Shadowland: Bourne Again?

Who doesn't love a good spy story? Shadowy operatives, evil terrorists, dangerous betrayals and the future of the free world hanging in the balance. Throw in the suggestion of sinister conspiracies at the very top of government--and some sex, of course--and you've got a pretty good book to take to the beach.

But when real U.S. officials start acting like they're living a Robert Ludlum saga, then you've got problems. And the more documentation that surfaces about the mysterious abduction of a suspected Al Qaeda figure from the streets of Italy in February 2003, the more it looks like whoever in the administration ordered the snatch got carried away with the dangerous glamour of the moment.

The arrest warrant issued by Italian judge Chiara Nobili charges 13 presumed CIA operatives--10 men and three women--allegedly involved in the kidnapping of Mostafa Hassan Nasr Osama, a.k.a. Abu Omar, on Feb. 17, 2003. At just about noon that day, he was bundled into a truck, driven to a U.S. airbase, and flown to Egypt for some tough questioning. Three other men and three other women are also named in the warrants, but because they were not at the scene of the kidnapping, have no arrest orders against them. The 230-page court document chronicles all of these characters' movements, some of their meals, their raids on hotel minibars, even, it would seem at first glance, their romances.

Some of the alleged agents started showing up in Milan at the end of 2002, but most converged on the city in late January 2003. They stayed at some of the finest hotels, including the elegant Principe di Savoia and the Westin Palace. Their king-size beds and their well-equipped gyms were close to the fashionable shopping streets, and far from the dreary industrial zone where Abu Omar lived, worked, prayed and allegedly recruited terrorists. But the mobile phones they used showed up many times in his neighborhood. Each "cell" in a network has a record of every call made through it, in case you didn't know. More importantly, if the agents knew, they didn't seem to care. It was those records that allowed their movements to be traced so closely.

On the weekend of Feb. 1-2, 2003, 10 members of the team took off for the city of La Spezia on the coast. The beach resort is pretty depressing that time of year, but Monica*, the youngest on the team, was marking her 30th birthday that weekend. Maybe that was the occasion. In any case, the court records say she shared a room that weekend with 50-year-old John D. (Eliana, 33, and Ben, 58, also bunked together.) Then five members of the team, including Monica and John D., went off to a sumptuous hotel in Florence for two more days. Another couple, 41-year-old Pilar and 63-year-old Ray H., went from La Spezia to the out-of-the-way Alpine village of Chiesa de Valmalenco near the Swiss border. Joseph S., who was born in Eastern Europe in 1953, and seems to have exquisite taste, blew off the beaches, the mountains and Monica's birthday. He went to the legendary Danieli Hotel in Venice.

It looks like they were all taking a break, and they probably needed it. By then, the pressure on CIA operatives doing this kind of fieldwork must have been enormous. They had taken the point in the Global War on Terror, pursuing Al Qaeda's key figures wherever they might be found. In coordination with many different intelligence services, they had tracked down most of those linked directly to 9/11. As Dana Priest reported last week in The Washington Post, an extraordinary top-secret counterterrorism center known as Alliance Base was set up in France soon after the attacks on Washington and New York, with French, British, German, Canadian, Australian and American case officers not only sharing information but planning operations against terrorist cells.