The Editor who spooked Italy

John Hooper in Rome
January 29, 2007
Media Guardian

Late last May, a court reporter from the conservative Italian daily Libero and the paper’s deputy editor, Renato Farina, went to see two prosecutors leading an inquiry that was making headline news.

The prosecutors had been trying to get at the truth behind the disappearance from Milan four years ago of a radical Muslim cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as “Abu Omar”. They had already concluded he was seized in a so-called “extraordinary rendition”, organised by the CIA with the help of the Italian secret services. He is thought to have been flown out of Italy from a US base and jailed and tortured in Cairo. Today, committal proceedings are to reopen in Milan in which 35 people, including 26 CIA officers, face charges linked to the affair.

What neither of the journalists knew as the door of the prosecutors’ office closed behind them was that their conversation would be secretly taped – and that one of them, Farina, would end up charged with aiding and abetting a kidnapping.

The interview was the turning point in an affair that has ripped through the Italian media, devastating the careers of two leading journalists and prompting a daily newspaper to be raided by police. Above all, though, it has spotlighted an issue of concern to journalists everywhere – the fraught relationship between reporters and intelligence officers.

Tipped off by police, the two prosecutors interviewed by Farina suspected the information he was demanding was not intended solely for his readers. Raids last July on Libero’s offices in Milan and a Rome apartment provided the evidence they were seeking. The apartment was an undeclared annexe of Italy’s military intelligence service, SISMI. It contained thousands of files on politicians, prosecutors, judges, journalists and even business executives apparently considered by SISMI as “enemies within”.

Telephone conversations involving intelligence officials intercepted on the orders of the prosecutors indicated Giuseppe D’Avanzo of the liberal daily La Repubblica had been followed by SISMI officers while on an assignment connected with the Abu Omar affair.

The annexe also contained papers detailing the service’s routine contacts with reporters from other media outlets. In general, those links were entirely proper. But not always. Last December, the Order of Journalists, which controls membership of the profession, imposed a 12-month suspension on another La Repubblica journalist, Luca Fazzo. He had earlier admitted to his editor that he tipped off SISMI to exclusive reports on the Abu Omar affair.

Most sensationally, though, what the documents showed was that Renato Farina was a paid SISMI agent – recruited despite a 1977 law that forbids the intelligence services from employing journalists. In an emotional confession in Libero, Farina admitted: “I gave a hand to our military secret services. I passed them information.” He depicted his collaboration as the response of a patriot and devout Roman Catholic to the outbreak of what he termed “the fourth (sic) World War, that unleashed by Osama bin Laden”.

In a statement to prosecutors, Farina said he first flirted with the world of espionage as a correspondent in Serbia for Il Giornale. He claimed to have been a go-between for the Italian government with Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milosevic. In 2004 he was recruited by SISMI’s former director, Nicolo Pollari. “We spoke for five or six hours”, the interrogation transcript records, “after which I … It’s as if I fell in love with Pollari”.

Farina admitted to receiving about €30,000 – plus free World Cup tickets – in the two years he was an agent. But he said he had given the money away to charity. A lot had just been left in the basilica of St Mary Major in Rome.

He claimed to have helped free Italian hostages in Iraq and said that, when he was invited to Qatar for a conference organised by al-Jazeera, SISMI officers asked to fit a micro-camera to his spectacles so he could film a video held by the TV station showing the death of an Italian kidnap victim. He refused, feeling it would be a betrayal of his host’s trust. The Order of Journalists dismissed his explanations for what he had done. Imposing a 12-month suspension on Farina, it said he had “betrayed the journalistic profession”, “compromised his dignity and that of the Order to which he belongs, damaging too the relationship of trust that ought to exist between the press and its readers”. According to judicial sources, the prosecution in the Abu Omar trial is considering a plea bargain with Farina under which he will receive a nine-month suspended sentence. His lawyer did not return calls.