Italy Says It Didn’t Know of CIA Plan

In a case threatening to explode into a diplomatic row, the Italian government denied Thursday that it had authorized or even known about an operation in which CIA agents allegedly kidnapped a radical Egyptian cleric from Milan and flew him to Egypt for interrogation and torture.

Italy’s denial was at odds with assertions by former CIA officials that the agency had obtained the consent of the Italian intelligence service before dispatching a CIA paramilitary team to abduct the cleric.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Thursday summoned the U.S. ambassador to his palace for an explanation of U.S. actions in the 2-year-old incident.

The case gained attention last week when a judge in Milan issued arrest warrants for 13 American intelligence operatives on kidnapping charges. According to court documents, they were part of a 19-member team under the CIA lead officer in Milan that in February 2003 followed and then seized Hassan Osama Nasr, whom Italian investigators suspected of heading a terrorist network.

Italian prosecutors say the agents shoved Nasr, better known as Abu Omar, into a minivan and drove him four or five hours to the U.S.-Italian Aviano Air Base, where he was put aboard a jet and flown to Egypt, with a stopover at a U.S. base in Germany.

After Abu Omar was released in early 2004, he said he had been dumped into an Egyptian jail, where he was tortured and beaten during the interrogations. He has since disappeared again and is reportedly back in an Egyptian prison.

The action by the Milan judiciary marks the first time an ally of the United States has attempted to arrest and prosecute American spies in connection with what appears to have been an “extraordinary rendition,” the CIA practice of seizing suspected terrorists and transporting them to third countries without judicial permission.

The lead prosecutor in Milan, Armando Spataro, has said he plans to seek extradition of the Americans named in the warrants. Italian authorities also asked Interpol for help in arresting the 10 men and three women.

Italian law enforcement officials have said they were outraged by the abduction because it ruined the case they were building against Abu Omar. Five of his associates are now on trial in Milan on terrorism charges. Opposition politicians have contended that allowing the CIA to conduct an operation of questionable legality was a violation of national sovereignty.

Berlusconi had refused to comment on the case until now. On Thursday, however, Berlusconi sent a junior member of his Cabinet before Parliament to present the government’s views.

Appearing uncomfortable as he spoke, Carlo Giovanardi, the minister for parliamentary affairs, used often convoluted language to describe the incident.

It was “not even imaginable,” he said, that the kind of CIA commando operation described in Milan could have been authorized by Italian institutions.

“Our secret services were not aware of the operation,” Giovanardi said. “It was never brought to the attention of the government or national institutions.”

Speaking briefly in Milan later Thursday, Berlusconi confirmed Giovanardi’s comments but would not elaborate. He said he expected to meet with U.S. Ambassador Mel Sembler today.

The comments from Giovanardi and Berlusconi contradict accounts from former CIA officials involved in or familiar with the operation to abduct Abu Omar. According to the former officials, the CIA’s station chief in Rome had cleared the mission with his counterpart in the Italian intelligence service.

“The notion that it was some sort of rogue operation by the CIA is absurd,” said a former senior agency official who was briefed on the matter before leaving the CIA last year. He added that the Italian denials were “to be expected,” meaning that ground rules on such an operation call for each side to deny involvement if the operation is exposed. “Nobody’s going to publicly contradict them,” the former official said.

The CIA declined to comment on the matter Thursday. But ex-agency officials offered an expanded account of events leading up to the abduction.

A former high-ranking official said that the agency had been aware of Abu Omar for some time but that the cleric had not been a high priority for officials in its counter-terrorism center until they received warnings from the Italian intelligence service about possible plots against the U.S. Embassy.

“Back in 2001, they were talking with us about Abu Omar and how they wanted to do something with him but didn’t think they could at the time,” the former official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They were worried he represented a real threat to the U.S. Embassy in Rome.”

Italian authorities’ claims that they were moving toward a possible arrest of Abu Omar when he was snatched by CIA operatives are “not true,” the former official said. “The Italians were interested in this guy, but they couldn’t do anything about it, because he hadn’t violated any laws that rose to the level of arresting him.”

The case poses an embarrassing dilemma for Berlusconi. If he acknowledged authorizing the abduction, he would be admitting to having undermined his own security agencies working to prosecute Abu Omar. He also would be acknowledging complicity in a practice that many human rights organizations contend is illegal.

Saying that neither he nor his government was aware of the operation raises a different set of questions. By the prosecutors’ account, the CIA operatives made little effort to hide their trail. Mounting such an operation under the noses of Italian police without being detected suggests a serious lapse by Italian security.

The operatives chatted openly and voluminously on 17 cellphones before and during the operation, calling ahead to the air base and to their U.S. homes and offices, according to court documents filed in connection with the warrants. They presented passports, driver’s licenses and credit cards at some of Milan’s best hotels, where they ran up huge tabs, as well as at rental car companies and restaurants.

All have since left the country. The head of the CIA’s office in Milan, who was well known in the city under his cover as a consular officer, retired from the U.S. government but continued to live in a villa near Turin, which Italian police raided last week. He was out of the country at the time, although his wife was present.

Former CIA officials expressed dismay at the seemingly careless behavior attributed to the operatives, but they also argued that it supported their contention that the agency was operating with the consent of Italian authorities. The operation was allegedly carried out by members of the CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Division.

When he disappeared, Abu Omar was under investigation by Italian law enforcement officials who suspected him of organizing a network of Islamic fighters being dispatched to Iraq. Through wiretaps of Abu Omar’s office, his mosque and other locations, Italian authorities documented his meetings with a string of North Africans, Syrians and others, who allegedly discussed suicide bombings and other terrorist acts.

Abu Omar was in Italy with the status of political refugee, which made his abduction all the more problematic, said Judge Chiara Nobili, who ordered the arrests of the CIA operatives.

After his Egyptian jailers released Abu Omar last year, he described his abduction and torture in telephone calls to his wife and an associate in Milan. His phone was being tapped, providing Italian agents with their first complete account of what had happened to the imam.

The Egyptians put Abu Omar back in prison after the phone calls, and his whereabouts had been unclear for many months. An associate in Milan said this week that Abu Omar remained in prison in Cairo. The associate, Abdelhamid Shaari, president of the Islamic Cultural Center in Milan, said in an interview that Abu Omar’s relatives were able to see him periodically and that he bore scars from his torture.

The Italian government’s presentation to Parliament on Thursday did little to quell protest over the case, especially from leftist political parties. Several politicians said they were incensed that Berlusconi had not sent a more senior representative to speak on the government’s behalf, namely a defense or interior minister responsible for security operations.

“The extremely low profile that the government is taking on this is a sign of the extremely low level of national dignity that distinguishes” the case, said Sen. Antonello Falomi. “A government worthy of the name should be raising its voice loud and clear against such a barbaric practice.”

Pierluigi Castagnetti, a legislator who heads the opposition Margherita party, said he was aghast at the Giovanardi report.

“The government has admitted not being informed,” he said. “In any democracy, a government that doesn’t defend its own country’s sovereignty is out of a job. Only not in Italy.”

This is the second time in four months that Berlusconi has summoned Sembler. In March, the ambassador had to explain U.S. troops’ slaying in Baghdad of an Italian intelligence agent who was escorting an Italian journalist to safety after she was freed by kidnappers.

The agent was hailed as a hero at home, and Italy and the U.S. failed to come to terms in a joint investigation into the circumstances of the shooting, putting a strain on their otherwise close diplomatic relations.

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Wilkinson reported from Rome and Miller from Washington.