Shadowland: Bourne Again?

Now a new war, with Iraq, was only weeks away. The Bush administration obsessed with the notion that Saddam Hussein might strike back anywhere at any time with those weapons of mass destruction he was supposed to have. The administration was pushing hard to make the case to itself and to the world that the threat was imminent and immense. At Alliance Base, as Priest's article suggests, the world's best counterterrorist minds were less than convinced. (For a snapshot of the thinking at that time, see "Rumors of War," from March 2003.) But in Italy there were some tantalizing bits of information still to be mined. The Italian government of billionaire Silvio Berlusconi was backing the American rush to war, volunteering to send troops, showing itself a solid member of the "New Europe" on the Bush team. Unlike the British, who dreamed of moderating Bush's behavior, or the French who found W distasteful and dangerous, Berlusconi was an unapologetic cheerleader.

In 2002, Italians with spooky connections helpfully provided documents that seemed to show Saddam was trying to buy uranium from the African nation of Niger. President Bush famously referred to this ostensible danger in his State of the Union speech in January 2003. Then the documents turned out to be clumsy forgeries. In early February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations to make the American case for invasion. He'd dropped the Niger stuff, but picked up other Italian threads of information about terrorists with horrible weapons.

Powell fixed on the network of Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, a then-little-known terrorist wannabe who had been operating out of the Kurdish area in northern Iraq, but whose actual ties to Saddam were hard to substantiate. "Since last year, members of this network have been apprehended in France, Britain, Spain and Italy. By our last count, 116 operatives connected to this global web have been arrested," Powell told the world. He limned Zarqawi-linked conspiracies to use deadly poisons in Great Britain, Chechnya, even in the Pankisi Gorge in the Caucasus. But, still, no solid link to Saddam. Powell showed a slide that underscored what was supposed to be known, and implied what needed to be known. A large block on the diagram read: "Possible Italy Cell."

Powell's speech came the same day the alleged kidnapping team assembled again in Milan. Their target, Abu Omar, looked like he might be the missing link tying terror to Saddam and deadly toxins. Italian prosecutors and judicial police had been building a case against the Egyptian preacher for months, in consultation with the FBI, according to a senior Italian source involved with the investigation. But Washington intended to invade Iraq in March, no matter what, and Italian prosecutors were not ready to arrest him. The Italian plan, according to the same source, was to nail Abu Omar and other alleged members of the same network in early April 2003. But Monica and her friends snatched him off the street in the middle of February. A few days later, according to traces run by the Italian prosecutors, the telephone used by Bob L., the man identified in the court documents as head of the CIA in Milan, showed up in Egypt for a couple of weeks. That would have been the time when interrogators most needed the expertise of someone like Bob, who had been thoroughly briefed on the case by the Italian political police, known as DIGOS.

As happened so often when the Bush administration went looking for grand conspiracies in the free-wheeling spring of 2003, Abu Omar wasn't able to tell the Americans all they wanted or needed to hear. Fourteen months later, the Egyptians briefly let him out of prison, apparently thinking they had turned him into a collaborator. He phoned his wife and another imam in Milan and told his story. Italian police, who monitored those calls, set out to find whoever had stolen him. The cell phone records from the scene of the kidnapping, like crumbs in the forest, led the way to the CIA.

Most of the people on the team were in their 40s, 50s or 60s. Presumably they were old pros. Why didn't they do a better job of covering their tracks? Almost certainly because they believed the fix was in.