The CIA’s Odd Man Out
[Quote:]
So last week 26 Americans, most of them CIA employees, went on trial in Milan for kidnapping, albeit in absentia and to little notice here. They are fugitives from justice, with international warrants issued for their arrests.
The central figure in the case has always been “Mr. Bob,” Robert Seldon Lady, a bear-like man with a pasha’s grin who spent a lifetime in the CIA.
He and his wife loved Italy so much they bought a house in the foothills of the Alps and retired there in 2004.
Months later an urgent call came, warning Lady to get out of Dodge — don’t even pack.
The cops were on their way.
Tipped off, the Ladys successfully fled the country. But they left behind a bonanza of evidence in their dream home, not the least of which was a CIA surveillance photo of the kidnap victim, Osama Mustafa Hasan Nasr, known as Abu Omar.
How dumb can you get? Sometimes it seems the CIA’s ineptitude knows no bounds.
[..]
“I’ll probably be convicted,” Lady told Cole. “But I won’t go to the trial, and I’ll never see Italy again.”
In the ultimate irony, his house could end up the property of al Qaeda suspect Abu Omar, who’s recovering in Egypt from wounds suffered at the hands of Egyptian interrogators, to whom the CIA delivered him in February 2003.
Italian investigators, tracing Lady’s cell phone calls, put him in Cairo the same time Omar was there.
So it’s hard to be too sympathetic for his plight.
Except for this: He was abandoned on the field.
The CIA has disowned him. It hasn’t provided him a lawyer, or helped him pay for one. Lady is on his own.
[..]
“Leaders used to protect those below from the top as they went up,” Lady groused. “It’s a way of harnessing the loyalty of those they led.”
He is bitter. “Now they protect the top. They manage down and step on anyone below.”
I bet CIA campus recruiters don’t talk about that.