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DEATH TO SPIES: an overview of the intelligence services in Italy, before and after L. 124/2007
Articolo a cura di Iacopo Brini
Revisione a cura di Federico Grossi
Introduction
To say that the Italian intelligence community has been, since its inception, rather problematic would probably be one of the understatements of the century. After the collapse of the Fascist regime and the birth of the new Italian Republic, the burgeoning new State was faced with a daunting task: to build a new security and military apparatus loyal to republican principles and the new 1948 Constitution, to ensure Italy’s continued survival and permanence in the circle of European powers, whilst disavowing the aggressive policies and repressive tendencies the Fascists held so dear and had made an integral part of the State Administration’s culture in their twenty years in power.
In facing these challenges, it is safe to assert that Italy both failed and succeeded. On one hand, the new State security apparatus succeeded in enforcing Italy’s new role as a Western, democratic and NATO-integrated nation; on the other hand, the legislative background remained basically unchanged from Fascist times, and similarly unchanged were the ranks of the services themselves, which remained filled to the brim with ex-fascists and individuals of highly questionable republican loyalties.
To better understand the implications and intricacies of these shaky foundations, full of intestine contradictions and conflicts of interests, one need to look no further than to the troubled and unstable legal framework that held together the Italian secret services for the last eighty years, across three major restructurings, countless scandals and culminating in the watershed reform of 2007.
1. The earliest years and SIFAR
The first post-war secret service was created in 1949 as the SIFAR, (Servizio Informazioni Forze ARmate, armed forces intelligence service) by an internal circulaire of the newly created Ministry of Defence, and not by any formal law. This was in no small part due to the early Cold War ideological and political climate, with a strong paranoia surrounding leftist elements within and without the Italian Parliament; owing to this mistrust, intelligence matters were left strictly under the purview of military personnel and the Ministry of Defence, who were viewed both by the governing majority and the American intelligence chiefs in Italy as more reliable and loyal to the burgeoning NATO system, founded not so coincidentally just a few days later.
SIFAR was tasked with coordinating the three SIOS, the intelligence groups of the Army, Navy and Air Force respectively, and it existed with the same “limited sovereignty” that characterized most of Italian foreign and domestic policy in the 50s and 60s: its directors, all of them generals in the Italian Army, had direct ties to the United States and the CIA in particular, to whom they essentially reported. Under the NATO agreements, in essence, the Italian service was required to pass information and receive instructions from a special CIA centre; the informational asymmetry was particularly skewed, given that the US had the right to access information from Italy on a whim, but not vice versa. The existence of secret protocols attached to the Atlantic Pact and relating to the intelligence services of Europe is generally known, although the actual consistency and content of such documents remains secret to this day.
SIFAR was therefore born under the sign of two crucial factors that conditioned its organizational characteristics and operations: on one hand, the traits of continuity with fascism in the functioning rules and personnel involved; on the other hand, the constraints imposed by the Cold War, in particular the asymmetrical relationships with the American ally; as such, its overall tasks were broad and its powers vast and vaguely defined by that single circulaire and the remaining Fascist-era internal norms on State Security. Owing to this, SIFAR only recruited enlisted men or officers from the Armed Forces, and it operated both inside Italian territory and outside it without much in the way of restraints.
SIFAR thus became quickly embroiled in a number of scandals, of which three at least deserve a special mention: the first was its direct involvement in the establishment, recruitment and organisation of the stay-behind group known as GLADIO, under NATO orders. SIFAR was instrumental in the selection of its operatives and provided the necessary secrecy to cover for the materiel and resources being funnelled into the project, which was to be a counterinsurgency and anti-communist force to be activated in case far left forces ever took power in Italy, to rapidly organise a counter-coup and seize back power for the Western allies. Aside from this stated purpose, the uttermost secrecy and the web of lies and deceit that surrounded GLADIO saw it or its members either directly or indirectly involved in almost all of the murders and massacres that shook Italy from the 70s up until the 90s. While no connection was ever definitively proven, GLADIO has remained an infamous part of Italian popular culture to this day.
The second scandal regarded a massive, generalized profiling operation that targeted politicians, clergymen and other public figures with purposes completely unrelated to the service's objectives; this practice had emerged during the long leadership of General Giovanni De Lorenzo (from 1955 to 1962), it had continued under his successors, and had extremely evident blackmailing objectives, as it had led to the creation of more than 157,000 files (the so-called fascicoli del SIFAR, the SIFAR files), of which 34,000 were beyond doubt illegal in either their acquisition methods, purpose or even existence.
In addition to this, the weekly magazine "L'Espresso" revealed the Piano Solo, prepared in secrecy by General De Lorenzo during his tenure as Commander-in-Chief of the Carabinieri, Italy’s militarized gendarmerie, with the support of then-President of the Republic Antonio Segni. The plan essentially delineated the basics of a coup to be carried out by the Carabinieri, who would have seized control of the capital by military force and kidnapped political opposers and “dangerous individuals”, carrying them to a GLADIO facility in Sardinia. While never actuated, socialist politicians and members of the left wing of the ruling centrist party, Democrazia Cristiana, attested to the fact that President Segni used this plan as a bargaining chip against them during a government and monetary crisis in 1964, in a period dubbed il tintinnio di sciabole (the sabre rattling)
2. The SID, the AARR and the Strategy of Tension
Just before the profiling scandal was revealed to the public, SIFAR was renamed SID (Servizio Informazioni Difesa, Defence Information Service) by Presidential Decree No. 1477 of November 18, 1965. The choice of a new name was rather unfortunate, as the secret service of the defunct Fascist Republic of Salò, the rump state which had collaborated with the Third Reich after the Armistice of Cassibile, was also called SID. While apparently a reform, the service’s personnel and structure remained almost unchanged; as evidenced by the legislative tool used to enact it, the Decreto del Presidente della Repubblica or Presidential Decree, there was no parliamentary debate or specific law to regulate the functioning of this new service.
SID adopted the doctrines of unorthodox warfare for anti-communist purposes, publicly discussed at an infamous conference on “revolutionary warfare” at the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Rome in May 1965, where among the attendees one could find high-ranking military officials, entrepreneurs, politicians, journalists, and a group of 20 university students (most of them neo-fascists); figures whose names would appear a few years later in the chronicles of investigations into the most serious subversive events of the Years of Lead, starting from the Piazza Fontana massacre.
The SID is in fact mostly known for its repeated involvement in the investigations on the so-called strategy of tension: there were documented, dense, stable, and high-level links between military intelligence and extremist right-wing organizations, in particular Ordine Nuovo and the mysterious Rosa dei Venti, a quasi-military neo-fascist group that was said to have originated within the Piano Solo and was often dubbed SID parallelo, or parallel SID. Its members were well connected within the military hierarchies of SID and oftentimes were service members themselves, and belong to a secondary hidden hierarchy that, according to some testimonies, had its leadership in the CIA. The Service’s officers also played a misleading role in investigations into the main terrorist attacks between 1969 and 1974, often placing false trails and hiding or destroying evidence of the real culprits behind the attacks.
The SID’s most infamous hour came with the Golpe Borghese of 1970, a coup attempt organised by prominent neo-fascist and self-styled “Black Prince” Junio Valerio Borghese, a former navy officer in the Tenth MAS flotilla of the Fascist Navy. Borghese, alongside several conspirators in the Armed Forces, had the intention of seizing power in Rome and transforming Italy into an authoritarian regime like those of Greece and Spain at the time; the operation was well underway in the middle of the night, with several thousand soldiers mobilizing and hundreds of police officers loyal to Borghese ready to storm key places in the capital, when the Black Prince himself aborted the coup, ordered his conspirators to cease operations and fled to Spain not long after. SID’s utter failure to discover and counteract this coup, alongside the fact that many of the conspirators had strong ties with the service itself or at least with its “parallel” hierarchy, led investigators and the public to believe that the Service was either complicit with the plot or so heavily infiltrated that it was unable to prevent it.
The scandals that came to light, especially through the investigation into the Piazza Fontana massacre and the Golpe Borghese investigation, dealt with their increasingly serious nature and troublesome frequency many fatal blows to the service's credibility and made ever more urgent the need for a real reform of the services, a topic that had already ended up on the agenda of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the SIFAR established in 1969. After preparatory works carried out by another special parliamentary commission, the reform was finally achieved with Law No. 801 of October 24, 1977.
Before delving into this Law, a special mention should be made for a contemporaneous sort of civilian counterpart to the SID, that arose around the 60s and saw its apex during the Years of Lead and the strategy of tension; while not organised under a specific name or given actual power as an internal counterespionage civil secret service, the Ministry of the Interior operated a network of offices present in every Questura in each major Italian city and headed by the Ufficio Affari Riservati, or AARR for short.
These offices, called uffici politici, were staffed by policemen and were tasked with a variety of surveillance tasks on both left and right wing agitators, as well as serving as the intelligence branches for the investigations conducted by police and prosecutors: their reach was vast and in the 50s and 60s their files rivalled those gathered by the SIFAR in terms of both size and illegality: a strong rivalry was in fact alleged between the two, with some inferring that General Di Lorenzo’s profiling operation was initiated in response to the AARR’s own activities.
The main office at the Ministry of the Interior, as well as several local political offices, were filled to the brim and headed by former agents of the OVRA, the secret police that had existed under Fascism in Italy and was one of the main instruments of enforcement in the hands of the regime: while some of the main heads of the OVRA were arrested and tried after the Second World War, the occupying United States insisted that most of its leadership in general be let off without any major consequence, to speed up the reconstitution of the state security apparatus of Italy, which the Americans believed to be in danger of falling prey to communist or other left wing forces. The Togliatti amnesty of 1946, aimed at avoiding a second civil war in post-bellum Italy by refusing to prosecute former members of fascist organisations and allowing them back into their old professions, also contributed significantly to the concentration of neo-fascists into these offices.
3. The first true reform: Law 801/1977
The aforementioned Law introduced the duality of the secret services, or more correctly formalized it, since the AARR had previously de factoperformed the function of a civilian intelligence service parallel to the military one. Thus, two bodies were established in place of the now defunct SID: the Servizio Informazioni e Sicurezza MIlitare (Military Intelligence and Security Service), or SISMI, and the Servizio Informazioni e Sicurezza DEmocratica, (Democratic Intelligence and Security Service), or SISDE.
At the same time, an Executive Committee for Information and Security Services (CESIS) was established, with its main function being coordination between SISMI and SISDE as well as between them and the Presidency of the Council, the political authority to which Law 801 attributed “general political responsibility” (Art.1), explicating for the first time that the services responded at least nominally to the Executive; the Law contextually introduced in Article 11 forms of parliamentary control over intelligence through a special permanent committee.
SISMI essentially inherited the SID’s old personnel and especially its archives, and its mission statement tasked it with intelligence gathering “for the military defence of the independence and integrity of the State from any danger, threat or aggression, including counterespionage”. As such, SISMI was placed under the oversight and purview of the Ministry of Defence, and its range of operations remained rather expansive, being authorised to act both on foreign and domestic soil. However, the stronger parliamentary and executive oversight placed upon it prevented it for the most part from falling into the same corruptions of its predecessors: SISMI’s main problems came instead in 1981, when its Director (and an astounding number of other high ranking military officers, including former SID directors, industrialists, politicians and notables of all kinds) was found to be in the rolls of the P2 Masonic lodge, which itself had been involved in almost all of the massacres and murder of the Years of Lead, and in some cases was thought to be their main planner.
SISDE, on the other hand, came as the new, more official form of the old Interior Ministry AARR offices. Its mission statement tasked it with intelligence gathering “for the defence of the democratic State and the institutions posed by the Constitution at its foundations, against anyone intending to attack it and against any form of eversion”. As such, it was placed under the oversight and purview of the Ministry of the Interior, which continued to operate its political offices through the newly rebranded UCIGOS office.
The law also intervened on the discipline of state secrets (Article 12), mainly following the controversies raised by the previous so-called “political-military secret” (segreto politico-militare) during the investigations into the massacres and subversive projects of the Years of Lead, and in particular following a sentence of the Constitutional Court prompted by magistrates who contested its legitimacy when opposed to them by SID agents. The ultimate authority in the matter was placed within the Presidency of the Council, while a provision explicitly stated that "in no case can acts aimed at subverting the constitutional order be subject to state secrets", a formulation that, however, proved to be rather simplistic and insufficient.
The 1977 reform, although significant in its attempts at placing the rabid and wanton services under some sort of oversight, had clear and present limitations. Firstly, there was significant overlap and competition between SISMI and SISDE, and their roles and interaction were often conflictual: the clear-cut distinction between military and civilian service, a wholly and uniquely Italian invention, compounded this lack of cooperation. Secondly, SISDE itself never truly operated at its full capacity, since most of its work was taken up without much hesitation by the new UCIGOS office and its peripherical DIGOS offices in each questura, which provided far better and immediate control over intelligence on home soil.
In a short time, the limits of the state secrecy discipline introduced by law 801/77 also became quite apparent: on the one hand, no time limit had been set for the segreto di Stato; on the other hand, given the absolute impossibility of external control over the contents of the intelligence services' archive, in the event of judicial investigations, intelligence officers could in fact prevent access to information without formally invoking secrecy. The fact that the services' archives were effectively uncontrollable (other critical factors leading to this were their methods of management and the high number of unrecorded depots spread throughout Italy), led authorities to suspect the persistence of the practice of illegal dossiering, which led to several inconclusive inquiries through the 80s.
4. The Services after 2007
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The Law n.124/2007 served mainly as a wide sweeping reform of the Italian Intelligence services, which at the time still operated under the 1977 Law with only a few modifications from the 90s; as one can imagine, the services of those years still enjoyed their less than enviable reputation, being seen by the country as particularly susceptible to corruption and undue influences at best, and wholly infiltrated and actively working against the State at worst; their nebulous involvement in scandals, illegal profiling, secret operations and terrorism on Italian soil all throughout the Cold War had completely tarnished their image in the eyes of the public.
Namely, the SISMI military foreign intelligence was mainly known for its nefarious tradition of secret unauthorised operations, dating back to the 1960s and the SIFAR files scandal, as well as the Piano Solo and Golpe Borghese coup attempts, and the SID’s involvement in the Strategy of Tension. In the 70s and 80s, their infiltration by, or active involvement in, paramilitary and clandestine stay-behind organizations under NATO purview was laid out with particular shame when investigations into neofascist terrorist attacks revealed that the bombs and weapons used had come from GLADIO and SISMI secret depots. The P2 scandal highlighted another layer of hidden loyalties, uncovering a power nucleus within SISMI, dubbed SuperSISMI or SuperEsse, which operated outside of any control and often legality, mimicking the old SID parallelo’s own secret hierarchy and CIA affiliation.
However, the final straws for SISMI came with the new millennium and a few other high-profile scandals: the so-called Nigergate, where the Italian services (allegedly under request of the CIA) fabricated intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program that was then circulated to the MI6 and other European services, leading to the invasion of Iraq by the United States military; the Abu Omar kidnapping, where the eponymous Milanese imam was subjected to a CIA-sponsored and SISMI-executed extraordinary rendition that saw him transported to Egypt and thence tortured by way of enhanced interrogation techniques; the Telecom-SISMI scandal, where members of the latter collaborated with favourable elements in Telecom’s security to illegally intercept conversations between left-wing politicians and journalists who were investigating, among other things, the previous two scandals. True to its traditions, a secret archive was also discovered during the inquiries into the Telecom-SISMI scandal.
SISDE, while not exempt from its own share of scandals, had remained mostly understrength and underfunded throughout its existence, and was only brought to the forefront when investigators discovered its leadership was funnelling money and funding meant for the service into their own pockets (the so-called fondi neri, “dark funds” scandal), probably compounding if not outright generating the aforementioned manpower and resource shortages, with the consequent inactivity of the service and its overshadowing by its military counterpart and the UCIGOS office.
All in all, this slew of compromising incidents as well as the trials that followed served as the death knell for the old system and prompted the Italian Government to enact L. 142/2007 as an organic reform of both the State secret procedures and the State security apparatus, to solve those gaping issues the Law 801/1977 had left open. Specifically, the Law reorganised the intelligence community as the SISR, Sistema di Informazione per la Sicurezza della Repubblica (Intelligence System for the security of the Republic), attributing political responsibility for the secret services’ operations directly and singularly to the Prime Minister of Italy and replacing the previous organisational structure that saw responsibility being shared by the Ministers of Defence and the Interior and created serious uncertainty in terms of culpability and transparency.
Assisting and counselling the Prime Minister in his functions is the CISR, an inter-ministerial committee composed of the Defence, Interior, Foreign Affairs, Economy, Economic Development and Environment Ministers; its roles are mostly advisory, but it holds the important functions of determining the budget for the secret services and selecting what information may be circulated to the Ministers, the Ministries and their staff, as well as concurring in the nomination of the agency directors.
Also assisting the Prime Minister is a so-called “Delegated Authority”, Autorità Delegata, usually an Undersecretary of State that handles the day-to-day operation of the SISR. This figure serves as the junction between the Prime Minister and the DIS, Dipartimento delle Informazioni per la Sicurezza (Security Information Department), which is headed by a Director General and itself serves as a node of coordination and strategic analysis of the intel gathered by the two main intelligence agencies, AISI and AISE, respectively the interior and foreign organisations. DIS can also acquire, with previous and mandatory authorization from a Judge, any and all information over ongoing investigations, even if it is covered by the so-called “segreto d’indagine” (investigative privacy) which usually bars any third party from access.
AISI is tasked with internal surveillance, counterterrorism and counterintelligence operations, collaborating closely with the State Police’s own so called “prevention police” service, better known as DIGOS (the heirs to the old political offices), while AISE only recruits from the ranks of the Italian security and military forces and operates foreign intelligence gathering operations, as well as coordinating closely with intelligence units of the Armed Forces in planning and executing missions on foreign soil. The double structure is a carry-over from the previous disposition and the SISMI-SISDE, military vs civilian duality, but while internal structures have not seen noticeable changes, their fields of operation and purpose have been revolutionised by the enactment of the 2007 reform: the tasks of the two organisations have been more clearly defined and their mission statements have gravitated noticeably towards the more common western dichotomy of internal vs external service, with a clear legal distinction between home soil counterespionage authority and powers, and foreign soil espionage and intelligence, with its own set of specific and mandatory authorisations and clearances. AISI is prevented by Law 124 from ever operating outside of Italy, whilst AISE operates by mandate exclusively outside of Italian territory.
While the old contrast between military and civilian recruitment has remained in force, the line has started to blur as the DIS, and most recently the ACN (Agenzia per la Cybersicurezza Nazionale, National Cybersecurity Agency) represent strong points of convergence and coordination between the two agencies, recruiting from both civilian authorities and military officer ranks. Recruitment itself has also been revolutionised, as the previous system relied on a “call-up” methodology whereby potential agents were referred to the Services for recruitment or were themselves called up by the Service with a job proposal; especially in the latter years, this system had lent itself to rampant nepotism and corruption. The new recruitment process operates mainly through spontaneous candidatures or more transparent, while still secretive, concorsi interni, internal examinations whereby the scores of the candidates determine their admission.
A new Parliamentary Committee for the security of the Republic, the COPASIR, has also been given oversight responsibility over the whole intelligence structure, tasked to verify with systematic precision that the system is working both legally, under the dispositions of the Constitution and the 2007 Law, and exclusively in the interest of the Republic and its institutions. The Prime Minister of Italy himself has an obligation to report to the Committee whenever asked to, and COPASIR holds substantive probing powers in regard to the details of the AISE and AISI operations, which they can audit at will without any opposition of secrecy.
The whole structure is meant to introduce a complex system of checks and balances to increase oversight and cross-examination of operations, seeing as one of the main issues with the previous system was due to the unclear chain of command and the broad discretionary powers enjoyed by the agents of SISMI and SISDE. COPASIR serves as the ultimate external controller, while the President has to coordinate with both the CISR and DIS and does not hold direct and immediate control of the services themselves. The President however serves as the clear and ultimate repository of all responsibility in matters of Intelligence and security, and especially with regard to the imposition of the State secret. DIS holds a monopoly over the information flow from the twin agencies, and is itself controlled by the Autorità Delegata, while CISR’s authority over the budget is a powerful bargaining chip against any possible Presidential overreach.
5. The State Secret doctrine after 2007
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The new laws on the matter aimed mostly at solving the old problems from Law 801/1977, as well as the more recent concerns that arose in the wake of the Abu Omar scandal: the reform passed just in time for the first instance trial on the subject of Omar’s extraordinary rendition, and allowed the government to shroud the old SISMI’s involvement in the matter with the cover of a newer and more solid framework of State secrecy.
This brand-new State Secret may cover “any act, document, information or activity whose diffusion may bring harm to the integrity of the Republic […]”. “Facts of eversion of the constitutional order, of terrorism, of premeditated mass murder […] of mafia association […]” may not however under any circumstance be covered by secret. A double layer of control has been put in place to verify that the apposition of the secret is not unconstitutional or illegal: control into the merit of the matter lies within the COPASIR, who is briefed by the President on the contents of the matter before deliberating, while the Constitutional Court may review its legitimacy whenever opposed by a functionary of the Services.
This form of control is far more substantive than the one that preceded it, and it is at least in theory meant to limit its discretionary application by the Government and the President to cover for the Service’s misdeeds. The Constitutional Court interpretative orientation on the topic has however been rather conservative, with a restrictive interpretation of the wording above being enforced: in the Abu Omar case, for example, the extraordinary rendition of the imam was considered coverable with the secret, since Law 124 does not mention acts that are contrary to the Constitution’s inspiring principles (such as extraordinary renditions) and only mentions those of actual “eversion, terrorism or mafia”.
The new secret has also a fixed duration of 15 years, with the option of a 15-year renewal and the only exception being deals based on international accords with other sovereign countries. This action was taken in conjunction with the creation of a unified archive of the secret services, and periodic mandatory deposits of intelligence documentation in the Central State Archive, to quell the practice of illegal dossiering and the frequent instances of secret archives known only to a select few within the system itself.
Sitografia
- https://www.normattiva.it/uri-res/N2Ls?urn:nir:stato:legge:1977-10-24;801
- https://www.sicurezzanazionale.gov.it/sisr.nsf/index.html
- https://www.memoria.san.beniculturali.it/uffici/-/office/detail/be3c59cc-71ff-4f64-a3e2-912d9595e559%23580c5ad9-5964-4f7e-ab4e-99c2f7866d64/Servizi+segreti+%28SIFAR+%E2%80%93+SID+%E2%80%93+SISMI+SISDE+%E2%80%93+AISI+AISE%29- La Repubblica
- https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/1990/11/09/la-tentazione-del-golpe.html
- https://www.ilpost.it/2021/01/22/servizi-segreti-italiani/
- https://gnosis.aisi.gov.it/sito/Rivista3.nsf/servnavig/23
- https://www.safetysecuritymagazine.com/articoli/la-tutela-delle-informazioni-classificate-in-italia/
Conclusions
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Overall, the history of the Italian Secret Services is truly a complex one, where the normative pretences of a Western democracy have often been met with a rubber wall of silence and half-truths, covering mad plots and shadowy deviations that for the longest time made it essentially impossible to regulate their activities and truly bring them to heel. The latest reform has undeniably been a gargantuan step in the right direction, but only posterity may judge whether or not the Services have truly been brought back into the republican, constitutional and democratic fold. For now, the jury remains out.