Former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi was allegedly captured on cell phone video meeting secretly with a senior member of the Italian secret services on December 23, 2020. That person has been identified as Marco Mancini, a high-ranking official at the Security Intelligence Department (DIS), the body responsible for coordinating Italian AISE and AISI, the Italian domestic and foreign intelligence agencies respectively.
The two men have history together.
In 2003 a Muslim cleric was abducted from Milan, Italy, and flown to Egypt where he was allegedly tortured by the Egyptian government. The cleric, known as Abu Omar, would be released by the Egyptian government over a year later with an Egyptian judge citing lack of prosecutable evidence.
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.
The botched anti-terror operation would become known as the Milan Rendition. In Italy it is known as caso Abu Omar.
Although approved at the highest levels of the George W. Bush and Silvio Berlusconi governments at the time, 26 rank and file CIA officers would be charged in the case. One officer, Sabrina de Sousa, would be the only officer to serve time for charges stemming from the case.
De Sousa, it is worth noting, had no role in the planning or execution of the rendition, something Abu Omar has himself publicly declared.
Mancini, at the time the number two official at AISE (formerly SISMI, the Italian military intelligence agency), was charged in connection with the case and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Mancini’s sentence would be reversed in 2014 by Italy’s highest court. The reason for the reversal was a state secrets privilege.
In 2016, with the SpyGate scandal in full swing, the Abu Omar case resurfaced. Renzi, then prime minister, would place a state secret designation on the results of an AISE investigation into caso Abu Omar. The document detailing the results of the investigation – previously unclassified – would have revealed a “political cover-up.” It identified senior Italian government officials who authorized and facilitated the rendition and were never held accountable.
It also would have exonerated Mancini. Reports in Italian media would speculate Renzi dismissed Mancini’s lawsuit over the document and awarded him with a high-ranking position in Italian DIS. They would also speculate that Renzi would meet with Mancini frequently afterward.
De Sousa is also interested in obtaining the document, she told ITN.
In December 2018, she wrote to PM Giuseppe Conte requesting this and other information relevant to her case currently before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Conte, not surprisingly, did not respond. But de Sousa’s letter is now a matter of record. Italy, per its obligation to the ECHR in response to Nasr/Ghali vs Italy (as the Abu Omar case is known), committed to not imposing state secrets on future cases involving the Milan rendition.
De Sousa notes that ironically it was Mancini in his position as a senior DIS officer who signed a response to her Italian FOIA requests debunking one of the charges against her for submission to the ECHR.
The decision to keep the state secret designation on the document would be upheld by successive Italian Prime Ministers after Renzi. Unlike U.S. presidents Italian Prime Ministers have absolute power over their government’s state secret portfolio classifying and declassifying information at their discretion.
That Renzi would be meeting secretly with a high-ranking member of the DIS three weeks after allegations of the ItalyGate scandal broke and several weeks before pulling his support from Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte raises questions. Renzi had been challenging Conte’s hold on the secret services portfolio for some time.
Renzi says he has had several such meetings with intelligence officials. The setting of this particular meeting with Mancini – an Autogrill highway rest stop – especially raises questions.
“Marco Mancini is one of the leaders of the secret services with whom I had confidential meetings. I think I also saw it at the Autogrill, so let alone. If you refer to the fact that I met him in December at the Autogrill, absolutely yes, I met him here,” Renzi is quoted as saying. “I met many other managers.”
Renzi says the reason for the meeting with Mancini was to receive a chocolate Santa.
While the timing of the meeting raises questions the timing of its revelation also does so as well, considering Renzi has been meeting with secret services officials since 2016. COPASIR, the parliamentary body charged with oversight of the Italian secret services – and a body that has also previously requested the document labeled as a state secret – has opened an investigation into Renzi’s meeting with Mancini.