A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (23 page)

Spataro completed his investigation in April of 2005 and asked a judge to indict nineteen Americans for kidnapping Abu Omar. Two months later, the judge issued arrest warrants for thirteen of the Americans: Lady, Adler, Asherleigh, Carrera, Channing, Duffin, Harbaugh, Harty, Logan, Purvis, Rueda, Sofin, and Vasiliou. Spataro appealed the six he had been denied—Castaldo, Castellano, Gurley, Ibanez, Jenkins, and Kirkland—and won indictments and warrants for them too. A little later, he won indictments and warrants for three more: Faldo, Harbison, and Medero-Navedo. Spataro had argued, and the judge agreed, that neither Lady nor Medero-Navedo was immunized from arrest by their consular (in the case of Lady) or diplomatic (in the case of Medero-Navedo) employment. For lesser alleged crimes, Spataro allowed, they might have been; for a crime as serious as kidnapping, no.

The day after the first batch of warrants was issued, Spataro sent officers from DIGOS to Via Don Bosco. Martha Lady was home, and was displeased by her visitors’ arrival. Her husband was not in the country. DIGOS’s search of the farmhouse turned up several documents of interest, most of which were on Lady’s computer. One pair of documents showed that a few days after the February 17 kidnapping, Lady booked a room at a hotel in Zurich for February 23, then booked a ticket to fly from Zurich to Cairo on February 24, returning March 7. This itinerary matched what DIGOS had already learned from one of Lady’s SIMs, which had traveled east from Milan on February 21, stopped for the night in Vicenza, then continued the next day past Venice to Gorizia. The SIM then went silent, apparently upon crossing the Slovenian border. When it was next heard from, on March 3, it was in Egypt, where it received two phone calls. Probably Lady attended to (though not necessarily attended) some part of Abu Omar’s interrogation.

The police also found on Lady’s computer three black-and-white photos of Abu Omar walking along a street bordered by a high wall. The photos had been taken from inside a vehicle, a little of whose dashboard crept into the bottom of the pictures. A caption read 12:25 hours 14 jan 2003 via giuseppe guerzoni near medical park—the place and hour of Abu Omar’s kidnapping, one month before it occurred.

Other files of interest on the computer had been deleted, but DIGOS was able to resurrect them. They included maps and directions from Via Guerzoni to Aviano downloaded from the Web site Expedia on January 23 and 24. (January 27 was the first day Lady sent Maresciallo Luciano Pironi, a.k.a. Ludwig, to Piazza Dergano to intercept Abu Omar.) Also deleted was an e-mail sent to Lady ([email protected]) from a Susan Czaska ([email protected]) on Christmas Eve of 2004.

“I am so glad to hear from you,” Czaska wrote. “Since I got your last note, I suddenly got an e-mail through work which was entitled ‘Italy, don’t go there.’ It was from Maura, giving a short rundown regarding the Milan Magistrate’s intentions. I was a bit taken aback by all this since this was the first I had heard. Then when I didn’t hear back from you, I was truly concerned that you were sitting in some Italian holding cell. I sent a note to Torya, trying to get some more information (since everyone seems to be so tight-lipped), and she said she had gotten a note from Sabrina, telling her that could [
sic
] not visit Italy and that you were in Geneva until this all blew over. I was extremely relieved to get your note—do be careful, and let me know if I help [
sic
] in any way.”

Czaska, Spataro learned, was a U.S. citizen of fifty-odd years who clerked at the consulate in Milan—or did until three days before the raid at Penango, when she left Italy for good. Spataro suspected her of more than mere clerking for the State Department but could learn nothing more. He was not entirely surprised to discover from her e-mail that the CIA, with its informers burrowed inside Italy’s government, like Massimo of Chapter 1, had learned of his investigation long before it was made public. (Reporters for
La Repubblica
also got wind of it and published some details a couple of months after Czaska’s e-mail.) But the discovery was still disappointing.

The Sabrina whom Czaska mentioned, Spataro assumed, was Sabrina De Sousa, the CIA officer from Rome and Milan whose SIM was among the suspect ones. The other women Czaska mentioned, Maura and Torya, were unknown to the Italians. Probably they were CIA hands elsewhere, Langley maybe.

Also in Lady’s study were compact discs that had been intended for old-fashioned deletion, but the trash can in which they had been tossed had yet to be emptied. One of the CDs had a list of hotels in Milan, including hotels that gave discounted rates to employees of the U.S. government. The kidnappers had stayed in some of the hotels. This discovery cast the CIA’s seeming extravagance in a more favorable light: the $400 a night that Adler and others spent at the Savoia had perhaps been a steal. (There were no records to say for sure.) If so, the CIA apparently did not mind having its officers identified as federal employees in pursuit of a bargain.

After Spataro’s raiders left Penango, Bob called Martha from a mobile phone in Honduras. His Italian SIM had been deactivated some time earlier, but Spataro had tapped the phone in Penango.

“Hear me out and don’t say anything,” Martha told her husband. “They came to the house today, the Milan police, and they seized stuff. They looked everywhere—outside, inside—and they took off with everything they found—your PC and the hard drives in your study. They took all your documents and floppy disks. They showed me the judge’s warrant. Megale was also there and others I’d never seen, but they knew you. It’s bound to become public tomorrow in the press.”

“And they found nothing?” Lady asked.

“What are they supposed to find if there’s nothing to find?”

Afterward, theories abounded about why the CIA had been so reckless from start to finish—why, for example, the spies had not used satellite phones, which the Italians could not have traced, why they had used their phones like teenagers, why they had not paid in cash, why Lady had brought work home. One theory focused primarily on mechanics: satellite phones had larger antennae and might have seemed more conspicuous on the street; paying $8,000 hotel bills in cash would have seemed suspicious. But this theory was unsatisfying because the mechanical problems were easily solved: satellite phones would not have been conspicuous if used sparingly; the team could have stayed in less expensive hotels and changed them every few nights. And no mechanical dilemma explained Lady’s domestic carelessness, the frequent-flyer accounts, and other Keystone Kommando-isms.

A second, somewhat more satisfying theory was that after September 11, American covert operations grew so rapidly that the CIA could not properly run them all. Jobs that would once have been closely managed and scrutinized by headquarters were now put together in haste, and the chiefs of station who should have provided local oversight were, in cases, ill trained to manage operations like a rendition. It may also have been relevant that after September 11 the CIA increasingly outsourced parts of its covert operations. Several of Abu Omar’s kidnappers were almost certainly contractors—the spies who billed me, as they were known in the trade. Perhaps they were properly trained, perhaps not.

A third, also satisfying theory focused on idiocy, of which the CIA has a long history—as, for example, the case of the CIA’s forty agents in Iran who were imprisoned or executed in 1989 after the CIA mailed all of them letters at the same time, in the same handwriting, at the same address, from the same German mailbox; or the case in 1994 of the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala whom the CIA tried to smear as a lesbian (because of her support for human rights) by leaking transcripts of her cooing in bed to her female lover, who turned out to be a poodle; or the case of CIA analyst Aldrich Ames, who over many years betrayed dozens of American agents to the Soviets without arousing the CIA’s suspicion, even though he bought his $500,000 house with cash, drove a Jaguar, and regularly paid credit card bills of $20,000 a month on a salary of $70,000. Nathan Hale predated the CIA, but it is apt that the agency honors him with a statue in its headquarters, since in his week as one of the nation’s first spies, he gave General Washington not a jot of intelligence before the British discovered and hanged him. Had he had more than one life to give for his country, he might have given it a couple of centuries later with a frequent-flyer number.

A fourth and still more satisfying theory was that the kidnappers believed they would not be caught or that, if caught, they would be immune. This theory too had a pedigree, one specific to Italy.

Chapter 8

Gladiators

IN 1972
NEAR
the village of Peteano, in Italy’s northeast, an anonymous caller lured several Carabinieri officers to an abandoned car with bullet holes in its windshield. As they examined the car, a bomb inside it exploded, killing three of the officers and badly wounding a fourth. In the investigation that followed, the Carabi-nieri first concluded that leftist terrorists were to blame, but the leftists were eventually exonerated. The Carabinieri then concluded that other, non-political culprits were behind the crime, but they were not convicted either. The case fell dormant.

Ten years after the bombing, a young magistrate named Felice Casson, dissatisfied that the case had never been solved, reopened it and discovered several oddities. For example, a junior Carabinieri officer who had examined the crime scene had found two .22-caliber shells, presumably from the bullets that had been fired through the windshield of the car, but he had been told by his seniors that the shells were irrelevant to the investigation and he should ignore them. The shells then disappeared. The Carabinieri said the shells had been given to a lab technician, but this proved untrue. A report in which the young officer mentioned the shells also disappeared, and a new report that did not mention them was put in its place. Magistrate Casson also found that a small group of senior Carabi-nieri had tightly controlled the investigation, which was unusual, and that this group had steered the blame, without cause, first to the leftists and then to the other innocents.

Casson’s case might have gone no further but for a related mystery. Around the time of the bombing, police in Aurisina, not far from Peteano, found a buried cache of guns, ammunition, and explosives. From the way the cache was packed, it seemed that it had once held more explosives than it did when the police found it, but there was no sign of when the missing explosives might have been removed. At the time, the authorities concluded that the cache’s explosives were not similar to the ones used at Peteano, but Casson discovered that their conclusion was without foundation. No one knew who had put the cache there.

Casson was curious about why the Carabinieri might cover up, as it seemed they had, the murder of their own officers. He was also curious about whether there was a tie between the cover-up and the arms cache. It took him years to find answers, and he did not find them all, but what he found was incendiary enough: the caches belonged to a secret stay-behind army that the CIA had created to fight Communists, and some of the officers who papered over the Peteano bombing were linked to the army. The army was called Gladio, after the short sword favored by the gladiators of ancient Rome.

IN THE
YEAR
of its founding, 1947, the CIA honored Italy with the agency’s first campaign of political subversion anywhere in the world. The campaign was aimed at the national elections of 1948, which Italy’s Communist Party, the strongest in Western Europe, stood a chance of winning, at least in coalition with the smaller Italian Socialist Party. This prospect struck dread in the breasts of American Cold Warriors, who disapproved of Communism whether it ascended by bullet or ballot. It did not matter that in Italy an elected Communist government would have been constrained by the republican constitution. A country that “went Communist” might allow the Soviet Union to quarter its forces there or forbid Dow and Exxon to quarter
their
forces there. The first possibility was a threat to global peace, the second to American prosperity.

Congress had not authorized the CIA to interfere in foreign elections, which meant the CIA’s plans for Italy were illegal. It also meant the CIA had no budget for propagandizing and other campaigning. But the agency’s senior ranks were filled with Ivy Leaguers and erstwhile corporate lawyers who were able to beg money of anti-Communist industrialists and bankers of their acquaintance. The CIA also convinced the secretary of the treasury to shunt funds that were meant for rebuilding Europe to the Italian campaign. The recipients were mostly leaders of Italy’s Christian Democratic Party, which had been founded at the end of the Second World War as a conservative counterweight to the Communists, and leaders of Catholic Action, the political arm of the rigidly anti-Communist Church. (Pope Pius XII, who had been careful not to condemn Hitler’s Final Solution, excommunicated Italy’s Communists en masse in 1949.) Sometimes the CIA laundered the money before giving it to the Italians, but other times CIA officers just handed it over in suitcases full of cash at the Hotel Hassler above the Spanish Steps in Rome. “We would have liked to have done this in a more sophisticated manner,” CIA officer F. Mark Wyatt said many years later. “Passing black bags to affect a political election is not really a terribly attractive thing.”

There is no reliable record of how much money the CIA funneled into the campaign or, for the most part, what it was spent on, although CIA-funded pamphlets that depicted Communist candidates as sexually depraved are known to have been distributed. The agency would later tell Congress it spent $1 million. James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s then chief of station in Italy (later its megalomaniacal director of counterintelligence), once said the figure was $10 million, which would have gone far in poor Italy of the immediate post-war. Others have estimated $30 million, which today would be roughly equivalent to $300 million. Whatever the case, the Christian Democrats won the elections by a wide margin. The portion of the margin attributable to the CIA is unknowable, but the success helped resolve a debate then taking place in Congress and the White House about whether the CIA should be a mere collector of intelligence or a subverter as well. The advocates of subversion won, and over the next few decades, the CIA ran dozens of covert campaigns in other countries based on the Italian job.

To undermine the Italian Communists for the longer term, the CIA turned after 1948 from ad hoc electioneering to systemic subversion of the Italian polity. The CIA gave money to anti-Communist labor unions and strike-breaking gangsters, founded publishing houses that excreted anti-Communist tracts and books, paid reporters to write and editors to approve anti-Communist articles, threatened other reporters and editors who would not be bought, and held membership drives and rallies for the Christian Democrats. The Soviet Union was doing some of the same for the Communists but, to judge from evidence revealed since the end of the Cold War, with fewer resources.

The Italian Left grew anyway. In the elections of 1953 the Communists and Socialists won a combined thirty-five percent of the seats in Italy’s parliament, against the Christian Democrats’ forty percent. A rattled CIA responded with so vigorous a campaign of “political action” that William Colby, who ran the station in Rome (years before he ran the Phoenix program in Vietnam, then ran the entire CIA), could say twenty years later that the agency had yet to run a bigger campaign. But in the elections of 1958 the Communist–Socialist bloc again lost by only a few percent, and in 1963 the bloc finally won a narrow plurality. The Christian Democrats could maintain their power only by giving the Socialists a few shelves in the national cabinet, a development that, in the CIA’s view, portended the fall of Western Europe. Money continued to flow from Langley to Rome.
The CIA would later claim that in the twenty years after the 1948 elections, it gave politicians of the Italian Right $65 million. That sum did not appear to include the money the CIA gave reporters, labor bosses, and the like. Victor Marchetti, a former senior CIA officer in Italy, estimated that a truer and more inclusive figure for the 1950s was $20 million to $30 million per year. Other students of the topic have concluded that every Christian Democrat who held a ministerial post between 1948 and 1968 took money from the CIA, although the money was apparently well-enough laundered that not all of the ministers knew its source. Italy was an extreme but not unique case. German chancellor Willy Brandt and French prime minister Guy Mollet were both beneficiaries of the CIA’s political fund.

Concerned that these comparatively genteel efforts to influence Italy’s electorate might fail, the CIA, in or around 1951, created Gladio. The precise date, like many other details about Gladio, remains shrouded. Gladio had for a co-founder the Italian military secret service, the Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate, SIFAR, which was much the lesser partner. (SIFAR was a precursor of the Servizio Informazioni Difesa, SID, which was a precursor of SISMI.) Since the close of the Second World War, the CIA had exerted its considerable influence to ensure that SIFAR was run by ardent anti-Communists, including Fascists and members of a secret paramilitary wing of the Christian Democrats who were to have seized power if the Communists had won the elections of 1948. For years, whenever SIFAR gathered important intelligence, it sent it to “the boys at Via Veneto,” as the CIA officers at the U.S. embassy in Rome were known. The CIA and SIFAR hid Gladio’s birth from the rest of the Italian government. While some Italian prime ministers and presidents would be told of Gladio’s existence over the next four decades, many seem not to have been. Nor, as a body, was Parliament. Under Italy’s Constitution and laws, Gladio was as illegal as the Mafia.

To man the army, SIFAR quietly recruited zealots from Italy’s military and police forces and trained them in guerrilla warfare and specialized arts like espionage, electronics, and propaganda. The trained men in turn kept an eye out for other zealots to recruit, some of whom were trained as well but others of whom were kept as untrained reserves available for muster by the regular Gladiators when the great clash with Communism came. Apparently Gladio grew briskly, because by the late 1950s or early 1960s the CIA and SIFAR built a training center for the army on the island of Sardinia. The site was chosen because it could be defended should Communists take mainland Italy and because its remoteness helped maintain Gladio’s secrecy. At about the time the center was built, the CIA and SIFAR began sharing the management of Gladio with NATO. Probably NATO helped pay for the training center, which was no rude camp. A runway was laid, a firing range cleared, a small harbor dug, underwater structures for training frogmen built, and buildings erected for training in explosives and house-to-house fighting. Trainees were flown to Sardinia in planes with blacked-out windows, then driven in blacked-out vans from the airfield to their barracks. In the early years, the trainees seem to have had little idea where they were.

The CIA supplied the Gladiators with an arsenal, which was scattered about the country in caches that were to be opened when the war came. Most of the caches, like the one found near Peteano, were buried under fields or churchyards or mountainsides, but others were more brazenly stored in police barracks. Some may have held gold, whose worth, unlike the lira, was assured over time. When Gladio was exposed in 1990, Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti said there had been 139 caches, a number that might have been true or might have been gross understatement. Even 139, with dozens or scores of weapons per cache, suggested a sizeable army. Estimates vary widely, but regular Gladiators over the four decades of the army’s existence numbered at least several hundred, more probably several thousand, and possibly ten thousand. Irregular recruits were probably several thousand more. After Gladio’s exposure, a few Italian generals and prime ministers who had been complicit in Gladio’s operation said the army was to have been used only against Communists who invaded or mounted an insurrection, not against Communists the electorate might empower by vote. It was a highly improbable claim.

A PROBLEM
with preparing men to seize a country is that they may grow dissatisfied when not allowed to do so. If they have been encouraged in the belief that the enemy is not merely objectionable but diabolic, they may become more dissatisfied still. This may help explain how Italy came to be threatened with a coup d’état after the Socialists and Communists won their narrow plurality in 1963. A year and a half before the election, some senior CIA and military officers at the U.S. embassy argued that if the Socialists won a share of the government, the United States should encourage its proxies to intervene militarily. Their argument did not carry, and the Socialists were given their small share of the cabinet without violence. But the governing coalition of Christian Democrats and Socialists was shaky and soon collapsed. As negotiations got underway between the two parties for a new government, the head of the Carabinieri, General Giovanni de Lorenzo, publicly rattled his saber (and his armored brigade) and privately, it seems, threatened a coup. De Lorenzo took a dim view of Socialists, and his rattles were understood as a suggestion that the Socialists should have a diminished role, or none at all, in the new government. De Lorenzo had until recently been the longtime director of SIFAR and thus Gladio, a post in which he had been installed largely because the United States thought him more unyieldingly anti-Communist than other candidates and demanded he be put there. After he moved to the Carabinieri, he maintained influence over SIFAR and Gladio through men he had appointed during his tenure. The blueprint for his coup called for seven or eight hundred opposition leaders to be arrested and flown to the Gladio base on Sardinia for internment. It is conceivable that De Lorenzo would have planned a concentration camp at a base funded by the CIA and NATO without first getting their approval, but
just
. As it happened, the coup was not needed. The Socialists concluded from De Lorenzo’s threat that they would be annihilated if they did not restrict their ambitions, and they quickly accepted a minimal role in the new government and muted their calls for leftward change. The government listed rightward and stayed in that position for quite some time.

A few years after his gambit, De Lorenzo was discovered to have illegally compiled dossiers on tens of thousands of innocent Italians. His particular focus was the sexual and financial peccadilloes of the elite, although he was not averse to gathering whatever else might be used for blackmail. The file on former and future prime minister Amintore Fanfani ran to four fat volumes. When the dossiers were exposed, De Lorenzo said the United States and NATO had suggested he create them, a claim that has never been proven nor disproven.