Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

In 1995, at the urging of the CIA, the Albanian National Intelligence Service recruited Omar as an informer. He readily agreed to cooperate. The Albanians did not pay him, but they did help smooth out a dispute he had with the landlady of the bakery he had opened, and they fixed his residence permit after his marriage. Abu Omar was the first Arab willing to betray his colleagues to the Albanians, and the information the Albanians supplied to the CIA, thanks to him, greatly elevated the CIAs respect for their service. However, after a few weeks for unknown reasons—perhaps his fellow Islamic exiles got wind of his cooperation with the police—he and his family fled the country. The CIA later informed the Albanians that he was living in Germany. In 1997, he surfaced in Rome where he was granted political refugee status. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Milan, the center of radical Islamist activities in Italy, and began preaching at a mosque that had a reputation as a gathering place for religious and political extremists. The Italian counterterrorism police placed a tap on his telephone, while hiding microphones in his apartment and at another mosque where he preached. Although the police believed they had enough evidence to arrest him for “associating with terrorists,” they held off because the information they were gathering via the wiretaps was proving valuable and they were sharing it with the CIA.¹¹⁴

On Monday, February 17, 2003, shortly after noon, Abu Omar was walking down the Via Guerzoni toward a mosque to attend daily prayers when he was stopped by an officer of Italy’s paramilitary carabinieri police force. According to the Milan prosecutor, Armando Spataro, the Italian carabiniere had been hired by the CIA to approach Abu Omar and conduct a routine documents check. The participation of the Italian police officer, code-named “Ludwig,” has raised suspicions that the Sismi, the Italian intelligence service, was cooperating with the Americans. Former prime minister Berlusconi’s office has repeatedly denied any role, but the Milanese prosecutors are doubtful and are continuing their investigation.¹¹⁵

According to a passerby’s account, two men speaking “bad” Italian then emerged from a parked white van, sprayed a chemical in Abu Omar’s face, and hustled him into the van, which drove away at high speed followed by at least one and possibly two other cars. Between 2 and 5 p.m., the van drove northeast to the NATO air base at Aviano where it was met by a U.S. Air Force officer, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Romano, who escorted it to the flight line. Abu Omar was put aboard a civilian Learjet and flown to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. There, he was transferred to a civilian Gulfstream, which departed at 8:30 that night for Cairo. When Omar’s plane arrived in Cairo early on the morning of February 18, Egyptian authorities took him into custody. Accompanying Omar to Egypt in the Gulfstream was CIA Milan station chief Robert Lady.¹¹⁶

Although Italian political leaders have steadfastly maintained that they did not collaborate in any way with this kidnapping, it is obvious that police authorities knew a great deal about it. The nineteen-person CIA abduction team of commandos, drivers, and lookouts left an astonishing trail of evidence that suggests they were utterly indifferent to the possibility that they were being observed. The first operative arrived in Milan on December 7, 2002, and stayed at the Milan Westin Palace, according to court documents. The others started arriving in early January and by February 1, 2003, virtually all of them were there. They did not hide in safe houses or private homes but checked into four-star palaces like the Milan Hilton ($340 a night) and the Star Hotel ($325 a night). Seven of the Americans stayed at the Principe di Savoia—billed as “one of the world’s most luxuriously appointed hotels”—for between three days and three weeks at nightly rates of $450. Eating lavishly at gourmet restaurants, they ran up bills of at least $144,984, which they paid for with Diners Club cards that matched their fake passports. At each hotel, the staff photocopied their passports, which is how the police obtained their photos if not their real names.¹¹⁷ After the delivery of Abu Omar to Aviano, four of the Americans checked into luxury hotels in Venice and others took vacations along the picturesque Mediterranean coast north of Tuscany, all still on the government tab.

Most embarrassingly, the U.S. embassy in Rome had supplied the CIA agents with a large number of Italian cell phones, on which they communicated with each other while planning the abduction, during the actual operation, and en route to Aviano. All their transmissions were recorded by the Italian police. No one can explain this lapse in tradecraft. Unless its power is completely off and its antenna retracted, a European mobile phone remains in constant contact with the nearest cell-base station even when not in use. Since a phone is served by several base stations at any given time, investigators can easily triangulate its location. In cities like Milan, where the network of base stations is dense and overlapping, such tracking can be done with a margin of error of just a few yards.¹¹⁸ Thus, the Italian police were able to follow everything that the nineteen agents did both prior to and on the actual day of the rendition.

After Abu Omar’s disappearance, the Italian police opened a missing person s investigation but did not pursue it very vigorously. That changed radically in April and May 2004, when Omar unexpectedly telephoned his wife from Cairo and explained that he had been kidnapped and taken to U.S. air bases in Italy and Germany, flown to Cairo, and tortured by the Egyptian police. The Italian authorities recorded these calls, having kept the wiretap on Omar’s apartment in place. He informed his wife that he had been let out of prison but remained under house arrest. There is speculation that, as a result of reports on these conversations in Italian newspapers, the Egyptian police rearrested him. In any case, as far as is known, he remains in Egyptian custody, not charged with any crime but allowed occasional visits by his mother.

There is still no explanation for the CIA’s sloppy work in Milan— except that some of its operatives seemed to have wanted a nice holiday at the taxpayers’ expense and believed they could operate with complete impunity in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy. The Milan case goes into the record books as one more foolish and counterproductive felony committed by the CIA on the orders of the president. Ironically, the Milan CIA station chief had bought a house in Asti, near Turin, and planned to retire there. As the police bore down on him, he and his wife hurriedly fled their home, and a comfortable old age in Italy ceased to be an option for them.

Unfortunately, carrying out extraordinary renditions such as the ones in Sweden and Italy, torturing captives in secret prisons, shipping weapons to Islamic jihadists without checking their backgrounds or motives, and undermining democratically elected governments that are not fully on our political wavelength are the daily work of the Central Intelligence Agency. That was not always the case nor was it the intent of its founders or the expectations of its officials during its earliest years. As conceived in the National Security Act of 1947, the CIAs main function was to compile and analyze raw intelligence to make it useful to the president. Its job was to help him see the big picture, put the latest crisis in historical and economic perspective, give early warning on the likely crises of the future, and evaluate whether political instability in one country or another was of any importance or interest to the United States. It was a civilian, nonpartisan organization, without vested interests such as those of the military-industrial complex, and staffed by seasoned, occasionally wise analysts with broad comparative knowledge of the world and our place in it. As the New York Times’s Tim Weiner notes, “Once upon a time in the Cold War, the CIA could produce strategic intelligence. It countered the Pentagon’s wildly overstated estimates of Soviet military power. It cautioned that the war in Vietnam could not be won by military force. It helped keep the Cold War cold.”¹¹⁹

One of the CIA’s best-known historians, Thomas Powers, laments, “The resignation of Porter Goss after 18 months of trying to run the Central Intelligence Agency and the nomination [subsequently confirmed] of General Michael Hayden to take his place make unmistakable something that actually occurred a year ago: the CIA, as it existed for 50 years, is gone.”¹²⁰ I think it was actually gone long before. My own view is that President Bush’s manipulation of intelligence to deceive the country into going to war and then blaming his failure on the CIA’s “false intelligence” delivered only the final coup de grace to the CIA’s strategic-intelligence function. Henceforth, the CIA will no longer have even a vestigial role in trying to discern the forces influencing our foreign policies. That work will now be done, if it is done at all, by the new director of national intelligence. The downgraded CIA will attend to such things as assassinations, dirty tricks, renditions, and engineering foreign coups. In the intelligence field it will be restricted to informing our presidents and generals about current affairs—the “Wikipedia of Washington,” as John McLaughlin, deputy director and acting director of central intelligence from October 2000 to September 2004, calls it.¹²¹