🧵 Italian Navy officer Giulio Pistono was known as the “lord of spies” in Andalusia, Spain, during World War II. He was in charge of coordinating the Italian sabotage of British ships in the Bay of Gibraltar. Pistono, an engineer, served as a commander in the Italian Navy and later became the Consul General in Algeciras, a Spanish port city located across from the British outpost of strategic importance, the Rock of Gibraltar, in the Mediterranean.

🧵 In the mid-1960s, numerous Chinese posters were put up in various cities throughout Italy. This coincided with the Italian Communist Party, led by Luigi Longo (pictured), being targeted in a strategic and unconventional psychological warfare campaign. These posters, praising Mao Zedong and Iosif Stalin, announced the upcoming formation of a Maoist Communist Party in Italy, which would act as a competitor and opposition to the Italian Communist Party.

🧵 “Every proficient intelligence officer, equipped with his cypher or mini-recorder, always carries a notebook with a list of recommended restaurants in his own country and overseas,” wrote Federico Umberto D’Amato, a key figure in many Italian intrigues after the WW2. D’Amato joined the police force during World War II, after the armistice proclamation on September 8, 1943, and worked under OSS’ James Angleton. From 1943 to 1945, he conducted counterespionage operations.

🧵 The Italian supermarket chain Esselunga was founded by a group of American entrepreneurs led by Nelson Rockefeller and inspired by the CIA. The idea originated from James Hugh Angleton, a collaborator of the Office of Strategic Services, and is also known as the father of James Jesus Angleton, who served as chief of counterintelligence for the CIA from 1954 to 1975.

🧵 Few people know that Mike Harari, an operative of Mossad and the architect behind the elimination of the Palestinian individuals responsible for the Munich massacre in 1972, passed away in 2014 at 87. In his youth, he worked as a radio operator in Milan, Italy. Similarly, not many people know that Operation Wrath of God, orchestrated by Mossad to eliminate individuals linked to the 1972 Munich massacre, started in Rome.

https://twitter.com/GabrieleCarrer/status/1629415807917719552

🧵 In 1991, a Soviet diplomat serving in Italy defected to the US and revealed the existence of a network of 30 Italians and legal and illegal officers from both the KGB and GRU. The then President of the Republic, Francesco Cossiga, later called it Operation Red October 2. Last week, I told you the story of Raffaele Natale, a Carabiniere who had served at the Italian Embassy in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall. He had been honey-trapped by the Stasi.

https://twitter.com/GabrieleCarrer/status/1697912279256203596

🧵 Operation Postbox was Emilio Lussu’s plan to initiate an anti-fascist insurrection in Sardinia with the support of the Allied forces, which was meant to be the spark for the uprising throughout Italy. It relied on the backing of British intelligence. Myer Grienspan arrived on the evening of January 23, 1942, from Gibraltar to Barnstaple in the county of Devon with only a light suitcase.

Il generale Roberto Vannacci è stato addetto militare dell’ambasciata italiana a Mosca fino a metà dello scorso anno 2022.

È rientrato in Italia a seguito delle ritorsioni russe per l’espulsione da parte dell’Italia di 30 diplomatici russi dopo l’invasione russa dell’Ucraina. Si legge sul sito dell’Istituto Geografico Militare:

“Dal 2020 è impiegato quale Addetto per la Difesa presso la Federazione Russa, con accreditamenti secondari in Bielorussia, Armenia e Turkmenistan. Dichiarato ‘persona non grata’ dalle autorità russe a seguito delle...

🧵 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.

🧵Soviet espionage in Italy was highly active during the Cold War. Additionally, two other countries from the Warsaw Pact were very active in espionage in Rome: Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. The KGB and the GRU operated in Italy on behalf of the USSR, with the latter interested in both military and technical-industrial espionage.

🧵 In 1972, the Italian government deceived the United States and, with a clever and audacious move, supplied Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya with M-113 vehicles produced by Oto Melara in La Spezia under a US license. As I told you last week, in 1971, Italy had managed to thwart a coup attempt against Gaddafi by blocking a ship loaded with weapons departing from the port of Trieste.

https://twitter.com/GabrieleCarrer/status/1677611162307887106

🧵 In the spring of 1971, the Italian intelligence thwarted an initiative by Libyan exiles to overthrow the Gaddafi regime. The “Operation Hilton” helped to restore Italian-Libyan relations. In 1969, after Muammar Gaddafi had seized power in Libya, relations between Italy and its former colony were severely damaged, mainly due to Libya’s stance against Italians in Libya and Italian industries active in various sectors, including the oil industry.

🧵 In 1971, the Italian intelligence accurately predicted the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the fourth conflict between Arabs and Israelis, and warned their Israeli counterparts of how it would unfold. However, Israeli intelligence did not take heed of their Italian colleagues’ advice. Last week, I told you about “Operation Venti,” which refers to the collaboration agreement between Italian intelligence and Israeli intelligence dating back to 1975.

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🧵 In 1975, Italy and Israel agreed to a secret deal to strengthen the security of Israel’s borders and prevent potential military attacks against it. This information was revealed in April when Italian intelligence documents were declassified. The Italian SISMI (Military Intelligence and Security Service) had strong relations with major Palestinian organizations and had established a significant network of informants in the Middle East.

🧵 In light of his life and passions, the security of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who passed away this week, has always been a focal point of attention. A story from former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon serves to demonstrate this. Sharon served as the Prime Minister of Israel from 2001 to 2006, during the same period when Berlusconi served as the Italian Prime Minister for the second time.

🧵 Similar to Israeli intelligence, Italian intelligence can count on the support of the diaspora.

This was described by Admiral Fulvio Martini, who was the head of SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare) from 1984 to 1991, the Italian military intelligence. The Mossad “is facilitated by the fact that, being the Service of the Jewish nation, it can have recourse to all the Jews scattered around the world”, Martini wrote in his book “Nome in codice Ulisse” (2000).

🧵 The tragedy on Lake Maggiore, in which two Italian intelligence officials, an Israeli intelligence official, and a Russian citizen lost their lives, has fuelled conspiracy theories. For this reason, it is crucial to understand what the Italian intelligence can and cannot do. Both Haaretz and The New York Times have titled articles on the “conspiracy theories” fueled by the limited and confusing information we have about the incident.

“it's no secret that experienced and skilled retirees from the security establishment, including the Mossad, are periodically called up for reserve duty of sorts pursuant to special contracts” haaretz.com/israel-news/20… “Only then did the Mossad permit disclosure of his name – Erez Shimoni – as had already been reported in the Italian media. But that was not his real name. It's standard procedure for Mossad personnel, particularly in operations, to use an assumed name.”

Sottosegretario alla Presidenza del Consiglio Alfredo Mantovano: “Dal momento dell’insediamento di questo Governo non ho mai autorizzato, quale Autorità delegata per la sicurezza della Repubblica, alcuna forma di intercettazione a carico di esponenti politici o di giornalisti”. “Poiché il sen. Matteo Renzi evoca uno scenario che, se vero, sarebbe gravissimo, l’autorità giudiziaria valuterà ogni eventuale accertamento, a garanzia delle istituzioni e dell’ordinamento democratico”.

Today, Henry Kissinger turns 100 (Happy Birthday!). A CIA memo dated November 5, 1974, describes American intelligence's concern over the then Secretary of State's perception in Italy, where the Left feared foreign interference. Here is what the memo reads

«1 The current political turmoil in Rome has been marked by frequent allegations from the left of US interference in Italian domestic affairs, Leftist accusations have not been directed exclusively at CIA, but the Agency has taken its share of knocks.

During the Second World War, Maputo (then named Lourenço Marques) was a hotbed of spies. In May 1943, Alfredo Manna, an ardent fascist and spy-master of the Italian consul Umberto Campini, was kidnapped by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). Intelligence cooperation concerning the Indian Ocean, where submarines from the three powers hunted Allied shipping, was one crucial indicator of how Germany, Italy, and Japan worked together during the Second World War.