Robert Seldon Lady: The Antiterror Spy Left Out in the Cold ….VERY INTERESTING STORY
Caught up in a terrorist rendition debacle, Robert Lady is wanted in Italy, lost his house and marriage, and says he has been abandoned by the CIA.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324576304579071530823140604.html
When the anniversary of 9/11 came around this year, Robert Seldon Lady was moving between low-end hotels around Miami. An international arrest warrant keeps him from returning to his home in Panama. He says he’s flirting with personal bankruptcy, fears for his life, and is “getting pretty desperate.” His marriage is broken. He blames this hard luck on his former employer, the Central Intelligence Agency.
A decade ago, Mr. Lady served on the front lines of America’s antiterror efforts after 9/11, heading up the agency’s base in Milan. In the 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush credited him and his colleagues, albeit not by name, for dismantling several al Qaeda cells in that Italian city. “We’ve got the terrorists on the run,” Mr. Bush said. “We’re keeping them on the run.” Mr. Lady’s Italian stint capped a near quarter-century covert CIA career in Latin America, Asia and Europe.
Three weeks later and a year before his planned retirement, Mr. Lady helped CIA contractors and agents snatch an Egyptian Islamist off the streets of Milan and deliver him to an interrogation cell in Cairo. This so-called extraordinary rendition—one of 130 or so carried out by the Bush administration—set in train events that soured America’s relations with Italy and upended the life and career of Mr. Lady and other CIA agents.
Saying “I’m fed up with all this,” Mr. Lady has some extraordinary steps in mind to change his fate. His actions and outspokenness are going to add to the discomfiture of his former bosses at Langley over this messy episode from the early days after 9/11.
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imageZina Saunders.
On Feb. 17, 2003, Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, a heavyset and bearded man in his early 40s, went missing en route to midday prayers at his mosque in Milan. The CIA and Italian police considered the man, better known as Abu Omar, to be a recruiter for al Qaeda. His family and the Italian police had no inkling where he’d gone.
Fourteen months later, Abu Omar emerged from jail, called his wife from Egypt and described his abduction and mistreatment in captivity. Italian authorities listened via a telephone tap on his home phone in Milan and started to look into a kidnapping.
Their investigation led to the CIA and its man in Milan. The political mood in Italy, initially sympathetic to the U.S. in the wake of 9/11, turned to outrage when the alleged breach of sovereignty was revealed in 2005. An aggressive magistrate named Armando Spataro got indictments for 26 Americans and five Italians, the first known time that employees of the CIA had ever been prosecuted by a friendly government for doing their jobs.
A judge brought separate terrorism charges against Abu Omar, but only the CIA case went to trial. The Americans were convicted in absentia. The debacle came to be known inside the agency as the “Italian job.”
Mr. Lady, who had planned to retire and become a security consultant from a farm house he bought with his life savings in Italy’s Piedmont region, received the stiffest sentence—eight years in prison, increased to nine on appeal. Before the case went to trial, Magistrate Spataro sued to seize the house and use the proceeds to pay damages to Abu Omar. Mr. Lady fled Italy in 2005 and lost the property. His 30-year marriage, he says, was another casualty.
Of all the convicted agents, Mr. Lady is the only one who still faces prison time, which was reduced by the justice ministry to six years in 2012. He’s also the only one whom the Italians are actively trying to catch. He was told by the U.S. government that an arrest warrant was issued by Italy last year, though he has not seen it. Two months ago Panama detained him for 24 hours as he was crossing into Costa Rica, but ignored calls from Italy’s justice minister to hold him longer. The U.S. told him to leave his home and business in Panama at his own expense, he says, and lie low in the U.S. for a couple of years. Mr. Lady, who is 59, says he needs to travel internationally to make a living.
Over dinner in Coral Gables with me and his lawyer, Tom Spencer, Mr. Lady calls himself “a piñata.” After retiring from the CIA in 2004, he says he was on his own and an easy target: abandoned by the U.S. and scapegoated by the Italians. The intelligence agency “rallied around the [CIA] leadership to protect them,” he adds. His cover in Milan was deputy consul working for the State Department, but the U.S. government didn’t fight the Italians to honor his diplomatic immunity. The U.S. did assert diplomatic immunity for Jeffrey Castelli, the CIA’s station chief in Italy and his boss, but it was eventually revoked by an Italian judge. Mr. Castelli was convicted on kidnapping charges in February and sentenced to seven years in prison, pending an appeal.
Washington has never admitted the agency was behind the rendition. “I’m a victim of American waffling,” Mr. Lady says. “Italy is a very close ally” and the U.S. government “should have come up with a solution.” He says he received some compensation from the government but will only say it wasn’t enough to cover his losses. The agency isn’t paying his legal or any other costs now, he says.
The politics of antiterrorism has changed in the U.S., and rendition is out of official favor even if it is still practiced. Mr. Lady says he has called phone numbers at CIA headquarters that he was once given, but with no luck: “I know they have instructions, ‘Don’t answer him.’ It feels bad that I gave them 24 years of my life, and I get treated like that. . . . As far as they’re concerned, if I put a gun to my head and blew my head off, they’d be happy. The problem would be over. They would bring out the champagne.”
Telling his story, Mr. Lady layers his bitterness, which inevitably sounds self-serving at times, with an easy Latin manner. (He was born to an American father and Honduran mother and raised in Honduras.)
While his travails have gotten a little attention in the U.S., Mr. Lady is a poster child for Bush-era antiterror policy in Italy. He’s taking his appeals now to the Italian government. On Sept. 11 this year, he sent a letter to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano to ask for “personal forgiveness and legal pardon.”
Mr. Lady says he saved Italian and American lives by foiling multiple terror attacks. “I can assure you that at all times, I was informed that my activities were in accordance with United States, Italian and International law and vetted by very high officials,” he wrote in the pardon appeal. Those officials who ordered and approved the Abu Omar rendition were never charged with a crime, he pointed out.
Mr. Lady says he won’t wait forever for Italy to answer. He’s ready to take responsibility—as he says his bosses never have—and turn himself in “on my own terms,” serve his prison sentence, and get his life back. He may be calling a bluff. Italy has never asked the U.S. to extradite the convicted agents. “If Italy believes they have the political will to arrest a former CIA officer and keep him in jail for six years, my hat goes off to them,” he says.
As the rendition drama has played out, Mr. Lady has been depicted—in the Italian courts, the media and in a 2010 book by Steve Hendricks, “A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial”—as either the central actor or a marginal CIA dissident. He puts forward the latter characterization, insisting that he fought the decision to abduct Abu Omar.
Sabrina de Sousa, a CIA operative in Rome and Milan who was also convicted in absentia by the Italians, told MSNBC this summer: “Bob absolutely did not want to have this rendition take place.” Ms. de Sousa still sued Mr. Lady and their boss in Rome, Jeff Castelli, for ruining her career. The case was dismissed.
Mr. Lady says he opposed the Abu Omar snatch, but not rendition itself: “I think rendition is the second oldest profession, it has been happening forever.”
He helped organize the capture of drug kingpin Ramón Matta-Ballesteros from Honduras and transfer to the U.S. in 1988, he says. In 1998, Rome asked the U.S. to help extract an Italian mafia boss from his Latin American exile, says Mr. Lady. “He was in a country where he could pay judges and everybody,” he says, declining to name the country or the don. “We lured this guy to Panama, grabbed him and turned him over to the Italians. No extradition, nothing.” The abducted man was convicted in Italy, Mr. Lady says.
More recently, Italy worked with the CIA to grab an al Qaeda member—a “high-level guy”—and put him into an Egyptian prison “forever,” he says, but “I can’t tell you the details.”
Thinking of his current predicament, Mr. Lady says he’s struck by “the hypocrisy of this whole thing.” Bill Clinton approved extraordinary rendition and so has every president since. “In every case, in every rendition I have ever been involved in, the local government was a partner,” Mr. Lady says, and Abu Omar was no exception.
Who in Italy knew what about the Omar rendition remains unclear and controversial. The government of Silvio Berlusconi, then in power, denied direct knowledge. The brass at the CIA’s Italian counterpart, the SISMI, was aware of the operation. An Italian policeman, who testified that he was tapped by Mr. Lady to take part, stopped Abu Omar on the street to check his documents seconds before American agents threw the cleric into a white van. Mr. Lady denies he recruited the policeman for the rendition, saying “I’m convinced that he was forced to say that so he could get immunity.”
He has no doubts the Italian government was on board. “Everything we did in Italy was joint. Everything,” he says. “Italy is one of our closest allies. Our only interest in Italy was working on common targets.”
Mr. Lady, who arrived in Milan in 2000, developed close personal relationships with Italian counterterrorism police. He says he brought Abu Omar to the Italians’ attention a month before 9/11, identifying him as rising militant.
After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, field operatives were under pressure to take “hard measures,” as in the title of the memoir by former CIA clandestine service chief José Rodriguez, to produce “legitimate, actionable intelligence against terrorists,” says Mr. Lady. “They were desperate times. We were working endless hours.” He says his superior, Mr. Castelli, wanted to pull off a notable rendition just to help his own career. He calls Mr. Castelli “human exhaust” and suggests the feeling was mutual. “Castelli hated me so much,” Mr. Lady says, “that he wouldn’t let me near an operation like that.” (Mr. Castelli, who has since left the CIA, didn’t respond to requests for comment submitted through his office.)
The CIA station chief in Rome insisted on grabbing Abu Omar over objections from Mr. Lady and skepticism in Washington, according to Mr. Lady and Ms. de Sousa. Mr. Lady says Abu Omar was “a bad guy” but “not a major al Qaeda figure.” His capture, the CIA agent worried, would irritate the Italian police, who had put in time and resources to monitor him.
Once Washington approved the rendition, Mr. Lady says he was told “either do it or get out of Dodge.” Why not resign? “I was,” he says with a long pause, “one year away from retirement. Would you throw away 23 years of your career and resign without a pension?”
As Italian investigators showed with excruciating detail, the “Italian job” was sloppy tradecraft. The several dozen agents brought in for the rendition—many more, says Mr. Lady, than the 20 identified by the Italians—used cellular phones and paid hotel bills with credit cards that were easily traced back to them.
Italian police raided Mr. Lady’s house in 2005. They found a picture of Abu Omar on his computer and a flight reservation to Cairo from Zurich a few days after the Islamist’s rendition. He says he took part in some of the interrogation sessions in Egypt, but never saw Abu Omar tortured. Mr. Lady says the photo came from the Italian police and wasn’t classified, as press accounts suggested. Still, he made a cardinal mistake of bringing a spy’s work home.
“We are not an organization equipped to do an operation that they tried to do,” he says. “I think Ringling Brothers would do a better job.” He was depicted as “the circus master,” he says, “but I wasn’t.” Local CIA field operatives help but are kept at a distance from such operations to preserve “deniability,” he says, adding that he didn’t meet the agents who planned and executed the rendition.
The Abu Omar case poisoned relations with the Italians and embarrassed the CIA. The fallout has also hurt antiterror efforts, Mr. Lady says: “Politics in Italy has made it so difficult to go after these characters. Throughout Europe you almost have to catch them with a bomb in their hands, and then if it doesn’t blow up, they say it’s a toy.” The CIA’s bloated bureaucracy has demoralized field agents like him, he adds. That complaint is echoed in a recent agency internal report obtained by the Los Angeles Times in July.
After spending several years in the custody of Egypt’s Mukharabat without charge, Abu Omar lives in Alexandria, Egypt. He’s a wanted man in Italy.
Stuck in his own legal limbo, Mr. Lady says, “I’m a prisoner, serving time.” He adds that the agency once told him it had picked up threats against him on al Qaeda Internet message boards. These days, he has “gone operational,” keeping a low profile and “watching my back.”
Sometimes, he says, “I wake up in the morning and say I want to shout to everyone, finally tell the truth about everything.” The classified full story would cause a “scandal,” in his words. “But I can’t. I made a vow and frankly I think I’m going to die with that vow.”
A vow to the CIA, the institution that you say betrayed you? “I made a vow to the flag. The institution, I clean my [expletive] with. My flag, I will never betray. I think the institution is betraying my country.”
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