April 19, 2008 – 2:43 p.m.
It’s not easy for me to generate a lot of sympathy for a CIA man involved in a kidnapping, but I feel sorry for Bob Lady.
Lady, many readers will remember, was the CIA’s base chief in Milan, Italy, and nominally in charge of a February 2003 agency operation to snatch an al Qaeda suspect off the city’s streets.
Sounded like a pretty good idea at the time. It was only a few months after we’d been smacked, big time, by al Qaeda killers here.
But the snatch turned into a public relations nightmare two years later when Italian authorities announced they had eyewitnesses and indisputable evidence tying the CIA to the crime.
So last week 26 Americans, most of them CIA employees, went on trial in Milan for kidnapping, albeit in absentia and to little notice here. They are fugitives from justice, with international warrants issued for their arrests.
The central figure in the case has always been “Mr. Bob,” Robert Seldon Lady, a bear-like man with a pasha’s grin who spent a lifetime in the CIA.
He and his wife loved Italy so much they bought a house in the foothills of the Alps and retired there in 2004.
Months later an urgent call came, warning Lady to get out of Dodge — don’t even pack.
The cops were on their way.
Tipped off, the Ladys successfully fled the country. But they left behind a bonanza of evidence in their dream home, not the least of which was a CIA surveillance photo of the kidnap victim, Osama Mustafa Hasan Nasr, known as Abu Omar.
How dumb can you get? Sometimes it seems the CIA’s ineptitude knows no bounds.
Ironically, Lady had successfully pursued other al Qaeda operatives, according to Italian law enforcement sources I talked with in Milan last November. They said they liked working with Lady, a onetime cop.
But the greater irony is that Lady had opposed the operation from the get-go, American intelligence sources said.
Snatching Omar was the brainchild of Jeff Castelli, a rising star in the CIA, who was the Rome station chief and in charge of all U.S. intelligence operations in Italy.
There was little doubt Omar was a bad guy, a cog in an Islamic underground that was recruiting, preparing and dispatching holy warriors to Muslim crusades in Chechnya, Kashmir, Bosnia and later Iraq. Indeed, Italian prosecutors and counterterrorism police were closing in on Omar and another 20 or so Milan-based terrorist suspects.
Why, Lady argued, should they get in the way of the Italians, who were doing a good job recruiting sources in Milan’s Muslim neighborhoods and getting close to the terrorists?
From the standpoint of standard clandestine tradescraft, there were other foolish elements to Castelli’s plan as well, such as allowing the CIA surveillance and snatch teams to use cell phones, which can easily be traced to their owners and used to track their locations.
The Italian investigators did just that. It turned out the CIA boys and girls were using not only their own phones but also personal credit cards, for both pleasure and business as they cavorted through the luxury hotels of Milan and Venice for their mission.
Ruh-roh.
But “renditions,” as the kidnappings are called, were all the rage in 2003, not arrests.
The CIA’s Counterterrorism Center gave Castelli his head. Lady, ever the good soldier, went along.
Mr. Bob’s team play cost him his retirement home, which was seized by Italian authorities when he fled, and eventually, his wife.
“I don’t blame her,” Lady told writer Matthew Cole, the only journalist known to have interviewed the ex-CIA man, in a little noticed piece in the March 2007 issue of GQ magazine.
“She’s been living with a guy who is frustrated and powerless,” Lady said. “I can’t take this stuff out on anyone, so she has to bear the load. It’s too much. Why should she have to deal with this?”
At the time, a downcast Lady was hanging out in South Florida. Lately he’s been doing some security consulting work in Central America, where he grew up, the son of an American businessman in Honduras.
The Italian dream has evaporated. Even the family photos and other mementos left behind could be auctioned off with the house, if he’s convicted.
And there’s little doubt of that.
“I’ll probably be convicted,” Lady told Cole. “But I won’t go to the trial, and I’ll never see Italy again.”
In the ultimate irony, his house could end up the property of al Qaeda suspect Abu Omar, who’s recovering in Egypt from wounds suffered at the hands of Egyptian interrogators, to whom the CIA delivered him in February 2003.
Italian investigators, tracing Lady’s cell phone calls, put him in Cairo the same time Omar was there.
So it’s hard to be too sympathetic for his plight.
Except for this: He was abandoned on the field.
The CIA has disowned him. It hasn’t provided him a lawyer, or helped him pay for one. Lady is on his own.
This is taking the concept of “plausible denial” way too far.
For sure, the sacrifices of many an agency operative must forever remain secret, as the wall of anonymous stars in its headquarters vestibule so elegantly attests.
But that’s for operatives who have never been conclusively identified as agency employees. Italian prosecutors have a shopping cart full of evidence about Lady’s role in Milan, where he was well known to local authorities.
While Lady suffers, the official who concocted the Milan caper is moving on up.
As I reported last February, Jeff Castelli got only a rap on the knuckles from the CIA’s Accountability Board and is being groomed to take over the agency’s New York station, a hugely important post.
CIA spokespeople will not discuss Castelli or Lady. They don’t exist, in the CIA’s fantasy.
“Leaders used to protect those below from the top as they went up,” Lady groused. “It’s a way of harnessing the loyalty of those they led.”
He is bitter. “Now they protect the top. They manage down and step on anyone below.”
I bet CIA campus recruiters don’t talk about that.
Memo to CIA honcho
Tactical Nukes in Vietnam: The private, nonprofit National Security Archive released an extraordinary document last week that elicited hardly more than yawns: Evidence that Air Force commanders considered dropping tactical nuclear weapons in support of embattled U.S. troops at Khe Sanh, South Vietnam, in 1968. The formerly top secret Air Force history is eye-opening reading, showing that the “unthinkable” was always, in fact, always thinkable.
Spook candidate challenges Swiftboater: Massachusetts Sen.
Miami Vice: The government’s terrorism case against the so-called Liberty City Seven, a bunch of sad sacks who an FBI informant persuaded to dream big about taking down the Sears Tower in Chicago, collapsed last week when the judge declared a mistrial after the jury failed to come to a verdict after 12 days. As it turned out, the FBI’s informant was found to be deceptive in an earlier FBI undercover operation in Chicago, says former FBI special agent Jim Wedick, who helped the defense and has been critical of other terrorism investigations by his former colleagues. “The informant — Elli Assad — was suspected of not being truthful and after being asked to take a polygraph, failed the exam,” Wedick said in an e-mail. “Leaving the country, the informant later re-entered the country in Miami and seeking funds made contact with the Bureau and again offered to be an informant on international terrorism.” The FBI has strongly defended its handling of the Liberty City Seven and other domestic terror prosecutions, which came under withering criticism in a Feb. 7 piece by Rolling Stone’sGuy Lawson, “The Fear Factory.”