For two and half years starting in June of 2002, the CIA used Morse’s plane for dozens of flights around the globe: to Afghanistan and Azerbaijan, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Japan, the Czech Republic and Romania, Switzerland and Guantánamo. The plane often landed on Spain’s Majorca and Canary Islands, both of which were eventually recognized as rest-and-refueling stops for rendition flights. It also called eighty-two times on Dulles International Airport, just down the road from CIA headquarters. When the CIA was not using the plane, Morse or the Red Sox usually were. Once, Morse lent it to the Sox’s manager so he could fly to his son’s high school graduation. More than once, Morse flew on it with his friend the first President Bush. One of their trips was to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Torture, one might conclude from the Gulfstream’s overlapping uses, was as American as baseball and apple pie.
When it was reported in 2005 that the Gulfstream was a torture taxi, the president of Richmor Aviation, Mahlon Richards, said he knew nothing about the transport of “detainees,” as the kidnapped and tortured are tepidly called by U.S. reporters. He knew only that the Gulfstream was flying federal workers. As to their purpose, he said, “I don’t ask my customers why they go anywhere, whether it’s West Palm Beach or the moon.” In his youth, Richards had been a recipient of his church’s God and Country Award for a Boy Scout. His fidelity to Country, at least, had remained true.
Morse rather undermined Richards’s disavowals by saying, “It just so happens, one of our customers is the CIA. I was glad to have the business, actually. I hope it was all for a real good purpose.” Told by a reporter that the plane might have been used for kidnappings, he said he was stunned.
It was Morse’s Gulfstream that flew Abu Omar from Ramstein to Cairo. The jet did not tarry in Egypt. A few hours after landing, it left for Shannon, Ireland, another way station for torture taxis, and from Shannon it continued to Dulles, then returned home to Hudson.
It is unclear why Abu Omar was flown first to Ramstein, then to Cairo. Maybe his conveyors preferred to launder him rather than fly him directly from Italy to Egypt. Or maybe he needed to be photographed and repackaged in Ramstein for some reason. It was a mystery.
TO BE CHIEF of the CIA in Milan is to have done well for oneself. It is to have escaped Dili and Guatemala City, dysentery and uncertain electricity, and to have landed among ossobuco and opera and the Pinacoteca di Brera. Bob Lady got to Milan in 2000. He was born Robert Seldon Lady in Tegucigalpa in 1954, the son of a Honduran mother and an American father. The latter, William Lady, was an Arkansan who seems to have been a mining engineer, although he may also have worked in some capacity with the U.S. military. Bob Lady considered himself a Southerner, notwithstanding that his first language was Spanish. In high school in Honduras, when a group of students with wild Che Guevara beards taunted him with cries of Gringo! Imperialista! Yanqui!, he replied that he might well be a gringo, and he might well be an imperialist, but he wasn’t no goddamned Yankee. His self-assessment would prove accurate on all counts. After high school, he settled in New Orleans, where he may have joined the New Orleans Police Department (by another account, he headed north and joined the New York Police Department) and where he married Martha Coello, late of Redemptorist Boys and Girls High. They raised two children. In the late 1970s or earliest 1980s, Lady joined the CIA, where his fluency in Spanish and ease among Latin Americans must have been appreciated. For the next two decades, he served in the region of his birth, the gringo imperialist.
In Milan the Ladys lived on Via Cimarosa, a wide boulevard that was planted in atypically neat hedges. Their small apartment building was detached from the rest of the conjoined city and surrounded by high walls—a suburban privacy for Milan. Bob Lady’s employer of record was the U.S. State Department, and his official title was deputy consul, but all of the Italian counterterror police knew Mr. Bob, as they called him, for the CIA officer he was. He liked his Italian counterparts as much as they did him, and he understood that the hundred small considerations he extended them were as important as the dozen big ones. He was liberal, for example, with mugs and pens from the CIA, whose cachet was considerable. Only rarely did the Italians refuse his overtures, as when he offered to pay for a hotel room from which the Carabinieri were staking out an apartment. The Carabinieri, not wanting to be unnecessarily dependent on the CIA, gently declined.
Lady was fond of his work, but by the time he had come to Italy, he had given half his life to the CIA, and he did not mean to give the rest of it. Nearly a quarter century of service had endowed him with a substantial pension, which, if supplemented with private consulting, could provide him a comfortable income indeed. He had encouraging leads on a contract to help protect celebrities at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, and he was confident that other lucrative, if not quite Olympic, consultancies would follow. He and Martha looked for a place to pass their seniority and found it in the gentle hills of the Asti wine country, just outside the hamlet of Penango. It was an old farmhouse with walls in a shade of terra cotta, a roof of red tile, and ten acres of orchards. Via Don Bosco, on which the farmhouse fronted, honored a priest who espoused the theory, perhaps novel to a CIA man, that love was a better educator than punishment. No matter. From the fruits of an antithetical career, Bob and Martha would bottle their Barbera and live in graceful repose. They left Milan for Penango in late 2003, a few months before Bob turned fifty. Their peace did not last long.
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 Carabinieri first concluded that leftist terrorists were to blame, but the leftists were eventually exonerated. The Carabinieri then concluded that other, nonpolitical 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 Carabinieri 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 ar
ms 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.”
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