Sunday,
December 03, 2006
Italians Can't See Prodi
as Former KGB Agent
The
ANNOTICO Report
There's
no evidence that Prodi equals KGB
agent, but there is information about friendly relations, cultivation,
contacts with Russia, and a revitalized Berlusconi plans to use accusations to
"sew seeds of doubt", and force Prodi to
exhaust himself or his goodwill in defending himself.
Berlusconi
addressed a Rally of 80,000 in
Belusconi called it an attack on
Italy's middle classes, and called for defeat of the government,
which he said was destroying the wealth and freedom of all Italians, destroying
citizens' trust in the state, wasting resources and limiting everyone's
freedom, and impoverishing Italy morally and materially.
The
Benevolent
Italians
Find it Hard to See Prodi as James Bond
Sunday
Herald
December
3, 2006
THE LITVINENKO case poured a dose of
polonium into the Italian political process last week, with prime
minister Romano Prodi announcing his intention
to sue over suggestions that he had been recruited as a KGB agent in the 1970s,
and his supporters claiming a parliamentary commission had been used to
manufacture dirt for use against leaders of his centre-left coalition.
The controversy
revolves around the role of Mario Scaramella, the
security expert who met Alexander Litvinenko for
lunch on the day he was poisoned in
Prodi announced his decision to
sue on Thursday after newspapers published excerpts from intercepted phone
calls between Scaramella and Paolo Guzzanti, a senator in Silvio
Berlusconi's Forza Italia party and chairman of the Mitrokhin Commission. The conversations appear to reveal
that Scaramella was tapping his sources among former
officers of the KGB, and its successor FSB, for evidence of Prodi's
Soviet links.
"There's no
information that Prodi equals KGB agent, but we're
talking about friendly relations, cultivation, contacts," Scaramella reportedly told Guzzanti
last February. Guzzanti apparently welcomed the news
as "a thermonuclear bomb" and passed it on to his own boss,
Berlusconi.
[Scaramella] warned the then prime minister that they
would need proof that was capable of standing up in court but was allegedly
reassured by a gung-ho Berlusconi: "Hang on a moment, in the meantime we
force them to defend themselves."
Environment
minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, another of the
commission's reported victims, said the centre-right's fishing for political
dirt reminded him of Stalinist Russia, where the instruments of the state were
used to construct false accusations against the opposition. Pietro Fassino, leader of the Left Democrats, was equally
indignant. "They have attempted to pervert our democracy," he said.
"They have resorted to personal denigration and institutional destabilisation."
At the other end
of the political spectrum, Guzzanti was equally
furious. A parliamentarian carrying out his democratic duties had been spied
upon and his private conversations published in the papers. The Mitrokhin chairman said he welcomed Prodi's
lawsuit.
"Let's give
the Italians a Christmas present. Let's have a trial and give the Italians a
piece of the truth that has been hidden from them. If Prodi
comes to court we will be able to discuss the many obscure aspects of his
career."
One of them,
according to Guzzanti, involves a claim made by
Alexander Litvinenko himself to the Mitrokhin consultant Mario Scaramella.
Discussing a possible bolt-hole in the West with an FSB colleague prior to his
defection in 2000, Litvinenko was allegedly warned
not to go to
Other
commentators have suggested that the description of a KGB agent in Professor
Christopher Andrew's book on the Mitrokhin Archive -
a hoard of secret service documents smuggled out of
"Probably
the most important Line X agent at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the
1980s was Uchitel Teacher, who taught at a major
university and was controlled by Anatoli Kuznetsov," Andrew wrote. Uchitel
had produced valuable intelligence on military aircraft, including Nato's Tornado fighter,
helicopters and airborne guidance systems, the
Prodi is a university professor
and was often referred to in political circles as the teacher.
Many Italians
have difficulty in visualising Prodi,
a portly, politically moderate, bicycle-riding economist, as a James Bond
figure, or in this case as an agent of Spectre. For
the centre-left daily La Repubblica, the Mitrokhin's work was simply character assassination. Guzzanti had been desperately looking for suitable material
with which to build "the political tomb of Silvio
Berlusconi's antagonist".
Even some of the Mitrokhin's own consultants have been highly critical of
the commission's work. In an article for the Corriere
della Sera on Wednesday, the historian Salvatore Sechi told how he was
cold-shouldered after raising the suspicion that one of his own colleagues had
worked as a spy for the KGB.
"I found it
incredible that a researcher investigating the misdeeds of Soviet espionage
could himself be suspected (and it was this that I wanted to clarify) of having
been in the pay of Andropov and Putin," Sechi
wrote. He was not allowed to clarify it.
The Mitrokhin documents, passed on to the Italians by
As a country that
once had the largest Communist Party in
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