A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (6 page)

THE IMMIGRANT
to Milan travels with the arc of history. Over the millennia, bands of strangers from the North battled their way through Gaul, stopped in Milan with little more intention than to repair mail and plate, and ended up staying centuries. From the South warriors also came, meaning to fill their carts with grain before crossing the Alps, but they stayed too, and their blood still runs in Milanese veins. Strangers have often ruled, but not, historically speaking, for long. Thus the Celts supplanted the foundational Ligurians and were defeated in turn by the Romans, who succumbed to Hannibal and the Carthaginians, who were beaten in a return match by the Romans, who were followed, in loose succession, by Attila, the Goths, the Lombards, Barbarossa, the Spaniards, the Austrians, Napoleon, and Silvio Berlusconi. This crossroads history is reflected in the city’s name, which probably comes from the Celtic “Mid-lan,” or “place in between”—what we would call a hub—and has made a hash of Milan’s culture, so that one may enter a Milanese trattoria and find both
pomodoro a strica-sale
, which is salt-rubbed tomato, a legacy of the South, and
cotoletta alla milanese
, a breaded veal cutlet that any Northern European would recognize as wiener schnitzel.

The greatest immigration in Milanese history began just after World War II, when the U.S. Marshall Plan and newly liberated Italian capital remade northern Italy. Milan had been a seat of industry before the war—there was a saying that while Rome had a church on every corner, every corner in Milan had a bank—but after the war Milan was
the
seat of Italian enterprise. Breda made trains in the city, Falck forged iron and steel, Alfa Romeo built its sinuous coupes (the company’s logo, the serpent and red cross, was the coat of arms of Milan’s Visconti), and Pirelli, the colossus, made tires. Italians called the nation’s economic rebirth
il miracolo
, and “the miracle” became a byword for Milan. To man the enormous factories, Milan imported a proletariat of hundreds of thousands. Most came from Lombardy and other regions of the North, but a large minority came from the Mezzogiorno, the land of the Midday, which was to say south of Rome. In Italy, the cultural split between North and South approximates that of the United States. Northerners of that era called Southerners
terroni
, which was derived from
terra
, “soil,” and could be translated as “clodhopper.” In the Northern stereotype, terroni were indolent, dirty, clannish, and slow. Northerners liked to say that Africa began at Rome, and even that great urb irritated many Northerners with its inefficiency and bureaucracy. The Milanesi believed themselves mislaid in Italy. Their city, they said, was an international capital in search of a country.

The migrants who powered the miracle were greeted in Milan with wretched apartments in sunless streets, the worst of schools, and the blackjacks of police. Long after the miracle went bust, a haphazard jumble of tenements might still be called a
Corea
, because so many of them had been built during the Korean War, which coincided with the miracle. The bars where Southerners drank, having been kicked out, sometimes literally, of “Northern” bars, were called
le casbah
or
i suq
. The neighborhood of Dergano, where Abu Omar would settle, had its share of
le Coree
,
le casbah
, and
i suq
.

The immigrants helped make Milan the richest city in Italy and one of the richest in Europe. Milan faltered a bit in the early 1970s, when the factories were boarded up and the jobs sent to places where workers did not ask for union wages and Sundays off, but the recovery was quick. Other industries had flourished during the miracle: banking, technology, publishing, television, and above all the one with which Milan became synonymous—
la moda
,
fashion. Since at least the sixteenth century, Europeans had appreciated Milan’s skill with gloves and hats, ribbons and point lace, leather and jewelry. Sellers of these wares in England were called Milaners, and the English, with their genetic oblivion to the foreign accent, pronounced and eventually spelled the word “milliners.” (Later the meaning of “milliner” was restricted from a general haberdasher to a maker of ladies’ hats.) Toward the end of the miracle, Milan’s small fashion workshops transformed themselves into great manufacturers, and Armani, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, and Prada became global clichés for taste. To visit Milan was to know this. The shoes of the Milanesi were a little pointier than those of other metropolitans, their heels were a little higher, their pants a little blacker, their stockings runless, their hemlines revelatory of neither too little nor too much leg. Their glasses were isosceles.

The workforce of the more sophisticated second boom required a supporting proletariat as the first boom had, and many of the janitors and maids and nannies again had to be imported. The immigrants were poor, unskilled, and from families that had until recently worked the land, only this time the land was not metaphorical Africa but the thing itself: Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Senegal, and Mali; also Albania, Ukraine, Turkey, Syria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, and China. The newcomers found Milan no more hospitable than their predecessors had a few decades earlier. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, made their first Milanese homes in abandoned factories or idled trains. When these quarters became an embarrassment to the city, the local government steered its guests into metal, container-like shelters that broiled in summer, froze in winter, and were ringed with barbed wire and uplifting rules, like bans on card-playing and women.

In time, some immigrants established themselves in cheap apartments and lent their floors to newer arrivals, some of whom in turn established themselves and lent their floors. A few opened businesses. Because their neighborhoods tended to be run-down and their clothes not
alla moda
, many Italians associated the new residents with shabbiness and crime. The same Italians tended also to be disturbed when they emerged from certain Metro stops into a welter of Indo-Aryan and Semitic languages spoken by men socializing on the hoof outside kebab shops where not long ago pizzerias had been. Politicians saw opportunity in such changes, and mean, small-minded parties of the Right rose to power in Lombardy on “the immigrant threat.” Their hysterics about the contamination of the culture, the language, and the race were exactly those of such parties everywhere. By the end of the 1990s, residents of foreign extraction made up just ten percent of Milan—chicken scratch by the standards of major American or British cities—but to hear the xenophobes, one would have thought it was forty-nine percent and counting. For immigrants, the result was hostility, discrimination in housing and jobs, and stops by police on the street to check their identification—dark skin being cause enough for suspicion.

These affronts came to be symbolized in a homeless Moroccan named Driss Moussafir, who in 1993 was killed, along with four policemen and firemen, by a Mafia car bomb that exploded near a park in which he was sleeping. From the reaction of many Milanesi, one would hardly have known Moussafir was among the dead. The mayor’s eulogy of the victims omitted him, high officials paid their respects at the coffins of the Italians but ignored his, and police and news reports listed him last, when mentioning him at all, and usually referred to the others by name but to him only as “an immigrant.” There were protests of this neglect, and the city grudgingly agreed to name a school for him where immigrants were taught Italian. The sign on the school misspelled his name “Woussafir.”
Moussafir
meant “traveler.”

To the devout Muslim, Milan presented additional trials, not least of which was a constant assault by the human, particularly the female, form. In Milan one inhaled sex as in Alexandria one inhaled sea air. The prevailing advertising strategy—for clothes and perfumes, cars and stereos, dishwashers and paper clips—could be summarized in the word “cleavage,” if cleavage were no longer associated with the naturally occurring breast. The breast of advertisual Milan was watermelonious, demanding, and seemed to spring from every other billboard and shop window. There were buttocks to match, their display meant to give a dromedary assurance that in this desert of life a man could mount such as those and ride a long time before reaching the next oasis (where, apparently, he bought paper clips). Ten minutes’ residence in mammarian, gluteal Milan could prove a trial for the devout Muslim. The city made manifest what came of a people who deadened themselves to God, and the newly arrived Islamist was not surprised to learn that the country’s great cathedrals were filled only when a Nobel laureate or a foreign philharmonic visited. Many a pious Muslim dove for cover in Milan’s mosques.

ABU OMAR
CHOSE
Italy partly because he knew a few Islamists who had settled there and partly because Italy, notwithstanding the growing hostility to immigrants, was still relatively liberal with grants of political asylum. Italy was also easy to get to. The refugee center outside Munich was not much policed, nor were voyages by train, so he simply bought a ticket on the express to Rome and one day in May of 1997 was off. On arrival, he requested asylum from his persecutors in Egypt. Apparently he did not mention his fraternization with the mujahidin of Peshawar or his arrest by the SHIK of Albania. He was given temporary quarters and help with his petition by the Jesuit Center of Rome, which abutted Vignola’s Church of the Most Holy Name of Jesus, not far from the Vatican—an irony for an Islamist with, as would later be discovered, a growing distaste for infidels.

It would take the Italian government years to weigh Abu Omar’s petition, during which time he was free to move about. He settled in the town of Latina, south of Rome, where friends helped him find work of an unknown kind in the town’s mosque and where he began to preach, apparently as a lay imam. From time to time he visited cities in the North. Milan did not exactly enchant him, but its Muslim community was large, many of its members were fervent, and he knew the imam of one of the city’s largest mosques, a Gamaa man named Abu Imad, with whom he had been imprisoned in Egypt.

In the summer of 2000 he left Latina and settled in Milan. For an Islamist who had fled Egypt, worked for Islam in Peshawar, and been suspected of terrorism in Albania, it was not an innocuous time to go to Milan. Indeed, at that particular moment, Abu Omar could almost have settled in a training camp in Kandahar with less suspicion.

Chapter 3

The Enemy Within

IN FEBRUARY
of 1993 a Pakistani-Kuwaiti named Ramzi Yousef, who had come to the United States on a plea of political asylum and was at large pending a hearing on his plea, blew up a Ryder truck filled with fertilizer under the north tower of the World Trade Center. He was driven by a loathing of American sponsorship of Israel on the one hand and the brutal semi-secular regimes of the Middle East on the other. He had hoped to topple the north tower into its twin and bring down both in a hail of death—an outcome that would have to wait eight years and other attackers—but he succeeded in killing six, injuring more than a thousand, and, unintentionally, impelling the police of Milan to take a closer look at the deranged Islam in their midst.

Yousef, it turned out, was a disciple of Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the Blind Sheikh, who was perhaps the preeminent leader-in-exile of Gamaa. The Blind Sheikh had been expelled from Egypt for issuing fatwas condoning terrorism and had spent time among the mujahidin of Pakistan and the terrorists of Sudan. At one time he counted among his friends Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. In 1990 he settled in the United States, notwithstanding that he was on the State Department’s terrorist watch list. “We must be terrorists,” he told a Brooklyn audience a few weeks before the Trade Center bombing. “We must terrorize the enemies of Islam to frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet.” While Yousef plotted to blow up the Trade Center, the Blind Sheikh conspired to blow up the headquarters of the United Nations and bridges and tunnels into Manhattan. He was arrested in 1993, tried in 1995, and elected by a dozen infidels to life membership in an institution of correction. Yousef had by then fled to Pakistan, from which he advanced a plot with his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the future evil genius of the September 11 attacks, to blow up several airliners over the Pacific Ocean. Instead, Yousef was caught in Islamabad and extradited to New York, where he too received the sentence of a lifetime.

The FBI’s investigation of Yousef and the Blind Sheikh turned up a tangle of connections between their cell in greater New York and fanatics abroad. Among the connections were phone calls to Milan. The calls would have been interesting in any case, but they were the more so because Yousef sometimes traveled on a falsified Italian passport. The men on the Milan end of the calls were parishioners of the Islamic Cultural Institute, which was the formal name of the mosque on Viale Jenner that Abu Omar would later frequent. The mosque had been founded only a few years before the Trade Center bombing, in 1988, by one Ibrahim Saad, a devotee of the Blind Sheikh and another Egyptian whose commitment to Gamaa had made him unwelcome at home. On coming to Italy, Saad had been frustrated that Milan, unlike other large cities in Europe, had no correspondingly large mosque and that its small mosques lacked the proper zeal. He got a stake from an Islamic businessman—an Eritrean named Idris Ahmed Nasreddin, who had become rich in Milan and Switzerland and whom the U.S. Treasury Department would later declare, for a time, a financier of terrorists—and opened the mosque in an old garage. Squeezed among low-rent
tabaccherie
on Viale Jenner, the garage was bland, modern, forgettable, and advertised by no sign. One passed through its iron gate and into another world, like entering a gay bar in Biloxi.

Saad set himself up as imam, but his power was soon eclipsed by that of another exiled Egyptian loyal to the Blind Sheikh and Gamaa. He, Anwar Shaaban, was a naval engineer of middle age whose appearance suggested a withered cornstalk: widen the nose of Osama bin Laden, set glasses on it, and there was Shaaban. He had waged jihad in Afghanistan, then had come to Italy a political refugee, ungratefully. Western godlessness and materialism disgusted him, as did the slumbering, as he saw it, of Milan’s Muslims in the West’s downy bed. He preached a brimstone Islam.

Not long after Shaaban became imam, the Bosnian War erupted in the former Yugoslavia, just across the Adriatic from Italy. The advantage in the war lay with well-armed Serbia (sometimes aided by Croatia, sometimes opposed by it), which set to brutally cleansing itself of Bosnian grime. Europe and the United States stood aloof, as if the Serbs were only spring cleaning, and embargoed arms to all sides—an act neutral on its face but in truth punitive to the weaker Bosnians. Muslim nations tended to be less numb to the Serbs’ many atrocities (they did not mind the Bosnians’ so much), because half of Bosnians were Muslim and nearly all of the Serbs were Christian. Many Muslims called for a defense of their brothers and sisters in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Islamists of more malignant temperament saw in that defense a chance to establish a terrorist beachhead in the West. Bosnia, they believed, could become Europe’s Afghanistan.

Shaaban was one of the earliest such visionaries. He had many allies in Europe, and together they began to marshal an army, first from the ex-mujahidin who had found sanctuary in Europe but soon from young men new to jihad. Shaaban’s congregation—predominantly young, male, and immigrant—made a fine recruiting ground. Many of his parishioners were barely literate in their own language, let alone the new one, were bewildered by the differences from their homeland, and were further isolated by the slights and sneers of Italians. They turned to Shaaban for all manner of spiritual and practical guidance: how to keep one’s faith among unbelievers, how to renew a visa, how to find a flat, how to import a bride. Their trust in him and their alienation from Italy made them receptive to his talk of holy war against the West and of the ennobling deprivations of battlefield camps. He enlisted many such men and began taking them to Bosnia and returning for more. His allies from other European cities did the same.

To pay for their travel, camp supplies, and arms, he raised money from rich Arabs in Europe and the Middle East and supplemented their donations by extorting halal butchers in Milan on threat of torching their shops. Some of the arms purchases were elaborate. According to one terrorist, Shaaban’s circle bought assault rifles, grenades, and missiles from traders in Russia (where weapons circulated freely after the fall of Communism), shipped the arms by sea to Italy, and forwarded them to Croatia and from there on to Bosnia. Swiss corporations owned by Arabs and Pakistanis oversaw the logistics, and Swiss banks handled the payments, some of which were also filtered through charities like the Lucerne-based Mother Teresa of Calcutta Center. (In Milan, Shaaban had his own charity, Il Paradiso, whose relief also tended to ordnance.) The chain of supply for the arms shipments was, however, deemed too complicated, and simpler ones were established.

The army that Shaaban and his colleagues assembled in Bosnia was known as the Islamic Brigade. Although Shaaban consulted on battlefield strategy, his chief role when in Bosnia seems to have been more inspirational than strategic. He was something like the high priest of the mujahidin, and troops were apparently moved by his antebellum harangues. In combat they proved fearless or nearly so, but their first assaults were debacles. Men whose dearest wish is to be martyred are not necessarily assets under fire. They are wont to charge fortified machine-gun positions without a preceding artillery bombardment or covering small-arms fire. Their efficacy is then hindered by being cut in half. It would take time for the commanders of the Islamic Brigade to convince their men to sell their lives dearly.

Martyrdom, however, was good for recruiting. Hardly had a martyr, if martyred spectacularly, departed for his seventy-two wives than tales of him spread across the Islamic world. (The hadith, contrary to common report, does not specify that the seventy-two are virgins.) As such tales multiplied, Shaaban began to draw men from not just Milan but across Italy, then from other European countries, then from throughout the Arab world. There is a story of an Egyptian peasant, one Mahmoud al-Saidi, who desired to make jihad in Bosnia and asked his village elders how he might do so. Go to Milan, they told him, and seek out Anwar Shaaban. So al-Saidi sold his only cow to pay the airfare.

At its peak, the Islamic Brigade may have numbered five thousand men and was supported by tens of millions of dollars—by some accounts, hundreds of millions of dollars—that flowed through dozens of Islamic charities. Eventually the Brigadiers learned to fight. They won small battles, then larger ones, often with ugly consequences. After taking a village, they might smash the pews of its ancient church, burn its relics, and deface centuries-old murals by excising the head of a Madonna or modifying the genitalia of her Son. Worse might be in store for the villagers. When the Brigade took the Croat town of Miletici, with the loss of one of their fighters, they told their Croat captives that their dead comrade’s life had been worth those of four infidels. They selected four young men of the town, tortured them horrifically (the face of one was sliced off), and slit their throats. As the blood rushed from them, the executioners caught it in bowls and ladled it back over their heads. After another battle, at Podsijelovo, they tortured several Serbian fighters, then paired them off, armed them with knives, and ordered them to fight each other to the death. Those who refused or who became injured were decapitated with chainsaws or cleavers. Those who survived were made to kiss the severed heads, which the mujahidin nailed to trees. The Islamists evidently videotaped some of the sport at Podsijelovo; recordings of it were reported to have circulated among the faithful. A witness to another battle said that afterward the holy warriors and their wives took turns shooting two Serbian prisoners, then decapitated them and played soccer with the heads.

“They like to kill,” said a Bosnian soldier who fought with them. “Whenever they could kill with their knives, they would do so.”

Shaaban’s martial endeavors were not restricted to Bosnia. He also sent recruits to al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan. He showed them how to get visas to Pakistan on religious grounds, then arranged their travel, often by way of an intermediate point like Geneva or Zurich so as to cloud their point of origin. In Islamabad or Peshawar, al-Qaeda would take charge of them. One recruit Shaaban directed in this manner was L’Houssaine Kherchtou, a baker from Morocco who had come to Milan to make money, not war, but who was won over to jihad by Shaaban. Sent to Pakistan, Kherchtou was tutored by al-Qaeda in surveillance, electronics, and the use of rifles, anti-aircraft guns, mines, and explosives. Some of the lessons supposedly took place at bin Laden’s house in Peshawar. After a tour of duty in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda sent Kherchtou to Kenya and Sudan to become bin Laden’s personal pilot, but when al-Qaeda cut off his flying lessons and refused to pay for an operation for his wife, he defected. His testimony in a U.S. courtroom helped convict some of the al-Qaedans behind the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Shaaban also gave miscellaneous help to terrorists in Tunisia, Egypt, and the United States. One of those terrorists was Ramzi Yousef, who, it seemed, had spent time in Milan before bombing the World Trade Center and who may have received his false Italian passport from Shaaban or one of his lieutenants. This intercourse, along with the phone calls between Milan and the cell in New York, was among the earliest clues that all was not well behind the garage door on Viale Jenner.

THE POLICE
of Italy were then, as today, the least encumbered in Western Europe when it came to tapping phones. They tapped about 100,000 a year, for a total of 1.5 million calls. The per capita rate, about 170 taps for every 100,000 people, was three times that of their nearest rival in Western Europe and orders of magnitude beyond the rate—1 for every 100,000 people—claimed by the United States. After the emergence of disturbing signs from Viale Jenner, the counterterrorists at Milan’s DIGOS tapped the phones of Shaaban and his acolytes. What they heard disturbed them, and they opened an investigation they called Sphinx. For more than a year, they listened and watched.

They learned that a cornerstone of Shaaban’s work was a document-forging enterprise that served terrorists across Europe and that may have created Yousef’s false passport. When fully realized, the enterprise was highly compartmentalized: one team acquired blank documents, another team doctored them, another delivered them to the newly minted man. Often the doctorers did not know the true name of the client or his mission, and the client did not know who had made his papers. Where possible, the forgers supplied complementary papers: a passport and a visa, a driver’s license and a residency permit. The best documents were stolen ones that had already been used and stamped and that the forgers altered only slightly—for example by inserting a new picture but leaving the name and other data untouched. If the client could pass for a European, say an olive-skinned Italian or Spaniard, he was given a European identity. If time and money permitted, he would test his new papers by traveling to an irrelevant country before going to his ultimate destination, which, if he were stopped, would not be discovered. Apparently the Milanese scribes were skillful, because their clients were not often stopped. The scribes’ work refreshed the meaning of the “fine Italian hand,” which term had arisen in the Quattrocento to compliment Florentine copyists of the Bible but which now applied to copyists guided by a superseding text.

Their raw material—the blank or stolen documents—generally came from abroad. One of their sources was a Serbian gang that burgled city halls in Belgium, which tended to be lightly guarded on weekends and which held hundreds of blank passports, driver’s licenses, and official stamps. The Serbs sold the passports for between $700 and $2,300 apiece, and often they passed through several buyers before reaching Milan. Other documents came from purse-snatchers and hotel burglars, notably in Madrid, Toronto, and Cairo, and still others from officials in Yemen, Algeria, and Albania who sympathized with the terrorists or were persuaded to sympathy by a small consideration. Because no international authority kept a list of stolen passports, terrorists who needed to move across borders undetected could remake themselves again and again. After 2001, investigators would find terrorists who had changed their identities seventy times.