when the supposed architect of the mission, CIA Milan Chief
Robert Seldon Lady, blew town, he forgot to pack a surveillance photo
of Abu Omar. He left it (oops) in his apartment for the Digos to
find. The message seemed to be: Not only will we swoop into your
country, screw your investigation, and steal your suspect—we're going
to do it in broad daylight and leave a trail of clues, just because
we can.
But that wasn't exactly the message, because the Italian government
had given permission for the CIA's mission. When the story first
broke, representatives of Silvio Berlusconi's government denied
knowing anything about the rendition. But when Spataro's
investigators questioned a Sismi operative, he said he had been
told "in explicit terms" that the rendition was a joint operation
between Sismi and the CIA. Suddenly this was no longer a story about
Italian sovereignty. It was a turf battle between different security
agencies—the Digos and Sismi—that were both after the same guy.
Which explains the peculiar thing that happened next: At the
prosecutors' behest, Italian cops started wiretapping Italian spies.
It's hard to say which is stranger—that cops would monitor the calls
of their own country's spies, or that the spies would be foolish
enough to say anything sensitive on an unencrypted line. In Italy
prosecutors enjoy a great deal of institutional autonomy, and
suspicion that Italian spooks had aided a crime was grounds enough
for Spataro's team to start watching the watchers. Wiretapping is a
favorite tactic in Italy—police and spies tap 100,000 phones every
year—and the prosecutors who had pieced together the CIA's movements
by looking at phone records began doing the same with the Sismi
brass. Tracing the phone of Marco Mancini, Sismi's No. 2, led them to
a penthouse apartment on Via Nazionale, a popular shopping
thoroughfare in Rome. On July 5, police raided the apartment and
discovered a Sismi spy den filled with dossiers on various enemies of
the Berlusconi regime. There were files on journalists, prosecutors,
and businessmen, as well as evidence that Sismi had been paying
reporters at the right-wing paper Libero to spy and plant stories on
the agency's behalf.
The same day, prosecutors arrested Mancini, along with another Sismi
official, on suspicion of being involved with the rendition. The head
of Sismi, Nicolo Pollari, has escaped arrest thus far. But he is
alleged to have personally run the secret spy shop, and his
assurances earlier this year that he knew nothing of the Omar
rendition appear less credible every day. More troubling still, last
Friday, a security official at Telecom Italia named Adamo Bove, who
had been assisting Spataro's team in monitoring Mancini's phone, left
his Naples apartment, telling his wife he had to run an errand, and
threw himself off a highway overpass. Police have launched an
investigation into what they're calling "instigation to suicide."
It will take time for investigators to determine what happened to
Bove, and to sift through the secret dossiers removed from Via
Nazionale. But already one thing is clear: The secrecy surrounding
the espionage profession is a constant temptation to corruption.
The frequent refrain of the Bush administration has been that
Americans should not ask questions about how our spies operate and
whether they follow the law. If you assume that behind the veil of
secrecy, most spooks are just doing their jobs, then it seems
wrongheaded to risk exposing official secrets and thus endangering
national security by conducting a rigorous investigation. It's a
forceful argument, and one that has so far successfully forestalled
any serious assessment by Congress or the courts of extraordinary
rendition or warrantless wiretapping. After all, it would be paranoid—
even unpatriotic—to suggest that behind closed doors the very people
we entrust to keep us safe might be spying without cause on
civilians, misleading supposed allies, or running up $158,000 hotel
bills. And it seems paranoid to suggest that the recent suicide of a
man who was assisting the investigation of Italy's disgraced No. 2
spy might have been anything but a suicide. But at a certain point,
the frequent instances of abuse and overreach by intelligence
agencies—from the Stasi to Sismi, from J. Edgar Hoover's files to
Pollari's—begin to seem less like the anomaly and more like the rule.
And you're left to wonder: If this country had an investigator with
the autonomy and perseverance of Armando Spataro, just what might he
uncover?
Patrick Radden Keefe, a fellow at the Century Foundation, is the
author of Chatter, which is just out in paperback.
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