A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial Read online

  Massimo spent his life guarding against exposure. He could tell a dozen stories about the attentive porter, the bored housewife, the curious waitress who had stumbled onto a spy by accident. If you remembered at every hour of every day to keep your guard around the banal observer, you would simultaneously protect yourself from the true hunters of spies. Vigilance, however, had its cost. For one thing, if you were truly vigilant, you would permit yourself no intimate relationships. He knew of moles who took lovers or wives, but to do so was to invite peril into your life. Long ago he had concluded that it was better to struggle with loneliness and ennui than to risk such danger. No one knew him, and he knew no one.

  The reward for this isolation was the billow of adrenaline that coursed through him when he stole something and gave it to the CIA. That stolen something might influence the lives of many people, or even—why should he not say so?—of a nation. With the adrenaline came a sensation of power that, however brief, made the game worth it. The phrase was one Massimo liked to repeat: vale il gioco, the game is worth it.

  In Milan there was plenty of game. The extremists of Islam—the mujahidin and would-be mujahidin—made their spiritual home in the city’s two large mosques, and they hoped, like Massimo, to attain a permissive invisibility. Some of the Islamists were soapbox insurgents, more hellfire than gunfire, but others were organizers for al-Qaeda and kindred groups. For them Milan was like a stop on a caravan route of old, both a haven and a hazard—a place to gather supplies, knowledge, and allies, but also a place where they might be found by enemies. Among their enemies were intelligence agents from their Middle Eastern homelands. The agents came to Milan, watched the Islamists, and sometimes accomplished other ends. The Syrians, for example, trafficked in cigarettes and stolen cars. The Iranians shopped for forbidden technology. The Libyans—well, it was hard to say about the Libyans: they might be behaving themselves, or they might be doing as the Iranians. The Israelis were in Milan too, and their willingness to assassinate and kidnap had long inspired the deepest fear in Islamic terrorists. Then there were spies from beyond the Middle East, like the Chinese “businessmen” who sought industrial secrets and counterfeitable formulas, or the Russians, French, or Koreans who came to town for any number of reasons. In Milan, the game was all around you, if only you knew where to look.

  The day after the call from the Spaniard, Massimo left for the meeting. It was his precautionary habit with such meetings to spend at least two hours beforehand a piedi. The likelihood that he would be followed was small, but it took patience to make sure, or at least it took patience not to be crude about it. You could, inelegantly, walk down a street, double back, and note the faces, hair, coats, hats—whatever struck you—of the people you passed. Shoes were especially good; a person might shed a coat or a wig, but it was hard to change shoes on the go. Later, you could double back again, and anything familiar about the people you saw would give away your pursuer. Or you could hop on or off a bus just before it departed and see who else did the same. It was the stuff of movies, but sometimes Hollywood did not lie. These methods were not, however, the best for spotting a tail. If you were hunted with more than the mildest determination, you would have more than one follower, and when you “burned” the first by doubling back, a second would take over, and perhaps a third, a fourth, and a fifth, if the pursuers valued you enough. You could not double back forever. And even if you had only one follower, you marked yourself as having something to hide, a fact that might have been unknown to your pursuers, who maybe had been only a little suspicious of you. What you wanted was to convince them of your unexceptionality. To convince them took methods less crude. Walking was good and in Milan was easy since the city was as flat as Nature allowed and the streets had grown organically, Europeanly. A man could stroll, say, from the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where Leonardo’s The Last Supper was sheltered, across town to the castle of the Sforzas, or in the other direction to the Navigli, the canal district, without laboring for breath and choosing from any number of smallish streets that would make spotting a follower easy.

  So Massimo walked. The afternoon was cold, but there was no rain and even a bit of sun, an aberration for hibernal Milan. He enjoyed the fading light for a time, then, having seen no one of note on the street, he turned into a bookstore. He browsed, pulled a book off the shelf, and became to all appearances absorbed in it, but the door was never beyond his peripheral vision, and he noted everyone who entered. He watched to see whether any eyes flitted over him or worked too studiously to avoid him, but none did. Everyone gave the bland, aging man the small due he deserved. He left, walked some more, and entered a clothier’s, where he examined a shirt. Then it was a grocery, then an electronics superstore, then a sexy shop, as Italians call their stores for erotic assistance. Massimo enjoyed sexy shops, professionally speaking. They made people, even spies, uncomfortable, and a discomfited spy was one who made mistakes. At one or two stores he bought a bauble or two, which added a degree of realism to his errands. Amateurs never bought anything; they were too agitated. Now and then he caught a tram or a bus and rode it a few stops.

  Long after day had turned to dark, he reached Piazzale Loreto, where Mussolini and his mistress had been hung from the canopy of a gas station after their encounter with Partisan bullets. Massimo descended into the Metro and boarded the red line. Five stops later he alighted and emerged at Piazza del Duomo, where Milan consents to be wantonly glorious. The Duomo is one of the largest houses of Christendom, yet its edifice is like a bride’s mantilla—unimaginably intricate but not burdensomely so, and productive of the feeling, even in Massimo, that it is good to be alive. He skirted the cathedral and across from its north transept passed through the glass doors of La Rinascente, a department store of the prospering middle class that could have been uprooted and dropped at Fifty-ninth and Lexington without the shoppers of Bloomingdale’s ever noticing the difference. He rode up successive escalators past perfumes and stockings and cravats and tureens to the seventh floor, where he got off, bypassed the aisles of haute foodstuffs, and entered the modernist café and solarium, which might better have been called a nimbarium at that time of year. He took a table an olive’s throw from the brilliantly lit rooftop of the Duomo and ordered a beer. The café was filled with its usual polyglot mix of tourists and shoppers whose conversations—German here, Japanese there—made it a good place for foreigners to meet without drawing attention. He tried to guess who among the patrons might be his contact. This was just for sport since his contact would recognize him. He sent a passport photo to the CIA every three years for this purpose.

  He checked his watch: 19:15, a quarter of an hour to go. Punctuality was an obligation in this fraternity, even in Italy, where time is a fluid rather than a solid. If your contact did not arrive within a few minutes of the agreed-upon time, you left. There was a fallback arrangement in such cases, usually a return meeting the next day at the same time. Massimo sipped his beer, scanned the crowd again, then turned and looked at the Duomo’s hundreds of lit spires and uncountable gargoyles and curlicues. He had seen them any number of times, but he still could not look at them without thinking of the thousands of men over five centuries who had strained to create them. When he turned back to the café, two men stood before him, smiling, apparently pleased at having caught him unawares. He cursed himself for his mental digression.

  The men offered their hands, and one introduced himself in Spanish as Bob. He was stout with a smile that seemed to rise from his rounded belly. As soon became clear, he was serious about his work, but he did not appear to be encumbered by its seriousness, and one might even have called him merry. He was, as Massimo had guessed, the chief of the local CIA office. Massimo would later decline to describe Bob’s companion, except to say that he apparently had no Spanish. In any case, Bob shifted the conversation to English, which the other man did understand, and explained that he needed help with a terrorist named Abu Omar. He did not linger over the details, nor would
Massimo later. A spy prefers to share only that which is to his benefit, no more, and much of what he shares will not be true. This presents a conundrum for those who would understand espionage: Trust spies not at all, and one learns nothing. Trust them too much, and one might as well have learned nothing. It is probable that Massimo, who told his story to Guido Olimpio of Corriere della Sera, Italy’s largest newspaper, aggrandized many and fabricated some of the details about his involvement with Bob. But he was verifiably honest about some of his work, and it is certain that something very like what he described occurred.

  The three spies concluded their business in the café and left. They had work to do.

  MASSIMO LEFT MILAN early the next morning for a city in whose police station he sometimes worked. When he arrived at the station, he gave his magnetized ID card to a guard, who scanned it and waved him inside. It was early, and the office was empty. He seated himself at a desk, turned on a computer, and glanced at the summary of news bulletins that greeted officers at the start of the day—nothing interesting this morning. Then he navigated through the computer network, entering passwords as needed, and came to the files he intended to steal. The office had safeguards to prevent the theft of data. For example, the computer on which he was working was offline so that documents could not be uploaded to the Internet, and to get printouts past the guards at the exit required signatures and stamps from superiors. But there were loopholes, and by exploiting one of these, Massimo was able to transfer the files to a computer with an Internet connection and upload them to an e-mail account. Then he shut down the computers and the rest of the day went about his regular duties, a model officer of the law. When he got back to Milan, he downloaded the files, whose subject was Abu Omar, and passed them to Bob.

  Bob had also asked Massimo to establish a few prepaid mobile phone accounts that would not be traceable to “our men.” For this task Massimo turned to a man at a phone company whom he had paid regularly over the years. The man arranged the accounts, and Massimo gave their subscription cards to Bob. As he got to know Bob a little, he learned that he led with pats rather than prods, that he made people feel as if they were one of his band, not merely under his dominion. Massimo began to trust Bob a little, which was pleasant although unnecessary. He would have played the game no matter who at the CIA called the plays.

  As Massimo told the story, Bob eventually sent him to apply his research in the field. The day was Friday, February 14—St. Valentine’s Day in the United States, though not in Italy, where the citizens do not need a holiday to declare their passion. Per Bob’s instructions, Massimo went to Piazzale Maciachini, a large crossroads a few blocks from, and even more graceless than, the smaller Dergano. Maciachini’s architecture was an homage to the line and box and the merciless efficiency of capital. Its establishments included a tattoo shop, a discount shoe store, and a gas station. Its denizens were mostly Arab and Asian, a reflection of the demography of the quarter, and the twangy strands of Middle Eastern music sprang gaily from a couple of storefronts. Massimo waited at a specified corner, and soon a small white station wagon drew alongside him. He nearly laughed when he saw the driver. Giorgio, as the man might be called, had worked with Massimo on another job some years earlier. He seemed pleased to see Massimo, and Massimo, knowing Giorgio was trustworthy, did not mind seeing him. It could be small, this world of spies.

  Massimo got in the car, and Giorgio drove a few minutes, then stopped near Via Giuseppe Guerzoni, a narrow street of only a few blocks whose namesake had fought with Garibaldi in the Resurgence before retreating to a professorship of literature, where the battles were as contested but usually less bloody. A hundred meters of Via Guerzoni were lined by high walls on both sides. Behind one wall lay the grounds of Parco Bassi; behind the opposite wall, a plant nursery. It was a good block on which to encounter someone without witnesses. It was not, however, perfect. There were a couple of breaks in the walls through which people came and went, and Via Guerzoni terminated into Viale Jenner, a major ring road from which cars and pedestrians turned onto Guerzoni with some frequency. Worse, inside Parco Bassi stood a police station, and although the station’s entrance lay on the opposite side of the park from Via Guerzoni, it was still disconcerting to think of the number of officers who sat a few meters away who could step out for a noon stroll and stumble onto the confrontation with Abu Omar in which Giorgio and Massimo were to take part.

  As they waited for Abu Omar to arrive, Giorgio told Massimo that others on the team were keeping watch along his route and would alert the rest of the team when he passed by. But though Giorgio and Massimo waited several hours, the spotters never gave the alert. Abu Omar, the man of habit, had not been habitual. Eventually Giorgio and Massimo left.

  The next day Massimo returned to Maciachini and was picked up by an affable American named Leon. They took a short drive around what Massimo liked to call “the operational area” and passed a couple of parked, occupied cars, which Massimo suspected were part of the operation. He would have liked to get a good look at their occupants, but he had no desire to be seen by anyone who didn’t need to see him, so he turned his head. Leon stopped the car near Guerzoni and told Massimo that the team had already had a couple of near misses with Abu Omar. One time the job had been blown by a gattara, one of the old women of Italy whose self-imposed duties included the care of stray cats. On that occasion, just as Abu Omar was approaching his snatchers, a gattara stepped out of her doorway up the block with food for a gattino. This amused Massimo: a terrorist saved by a kitten. Leon also told Massimo that some of the spotters on the team were women, which Massimo found curious, possibly because his views on the female sex could not be called enlightened or possibly because in the Italian secret services relatively few spies were women. Now and then Leon exchanged calls with the other sentries, but again Abu Omar did not show, and after several hours the day’s work was called off.

  Before they parted, Leon asked Massimo to come to a certain address later that night for a meeting, and Massimo agreed. He thought he was being invited to a small conference, but when he arrived, he found to his horror that he was at a dinner party. A large group of spies about whom he knew nothing had “marked” him on entry, and among them were women—women!—whose presence suggested frivolity even if they were part of the snatch team. His face reddened, and he might have cursed Leon and walked out had not Bob arrived at his shoulder, jovial and calming. Bob made a short speech to the group praising their work, then gave the floor to Leon, who talked about plans for the next few days, which included a break for everyone tomorrow, Sunday. When the speeches were done, Massimo did not linger.

  He would later claim he was back on the stakeout Monday, which might have been true, and that he participated in the climactic events of that day, which was not. Although he talked a good line about soldiering away without recognition, the truth was that invisibility gnawed at him. He wanted his quarter hour of fame, even if the fame had to be obscured by anonymity, and he lied to get it. He did so on the assumption that the facts could not be verified. The assumption was presumptuous. As it would turn out, it was shared by his co-workers.

  THE FOURTH TIME Bob sent Ludwig to Abu Omar’s neighborhood was Monday, February 17. This time, however, Bob said that rather than go to Piazza Dergano at ten o’clock, he should go to Piazzale Maciachini shortly before noon. Ludwig went as instructed. He was chaining his scooter to a post when a dark-colored Volkswagen, a Polo or Golf, he would later recall, stopped beside him. The driver was a man of about forty, short and stocky, even pudgy, with black hair. Lowering the passenger window, he said in Italian, “Ludwig, I’m Bob’s friend. Get in!”

  Ludwig stepped into the car, and they drove in silence through Dergano. At the intersection of Via Guerzoni and Via Bonomi, steps from a plaque that honored Partisans who died fighting Fascists in the Second World War, Stocky stopped the car. He told Ludwig, as Ludwig already knew, that Abu Omar would be walking toward them from Piazza Dergano, which lay to the
east. When he came to the intersection where they were waiting, he would turn south onto Via Guerzoni. Stocky would let Abu Omar get a head start, then would essentially follow him down Guerzoni. He would not precisely follow him, because the first block of Guerzoni was one-way the wrong direction. So Stocky would loop around to the two-way portion of Guerzoni, overtake Abu Omar, and stop halfway down the block. There between the high walls a white cargo van would be parked on the sidewalk. Ludwig would get out, stop Abu Omar, and keep him by the van. Stocky said all of this briefly and then said no more. He was a rationer of words and had reached his quota. His Italian was flawless, which led Ludwig to think that if he was a foreigner, he was a well-practiced one.

  Some minutes later, a call came on Stocky’s phone. He said little to the caller—“Yes,” “Alright”—and hung up.

  “The subject is approaching,” he said to Ludwig.

  Ludwig looked at the clock on his phone and saw that it was ten or fifteen minutes past noon. A minute later, Stocky started the car, and a minute or two after that, Abu Omar appeared, long of beard and galabia. He passed briskly through the intersection, and just then Ludwig’s phone rang. It was his personal phone, not the one Bob had given him, and the ringing, at that moment, was as jarring as if it had occurred in a movie theater. Stocky snapped at Ludwig not to answer it, which Ludwig did not have to be told, but the phone’s silencer button was temperamental, and he had trouble working it, so he popped open the back of the phone in a fluster and after some fumbling yanked the battery out.

  Stocky put the car in gear, circled around to Via Guerzoni, and drove past Abu Omar to the white van he had described. It was parked almost crosswise on the right-hand sidewalk, its nose nuzzled up to the wall. Ludwig stepped out of the car and was relieved to find the street deserted, save for the approaching Abu Omar. He hailed him, flashed his Carabinieri identification, and asked to see his papers.