Italy Revolts Against Rendition

Prospect: Did CIA Go Too Far By Snatching Terror Suspect From Italy?

(The American Prospect) 

For two years, Italy's counterterrorism police unit, Digos, has been simmering about the snatch job carried out under its nose. It had been closely surveilling Omar for months when Washington "disappeared" him, as part of Italy's own domestic counterterrorism efforts. The CIA's extraordinary rendition of Omar blew Digos' investigation and led it to demand the Milan prosecutor's investigation of the Omar rendition from Italy's sovereign territory.

This creates a problem for the Berlusconi government, which is already reeling from U.S. solders' killing of an Italian military-intelligence agent, Nicola Calipari, in Iraq last March (see Jason Vest's story "Checkpoints and Balances") and the wider unpopularity of Italian participation in the Iraq War. Berlusconi administration leaders are claiming that the CIA kept them in the dark about the Omar operation.

But former U.S. intelligence officials say the details of the operation, the history of U.S. intelligence operations in Italy and NATO countries, and the timing of the raid as the United States was trying to woo European support in advance of its invasion of Iraq all indicate that the snatch would have been reported to certain Italian authorities in advance.

"There's no way you do something like this unilaterally in a friendly country without coordinating," says a former U.S. intelligence official who asked not to be named. "It's always coordinated."

"The Italians were one of the few countries in Europe standing by us on Iraq," Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit, told the Prospect. "There is no way in the world that agency management would have authorized unilateral operation in Italy on the eve of the invasion of Iraq by ourselves." Scheuer indicated that he did not know about the Abu Omar operation in particular, but was speaking from his years of experience overseeing similar cases before his resignation last November.

"We don't do, for the most part, unilateral operations in NATO countries," Scheuer continued. "I wish we would but our management -- and the White House -- values and worries so much about European opinion that we were never allowed to take unilateral operations in Europe."

Importantly, Scheuer adds that the Bush administration halted a plan to kill an al-Qaeda figure operating in northern Iraq before the war -- Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, now believed to be a leader of the insurgency -- because of European opposition. "In the same time frame as this operation was supposed to occur, we had precise locational data for Zarqawi in northern Iraq nearly every day for a year before the invasion," Scheuer said. "They could have killed him, using missiles or aircrafts, had the [National Security Council] approved it. But at the time they were sweet-talking all the Europeans, especially the French and the Germans, into joining us in Iraq. They tried to kill Zarqawi as soon as the war started, but at that time, he was gone."