Security Experts' 'Suicides' Called Into Question -- European Media Probe Dangers of Secret Surveillance Systems
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=d54bf5a301e73cbba0663d69a33d80c0New America Media, Investigation, Jeffrey Klein and Paolo Pontoniere, Posted: Aug 16, 2006
Editor's Note: European
journalists and investigators are
tracking the mysterious deaths of two
security experts -- one in Italy, the
other in Greece -- who had uncovered
extensive spyware in their
telecommunications firms. So far,
despite possible U.S. links to the
extralegal, politicized spy operations,
few U.S. media have picked up the trail.
Jeffrey Klein, a founding editor of
Mother Jones, this summer received a
Loeb, journalism's top award for
business reporting. Paolo Pontoniere is
a New America Media European
commentator.
Just after noon on Friday, July 21,
Adamo Bove -- head of security at
Telecom Italia, the country's largest
telecommunications firm -- told his wife
he had some errands to run as he left
their Naples apartment. Hours later,
police found his car parked atop a
freeway overpass. Bove's body lay on the
pavement some 100 feet below.
Bove was a master at detecting hidden
phone networks. Recently, at the
direction of Milan prosecutors, he'd
used mobile phone records to trace how a
"Special Removal Unit" composed of CIA
and SISMI (the Italian CIA) agents
abducted Abu Omar, an Egyptian cleric,
and flew him to Cairo where he was
tortured. The Omar kidnapping and the
alleged involvement of 26 CIA agents,
whom prosecutors seek to arrest and
extradite, electrified Italian media.
U.S. media noted the story, then dropped
it.
The first Italian press reports after
Bove's death said the 42-year-old had
committed suicide. Bove, according to
unnamed sources, was depressed about his
imminent indictment by Milan
prosecutors. But prosecutors
immediately, and uncharacteristically,
set the record straight: Bove was not a
target; in fact, he was prosecutors'
chief source. Bove, prosecutors said,
was helping them investigate his own
bosses, who were orchestrating an
illegal wiretapping bureau and the
destruction of incriminating digital
evidence. One Telecom executive had
already been forced out when he was
caught conducting these illicit
operations, as well as selling
intercepted information to a business
intelligence firm.
About 16 months earlier, in March of
2005, Costas Tsalikidis, a 38-year-old
software engineer for Vodaphone in
Greece had just discovered a highly
sophisticated bug embedded in the
company's mobile network. The spyware
eavesdropped on the prime minister's and
other top officials' cell phone calls;
it even monitored the car phone of
Greece's secret service chief. Others
bugged included civil rights activists,
the head of Greece's "Stop the War"
coalition, journalists and Arab
businessmen based in Athens. All the
wiretapping began about two months
before the Olympics were hosted by
Greece in August 2004, according to a
subsequent investigation by the Greek
authorities.
Tsalikidis, according to friends and
family, was excited about his work and
was looking forward to marrying his
longtime girlfriend. But on March 9,
2005, his elderly mother found him
hanging from a white rope tied to pipes
outside of his apartment bathroom. His
limp feet dangled a mere three inches
above the floor. His death was ruled a
suicide; he, like Adamo Bove, left no
suicide note.
The next day, Vodaphone's top executive
in Greece reported to the prime minister
that unknown outsiders had illicitly
eavesdropped on top government
officials. Before making his report,
however, the CEO had the spyware
destroyed, even though this destroyed
the evidence as well.
Investigations into the alleged suicides
of both Adamo Bove and Costas Tsalikidis
raise questions about more than the
suspicious circumstances of their
deaths. They point to politicized,
illegal intelligence structures that
rely upon cooperative business
executives. European prosecutors and
journalists probing these spying
networks have revealed that:
-- the Vodaphone eavesdropping was
transmitted in real time via four
antennae located near the U.S. embassy
in Athens, according to an 11-month
Greek government investigation. Some of
these transmissions were sent to a phone
in Laurel, Md., near America's National
Security Agency.
-- according to Ta Nea, a Greek
newspaper, Vodaphone's CEO privately
told the Greek government that the
bugging culprits were "U.S. agents."
Because Greece's prime minister feared
domestic protests and a diplomatic war
with the United States, he ordered the
Vodafone CEO to withhold this conclusion
from his own authorities investigating
the case.
-- in both the Italian and Greek cases,
the spyware was much more deeply
embedded and clever than anything either
phone company had seen before. Its
creation required highly experienced
engineers and expensive laboratories
where the software could be subjected to
the stresses of a national telephone
system. Greek investigators concluded
that the Vodaphone spyware was created
outside of Greece.
-- once placed, the spyware could have
vast reach since most host companies are
merging their Internet, mobile telephone
and fixed-line operations onto a single
platform.
-- Germany's Federal Intelligence
Service, BND, recently snooped on
investigative journalists. According to
parliamentary investigations, the spying
may have been carried out using the
United States's secretive Bad Aibling
base in the Bavarian Alps, which houses
the American global eavesdropping
program dubbed Echelon.
Were the two alleged suicides more than
an eerie coincidence? A few media in
Italy -- La Stampa, Dagospia and
Feltrinelli, among others -- have noted
the unsettling parallels. But so far no
journalists have been able to overcome
the investigative hurdles posed by two
entirely different criminal inquiry
systems united only by two prime
ministers not eager to provoke the White
House's wrath. In the United States,
where massive eavesdropping programs
have operated since 9/11, investigators,
reporters and members of Congress have
not explored whether those responsible
for these spying operations may be using
them for partisan purposes or economic
gain. As more troubling revelations come
out of Europe, it may become more
difficult to ignore how easily spying
programs can be hijacked for
illegitimate purposes. The brave soul
who pursues this line of inquiry,
however, should fear for his or her
life.
SIDEBAR -- Italy special place in the
heart of the Dirty War
As the investigation into covert CIA's
and local rogue intelligence operatives
in Europe expands across the continent,
Italy's emerges as the thinking head of
a hydra whose tentacles reach far into
worldwide communication net and backward
into the history of international
conspiracies.
Because of its unique politically hybrid
nature -- Italy contains both a strong
Christian Democrat constituency as well
as the largest Communist Party of a
Western country -- the nation has as
been at the crossroads of political
exchanges between East and West. This
has been true since the end World War II
and remained so until the fall of the
Berlin Wall. The crossroads was
economic, too; affinities between
Christian Democrats, Italian Socialists
and Communists and political parties and
leaders in the Middle East and the
socialist countries made it easy for
Italy to win strategically important
contracts in the field of energy,
construction and telecommunications.
Some of those contracts are still
operative, like those international
telecommunications routing through
Italian networks coming from North
Africa, the Middle East and some of the
world's remaining Communist countries.
Telecommunications apparatus that
formerly belonged to STET, the Italian
state-owned telephone company, today are
owned by Telecom Italia.
Italy is not new to convoluted networks
that bind security and military elites
to conservative business leaders in
long-term secret pacts to carry out
subversive activities. Historically such
networks have morphed into massive
bribing machines.
The Masonic Loggia P2 and Gladio are
just two examples. The first, a network
comprised of about 2,000 military
officers, public servants, bankers,
journalists and business-people,
operated between the 1970s and the '80s,
some say in concert with the CIA. Its
secret goal was to keep Italy solidly in
the hands of center-right
administrations. The P2 network is
reputed to have begun the "Strategia
della Tensione," a concoction of
terrorist attacks, political unrest and
economic crises that created a feeling
of uncertainty among Italians, which in
turn led them to vote for centrist
administrations.
In the case of Gladio, a much wider
intelligence and military net was
created to prevent the rise to power of
the Communist and Socialist Parties in
Italy. Although supposedly disbanded at
the beginning of the 1990s, this network
is said to have transformed into the
Department of Anti-terrorism Strategic
Studies, a neo-fascist organization that
in 2004, to benefit economically from
funding made available to fight
al-Qaeda, didn't hesitate to disseminate
false information about an impending
attack on Milan's Linate International
Airport and on the city's historical
Duomo.
Some European prosecutors and
journalists are now trying to discern
how today's covert intelligence networks
altered political discourse on the
continent.
--Jeffrey Klein and Paolo Pontoniere