TRIBUNE INVESTIGATION
CIA's bungled Italy job
Sloppy use of cell phones, other missteps help police unravel cleric's 2003 abduction
By John Crewdson
Tribune senior correspondent
Published December 25, 2005
MILAN, Italy -- The trick is known to just about every two-bit crook in the cellular age: If you don't want the cops to know where you are, take the battery out of your cell phone when it's not in use.
Had that trick been taught at the CIA's rural Virginia training school for covert operatives, the Bush administration might have avoided much of the current crisis in Europe over the practice the CIA calls "rendition," and CIA Director Porter Goss might not have ordered a sweeping review of the agency's field operations.
But when CIA operatives assembled here nearly three years ago to abduct an Egyptian-born Muslim preacher named Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, more familiarly known as Abu Omar, and "render" him to Cairo, they left their cell phone batteries in.
Even when not in use, a cell phone sends a periodic signal indicating its location, enabling the worldwide cellular network to know where to look for it in case of an incoming call.
Those signals allowed police investigating Abu Omar's mysterious disappearance to ultimately construct an almost minute-by-minute record of his abduction, and to identify nearly two dozen people as his abductors.
Aides use words such as "horrified" to describe Goss' reaction to the sloppiness of the Milan rendition, and the relative ease with which its details have been unearthed by the Italian police and the news media.
In response, Goss has ordered a "top-down" review of the agency's "tradecraft," as the nuts and bolts of the spy business is known.
So amateurish was the Milan rendition that the Italian lawyer for Robert Seldon Lady, whom prosecutors identify as the former CIA chief in Milan, says Lady's primary defense will be that he was too good a spy to have been involved with something so badly planned and carried out.
"I think Bob is too intelligent," the lawyer, Daria Pesce, said in an interview earlier this month.
Lady, 51, who retired from the CIA two years ago, is believed to be living in Florida. If he or any of the 21 other CIA operatives charged with Abu Omar's abduction were to set foot in the 25-nation European Union, they would be subject to arrest and extradition to Italy to stand trial.
Prosecutors say the hundreds of pages of documents they have filed with the court here leave little doubt that Lady was a key player in the February 2003 kidnapping of Abu Omar and his rendition to Egypt, where he claims to have been tortured.
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