Evidence has emerged that suggests both the Obama and Trump White Houses, as well as members of Congress were kept in the dark regarding mistakes made by CIA leadership in authorizing the Milan Rendition operation.
The evidence also suggests it was done to avoid accountability while scapegoating rank and file officers, as well as retaliate against officers who spoke out about those mistakes. Most of the revelations revolve around actions taken by former CIA director John Brennan.
In 2003 a Muslim cleric known as Abu Omar was abducted from Milan, Italy, and flown to Egypt where he was allegedly tortured by Egyptian government officials. The case would become known as the Milan Rendition. Despite being characterized as a joint US/Italy counter-terror operation approved by both the George W. Bush and Silvio Berlusconi governments, rank and file officers would be convicted for the op.
The following account is based on court documents, press reports and exclusive interviews with former CIA officer Sabrina de Sousa, who was based in Italy at the time of Abu Omar’s abduction and convicted in absentia for the operation. Her case is currently before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
In 2004 Abu Omar would be released after a year of imprisonment. An Egyptian judge cited lack of prosecutable evidence. Abu Omar would subsequently file – and win – a case against Italy at the ECHR.
The rendition had very little support both within the CIA and Italian intelligence services. Abu Omar never met the threshold of posing a clear and present danger and was already under physical and technical surveillance by the Italian police. It’s also unclear why he was rendered to Egypt when he could have just as easily been jointly interrogated and debriefed in Italy.
An Italian police officer, Luciano Pironi, would eventually offer to provide evidence to prosecutors in Milan against CIA officers as part of a plea deal. Pironi says he was the person who stopped Abu Omar on the street to positively identify him before the CIA snatch team proceeded with the abduction. Pironi says he was told by then-CIA chief in Milan (per Italian court documents Robert Seldon Lady) that the goal was to recruit Abu Omar, not render him, and that the operation was jointly approved by both the U.S. and Italian governments.
For his participation, Pironi was invited to CIA headquarters in the U.S. where he met with high-ranking CIA officials in the fall of 2003. According to Italian court documents Pironi provided Italian prosecutors with details of the operation and the identities of the CIA officers involved.
The Abu Omar trial against the CIA officers began in January 2007. Shortly after, plans to charge CIA leadership were scuttled when, in an unprecedented move, an Italian judge ordered an evidence “swap.” That evidence consisted of “non-redacted documents” and contained details about the rendition case, including presumably, the names of high-ranking U.S. and Italian officials who facilitated and approved the operation. The documents they were replaced with were redacted documents transmitted by Italian Intelligence.
As a result of that swap of evidence the prosecutor could not then charge CIA leadership identified by Pironi. Twenty-six rank and file officers – including de Sousa – would be charged instead.
“I object to the use of the term torture”
Jose Rodriguez who was the director of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center in 2003 would have been among the CIA managers who would have had to approve the operation. When the Italian investigation began in 2005 Rodriguez was the chief of National Clandestine Services at the CIA. (Of note, is that throughout the time Rodriguez led the Agency’s CTC and NCS, future CIA Director Gina Haspel would be his chief of staff.)
Rodriguez was an unabashed defender of clandestine services at the CIA. The New York Times reported in 2008 that when challenged on the crossing-of-lines by some clandestine officers by another CIA leader at an Agency retreat, Rodriguez stood in the middle of a room and shouted, in foul language, that the person should “wake up and smell the coffee,” because clandestine officers were now the “pointy end of the spear.”
He was also an unabashed defender of the Agency’s torture program. “I object to the use of the term torture,” he would tell the New Yorker years later. Indeed he wrote an entire book justifying the actions taken in the early years of the war on terror.
In November 2005 it was Rodriguez who made the decision to destroy video-taped evidence of suspects undergoing enhanced interrogation techniques, despite being told not to. “Nobody wanted to make a decision that needed to be made,” Rodriguez would say about the decision.
It’s unclear why if Rodriguez felt the enhanced interrogation techniques made us safer and were unquestionably legal, he felt the need to disobey directives and destroy all evidence of the interrogations. It’s equally unclear why if he felt so strongly about clandestine officers under his leadership being the “tip of the spear” of the U.S. national security apparatus, he made little effort to see to it that all rank and file officers – perhaps especially de Sousa, who would be the only CIA officer to see the inside of a prison cell over the issue – be prevented from being wrongfully accused, and tried, for “planning” the operation.
De Sousa would approach the CIA Inspector General to file a complaint. The IG denied her request saying it was not “part of their charter and mission.” The IG’s stance was likely the result of Rodriguez preventing him from investigating the rendition, despite an order an investigation take place from then CIA Director Porter Goss. (De Sousa, it’s important to note, was more than 100 miles away chaperoning her son’s school ski trip at the time Abu Omar was abducted from Milan and Abu Omar himself would publicly absolve de Sousa of any involvement in his rendition.)
Two trips to the CIA IG office…turned down.
Because Jose Rodriguez would not allow Helgerson (CIA IG) to investigate #milanrendition.
Word trickled down. Shame. https://t.co/hs2O2oZqh1
— Sabrina De Sousa (@Sadiso) September 30, 2019
Request for comment from Rodriguez, made through his team at his speaker’s bureau, has so far gone unanswered.
“Minions”
It was highly unlikely the CIA leadership that sanctioned the operation was going to put itself in legal jeopardy. Arrest warrants issued for any senior officers would also hamper travel to Europe. (It was foreseeable at that point that arrest warrants would be issued.)
“It’s always the minions of the federal government who are thrown under the bus by officials who consistently violate international law and sometimes domestic law and who are all immune from prosecution,” De Sousa would say in 2015. “Their lives are fine. They’re making millions of dollars sitting on (corporate) boards.”
What becomes clear though is that the CIA’s leadership who authorized the botched rendition, swiftly assigned blame for the fallout to the snatch team, who was told the Italian government had approved the operation.
The team was identified by the Italian prosecutor in the case by the trail they left behind of lodging at 5-star hotels and using traceable credit cards. “Sloppy tradecraft” became the figurative rug the operation would be swept under. Congress was told to never investigate and has to date refused to do so. It’s likely loathe to adversely affect such an important bi-lateral relationship between the U.S. and a major NATO ally like the one that exists with Italy.
During her detention in Portugal, de Sousa asked her U.S. lawyer to contact the Obama White House about obtaining a pardon. The White House directed her attorney to the CIA. It became clear at that point that the Obama White House was unaware de Sousa had been excluded (the only American to have been) from being pardoned in Italy.
That was a decision made by former CIA Director John Brennan in 2014, which seems to confirm his acting unilaterally without the knowledge of the Obama (and subsequently the Trump) White House in getting de Sousa imprisoned. Brennan asked Obama to broach the subject of pardons with the Italian president at the time Sergio Mattarella. He never mentioned to Obama that one officer, de Sousa, had been excluded from the list.
De Sousa said the reason for her exclusion was noted in an email from the Italian Ministry of Justice. That email confirmed “the main difficulty with the De Sousa case was related to the little support that the former US administration, [Obama] and the CIA itself gave her in the past. This didn’t allow her to be included in the former clemency request to the President of the Republic.”
Ties to SpyGate
The Trump administration took a much more aggressive tack with de Sousa’s case – at first. President Trump secured her release from prison in Portugal and shortly after the Trump White House began working toward a full resolution of the case.
Abruptly though and within weeks all efforts at securing that resolution stopped. It appeared CIA leadership, at that point under CIA Director Pompeo and Deputy Director Haspel, needed de Sousa to serve her sentence away from Washington. Former Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), a de Sousa advocate, says her criticism of the rendition may have cost her valuable friends in Washington putting an end to any help from the Trump administration.
De Sousa however, believes there was a quid pro quo: she serving her sentence in Italy in exchange for charges dropped against Jeffrey Castelli, the CIA station chief in Rome at the time of Abu Omar’s abduction. Castelli was privy to all the details of the operation including who in Italy ordered and facilitated it.
Her detention in Italy likely never came to the further attention of the Trump White House because upon her arrival in to begin serving her sentence in Italy an Italian court issued a gag order preventing her from discussing her case publicly. Notable is the gag order was a violation of EU law. De Sousa thus became an exception to the Trump admin’s policy of bringing all Americans detained abroad home.
By this time as well (early 2017), the SpyGate operation was well underway and de Sousa and her case were drawing dangerous attention to Italy and the anti-Trump operation underway there.
This not surprising. Our government should be ashamed of themselves. But, we all know they have no shame.