Thread by @GabrieleCarrer

🧵 On Valentine’s Day forty years ago, Italian authorities arrested Azeglio Negrino, 45, a Genoese engineer, and Viktor Pronin, 46, a KGB operative under the cover of a senior executive of the Soviet airline Aeroflot, as they exchanged materials “of great strategic importance”.

Negrino was a partner and executive of Microlito, a company in Recco, near Genoa, which had been awarded a contract to reorganize the microfilm process used by the Italian air force.

The exchange between Negrino and Pronin concerned information about the new Tornado military planes being built for NATO by a consortium of Italian, British, and West German companies.

It also included navigation systems, data display and recording subsystems, defensive aid subsystems, and weapon targeting radars.

A few hours after the arrest of Negrino and Pronin, Victor Koniaev, 38 years old, originally from Moscow but residing in Rome for a year and the deputy director of the brokerage company Nafta-Italy, was also arrested.

All three were charged with political-military espionage and faced potential life imprisonment.

Nafta-Italy company dealt with intermediation for purchasing crude oil and petroleum derivatives and had been founded four years prior. Both the president and director were Soviets, like Koniaev.

Investigators suspected that millions of Italian lire (around one hundred million) had been funnelled out of this company’s accounts, which were then transferred by Soviet intelligence to the Genoese industrialist over one and a half years in exchange for strategic materials.

Negrino communicated with Pronin using a device called a “Teledrin,” a pager similar to those used by doctors for urgent communication.

The exchanges of documents and information took place in a shop in the centre of Rome, a photography store owned by Umberto Cantoni.

Negrino travelled from Genoa with the microfilms, arrived in the capital, and left a bag with the requested material in the store. Before leaving, he took an identical bag containing a series of encrypted messages left by Pronin.

The spy story ended on February 14th, 1983, when the Genoese industrialist was arrested by SISMI (Military Intelligence and Security Service) officers as he exited the photography store leaving behind a bag containing around 40,000 pages of microfilmed documents.

This marked the end of a one-year operation conducted by Carabinieri and SISMI officials.

Cantoni helped dismantling the espionage network. He had been contacted by the Soviets in 1978 and asked to use his store as a dead-drop. He alerted service agents, who set the trap after investigations and surveillance.

Negrino was sentenced to six years in prison. He was found guilty of distributing photographic copies (microfilms and microfiches) of classified documents, to which he had access as a partner and executive of Microlito.

Pronin was sentenced to five years and six months in prison but had already returned to his homeland.

The verdict stated, “By engaging in operations related to the receipt of material, the exchange of bags mentioned above, and the retrieval of the material itself, he carried out acts that were clear and unambiguous in their intent for military espionage.”

Italian mathematician Piergiorgio Odifreddi was also involved in the story. He was in the Soviet Union for study purposes and was detained for several months.

As Odifreddi recounts in his book “La Repubblica dei numeri,” the Soviet Union detained him in Siberia as well as two other Italians – journalist Il Giorno’s Luigi Vismara and businessman Michelangelo Mazzarelli – in Moscow.

Odifreddi recounts being sentenced to 14 years for “anti-Soviet activities.” After a diplomatic intervention by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Giulio Andreotti, and President Sandro Pertini, the three Italians were released after six months in exchange for the Soviet spy.

As for Victor Koniaev, the judges found the evidence collected against him by the prosecution to be insufficient.

This is the thirty-second #SpiesInItaly thread of the year (the previous one is below). I am posting one of these stories every Saturday this year. Follow me, and please write for tips.

https://twitter.com/GabrieleCarrer/status/1687746883790258177