The CIA's La Dolce Vita War on Terror
The Spies Who Came In from the Hot Tub
by
Tom Engelhardt
by Tom Engelhardt
Be All That You Can Charge
Like
so much else in our moment, it contravened
laws the U.S. had once signed onto, pretzeled the English language,
went directly to the darkside, was connected
to various administration lies and manipulations that preceded
the invasion of Iraq, and was based on taking the American taxpayer
to the cleaners. I'm talking about a now-notorious Bush administration
"extraordinary rendition" in Italy, the secret kidnapping of a radical
Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan in early 2003, his transport
via U.S. airbases in Italy and Germany to Egypt, and there, evidently
with the CIA station chief for Italy riding shotgun, directly into
the hands of Egyptian torturers. This was but one of an unknown
number of extraordinary-rendition operations – the
estimate is more than 100 since September 11, 2001, but no one
really knows – that have been conducted all over the world
and have delivered terror suspects into the custody of Uzbeki, Syrian,
Egyptian, and other hands notorious for their use of torture. It
just so happens that this operation took place on the democratic
soil of an ally that possessed an independent judiciary, and that
the team of 19 or more participants, some speaking fluent Italian,
passed through that country not like the undercover agents of our
imagination, but, as former CIA clandestine officer Melissa Boyle
Mahle told
Reuters, "like elephants stampeding through Milan. They left
huge footprints."
Those gargantuan footprints – and some good detective work
by the Italian police based on unsecured cell phones (evidently
from a batch issued to the U.S. diplomatic mission in Rome),
hotel bills, credit card receipts, and the like – have given
us a glimpse into the unexpectedly extravagant "shadow war" being
conducted on our behalf by the Bush administration through the Central
Intelligence Agency. So let me skip the normal discussions of kidnappings,
torture, or whether we violated Italian sovereignty, and just concentrate
on what those footprints revealed. If the President's Global War
on Terror has been saddled with the inelegant acronym GWOT, the
Italian rendition operation should perhaps be given the acronym
LDVWOT or La Dolce Vita War on Terror.
Of course, if Vice
President Dick Cheney could say of administration tax cuts,
"We won the [2002] midterms. This is our due"; if House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay could charge his airfare to Great
Britain to an American Express card issued to lobbyist Jack Abramoff,
and food and phone calls at a Scottish golf-course hotel to a credit
card issued to Washington lobbyist, Edwin A. Buckham; if Halliburton
could slip a reputed $813 million extra in "costs" into a contract
to provide logistical support for U.S. troops (including "$152,000
in ‘movie library costs' [and] a $1.5 million tailoring bill");
then why shouldn't the Spartan warriors of the intelligence community
capture a few taxpayer bucks while preparing a kidnapping in Italy?
Here's what we know at present about this particular version of
La Dolce Vita:
-
The CIA
agents took rooms in Milan's 5-star hotels, including the
Principe di Savoia, "one of the world's most luxuriously
appointed hotels" where they rang up $42,000
in expenses; the Westin Palace, the Milan Hilton, and the
Star Hotel Rosa as well as similar places in the seaside resort
of La Spezia and in Florence, running up cumulative
hotel bills of $144,984.
-
They ate
in the equivalent of 5-star restaurants in Milan and elsewhere,
evidently fancying themselves gourmet undercover agents.
-
As a mixed
team – at least 6 women took part in the operation –
men
and women on at least two occasions took double rooms together
in these hotels. (There is no indication that any of them were
married – to each other at least.)
-
After the
successful kidnapping was done and the cleric dispatched to
sunny Egypt, they evidently decided they deserved a respite
from their exertions; so
several of them left for a vacation in Venice, while four
others headed for the Mediterranean coast north of Tuscany,
all on the taxpayer dole.
-
They charged
up to $500 a day apiece, according
to Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post, to "Diners
Club accounts created to match their recently forged identities";
wielded Visa cards (assumedly similarly linked to their fake
identities); and made sure they got or used frequent flier miles.
(The Diner's Club, when queried by Tomdispatch, refused to comment
on any aspect of the case.) Our master spies "rarely paid in
cash," adds Whitlock, "gave their frequent traveler account
numbers to desk clerks and made dozens of calls from unsecure
phones in their rooms."
-
To move their captive
in comfort – for them – they summoned up not some
grimy cargo plane but a Learjet to take him to Germany and a
Gulfstream
V to transport him to Egypt, the sorts of spiffy private
jets normally
used by CEOs and movie stars.
You would think that our representatives in Congress, reading about
this in their local newspapers, might raise the odd question about
the rich-and-famous life-styles of our secret agents. So far, however,
despite the well-reported use of taxpayer dollars to fund trysts,
vacations, and the good life, nary a peep on the subject has come
from Congress; nor has anyone yet called for the money to be returned
to the American people.
Now, because a Milan prosecutor had the temerity to issue arrest
warrants for thirteen of our high-flying spies and to
seek warrants for another six of them – the great majority
are officially "on the run" and assumedly have been pulled out of
Europe by the Agency. The CIA station chief who headed the operation
had even bought a retirement house near Turin. "That he thought
he could live out his golden years in Italy," reports Tracy
Wilkinson of the Los Angeles Times, "is another indication
of the impunity with which he and the others felt they were operating,
Italian prosecutors say."
A small tip for Interpol investigators: If any of these agents are
still at large in Europe, I wouldn't be checking out obscure safe-houses.
The places to search are top-of-the-line hotels, Michelin-recommended
restaurants, and elite vacation spots across the continent.
 When
evaluating the CIA's actions in Italy, you might consider the Agency's
mission statement as laid
out at its website: "Our success depends on our ability to act
with total discretion… Our mission requires complete personal integrity…
We accomplish things others cannot, often at great risk… We stand
by one another and behind one another." Or you might simply adapt
an ad line from one of the few credit cards the team in Milan seems
not to have used: The nightly cost of a room in Milan's Hotel
Principe di Savoia, $450; the cost of a Coke from a mini-bar
in one of its rooms, $10, the cost of leasing GulfstreamV
for a month, $229,639; that feeling of taking the American taxpayer
for a ride, priceless.
 Special
thanks go to Nick Turse for his typically invaluable research aid.
July
22, 2005
Tom
Engelhardt [send him mail]
is editor of TomDispatch.com,
a project of the Nation
Institute. He
is the author of several books, including The
Last Days of Publishing: A Novel and The
End of Victory Culture.
Copyright
© 2005 Tom Engelhardt
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