An "Espionage Powerhouse" in the Shadow of Telecom Italia
    By Eric Jozsef
    Libération

    Friday 22 September 2006

    Carlo de Benedetti, Calisto Tanzi, Diego Della Valle, the Benetton family ... Practically the whole Italian economic "who's who" was being monitored, as well as a few politicians, journalists, and sports personalities. At the end of two years of investigation, the Milan court ordered the arrest of 21 people, including several former managers at Telecom Italia. "In the shadow" of the country's main telecommunications group, "an espionage powerhouse without precedent in the history of our country was born," worried the the daily paper La Repubblica's director, Ezio Mauro, in an editorial yesterday entitled "Attack Against Democracy."

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    Along with his friend Emanuele Cipriani, boss of a private detective agency, a former official responsible for security systems at Pirelli, then at Telecom Italia, Giuliano Tavaroli - considered to be at the heart of the plan - established a data bank fed by illegal wiretaps. Apart from certain employees of Telecom Italia, hundreds of personalities - in particular bankers and even shareholders of the telecoms group, such as the Benetton family - were thus illegally monitored since 1997, for a still obscure motive. "At the present state of the investigations, the purpose of these operations eludes us," admitted the Milanese magistrates, who wonder who the sponsors of this espionage were. Was the president of Telecom Italia, Marco Tronchetti Provera, who resigned last week after an argument with the government with respect to a restructuring of the group, aware of Tavaroli's activities? "In practice, Tavaroli never reported to anyone," the prosecutors say. Officially, Tavaroli "was responsible to the president only," that is, to Tronchetti Provera.

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    For the moment, Tavaroli and Cipriani are accused of having corrupted police and officials to violate the "data banks of the Ministries of Interior, Economics, and Justice." They are also charged with "criminal conspiracy": their computer archives, "more complete than those of the police," could have served as a means of "pressure, conditioning, threat and extortion." Tavaroli's name had already appeared in similar fashion in investigations of illegal eavesdropping on candidates Alessandra Mussolini (extreme right) and Piero Marazzo (center left) during the Latium regional elections in the spring of 2005. And also within the framework of the CIA kidnapping of the radical imam Abu Omar in February 2003 in Milan. A great friend of the Italian military secret services' Number 2, Marco Mancini, Tavaroli is suspected of having supplied him with the telephone numbers of members of the Muslim community. To make the scandal even more sulfurous, an official of Telecom Italia Mobile, Adamo Bove, was discovered dead on July 21. After collaborating with the justice system, he committed suicide by throwing himself off a viaduct in a Naples suburb.