Tony Hatfield's Retired Ramblings

MILAN - From today, thirteen CIA agents are wanted all over Europe. The operatives are accused of abducting Imam Abu Omar in Milan and taking him to Egypt, where he was tortured. The formal transmission of the arrest warrant to the Eurojust judicial coordination office means that it will automatically become effective in all EU member countries. At this stage, any European police officer could arrest, as well as identify, the thirteen CIA agents, who are now “on the run”. According to the American press, the CIA is believed to have taken steps by relocating the operatives to duties outside Europe. Investigations, which so far have involved the Milan consulate, have now been widened to include the US embassy. According to sources at DIGOS, the special operations branch of the Italian police, some of the abductors are thought to have used “cellphones that are part of the service equipment issued to US diplomatic staff in Rome”, even “during the abduction”. WANTED ALL OVER EUROPE - The public prosecutor’s office has asked police forensic scientists to enhance the photos of the thirteen CIA abductors to facilitate the Europe-wide search. The entire “photo album” will be forwarded to Eurojust and Europol, the coordinating body for police forces, to be circulated to airports and border posts in particular. The identification photographs of the wanted agents were seized by DIGOS officers at the twenty-three Italian hotels where they had stayed during their three-month preparation and the week-long abduction operation. The three women and ten men used their American passports to register at the hotels, many of which kept photocopies of the documents. Some of the photocopies are a little dark, hence the request to the forensic police to make all thirteen faces identifiable. EMBASSY CELLPHONES - CIA procedure does not necessarily involve advising the local US embassy of any covert operations. In the case of the Abu Omar abduction, the problem is that according to the warrant the abductors were coordinated by Robert Lady, who was working as CIA station chief under the cover of "consul of the United States in Milan”. In this already delicate situation, police discovered that the cellphone used by Harty Benamar, one of the agents who actually carried out the abduction, was reactivated one and a half years after the abduction, from 11 to 19 September 2004. The new user was an American citizen, S.L., who changed the number with a new SIM card but not the cellphone itself, which is identified by its IMEI code. Initial investigations ascertained that the new user was working for the American diplomatic service in Rome. Apart from this, the cellphone always hooked up to the same base station during office hours, the TIM antenna in Viale Molise 4. This is the nearest base station to the American embassy, which is only 100 metres away. This incautious reactivation convinced the police that the cellphone was part of a batch supplied to the embassy. Some of the abductors were believed to have returned the phones to the embassy after the operation. During the abduction, Bob Lady is known to have used a landline and cellphone belonging to the Milan consulate. In addition, “subscriber 16”, another of the abductors’ cellphones, used by one of the six agents not yet identified, received a number of calls from two public callboxes in Rome. They are located in Via Veneto 2 and Via del Tritone 56, both very close to the US embassy. It is suspected that the callboxes were used to avoid direct contact between “subscriber 16” and US diplomatic staff. AT THE PENTAGON - In the next few hours, a formal request to United States magistrates for judicial assistance will leave Milan. For the time being, the most important rogatory letters concern two telephones in Virginia, the CIA’s home state, which were contacted four times each by the operating unit chief just after the abduction. The calls may have been made to report that the mission had been accomplished. Magistrates have already drafted a request to question as a suspect the former commander of the 31st Fighter Wing, Colonel Joseph Romano, who received three calls from the same cellphone just before the hostage arrived at the US base in Aviano. Today, Romano is a high-ranking Pentagon officer and, according to investigating magistrates, one of the few people who know the true identity of Agent X, the operative in charge of the abductors. Paolo Biondani