A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (20 page)

When Nabila Ghali and Mohammed Elbadry met with Spataro, they were not at first forthcoming. Over the course of their interviews, however, they seemed to understand that he was an ally of sorts, and they told him what Abu Omar had said in his calls from Alexandria: that an American-looking policeman had stopped him on the street, that while the American was inspecting his papers, other men opened the door of a van and dragged him inside, that he had been beaten and bundled and driven for what seemed like four or five hours, that he had been transferred to another vehicle, possibly a plane, which had traveled for a short time, that he had been taken out of the vehicle and into a building where commandos had stripped and repackaged him, that he had been loaded onto another vehicle, definitely a plane this time, and flown for several hours, that he had been unloaded at last in Cairo, and that for the next fourteen months the Egyptians had abused him in ways almost to horrific to describe.

The story resembled those of other kidnappings, just emerging, that the CIA had carried out elsewhere since September 11, and it seemed to Spataro that the CIA was probably behind Abu Omar’s disappearance too. If so, the drive of four or five hours from Milan must have been needed to get him to an American or NATO air base, since it would have been too risky to fly him out of the country from a civilian airport. As it happened, only one international air base lay within four or five hours of Milan—Aviano. Spataro asked DIGOS to learn what flights had left Aviano on the evening of the kidnapping and the following day.

BRUNO MEGALE,
the young director of DIGOS’s counterterrorism squad in Milan, was so somber that when he testified at trials, reporters had been known to lay bets on whether a full hour or only a portion thereof would elapse before he smiled. A Deep Southerner like Spataro, he seemed to have raised himself from the Calabrian toe of the Italian boot to his position on the Lombard calf by means of the severity with which he invested his work. Since he was not given to causeless excitement, when he told Spataro in almost a flutter, in the fall of 2004, that the analysis of the 10,718 SIMs in the kidnap zone had revealed something fascinating, Spataro was sure it had.

Between 11:00
A.M.
and 1:00
P.M.
on February 17, 2003, about three hundred of the 10,718 SIMs had exchanged calls with one another. Most of the calls seemed innocuous. But eleven of the SIMs had called one another more than once during the two hours, each call had lasted only a few seconds, and the calls had increased in frequency with the approach of the kidnapping, had peaked immediately afterward, then had fallen off drastically. The phones of nearly all of the callers had been connected to the cell towers atop the Best Western Blaise & Francis, the closest towers to the spot of the kidnapping. The picture the callers presented was about what one would expect of a group coordinating the stakeout and capture of a man.

Moreover, the users of the eleven SIMs had not acted alone. They were in frequent contact with six SIMs that had been connected to cell towers in the suburb of Cormano, on the northern edge of Milan. The most logical route from the site of the kidnapping to Aviano was via the A4 autostrada, and its nearest entrance was at Cormano. It was likely that the six SIMs in Cormano were some kind of support group for the drive to Aviano. Even allowing that some of Abu Omar’s kidnappers might have had more than one phone, seventeen SIMs suggested a large group. Later the investigators would find another SIM that had been in Cormano and two more SIMs in Abu Omar’s neighborhood of Dergano, bringing the total to twenty.

Spataro asked Megale to learn everything he could about the SIMs: Where did they go the rest of the day? Where had they been on other days? When, where, and by whom had they been bought? Were they still in use now (more than a year after the crime)? To and from whom had they made or received calls throughout their period of activation? Could the phones the SIMs were in be identified? If so, who were their owners? Were any of the SIMs, by chance, among the thousands tapped by Italian police in other investigations? If so, did recordings or transcripts of the conversations exist?

The answers trickled in. Megale’s investigators were not so lucky as to find that any of the phones had been tapped, but they had other luck. To start with, they found that in the months before the kidnapping, the twenty SIMs in Dergano and Cormano had often called and been called by thirty-four other SIMs. No one of the fifty-four total SIMs had called every other SIM, but their calls so overlapped and criss-crossed as to create an obvious web that tied them all together. While none of the newly discovered thirty-four SIMs had been in Dergano or Cormano on the day of the crime, nearly all of them had been to Dergano in the several weeks before. One had connected to cell towers in Dergano ninety-five times. After the day of the kidnapping, however, none of the SIMs ever went there again, which strongly suggested they did not belong to residents of the quarter. Almost certainly the newly-discovered thirty-four belonged to conspirators who had gone to Dergano to plan the kidnapping.

Megale’s investigators were also enlightened by the SIMs’ movements on the day of the kidnapping. Of the twenty that had been in Dergano or Cormano that day, one had started the morning in Cormano, then moved at driving speed toward Dergano—connecting to cell towers along the way—and met up with the Dergano group twenty or thirty minutes before the kidnapping. The investigators thought the user of this SIM was a liaison between the two groups. Nearly all of the SIMs in Dergano were located on or within a few blocks of the route Abu Omar would walk, and they remained there during his walk. After the kidnapping, almost all of the Dergano SIMs dispersed or were shut off, but the liaison moved back toward Cormano, again at driving speed. Probably he or she was in the van that held Abu Omar. The liaison’s SIM then entered the A4 autostrada eastbound, and as it did, it was immediately preceded or followed (it was hard to say which) by about half of the SIMs in Cormano. To judge from their movements, these Cormano SIMs were in their own vehicle. Six or seven minutes later, the remaining SIMs from Cormano followed in another vehicle. Spataro theorized that the first group from Cormano was traveling with the kidnappers in case they needed immediate, minor help, while the second Cormano group was to be available for bigger trouble, like a blown tire or an intrusive traffic cop. Spataro guessed that the trailing group was in another cargo van to which Abu Omar could be moved if needed.

As the caravan made its way to Aviano, the people in the three vehicles called one another and, in a few cases, called kidnappers who had stayed in Milan. Two and half hours after the kidnapping, one of the SIMs in the lead vehicle called a SIM that was connected to a cell tower at Aviano Air Base. The call lasted thirty-five seconds. An hour and a half later, shortly after the caravan exited the A4 at Portogruaro, the same SIM called the same phone at Aviano, this time for nineteen seconds. Twenty minutes later, there was a third call, of fourteen seconds. A few minutes later, just before five o’clock, the SIMs in the caravan connected to the cell tower at Aviano. Evidently the caller in the caravan had been coordinating the kidnappers’ arrival at the base. Moments later one of the SIMs back in Milan made two short calls to a mobile phone in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. Spataro theorized that the caller was passing the happy news to headquarters that Abu Omar had been delivered.

SIMs were not the only means by which the kidnappers revealed their route. The A4 was a tollway, which meant the kidnappers had to pass through toll plazas on entry at Cormano, en route past Venice, and on exit at Portogruaro. They could have paid their tolls with coins, which would have left no trace of their passage, but instead, as Megale’s team found when they checked the records of the tollway company, they had paid with scannable farecards, whose use the company logged. Possibly the kidnappers had used the cards because it took less time to pay with them than with coins. Farecards might also have lessened the chance of encountering a human toll collector. In any case, the company’s logs showed that three and only three vehicles entered the A4 at Cormano and exited at Portogruaro at times corresponding to the movements of the kidnappers’ SIMs: at Cormano at 12:46, 12:47, and 12:54 and at Portogruaro at 4:00, 4:00, and 4:07 respectively. Because tolls on the A4 varied with the size of the vehicle tolled, the first vehicle was proven to be a car, the second a van, and the third, as Spataro had guessed, another van. (The toll company did not keep videos from its plazas or record license-plate numbers, so no more could be learned of the vehicles. Two of the kidnappers’ three farecards had never been used before, but one had been used a few weeks earlier on a reverse trip from Portogruaro to Milan. All three of the cards turned out to have been bought at convenience stores in Milan, but since sellers were not required to keep information on buyers, the investigators could not discover who the buyers were. None of the farecards was ever used again, notwithstanding that each card had a credit of ten or more euros remaining. CIA officers, it seemed, might risk betraying their travels by reusing a farecard once, but no more.

The kidnappers stayed at Aviano a few hours. Probably they were debriefed. Possibly they had a celebratory round at the California Beer Parlor. Some of them drove back to Milan that night. Others drove part of the way back and spent the night in Padua, from which some of them probably returned to Milan the next morning. Others simply disappeared.

MEGALE’S INVESTIGATORS
were not long in discovering that one of the fifty-four suspect SIMs was owned by the chief of the CIA office in Milan, whose name was Bob Lady. The discovery was distasteful to Megale. Lady had been a great collaborator with DIGOS, a generous sharer of tips and reports and technology. By some accounts, it was Lady who gave DIGOS the bug that was installed in Abu Omar’s office. It was also Lady who gave DIGOS the software to analyze terrorists’ phone calls—the same software, it seemed, that was now being used to investigate him. Megale had found Lady a pleasure to work with. He had none of the crabbed guardedness that some spies, particularly spies for larger countries, had about them, and the two men had celebrated their victories over terrorists with convivial dinners. Several times they had discussed Abu Omar, but never had Lady hinted the CIA might snatch him. Megale was blindsided.

Lady’s SIM had not been in Dergano or Cormano on the day of the abduction. Indeed, it had never been to Dergano at all and seemed to have been in Cormano only in passing. But both his SIM and the landline in his apartment had made and received several calls from the SIMs of conspirators who had been in Dergano, and thirty or forty minutes after Abu Omar was kidnapped, one of the kidnappers called Lady, presumably to tell him the job had come off. The same kidnapper called again several times that afternoon, presumably to apprise Lady of the team’s progress from Milan to Aviano. Lady, in brief, was a conspirator.

Another of the fifty-four suspect SIMs also belonged to a U.S. official. She, Sabrina De Sousa, worked from both the U.S. embassy in Rome and, like Lady, the U.S. consulate in Milan. She was accredited as a second secretary but was known to DIGOS as a CIA officer (she later maintained she was not). She too had collaborated on counterterror investigations with Megale’s squad, some of whose members found her haughty and brusque, the antithesis of Lady. Her SIM, like Lady’s, was implicated in the conspiracy rather than the kidnapping proper.

A third suspect SIM was registered to an administrative technician at the U.S. consulate named Barbara Suddath. At first, Suddath’s SIM was a riddle to investigators because they had no information suggesting she worked for the CIA. But after they studied the movements of the SIM during the years of its activation, they saw that at night and earliest morning—the hours a person would normally be in bed—it was usually connected to a cell tower near Bob Lady’s flat. Later, after Lady and his wife Martha bought an estate in the Asti wine country, the SIM began connecting to a tower there. Clearly Suddath had given the SIM to Lady. She seemed to have had nothing to do with the kidnapping, and DIGOS never learned to what extent, if any, she worked with the CIA.

A final SIM registered to a U.S. official was the one at Aviano that the kidnappers called three times from the highway. It was owned by the U.S. Air Force and assigned to Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Romano III, who was the chief of security for U.S. forces at the base. Among other duties, Romano oversaw who came and went from the base’s American-controlled gates. A few weeks before the kidnapping, Romano’s SIM exchanged calls with another of the suspect SIMs—probably, Spataro thought, as part of the logistical planning for Abu Omar’s transport.

The SIMs of the four officials had been used long before the kidnapping and would be used long after it. But the other fifty suspect SIMs were activated only a few weeks or, in a handful of cases, a few months before the kidnapping. Some of the SIMs were used only briefly, for a week in December, say, or two weeks in January, while others were used, incautiously, for six or eight weeks. None was used more than a few days after the kidnapping. The pattern was that of a group that came from afar for a temporary job, did it, and left.

Italian law did not require the sellers of SIMs to record who bought them, although sellers could do so if they wanted. When they did, they usually forwarded the information to the phone companies to which the SIMs were subscribed. Many of the fifty SIMs had been sold without being registered. Others were registered, but unhelpfully. Ten of the SIMs, for example, were registered to one Mihai Timofte, who turned out to be a thirty-one-year-old Rumanian mason living outside Milan. Timofte had never had anything to do with the SIMs registered in his name, but he had once bought a SIM from a shop in Milan, and that shop was listed with the phone company as the seller of “his” ten SIMs. In the past, the same shop had also “sold” other SIMs to Timofte that were used by criminals in other cases. Those cases had already prompted the Carabinieri to investigate Timofte, whom they adjudged “of normal moral and civic behavior”—just an unfortunate victim of identity theft. DIGOS never learned whether the shop stole Timofte’s identity or someone else did—someone, say, working for the phone company. Other shops “sold” SIMs used in the kidnapping to other innocents: a jeweler, an octogenarian pensioner, a mother who bought a similar SIM for her son.