Italian intelligence services are assessed by John Kiriakou in unusually warm terms for a man who is generally sceptical of intelligence organisations. Asked about a set of long-standing Italian controversies and about the quality of the services themselves, he answered the second question first: “The Italian intelligence agencies are very, very good. And the CIA works very closely with them.”[1]
What he does not attribute to the CIA
The questions put to Kiriakou concerned the death of Enrico Mattei, the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, and Operation Gladio. His answers separate the three.
“Mattei was not a an American operation. Moro was absolutely not an American operation,” he says. On the contrary, in his account, “it was the Americans that worked with the with the Italians to try to find Aldo Moro’s kidnappers and and killers. And they did, of course. It was the It was the Red Brigades.” He adds that the Red Brigades broke up later in the 1980s.[2][1]
On Gladio his answer is short and affirmative — “Gladio in general, um, yeah, all of that happened” — which he does not extend to the other two cases.[1]
The exception
Kiriakou’s qualification to the close relationship is the phrase “except when they don’t”, and the case he attaches to it is the Abu Omar rendition from Milan in about 2002 or 2003. The Americans asked to seize the preacher; the Italians investigated, concluded he was a firebrand but not connected to al-Qaeda and had broken no law, and refused. “So, what the US did was we just grabbed him anyway.”[1][3][4]
After Egyptian interrogators reported that the man knew nothing and released him, the Italians reacted in a way Kiriakou plainly admires. “And so, what the Italians did, and this was really ballsy. I have real respect for them. They began investigating the CIA. And they were able to identify 21 undercover CIA officers, and not just undercover, but undercover and operating in alias.”[5][6]
The verdict
The identifications, in Kiriakou’s telling, were made possible less by Italian brilliance than by American carelessness — officers in alias telephoning their wives from hotel rooms and buying souvenirs on true-name credit cards. Two were arrested; the Milan base chief was expelled and took early retirement, and a dual-national officer served about six months in an Italian jail before resigning.[6][7]
Kiriakou’s summary keeps the compliment and the criticism in the same sentence: “So, you know, sometimes people just do stupid things. The Italians were really good, though.”[8]