Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Mario Scaramella paradigma del berlusconismo

http://www.slate.com/id/2155274/
The Secret Life of Mario Scaramella
What a bit player in the case of the radioactive Russian tells us about
Berlusconi's Italy.
By Alexander Stille
The story of Alexander Litvinenko-the former KGB agent contaminated
with the radioactive isotope polonium-210 who died in a London hospital
insisting that he had been poisoned by agents of Russian President
Vladimir Putin-grabbed the world's attention. But what of Mario
Scaramella, who met with Litvinenko at the Itsu sushi bar in Piccadilly
Circus and was himself diagnosed with the dangerous radioactive
substance in his blood?*
He is a kind of Rosencrantz or Guildenstern of the Litvinenko tragedy,
a minor character who sheds a highly revealing sidelight on the larger
drama while also illuminating a different and very Italian tragedy. He
is a type that shows up in spy stories-a teller of tall tales and
half-truths; part Walter Mitty, part con man, part spy; a person who by
virtue of bogus credentials and connections acquires real credentials
and real connections. The Italians have a term for people like this
that has no exact equivalent in English: millantatore di
credito-someone who claims to know a lot more and to have done a lot
more than he really does. (It is even a crime in Italy, generally
invoked in fraud cases.)
Although a baby-faced man of only 36, Scaramella claims to have been
recruited several years ago by the CIA to trace relationships between
South American narco-traffickers and Russian spy agencies. He has
claimed to have been educated in England, Belgium, and France, without
saying exactly where. He says he taught at the University of Naples
(which says it has no record of him) and at various American
universities, including San Jose University (which doesn't
exist-though there is a San Jose State University, which says it
knows nothing of Scaramella)-and Stanford University. He claims to
have been a judge, but this appears to have consisted of an unpaid
position as a justice of the peace.
The one indisputable element in Scaramella's résumé is that for the
last three years he has served as a paid consultant on a commission of
the Italian parliament set up by then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
in 2002 to investigate the occult influence of the KGB in Italian life.
As newly published wiretaps reveal, the commission quickly degenerated
into a dirty-tricks operation to dig up dirt on Berlusconi's political
opponents.
The commission was named for Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist
who moved to England in 1984 and claimed to have copied extensive
portions of KGB files on its agents and informants operating in the
United States and Europe. While British intelligence made a serious
effort to document and verify the information that Mitrokhin brought to
them, the same care was not taken in Italy. When Silvio Berlusconi took
over as prime minister in 2001, he saw the Mitrokhin case as a cudgel
with which to beat his political opposition. Berlusconi created the
Mitrokhin Commission to investigate KGB infiltration in Italy and
handed the direction of it to Paolo Guzzanti, who simultaneously works
as a member of parliament for Berlusconi's Forza Italia party and as
deputy editor of the Berlusconi family newspaper Il Giornale.
Guzzanti's double role is typical of the rampant conflicts of interest
of Italy in the era of Berlusconi-who saw nothing wrong with owning
half the country's media outlets while running the country.
However, the commission failed to provide the rich material that
Berlusconi and Guzzanti were hoping for-material to keep the Italian
left on the defensive and in opposition for years to come. Mitrokhin's
information was very old, and most of the people in his files were dead
or retired. "There wasn't much to discover about spies and foreign
agents," said Giulio Andreotti, an Italian senator and former prime
minister during the Cold War period and himself a conservative member
of the Mitrokhin Commission, in a recent interview with La Repubblica.
"All the material had been published already in Great Britain, and
there was really no reason to do further investigations."
As a result, in 2003, Guzzanti hired Scaramella hoping to dig up
information of more recent vintage. Of course, this meant going beyond
documentary evidence supposedly copied by Mitrokhin from the KGB files,
investigating all sorts of ties between Russia and Italian politicians,
and refreshing the memories of unemployed or underemployed former spies
with nothing to sell other than their stories. The commission's work
was so poorly regarded even by many conservatives that not only was it
unable to generate a bipartisan report, but Guzzanti ended up issuing a
report without the signatures of his fellow commissioners on the
center-right.
Even after issuing his official report in December of 2004, Guzzanti
continued his investigations with Scaramella at his side. But soon
enough, Scaramella became a major source of embarrassment. He told
Italian authorities that the Russians had planted an antenna on Mount
Vesuvius that could activate nuclear missiles that were in a sunken
Soviet submarine at the bottom of the Bay of Naples. Investigations
found no antenna, and the submarine in question was known to have sunk
in the Bay of Biscay. In looking for the mysterious antenna, Scaramella
obtained a police escort and got involved in a shootout that he
described as an attempt on his life. Investigations proved that
Scaramella's bodyguard had done all the shooting, firing 16 bullets
into a parked car. Scaramella insisted that he was the target of an
assassination squad from Ukraine connected to al-Qaida, and he led
police to a truck containing four Ukrainians and an unimpressive stash
of arms: two grenades. Scaramella's precise knowledge of the operation
attracted suspicion, and he is now under investigation for arms
trafficking. He also claimed that Russians were transporting a shipment
of uranium across Italy-another claim that didn't pan out.
Scaramella's interest in nuclear waste is linked to a business he has
set up in the field of environmental security. He lists himself as the
"secretary general" of an organization, allegedly connected to the
United Nations, known as the Environmental Crime Protection Program,
which has been described as little more than a small office in Naples,
an "empty box," that gives Scaramella an impressive-sounding title to
put on his business card. The ECPP, in turn, could be used to win
government contracts for investigating crimes against the
environment-hence Scaramella's claims about uranium shipments and
nuclear missiles in Italy.
Potentially, this was a good fit with his position as consultant to the
Mitrokhin Commission, putting him into contact with former Soviet spies
who might give him information about hazardous nuclear materials that
he could, in turn, use to drum up business for his Environmental Crime
Protection Program. Scaramella was interested in what Litvinenko could
tell him about the status of Russian nuclear materials and potentially
embarrassing material about Italian politicians. We know that he was
trying to get the former KGB agent to state that Berlusconi's principal
political rival (and current prime minister) Romano Prodi was being
groomed as a Soviet spy, but the presence of polonium-210 at their last
meeting may have been related to Scaramella's interest in nuclear
materials in his environmental security business. British police have
not immediately accepted Litvinenko's claim to have been poisoned by
Vladmir Putin's secret police. It is possible that Litvinenko may have
been trafficking in nuclear materials and accidentally poisoned himself
while handling a leaky vial of the radioactive isotope. This would
explain why traces of polonium-210 have turned up in different places
where Litvinenko went in early November. Scaramella, along with a few
others, may have been accidentally exposed in the process.
For Scaramella, a man who had been insisting that he was the target of
a massive international assassination plot, the polonium episode may
have appeared like the fulfillment of his deepest fantasies. He and
Guzzanti held press conferences and gave interviews by the dozen about
being targets of an international hit squad. (Why Putin would want to
kill associates of his good friend and ally Berlusconi, they never
explained.) As the criminal investigations into his activities heated
up, Scaramella flew to London and announced that he had ingested "five
times the lethal dose" of polonium-a fact immediately denied by
British doctors. In Rome, Guzzanti told the press that Scaramella had
been given a "death sentence." A week later, Scaramella walked out of a
London hospital under his own steam, apparently in good health, saying
that he had been contaminated accidentally.
In the last few days, another KGB agent and sometime source of
Scaramella's, Oleg Gordievsky, has come forward, granting a long
interview to Rome's La Repubblica in which he revealed that Scaramella
persecuted him for two years, trying to get him to make false
statements about Prodi and other politicians of the Italian
center-left. He referred to Scaramella as a pathological liar and a
megalomaniac. At a certain point, he says he e-mailed Guzzanti,
insisting that Scaramella was a "mental case" who needed to be reined
in. He then contacted MI6 and asked the British security service to get
the Italians to cease and desist.
The kind of thing that Scaramella was really up to in London has come
out in a series of wiretapped phone conversations made in the course of
the arms-dealing investigation. Most revealing of all was a series of
phone conversations between Scaramella and Guzzanti that took place a
month before the Italian national elections this March, in which Prodi
narrowly defeated Berlusconi. (Guzzanti and Scaramella have expressed
outrage that the conversations of a member of parliament were
wiretapped and leaked to the press, but they have not contested the
accuracy of the accounts published in the newspapers.)
Scaramella tells Guzzanti that he has a former KGB agent who is
prepared to go on record saying that the KGB was "cultivating" Romano
Prodi as a source. "There is no information that Prodi was a KGB agent,
but we can talk about his being 'cultivated,' " Scaramella tells
Guzzanti. "Cultivated is enough," Guzzanti says. "It's a lot, but don't
imagine we're going to get a statement by whoever saying 'Prodi was an
agent.' ... What is undoubtedly true is that the Russians considered
Prodi a friend of the Soviet Union." Guzzanti becomes furious: "Friend
of the Soviet Union doesn't mean a thing. What do I give a shit about a
friend of the Soviet Union? Does that sound like a big news story to
you: friend of the Soviet Union? ... But 'cultivated' suits me fine."
In another conversation, Scaramella insisted that Berlusconi promised
him a job at the United Nations after the elections, though Berlusconi
has denied even knowing who Scaramella is. But in one of his wiretapped
conversations, Guzzanti indicates that he has kept Berlusconi informed
about his investigations. "The news made a big impact," Guzzanti told
Scaramella. "I told him that the problem with this business is that we
need to be able to prove what we're saying, and he, surprising me a
bit, said, 'Well, in the meanwhile, we force them to defend
themselves.' "
What the Litvinenko-Scaramella connection offers-along with a glimpse
at the murky world of former Soviet spies-is a picture of
Berlusconi's Italy, in which bogus scandals are manufactured in order
to distract attention from real scandals (many involving Berlusconi and
his associates), a place where a businessman-turned-politician can use
one of his journalists to conduct a bogus investigation carried out by
a shady con man without the least regard for the truth or lack of truth
in whatever dirt they dig up.

By Alexander Stille
Consiglio a figlio di Ugo Stille di riflettere sul fatto che Berlusconi ha 
una certa eta' e anche politicamente non gli resta molto tempo. Oramai sono 
anni che il figlio di Ugo Stille non versa una sola goccia di inchiostro se 
non per spiegarci quanto e' cattivo, sporco, puzzolente e pericoloso il nano 
di Arcore. Non vorrei che una volta che con il berlusca dalla politica, il 
simpatico figlio di Ugo Stille si ritrovi senza piu' argomenti da trattare e 
con la necessita' di dover trovare un altro lavoro.
lsd.