Italy Replaces Military Intelligence Chief

The Italian government Monday replaced the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, who is under investigation in the alleged CIA abduction of an Egyptian cleric in Milan in 2003, according to government officials.
SISMI director Nicolo Pollari was replaced after a special Cabinet meeting, along with the heads of the civilian intelligence agency and the agency that coordinates the country's intelligence services.

The government said the replacements were part of a broader overhaul of the intelligence services. The heads of the two non-military services are not under investigation in the alleged abduction.


''After a few years these positions of delicate responsibility must find their natural rotation,'' Premier Romano Prodi was quoted as saying by news agency Apcom.

Pollari had long resisted widespread calls for his resignation - which intensified after he became the highest-ranking Italian official named in the investigation.

Pollari faced questioning in July by prosecutors in Milan, who recently renewed their request for Italy to ask Washington to extradite 26 Americans, all but one believed to be CIA agents, in the alleged abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a Muslim cleric also known as Abu Omar.

Nasr was allegedly abducted as part of a CIA ''extraordinary rendition'' program in which terrorism suspects are transferred to third countries where some allegedly are subjected to torture.

The cleric was allegedly flown out of northern Italy from a military base in Aviano, and, according to the prosecutors, taken to Egypt, where he says he was tortured.

Prosecutors allege that Pollari and other top officials of SISMI collaborated with the Americans to abduct the cleric.

Two of Pollari's top aides, Gustavo Pignero and Marco Mancini, were arrested this summer and other SISMI officials placed under investigation as part of the case. Pignero has since died of natural causes, while Mancini is said by his lawyers to be collaborating with prosecutors in implicating his boss.

Pollari has insisted in questioning before parliamentary committees that Italian intelligence had no role in Nasr's disappearance from Milan, where the cleric lived and worked.

Conservative leader Silvio Berlusconi, who was in power at the time of the alleged abduction, has staunchly defended Pollari, maintaining that his government and SISMI were not informed of the alleged operation and had not taken part in it.

Prodi's center-left government has refrained from backing the allegations against Pollari, but has been more lukewarm in its defense of the spy chief and has maintained that the question of whether America told Italy of the supposed plan to kidnap Nasr is a state secret.

Pollari, 63, took the helm of SISMI in 2001 after holding key posts with Italy's financial police and CESIS.

Even before being drawn into the Nasr investigation, he faced difficult times at SISMI.

In 2005, he dealt with the fallout over the death in Iraq of top officer Nicola Calipari, who was killed by U.S. gunfire as he headed by car to Baghdad airport with a recently released Italian hostage.

The incident strained relations between Italy and the United States, and the two countries issued separate reports on the shooting after failing to agree on a shared version of events.

That year, Pollari also faced calls for resignation after several news reports in leftist daily La Repubblica alleged that he had knowingly passed forged documents to the United States suggesting that Saddam Hussein had been seeking uranium in Africa - information that was used to bolster the case for the invasion Iraq.

Pollari denied that SISMI had any hand in disseminating the fake dossier, which detailed a fictitious Iraqi deal to buy 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger.

The Cabinet meeting Monday was called ahead of Prodi's departure later for Egypt on a long-scheduled visit to the country.

Replacing Pollari is Admiral Bruno Branciforte, a fleet commander and former head of navy intelligence. The 59-year-old officer's experience also includes stints as navy attache in Washington, D.C., and as Italian representative at U.S. Central Command in Tampa during the war in Afghanistan.

Gen. Mario Mori, an officer from Carabinieri paramilitary police, was replaced at the helm of the civilian intelligence agency, SISDE, by Franco Gabrielli, a top anti-terrorism police official. Gen. Giuseppe Cucchi, a retired army officer with experience in local and international military politics, replaced government official Emilio Del Mese at the cordinating body CESIS.

Intellpuke: You can read this Associated Press article, filed from Rome, Italy, in context here: www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Italy-Secret-Services.html?hp&ex=1164085200&en=9db363053999e12c&ei=5094&partner=homepage


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