Special Report

New flap in Italy over hostage-release policy

By Luciana Bohne
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Download a .pdf file for printing.
Adobe Acrobat Reader required.
Click here to download a free copy.

August 31, 2005—The government-appointed ex-commissioner of the Italian Red Cross, Maurizio Scelli, has recently rekindled the hostage-negotiation political scandal that severely damaged Italy's relations with Washinton, following the killing of top intelligence agent Nicola Calipari at Baghad airport by American troops last March.

Scelli, a loyalist of the Berlusconi clique in power in Rome, seems to have come out of the woodwork, a year after the event, for the sole purpose of embarrassing his cronies, it has been suggested. In an interview in La Stampa, the venerable Turin paper.

Scelli said that mediators for the release of two aid workers, abducted in Baghdad in September 2004, Simona Torretta and Simona Parri, requested the assistance of the Italian Red Cross in treating four combat-wounded "terrorists," wanted by the Americans, as a condition for release of the hostages. A further condition required that the Americans be kept in the dark about these maneuvers. An additional request called for the treatment of a number of children suffering from leukemia.

Scelli affirms that the "terrorists" were hidden under blankets to escape detection by American troops on the way to Red Cross surgical facilities where they were treated. Moreover, Scelli maintains, Calipari, the artificer of the release of journalist Giuliana Sgrena and the victim of the improvised US checkpoint killing on the night of 9 March, himself advised that General Mario Marioli, vice-commander of allied forces in Iraq, not be informed of these compromises in the negotiations for the release of the aid workers.

Calipari's boss, SISMI (Italian secret service bureau) chief Nicolo' Pollari, and his boss, parliamentary undersecretary for intelligence affairs, Gianni Letta, knew and consented to these measures, which means that the negotiations were approved at the topmost levels of the Italian government, behind the back, so to speak, of the Bush administration.

If Italy's former ambassador to the US, Sergio Romano, is correct in claiming that Washington is politically "terrorized" by the thought of an Italian troop withdrawal from Iraq, then Gianni Letta's reported furor behind closed doors at Scelli's revelations is understandable. "Scelli has gone mad! We worked so hard to rebuild relations with Washington after the Calipari incident and now he blows it all up again," said the normally unflappable under-secretary.

Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini quickly moved to assert that, in the matter of the release of the two Simonas, "Italy had not activated behavior intended to hide anything from the ally."

In Washington, Bush spokesmen said that the Scelli incident was an internal matter, which concerned the Italian government.

Meanwhile, the Italian justice department, investigating Calipari's homicide, is preparing to make public its findings, but one conclusion seems to have been leaked. Ballistic analysis of the white Toyota, the Sgrena rescue car fired upon at the fateful rendezvous with American troops, shows that two weapons were used, not one, as the American investigation had concluded last spring.

If Scelli's claims are trustworthy—the government has not denied them—then there is a common link between the release of the Simonas and the release of Giuliana Sgrena. In both cases, Calipari insisted upon keeping Americans in the dark. On his second try, he was killed.

Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. She can be reached at lbohne@edinboro.edu.