The Financial Times, Dec 4, 2006: (...) Sergio Rastrelli, Mr Scaramella's lawyer, told Italian television on Sunday that his client would name Italians who had allegedly been KGB agents. On Monday Mr Rastrelli said Mr Scaramella did not want to do that.
Mr Scaramella says he was born in Naples and worked at universities in Colombia, Italy and the US. His accent and mannerisms strike some people who have met him as neither southern Italian nor those of an academic. Italian internet sites are bubbling with speculation that he may be a spy, perhaps for Russia. Italy's government has stated that he is not an Italian agent. The University of Naples, where he claims to have held a post, has no record of him. At the "Environmental Crime Protection Program", an organisation of which he styled himself secretary-general and which has a University of Naples e-mail address, no one answered the telephone on Monday. Mr Scaramella attracted attention in Italy when he was appointed in 2003 as a consultant to the Mitrokhin commission, a parliamentary inquiry set up by the former government of Silvio Berlusconi, the centre-right leader. Its official remit was to investigate KGB activities in Italy but centre-left politicians suspect that its real purpose was to smear them. By his own admission, Mr Scaramella was no expert on the Soviet security services when he began working for the commission. Paolo Guzzanti, the MitÂrokhin commission's chairman, quoted Mr Scaramella as telling him in a phone call: "I hope to spend Christmas with my children. It depends on the way the poison attacks my spinal cord." Financial Times, Dec 4, 2006 # The Independent, Dec 3, 2006: (...) Mr Scaramella claims to be many things, including a professor at Naples University, an honorary magistrate, and consultant to something called the Environmental Crime Protection Programme (ECPP). But Naples University has not heard of him. The ECPP has no fixed office. The post as magistrate is non-paying. The only job he has had in recent years over which there is no doubt is with the Mitrokhin Commission. Yet it is this job, which finished before Italy's general election in April, that has now landed him in hot water. On the orders of the public prosecutor of Naples, Mr Scaramella's phone was tapped; last week Italian papers published what were reported to be transcripts of conversations between him and the president of the Mitrokhin Commission, Senator Paolo Guzzanti, a member of Mr Berlusconi's Forza Italia party. The transcripts allegedly show the two men discussing how Mr Scaramella is to acquire strong enough evidence from Moscow to label Romano Prodi, then the leader of Italy's centre-left opposition, now Prime Minister, a tool of the Russians. Other members of the Prodi government were also said to have been targeted, including the head of the Green Party, Alfonso Scanio, who is now environment minister. "We can't go so far as to say Prodi is a KGB agent," Mr Scaramella allegedly says at one point. "But we can say that the Russians consider Prodi a friend ..." Mr Guzzanti explodes. "Friend doesn't mean a fucking thing!" he roars. "Are you taking me for a cunt?" Lawyers for Mr Scaramella and Mr Guzzanti have protested at the bugging, but have not questioned the authenticity of the transcripts. After they appeared, Mr Prodi announced that he would sue "all those who, by words and deeds, have wounded my dignity as a citizen and as a representative of institutions". Doubts about Mr Scaramella's work for the Mitrokhin Commission are not new. In 2004, opposition members of the commission described his contributions as "barely credible and not at all helpful ... grotesque and mysterious ... " But yesterday Oleg Gordievsky, the most senior Russian agent ever to defect to Britain, said Mr Scaramella's main source for allegations against Mr Prodi was none other than Mr Litivinenko, who came to this country in 2000 and recently became a British citizen. "I was with Litvinenko when we met members of the UK Independence Party, " Mr Gordievsky told the IoS yesterday. "He told them that a KGB general, Anatoly Trofimov, had said to him: 'Prodi is one of ours.' The UKIP members later repeated the allegation in the European Parliament, when Mr Prodi was head of the European Commission in Brussels." Mr Gordievsky, who was smuggled to Britain by MI6 after coming under suspicion as a double agent in 1985, said he knew nothing to support the allegations against Mr Prodi. But he was at one with Mr Litvinenko's other associates in accusing the Kremlin of murdering him. "Since July Russia has had a law permitting the FSB to kill people abroad that it doesn't like," he said. "They killed a British citizen on British soil, and they are smearing other people, including me." (...) The Independent, Dec 3, 2006 # Italian in poison spy case leaves London hospital LONDON, Dec 6 (Reuters/06 Dec 2006 13:42:13 GMT) -- An Italian contact of poisoned Russian Alexander Litvinenko was on Wednesday discharged from a London hospital which had been monitoring him for radiation poisoning, a medical spokesman said. Mario Scaramella had been admitted to hospital last Friday after polonium 210, the same poison that killed former Russian agent Litvinenko, was detected in his body. But doctors had said Scaramella had received a much lower dose than Litvinenko and was not showing any symptoms of radiation poisoning. "Around noon today, he was discharged," said a spokesman for University College Hospital, declining to give further details. The Litvinenko case has strained relations between Britain and Russia, which denies his deathbed accusations that the Kremlin ordered him killed. Scaramella emerged as a central figure in the case because he met Litvinenko in a London sushi bar on Nov. 1, the day the Russian fell ill. Scaramella and his lawyers could not immediately be reached for comment on his release from hospital.
