A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (26 page)

D’Ambrosio entered Pignero’s office, and the general did not waste words. He said he was transferring D’Ambrosio to Fort Braschi and assigning him different duties. His tone made clear this was not a promotion.

D’Ambrosio said he did not see why he should be relieved of his command. His work in Milan had never been called into question. Indeed, he had had several important successes, including the recent arrest of an arms trafficker that had earned the praise of Prime Minister Berlusconi himself. What, he asked, had he done wrong?

Pignero answered metaphorically. Imagine, he said, that a soccer coach had a player on the field who was playing at eighty percent, which, Pignero allowed, was pretty good, but on the bench sat a player who could play at one hundred percent. Was it not the coach’s duty to make a substitution?

“When will I have to move?” D’Ambrosio said.

“Immediately.”

D’Ambrosio returned to Milan and surrendered his post the following morning to Mancini, who—rather officiously, D’Ambrosio thought—demanded his service phone on the spot. D’Ambrosio asked Mancini who the hundred-percent player was who would replace him, and Mancini said he would run the station himself. D’Ambrosio thought this odd in light of Mancini’s many other duties supervising SISMI chiefs across northern Italy. Understanding his career at SISMI was over, D’Ambrosio requested the transfer back to the Carabinieri himself. A colleague at Fort Braschi would later tell him that his ruin had been effected less by Mancini than by Jeff Castelli, who had wanted his head.

The next time D’Ambrosio saw Lady, Lady asked whether he had spoken to anyone about the “confidential information” they had earlier discussed.

D’Ambrosio lied that he had not.

Lady said that was interesting, because he too had received a summons to Rome, where Jeff Castelli had chewed his ass for fraternizing too closely with the natives. Castelli had mentioned D’Ambrosio by name. No matter, though, Lady said. Water under the bridge. He was only sorry for D’Ambrosio. His fate was another sign, of which Lady had seen many, that the era of the honorable intelligence professional was over. The show was now being run by men like Mancini and Castelli, bastards out for their own interests. Men like D’Ambrosio and Lady, servants devoted to their countries, got shat on for thanks.

AFTER THE
KIDNAPPING
,
Ludwig expected Lady to call, but he did not hear from him on the evening of February 17, nor on the next day, nor the next. Eventually he called Lady’s two mobile phones, but there was no answer. Weeks passed, during which Ludwig also heard nothing from SISMI about his hoped-for transfer. Then one day, maybe a month after the kidnapping, he was watching TV and saw a news report about the disappearance of a Muslim cleric. The newscaster said the police suspected he had been kidnapped and that a woman on the street may have witnessed some of it. The cleric’s name was Abu Omar.

Ludwig was dismayed—he hadn’t noticed a woman on the street. He would later understand that his preoccupation with Abu Omar had been total and that the woman must have been the reason the men in the van had waited so long before seizing Abu Omar: they had been letting her pass, but, as it happened, incompletely. Maybe another pedestrian had been approaching, or maybe they were just incompetent. Ludwig was also disturbed by the news report because he thought of what he had done on Via Guerzoni as an intelligence job, not a crime, but here the newscaster was discussing it as a run-of-the-mill felony, prosecutable like any other. It put the thing in a new light.

Ludwig finally saw Lady about six weeks after the kidnapping. He came by the Carabinieri office, looking a touch less ebullient than usual, and Ludwig managed a few private minutes with him to say that his superiors in the Carabinieri suspected the CIA was behind the kidnapping. He asked what had become of Abu Omar. Lady told him not to worry. Abu Omar was now in the Balkans with his first wife. The operation had gone well, in fact was still going well, still reaping benefits, by which Ludwig understood that Abu Omar had talked and the CIA was fruitfully pursuing leads he had given.

Ludwig also asked what had come of his application to SISMI. Lady, by way of reply, asked whether Ludwig had considered the private sector. He said he himself was about to retire from the CIA and do security work for the Olympics, and he was entertaining offers or near offers from the manufacturing giant Pirelli and a company of former CIA officers that negotiated the ransom of hostages. He did not remark the irony of a kidnapper working to free the kidnapped. A man of Ludwig’s talents, Lady said, could do well in the private sector. A cynic might have thought he had cared less about Ludwig’s career all along than about securing his help in the rendition. Ludwig was desolated.

Apparently sensing his desolation, Lady eventually offered, as a kind of consolation prize, to fly Ludwig and his wife to Washington when they vacationed in New York later that year. They were going to New York partly because Ludwig wanted to pay homage at Ground Zero. Lady would arrange a tour of the CIA’s headquarters for Ludwig while Mrs. Ludwig shopped or saw the sites in Washington. His offer had the intended effect, and the maresciallo accepted with the awe, as he later said, of “the little priest going to the Vatican.” On the appointed day, Ludwig was given his tour, and when it was done, Lady surprised him with a small ceremony honoring his service to the CIA. Some of the CIA’s lesser counterterror nobility were in attendance and drank his health. The toastmaster apologized for serving Bordeaux to an Italian, but Ludwig took of it as if it were communion. After the ceremony, Lady asked if there was anything else Ludwig particularly wanted to do, and Ludwig replied that he would like to visit the CIA’s gift shop and buy souvenirs. The shop, however, was closed. Lady promised to send him a cigarette lighter.

Over the next year or so, Ludwig tried several other routes to SISMI, all without success. In the end he gave up and accepted a post with the Carabinieri at the Italian embassy in Belgrade. In November of 2004, before he left for Serbia, he and his wife went on a trip that took them near the Ladys’ villa in Penango. They stopped to visit, and while the women were elsewhere Ludwig said he was still concerned about the Abu Omar affair. Could he be prosecuted? Could they all be prosecuted?

Lady told him to relax, there was nothing to worry about. Ludwig had seen his magnificent villa among the vineyards, yes? He had invested all his savings in it. His entire future lay in Italy. Would he have made it so if he weren’t certain that there was not now and never would be an inquiry against him?

BRUNO MEGALE’S
INVESTIGATORS
at DIGOS had tracked the SIMs of the conspirators who had called one another, and they had tracked the SIMs of those who had stayed in hotels, but they had not tracked the SIMs of those who had made no calls and stayed in no hotels. If any such conspirators existed, they would be all but impossible to find—unless, perhaps, they had staked out Abu Omar’s neighborhood of Dergano at the same times the other kidnappers had and, also, they had had mobile phones with them that, although neither making nor receiving calls, had been powered on. With other demands on their time, the investigators did not look, or did not think to look, for these hypothetical conspirators in the first phase of the investigation. But in the spring of 2006, nearly a year after Spataro had won the arrest warrants for Lady and the other spies, DIGOS analyzed the many thousands of SIMs that had been in Dergano when the spies had been there. They found one suspicious SIM. It had been in Dergano around noon on each of January 27, February 2, February 9, and the day of the kidnapping, February 17, after which it never returned to the quarter. The SIM was registered to one Luciano Pironi, who on investigation turned out to be a maresciallo of the ROS Carabinieri with the nom de guerre Ludwig.

In April Spataro invited Ludwig to a dialogue at the Palazzo di Giustizia. He arrived and said he knew nothing about a kidnapping on Via Guerzoni, nor did he know how his mobile phone—the one that had rung just as he and Stocky were approaching Abu Omar—might have connected to cell towers near there. Spataro said he found Ludwig’s ignorance unconvincing. The maresciallo left with a scent of indictment trailing him. Eight days later, however, he came back and admitted that he had not been truthful. He proceeded to relate, with only a few evasions, all that he had been involved in, from his recruitment by Lady to his abandonment by same. He acknowledged having his personal phone with him on the day of the kidnapping and on his other outings to Dergano. Had he left it at home or simply powered it off, he would never have been discovered.

His confession led Spataro to Major D’Ambrosio, who willingly told what he knew and who impressed Spataro as a moral soldier who had refused to acquiesce in immoral orders. His testimony about being removed from his post by Mancini and Pignero prompted Spataro to tap their phones. The taps were fructiferous, for the two men called each other often.

“At the end of 2002,” Pignero said in one of the calls, “I often met with Castelli.”

“Of course,” Mancini said.

“One of the things we talked about was that the CIA was planning to start up the American public project of—”

“Of renditions.”

“I didn’t talk about ‘renditions.’ I said exactly this: of search, localization, and capture—”

“Ah, perfect.”

“—of people they believed were—”

“—involved—”

“—anywhere they might be in the world, even in Europe and Italy—who were involved in the attack on the Twin Towers or with al-Qaeda activities.”

“Exactly.”

“In this context,” Pignero said, “informally and only orally, he gave me a series of names, a series of characters.”

“Americans?”

“No, Arabs.”

“Arabs, ah, yes.”

“To look for, to look for.”

“Yes.”

“They were in Europe . . . Holland, Belgium, Austria.”

“You didn’t tell me this, this thing here.”

“Also in Italy. He gave me some names of people in Italy, but I can’t remember the names now. . . . But Abu Omar was one of these names, only in the sense that—he wasn’t referring to him as ‘Abu Omar,’ but with his proper name.”

“Yes.”

“In addition to this, he also told me about this guy working in Vercelli.”

“Hey,” Mancini said, “you didn’t tell me about that guy.”

“In Vercelli, Naples, Turin—”

“Yeah, but you didn’t tell me about this part.”

“Yes, but there was a list of—“

“I understand, I understand.”

“Turin, et cetera, et cetera.”

In all, at least ten candidates for rendition were on the list. Pignero said he didn’t tell SISMI’s director, General Nicolò Pollari, about his conversation with Castelli, apparently because he wanted to protect Pollari. He later learned his protectiveness was unnecessary. Pollari and Castelli had also talked about renditions, and according to Pignero, Pollari had offered SISMI’s help. Pignero told Mancini that eventually Pollari ordered him to help the CIA plan Abu Omar’s rendition.

“How was that request made?” Mancini said. “Was it protocol?”—meaning written in a formal memo, signed, dated, and filed.

“Which request?”

“The one for the rendition, the one the director gave you. Was it protocol or not?”

“Noooo! No, no.”

“Then what was it?

“It was an anonymous note,” Pignero said. “Just a note I kept until one year ago when—I kept it in my office. Then one fine day I read this thing—” by which he seemed to mean a news report of the Abu Omar affair.

Mancini laughed.

“Ah, go fuck yourself!” Pignero said.

Mancini laughed again.

“I destroyed it,” Pignero continued, “and it was the only copy.”

“The one the director gave you?”

“Yeah.”

“The fucking director,” said Mancini, who, it became apparent, thought Pollari a coward for not publicly taking responsibility for SISMI’s part in the rendition. Mancini and Pignero then discussed whether Pollari had written the anonymous note himself, and Pignero said, “I remember that it was written in English.”

“Shit,” Mancini said. “The director doesn’t speak English, so it’s difficult to believe he wrote it himself.”

“There wasn’t even a remote chance of tracing anything in any fucking direction. And even if the Americans did make a copy and by some absurd, crazy chance somebody drags out that copy, it was still a piece of paper with no date, no protocol. It could have been written today.”

“As long as the Americans don’t say, ‘Yes, the Italians knew about it.’ ”

“They do say that. But I say no.”

AS EVIDENCE
of SISMI’s involvement in the kidnapping mounted, an editor from the right-wing newspaper
Libero
asked to interview Spataro and his colleague Ferdinando Pomarici, who was helping with the investigation. Spataro granted the request, and the editor, Renato Farina, arrived with a young reporter in tow and said they too had been investigating whether Italy’s government had been involved in the kidnapping. He and his reporter then asked a series of questions that seemed to the magistrates designed chiefly to learn how much they knew of SISMI’s role. Next Farina told the magistrates he had quite a scoop, which he would generously share: Italian officials had indeed been involved in the kidnapping, but they were not the officials Spataro and Pomarici might have expected. The ringleader was Magistrate Stefano Dambruoso, the first prosecutor on the case, and his co-conspirators were officers in DIGOS. Together they had covered up for the CIA and had possibly done worse. This astounding news explained why the case had not advanced before Spataro took it over from Dambruoso. Spataro and Pomarici said they would study the matter, and Farina and his protégé left.

Farina was not quite the editor he seemed. A few days before the interview, a SISMI officer named Pio Pompa had called Farina and asked him to set up the interview. After Farina had done so, Pompa and Farina exchanged further calls to discuss what questions Farina should ask. Pompa then called General Pollari, SISMI’s director, to keep him abreast of the developments. Unfortunately for all three men, DIGOS had already suspected Farina of colluding with SISMI and had tapped his phone. What the investigators heard led them to tap Pompa’s phone too, and when Farina interviewed Spataro and Pomarici, his interesting but false claims about Dambruoso and DIGOS were recorded by a bug that Spataro had had DIGOS install in his table. Hardly had Farina walked out of Spataro’s office than he called Pompa to report on the interview, and Pompa in turn reported to Director Pollari. Pompa and Pollari then deliberated whether they might be able to get the investigation taken from Spataro and given to friendlier jurists in Brescia. (Ultimately they couldn’t.) Throughout, the men of SISMI exhibited a remarkable oblivion to the fact that they did not have a monopoly on phone-tapping in Italy.