Free A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial by Steve Hendricks Page B

his flying lessons and refused to pay for an operation for his wife, he defected. His testimony in a U.S. courtroom helped convict some of the al-Qaedans behind the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
    Shaaban also gave miscellaneous help to terrorists in Tunisia, Egypt, and the United States. One of those terrorists was Ramzi Yousef, who, it seemed, had spent time in Milan before bombing the World Trade Center and who may have received his false Italian passport from Shaaban or one of his lieutenants. This intercourse, along with the phone calls between Milan and the cell in New York, was among the earliest clues that all was not well behind the garage door on Viale Jenner.
    THE POLICE of Italy were then, as today, the least encumbered in Western Europe when it came to tapping phones. They tapped about 100,000 a year, for a total of 1.5 million calls. The per capita rate, about 170 taps for every 100,000 people, was three times that of their nearest rival in Western Europe and orders of magnitude beyond the rate—1 for every 100,000 people—claimed by the United States. After the emergence of disturbing signs from Viale Jenner, the counterterrorists at Milan’s DIGOS tapped the phones of Shaaban and his acolytes. What they heard disturbed them, and they opened an investigation they called Sphinx. For more than a year, they listened and watched.
    They learned that a cornerstone of Shaaban’s work was a document-forging enterprise that served terrorists across Europe and that may have created Yousef’s false passport. When fully realized, the enterprise was highly compartmentalized: one team acquired blank documents, another team doctored them, another delivered them to the newly minted man. Often the doctorers did not know the true name of the client or his mission, and the client did not know who had made his papers. Where possible, the forgers supplied complementary papers: a passport and a visa, a driver’s license and a residency permit. The best documents were stolen ones that had already been used and stamped and that the forgers altered only slightly—for example by inserting a new picture but leaving the name and other data untouched. If the client could pass for a European, say an olive-skinned Italian or Spaniard, he was given a European identity. If time and money permitted, he would test his new papers by traveling to an irrelevant country before going to his ultimate destination, which, if he were stopped, would not be discovered. Apparently the Milanese scribes were skillful, because their clients were not often stopped. The scribes’ work refreshed the meaning of the “fine Italian hand,” which term had arisen in the Quattrocento to compliment Florentine copyists of the Bible but which now applied to copyists guided by a superseding text.
    Their raw material—the blank or stolen documents—generally came from abroad. One of their sources was a Serbian gang that burgled city halls in Belgium, which tended to be lightly guarded on weekends and which held hundreds of blank passports, driver’s licenses, and official stamps. The Serbs sold the passports for between $700 and $2,300 apiece, and often they passed through several buyers before reaching Milan. Other documents came from purse-snatchers and hotel burglars, notably in Madrid, Toronto, and Cairo, and still others from officials in Yemen, Algeria, and Albania who sympathized with the terrorists or were persuaded to sympathy by a small consideration. Because no international authority kept a list of stolen passports, terrorists who needed to move across borders undetected could remake themselves again and again. After 2001, investigators would find terrorists who had changed their identities seventy times.
    “Sphinx” is ancient Greek for “to strangle”—the sphinxes of Egypt may have been given their name for the way lionesses attack the throats of their prey—and in June of 1995 the investigators of Operation Sphinx