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| Image from the CIA's surveillance of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr recovered during investigations by the prosecuting authority of Milan. |
Abu Omar was abducted on February 17, 2003, in Milan by agents of the SISMI and CIA. and transported to the Aviano Air Base, from which he was transferred to Egypt, where he was secluded, interrogated, tortured and abused. The CIA operation interrupted a surveillance programme that was being carried out by Italian authorities into Nasr's alleged participation in Islamistorganizations. Hassan Nasr was released by an Egyptian court in February 2007, which ruled that his detention was "unfounded". He has been indicted for international terrorism offenses in Italy since 2005.
The Italian government originally denied having played any role in the abduction. However Italian prosecutors Armando Spataro and Ferdinand Enrico Pomarici indicted 26 CIA agents, including the Rome station chief and head of CIA in Italy until 2003, Jeffrey W. Castelli, and Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady, as well as SISMIhead General Nicolò Pollari, his secondMarco Mancini and station chiefs Raffaele Ditroia, Luciano Di Gregori and Giuseppe Ciorra. Referring to the Italian military intelligence agency, the Italian press has talked of a "CIA-SISMI concerted operation." The prosecutors sent extradition requests for the indicted American citizens to the Italian Ministry of Justice, then headed by Roberto Castelli, for onward transmission to Washington. However Castelli refused to forward the demand for extradition.
The affair also created controversy within the CIA when the story came to light in 2005. Porter J. Goss the director of the CIA at the time, ordered the agency's independent inspector general to begin a review of the operation. Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then head of the National Clandestine Service (NCS), stopped the inspector general's review, stating that the NCS would investigate itself. In June 2009, Robert Seldon Lady, Milan CIA station chief at the time, said "I'm not guilty. I'm only responsible for carrying out orders that I received from my superiors." CIA officer Sabrina DeSousa, sentenced to five years in prison, said that the United States "broke the law ... and we are paying for the mistakes right now".
On February 12, 2013, the Court of Appeal in Milano sentenced former SISMI directorNicolò Pollari, his deputy director Marco Mancini, former Rome CIA station chief Castelli and two other CIA employees to up to 10 years in jail. Pollari has announced he will appeal against this ruling at the Corte Suprema di Cassazione. On February 24, 2014, the Corte Suprema di Cassazione, following a sentence of the Italian Corte Costituzionale regarding the use of secreted evidence in the proceedings, acquitted Pollari and Mancini.
Investigation of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasar
Hasaan Mustafa Osama Nasr was a radical Egyptian cleric and alleged member of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya who had fled Egypt due to that group's prosecution as a terrorist organization by the Egyptian government. He was granted political asylum in Italy in 2001, and held an Italian asylum passport.
As early as Spring 2002, he was under investigation by Italian and American intelligence agencies by means of wiretapsand physical and electronic surveillance. Italian authorities have claimed that they believed that they had evidence Nasr was building a network to recruit terrorists, and possibly had links to Al Qaeda. They alleged in particular links with Ansar al-Islam and ties to a network sending combatants in the Iraqi Kurdistan. However, citing a book on Al-Qaeda by Jason Burke, a British reporter atThe Observer, La Repubblica noted in June 2005 that in 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration was claiming, along with British prime minister Tony Blair, that Iraq maintained close links with Al-Qaeda, in particular through Ansar al-Islam. The Italian newspaper concluded that the Abu Omar case was a "chapter in the combination ofintelligence–psychological warfare–information war engaged by Washington and London to justify the invasion of Iraq." There are also reports that Nasr was involved in plotting a terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy in Rome, and was suspected of being involved in a plot to bomb a number of children of foreign diplomats attending theAmerican School of Milan, although sources disagree whether such plots even existed.
Most observers have come to believe that Nasr was abducted by the United States as a source of intelligence on foreign combatants being recruited to fight in Iraq, which, at the time, the United States had yet to invade.
Abduction and rendition to Egypt
On February 17, 2003, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr was abducted by persons affiliated with the CIA as he walked to his mosque in Milan for noon prayers.
According to court documents, Nasr was pushed into a minivan on Via Giuseppe Guerzoni in Milan and driven four or five hours to a joint Italian-U.S. air base at Aviano, where he was tortured. From there, he was flown by a Lear jet (using the call sign SPAR 92) to Ramstein, Germany. SPAR (Special Air Resources) is the call sign used by US senior military officers and civilian VIPs for airlift transport. A second plane then took him to Cairo, where he was imprisoned and, he claims, tortured.
In April 2004, while his incarceration had been downgraded to house arrest, Nasr placed several phone calls from Egypt to his family and friends. He told them he had beenrendered into the hands of Egypt's SSI at Turaprison, twenty miles south of Cairo. He was subjected to various depredations, tortured by beating and electric shocks to the genitals, raped, and eventually had lost hearing in one ear. At the time of the calls he had been released on the orders of an Egyptian judge because of lack of evidence. Shortly after those calls were made he was re-arrested and placed back in prison.
Nasr was not released again until February 11, 2007, at which time he was permitted to return to his family. After four years of detention, an Egyptian court ruled that his imprisonment was "unfounded."
In 2006, Nasr's lawyer Montasser el-Zayatsaid Nasr was underfed but there were "no signs of torture."
Investigation and warrants for CIA operatives
The CIA agents were implicated, in part, by extensive cellphone records which allowed Milan police to reconstruct their movements for the nine days they were in the city. Because the agents had apparently not, at any time, removed the batteries from their cellphones, investigators were able to pinpoint their locations from moment to moment. The agents also made numerous phone calls to the US consulate in Milan, tonorthern Virginia (where the CIA headquarters are located) and to friends and family in the United States.
The operation was led by Robert Seldon Lady, former CIA station chief in Milan, who was then operating out of the U.S. embassy under diplomatic cover as the "Consul of the United States in Milan." The operation was carried out by the CIA's Special Activities Division. Lady has said that he opposed the abduction plans, but was overruled. Lady has since retired from the CIA, which puts him in a precarious legal position, as the status of his diplomatic immunity is now in doubt.
In December 2005, CIA Director Porter Gossordered a sweeping review of the agency's field operations because of what he perceived as the Milan rendition's "sloppiness".
In June 2005, Italian judge Guido Salvini issued warrants for the arrest of 22 persons said to be agents or operatives of the CIA, including Jeffrey W. Castelli, head of the CIA in Italy until 2003. Salvini said the abduction was illegal because it violatedItalian sovereignty and international law and disrupted an ongoing police investigation. He also issued a warrant for the arrest of Nasr, on charges of associating with terrorists.
In November 2005, Italian prosecutors requested that Italy's Justice Ministry seek the extradition of the suspects from the United States. The Italian government declined.
On December 20, 2005, European arrest warrants were issued for the 22 suspects.
In April 2006, just after the Italian general election, outgoing Justice Minister Roberto Castelli (Lega Nord) told prosecutors that he had decided not to pass the extradition request to the United States.
One of the "concerted CIA-SISMI operations"
The abduction occurred without the knowledge of at least the Italian intelligence and law enforcement officials working directly on the Nasr case, who initially suspected that Nasr had been kidnapped by the Egyptian government, possibly with the cooperation of other branches of the Italian government. When the Italians questioned their American counterparts about Nasr's disappearance, they were told he had traveled voluntarily to the Balkans.
Furthermore, Italian officials initially denied the Italian government had authorized or sanctioned a US operation to kidnap Nasr. Italian Minister for Parliamentary AffairsCarlo Giovanardi, member of Silvio Berlusconi's second and third government, said in no uncertain terms to the Italian parliament: "Our secret services were not aware of the operation ... It was never brought to the attention of the government or national institutions."
But former CIA officials contradicted this by claiming the agency had secured the consent of Italian intelligence, and that the CIA'sstation chief in Rome, Jeffrey W. Castelli, had been granted explicit permission for the operation by his Italian counterpart. Furthermore, the circumstances of Nasr's abduction tended to accredit the thesis of at least passive support of the operation by Italian intelligence services. In particular, questions were raised by the CIA agents' startling laxity in travel arrangements. By all accounts, they did little to cover their tracks. Instead of fleeing immediately, most of them remained in Italy days after the operation, in some of Milan's best hotels. Only some of them used aliases. The rest traveled with their normal passports and drivers licenses, paid for things with credit cards in their real names, chatted openly on cell phones before, during, and after the operation. After the abduction, they even carelessly bypassed speed limits in Milan. Some have speculated this represents evidence of Italian complicity, as little apparent effort was made to obfuscate the identities of the participants.
This hypothesis was confirmed by Italian investigations. On July 5, 2006 two high-ranking Italian intelligence officers were arrested by Italian police for their complicity in Abu Omar's kidnapping. These includedMarco Mancini, number 2 of SISMI, Italy's military intelligence agency, and Gustavo Pignero, the agency's chief for the northern region of Italy. Italian wiretaps caught Mancini admitting that he had lied about his involvement in the abduction case. These arrests signaled the first official admission that Italian intelligence agents were involved in the abduction. Additionally, the former head of SISMI's Milan office, Col. Stefano D'Ambrosio, claims that he was removed from his position by his superiors because of his objections to the abduction plot; he was later replaced by Mancini.
Thus, public prosecutors Armando Spataro and Pomarici have described the abduction as "a concerted CIA-SISMI operation" organized by "Italian and American agents" with the aim of the "capture" and "secret transfer" of the imam to Egypt. Paolo Biondani and Italian counter-terrorist expert Guido Olimpio cited the November 18, 2005 article published by Dana Priest in theWashington Post, where she described theCTIC (Counter-Terrorism Intelligence Center), a "joint operation centers in more than two dozen countries where U.S. and foreign intelligence officers work side by side to track and capture suspected terrorists and to destroy or penetrate their networks. " Italy was not included in this international alliance of intelligence agencies, which largest base was in Paris, named Alliance Base.
According to Guido Olimpio and Paolo Biondani, Italy was not included in the CTIC because of internal jealousy between various Italian intelligence agencies. But they noted that, despite that, the arrest ordinance against Marco Mancini and his superior General Gustavo Pignero referred to the operation as an example of the "non orthodox activity" (the only one known of) realized by the CIA and the SISMI "since 2002," thus demonstrating some sort of cooperation between US and Italian intelligence agencies, albeit not in the frame of the CTIC.
Furthermore, according to testimonies by SISMI agents to the Italian justice, Mancini proposed himself to the CIA as a "double agent " According to Colonel Stefano D'Ambrosio, former SISMI responsible in Milan replaced by Mancini, the CIA refused to hire the latter because they considered him too "venal." But his demand "left traces in the computer" of the US intelligence. All SISMI testimonies converge in saying that Mancini owed his dazzling career to his "privileged relations with the CIA. " According to SISMI testimony, after the February 17, 2003 kidnapping of Hassan Mustafa Nasr, then CIA director George Tenet sent a letter to SISMI General Nicolò Pollari in August 2003, to which Mancini would allegedly owe the real reasons of his promotion to number 2 of the SISMI. In another, earlier article, the same author, Guido Olimpio, wrote that following the abduction of the imam, SISMI informed the Italian government and then the CIA, assuring them that no agent who had taken part in this covert operation would be prosecuted. In turn, CIA director George Tenet would have sent a letter to Forte Braschi, the SISMI headquarters in Rome.
Furthermore, apart of the July 2006 arrest of Marco Mancini, n°2 of the SISMI, and of Gustavo Pignero, the agency's chief for the northern region of Italy, the head of SISMI General Nicolò Pollari had to resign in November 2006 because of the affair and was indicted in December by the Milanese judges.
Political Context
The exposé of the incident, coming just before Italy's general election, was a major embarrassment for the Berlusconi administration. If it had admitted foreknowledge of or complicity in the operation, it would have been admitting that one part of the government (its intelligence services) deliberately undermined the efforts of another (its judiciary). If it had denied any involvement, it would point to a serious lapse in Italian security, as it would mean foreign intelligence agencies would be able to pull off major operations within Italy, right under the nose of Italy's own intelligence agencies, with virtual impunity.
Either way, most observers thought it clearSilvio Berlusconi did not wish the case to proceed. He initially told the press that he did not believe the CIA was responsible for the abduction, and even if they were responsible, it was a justifiable action. He was widely quoted in the press as having said, "You can't tackle terrorism with a law book in your hand.". He then declared to the ANSAagency: "This is a trial we absolutely should not have, and its result will be that our intelligence services will no longer have the cooperation of foreign intelligence".
The Abu Omar case poses the problem of Italy's involvement in the US "War on Terror". The incident also served to highlight tensions between Italy's fiercely independent judiciary and its executive administration (including the intelligence services), which would have preferred the judiciary didn't press the issue with the United States. During the Italian investigations into the incident, it was discovered that not only had SISMI (or a division of it) collaborated with the CIA in the abduction, it had also been illegally surveiling Italian citizens, particularly Italian magistrates unfriendly to theBerlusconi administration, often with the help of Italian journalists. Italian prosecutors believed reporters from right-wing paperLibero used interviews with the lead prosecutor in the abduction case, Armando Spataro, as a pretext to glean confidential information to pass on to SISMI agents. On July 6, 2006, Libero's offices were raided by Italian police.
SOURCES: Wikipedia
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