A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (27 page)

Pollari and Farina were well known to Spataro, but until this episode Spataro had never heard of Pompa. When he looked into him, he found that although Pompa worked in Rome, he did so not from SISMI’s headquarters at Fort Braschi but from a large, off-the-books aerie atop a splendid commercial building. Spataro ordered the suite raided in the summer of 2006, and the raiders found, among other documents, a memo saying that not long after Abu Omar was kidnapped, the CIA told SISMI that he had been taken to Cairo for interrogation—notwithstanding that the CIA had told DIGOS he was probably in the Balkans. Other damning papers, unrelated to the kidnapping, showed that someone working from the suite had had phones tapped, subjects tailed, and informers paid, all for the purpose of gathering dirt on politicians, magistrates, and reporters. The snoopers seem to have been particularly interested in antagonists of SISMI and Prime Minister Berlusconi. One might say that their outfit was a successor to the bygone Super SID of General Vito Miceli and the blackmailing dossier shop of General Giovanni De Lorenzo, although the men of the aerie had improved on the tradition by propagandizing more extensively. One of their specialties was drafting half-true and baldly false newspaper articles that were favorable to the government, which they gave to reporters for publication under the reporters’ bylines. Some of the journalistic shills, like Farina, published the compositions verbatim. Farina, it would turn out, fronted for SISMI not just in the Abu Omar case but also in the notorious Yellowcake Affair. In that episode SISMI gave the CIA fake documents purporting to show that Saddam Hussein was buying weapons-grade uranium from Niger. The documents gave George W. Bush one of his crowning justifications to war on Iraq, and when they were exposed as SISMI frauds, Farina tried unsuccessfully to pin their creation on France.

Spataro had Farina and Pompa indicted and Mancini and Pignero indicted and arrested. Farina confessed everything. He said General Pollari, SISMI’s director, had recruited him to sham for SISMI, notwithstanding that Italian law forbade Italy’s spy agencies from employing reporters, and he said that over two years SISMI had paid him between
€
20,000 and
€
30,000 and given him other tokens of gratitude, like World Cup tickets. He had, however, given most of the money to the Catholic Church and other charities, for he was no mere mercenary. He was, rather, a patriot who in his estimation had been “fighting the fourth world war—against Islam.” In return for his confession, he was given a light sentence, eventually converted to a fine, then he stood for Parliament with the party of Silvio Berlusconi, who hailed him “a guerrilla fighter for liberty.” He was elected.

Pio Pompa, whose name can be translated “Pius Pump” or, by a more colloquial rendering, “Pius Blow Job,” refused to tell Spataro much of anything and said he would see him at trial.

General Pignero at first lied wantonly to Spataro but eventually confessed to ordering subordinates to help the CIA plan the kidnapping. He said that when Jeff Castelli first asked SISMI to help with renditions, he, Castelli, had offered in return to have the CIA kidnap a fugitive leader of the Red Brigades who was living in South America. The CIA would have handed the fugitive to the Italians (apparently in South America), who could have brought him to trial in Italy or done what they wanted with him. SISMI declined, probably because on the one hand its officers would have had a hard time explaining to an Italian judge how the fugitive had been brought to Italy in violation of an extradition treaty and because on the other hand they did not care to summarily dispatch their own justice to the fugitive. Pignero may have been moved to confess to Spataro by a cancer that was killing him. The counterterror chief died two months later, on the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

As for Marco Mancini, Spataro showed him the transcripts of calls in which he and Pignero had agreed on lies he would tell Spataro. Several of Mancini’s subordinates also came forward, or soon would, to say that Mancini had ordered them, in preparation for the kidnapping, to stake out places Abu Omar frequented. (None of the SISMI men, it seems, was involved in the kidnapping proper, although it is possible that other Italians, like the double-agent Massimo, were. There were, after all, twenty SIMs whose users Spataro never identified.) At roughly the same time, allegations emerged that Mancini and two other men had run an illegal wiretapping shop similar to Pio Pompa’s, although more as an appendage of Telecom, the state telephone company, than of SISMI. The shop allegedly sold its intelligence for large sums to businessmen and politicians who wanted compromising information on their rivals. The buyers included a clique of right-wingers who squelched an electoral bid by Alessandra Mussolini, a rightist parliamentarian herself, though on the outs with her squelchers, who was best known as the granddaughter of Benito who had sometimes omitted to clothe her torso when appearing before cameras. Another client was an executive of the soccer club Inter Milan who paid to have his star player spied on because he feared the star’s off-field play was vigorous enough to disrupt his on-field play. These logs burning beneath him, Mancini yielded a few words to Spataro, the essence of which was that he had only been following Director Pollari’s orders. It was a
sua culpa
.

By the end of 2006, Spataro had enough evidence to charge Pollari with conspiracy to kidnap Abu Omar. The director had repeatedly denied that he or SISMI had been involved in the rendition, and he said now that he had documents proving his innocence but that they had been classified secret. Much later Pollari suggested that the decision to kidnap Abu Omar had not been his to make. His lawyer, asked by a reporter whether someone higher up in the Italian government had ordered the abduction, replied, “Evidently. It wasn’t the doorman.”

Spataro questioned Pollari’s predecessor at SISMI, Admiral Gianfranco Battelli, about who might have ordered the kidnapping, and Battelli also suggested it hadn’t been the doorman. He said that days after the attacks of September 11, Jeff Castelli had proposed to him that the CIA render men from Italy, and he had replied that if the project moved forward, he would need to tell Prime Minister Berlusconi. But Battelli had retired a few weeks later and, the project not having advanced, he only referred the matter to Pollari.

Of the rendition Silvio Berlusconi had once said, “There has not been, I repeat for the umpteenth time, any involvement by the government in those events. Neither I, nor my ministers, nor my undersecretaries, nor any Italian institution has been advised or informed by anyone. I deny in the most absolute way every false reconstruction, and I reject with disdain every attempt to distort the truth.” After Spataro indicted the whole top drawer of SISMI, Berlusconi’s denials were slightly tamer, but he maintained his claim of personal ignorance.

“Are you kidding?” said Vincent Cannistraro, a past director (long before Abu Omar’s kidnapping) of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, when an Italian reporter asked him about the plausibility of Berlusconi’s ignorance. “The CIA wouldn’t send a single man into Italy for a covert operation without first informing your premier and SISMI.”

SPATARO WAS
EGALITARIAN
.
When he charged Italy’s top spy and aides with conspiracy, he charged America’s too. A judge found merit in his charges and issued arrest warrants for diplomats Jeff Castelli, Sabrina De Sousa, and Ralph Russomando and for Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Romano of the U.S. Air Force. Russomando had only recently come to Spataro’s attention. Officially he was a first secretary at the U.S. embassy, but his indictment claimed he was a CIA officer who had sent DIGOS the mendacious note after the kidnapping that said Abu Omar was probably in the Balkans. All four indictees had long since left Italy. (The charges against Castelli, Russomando, Pollari, and Mancini were later dismissed, for reasons to be discussed.)

AT THE
end of 2006, as Spataro was putting together the last of his indictments, the newspaper
Corriere della Sera
published a document that began:

My name is Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, the Islamist kidnapped from the streets of Milan on February 17, 2003, by intelligence agents of the U.S. and other states. I am currently an inmate at Cairo’s Tora Reception Prison.

I write this testimony from inside my grave and burial place. My body has been weakened, my mind has been distorted, I am ill and diseased, and I can sense the signs of my death.

I write this testimony from inside my grave and burial place. The screams of the tortured, the whips of the torturers, the living hell inside this cell have changed the very features of my face.

I write this testimony from inside my grave and burial place. I give thanks to all those who are trying to shed the light of hope on the mystery of my kidnapping from Italy and my imprisonment and torture in Egypt.

Two and a half years had passed since Abu Omar had been summoned by the State Security Service to pick up his identification papers. When he had not returned home, his family had asked first the State Security Service and then other entities of the state where he had been taken, but all were dumb to their questions. Months went by, and they feared the worst. But in late summer or early fall of 2004 the police of Alexandria called and said they were holding Abu Omar and he could receive an occasional visitor. Nabila Ghali flew from Milan to see him. On arriving at the police station, she was shaken to find in place of her portly husband of a year and a half ago a near skeleton who hobbled more than walked and wheezed when he breathed and whose beard of rich black had gone almost completely white. He told her that a State Security officer had told him he had been re-arrested for not abiding by the Sacred Don’ts, particularly “Don’t contact anyone in Europe.” He had been sent back to Tora and held there some weeks or months when a judge ordered him released. The State Security Service had complied by “releasing” him to police custody in Alexandria. New charges were then brought against him, and he was given back to State Security, which returned him to Tora. Later, however, a judge ordered his release again, so State Security had brought him to the police in Alexandria once more. Now here he was, uncertain whether the release would be made real this time. He said nothing about how he was being treated.

Ghali visited him on one or two other occasions, but when next she came back, he was gone. She was not told where he had been taken. More months went by, then suddenly he was in Alexandria again on “release” and permitted visitors, but he disappeared just as suddenly. Months later he reappeared. This happened several times in 2005 and 2006. At some point in the sequence, he smuggled the testimony he had written in Tora to his wife, and she sent it to Milan. That he could write it—that is, that he had pen, paper, light, and the privacy to use them—were indications that his current imprisonment was not as severe as his previous one.

In his testimony he described his kidnapping and transport to Egypt, his first imprisonment and torture, and his miraculous release and re-arrest. The second arrest had been followed by beatings and electrocutions like those of his first imprisonment, but eventually, he would later say, the torture tapered off and he was abused irregularly—more remindfully than habitually. He would also say that after he wrote the declaration but before it was published, two Egyptian officials visited him in prison and said if he would agree to tell reporters that he had come to Egypt freely, a foreign intelligence service would give him $2 million. The claim was perhaps not as far-fetched as it might sound. The CIA had wanted to make a similar offer to Khaled El-Masri, a German the CIA had mistakenly rendered and brutalized. The agency had abandoned the idea only after the White House decided that El-Masri’s case could not be hushed up. Abu Omar said he spurned the offer on principle, but he also suspected that had he accepted, the money would have been taken back after he spoke to reporters.

After his testimony was published, he was tortured with renewed vigor, but again the abuse eventually fell off. A few months later, in February of 2007, four years after his capture and nearly three after his re-arrest, a court again ordered him freed, only this time on being returned to Alexandria, he was freed not just in theory but in fact. The State Security officer who discharged him said if he wished to keep his freedom, he should have nothing more to do with journalists. Abu Omar shuffled out into Alexandria, at large again.

JUDGE OSCAR
MAGI
of the Tribunal of Milan set trial for the American defendants in absentia and the Italians in praesentia for June of 2007. (In the United States, indictees who abscond before trial generally cannot be tried, but Italy believes in trying even those who would as soon skip the process.) Twenty-five of the Americans ignored the trial and were appointed counsel by Magi. The twenty-sixth, Bob Lady, hired his own lawyer. After several months, however, Lady acceded to the government line of ignoring the proceedings, dismissed his lawyer, and was appointed a replacement by Magi.

The governments of Italy—Silvio Berlusconi’s until 2006, Romano Prodi’s from 2006 to 2008, and Berlusconi’s thereafter—moved repeatedly to stop the trial. The essence of their several arguments was that SISMI and its collaborators needed secrecy to defend the nation and that the few trespasses they might from time to time commit in its defense were trifles compared to the threat posed by investigating them. In the governments’ reading of the Constitution and relevant statutes, Spataro’s investigation had illegally ruptured this vital secrecy and Judge Magi’s trial would further rupture it.

Spataro argued in reply that while spies must of course be able to act in secret, their actions had to be legal. If spies became their own law, there was no law. If today they could kidnap Abu Omar, tomorrow they could kidnap any of us. He maintained that his investigation had revealed nothing that hurt Italy or the United States in their fight against terrorists, and he found nothing in Italy’s Constitution or other law that permitted felons to hide behind the scrim of national security.