HOW AN ITALIAN EX-SPY WHO ALSO HELPED U.S. LANDED IN PRISON HERE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000100990002-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 24, 2010
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: August 7, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/24: CIA-RDP90-00552R000100990002-2
ARTICLE APPEARED WALL STREET JOURNAL
7 August 1985
AGE /
ON P
Tale of Intrigue
How an Italian Ex-Spy
Who Also Helped U.S.
Landed in Prison Here
Case of Francesco Pazienza
Involves Vatican Officials,
Arafat and Italy's Premier
Topic in Reagan-Craxi Talks?
By JONATHAN Kwrrtvy
Staff Reporter of THE WALL SmEF r JOURNAL
NEW YORK-In his orange prison jump
suit, gaunt from gastroenteritis, which he
blames on prison food, 39-year-old Fran-
cesco Pazienza doesn't seem much of a
threat to anyone.
Nor has_ he been accused of any crime
in the U.S. Of the alleged crimes for which
the government of Italy vigorously seeks
his extradition, the only one being consid-
ered in the U.S.. extradition proceedings is
a relatively picayune $250,000 fraud on the
failed Vatican-connected Banco Ambro-
siano, whose late chairman Mr. Pazienza
served as an outside consultant.
But as a free man, Mr. Pazienza rolled
like a loose cannon on the deck of Italian-
American diplomacy. His story is the
strange and curious tale of a highly placed
political operator and spy, put out in the
cold.
Few such prisoners since E. Howard
Hunt, arrested in the Watergate affair a
decade ago, have
commanded so
much official atten-
tion or caused so
much official con-
cern. Before his con-
nection with Banco
Ambrosiano. W.
Pazienza was a top
Italian intelligence
agent. U.S. us-
toms agent has testi-
fied in extradition
proceedings that an
"unidentified group
of people," who he
said might be Italian agents, want Mr. Pa-
zienza dead. William French Smith, the
outgoing U.S. attorney general, had a di-
rect hand in ordering Mr. Pazienza's ar-
rest.
He was arrested March 4, at a time
when, by the government's own admission
later in court, Mr. Pazienza was passing
"highly valuable" information on ter-
rorism and other matters to American
agents.
The next day. March 5, Italian Prime
Minister Bettino Craxi-who in earlier
days had dropped by Mr. Pazienza's house
in Rome to talk business-met with Presi-
dent Reagan in Washington. The main
news from the meeting was that Mr. Craxi
would publicly support President Reagan's
"Star Wars" space-defense program, de-
spite his misgivings about it.
Another Topic?
Did the two leaders also strike a deal to
jail Mr. Pazienza and try to extradite him,
as Mr. Pazienza's lawyer$-have suggested
in court? Neither the White House nor the
Justice Department will discuss any aspect
of the Pazienza case. But while Messrs.
Reagan and Craxi announced their accord
in Washington, Assistant U.S. Attorney Da-
vid W. Denton told a federal judge in New
York that there was "a significant national
interest in having Mr. Pazienza held."
Mr. Denton and the judge, Charles L.
Brieant, then talked for a while off the rec-
ord. Afterward, Mr. Denton declared that
"Mr. Pazienza should not be released on
any bail whatsoever. That is an extremely
firmly held view within the highest levels
of both governments." Mr. Denton said his
instructions on dealing with the case came
directly from Washington.
Judge Brieant acceded, and Mr. Pa-
zienza has languished in the federal Metro-
politan Correctional Center in New York
ever since, mostly in solitary confinement
but free on occasion to talk with reporters,
whom he had always avoided in the
past.
Feeling Betrayed
Now he has talked-feeling betrayed
by two governments he says he has always
helped, brooding in his 7-by-10-foot cell
over the corporate jets, private yachts and
multimillion-dollar deals that are gone
from his life. In interviews that have cre-
ated sensational headlines in Italy but that
have gone unnoticed in the U.S., he has
told tales of intrigue and secret dealings
between Italian and American political fig-
ures and others. Among those he has
named are Alexander Haig, the former
secretary of state; Michael Ledeen, a
newspaper and television commentator,
think-tank consultant and sometime offi-
cial of the State and Defense departments;
Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation
Organization; Robert Armao, a longtime
Rockefeller family aide who, among other
things, helped shepherd the family and for-
tunes of the late shah of Iran after he had
been deposed in 1979; and Archbishop Paul
Marcinkus, who has run the Vatican's
world-wit
past thre
All th,
spokesm,
Pazienza
serts, the
met him.
what he s
mony by .v?ucr uanan officials and by
other evidence.
In one case in Rome, Mr. Pazienza has
already been convicted of abusing his in-
telligence job in connection with the 1979
trip to Libya taken by Billy Carter, the
brother of President Carter. Mr. Pazienza
was found to have helped obtain details of
the politically embarrassing trip and to
pass them to Mr. Ledeen, during the U.S.
presidential election campaign of 1980. Mr.
Ledeen, who wasn't a defendant in the
case, is a close associate of Mr. Haig, who
was in line to become secretary of state
under President Reagan.
Mr. Pazienza's career. like his stories,
is a tan le of Intrigue. Trained as a medl-
cal doctor, he spent the 1970s as a business
cowl in France. Through strongly
anti-Communist em to ers, he says, he
met Frencn and intelligence agents,
while also developing contacts in the Arab
world and in Latin America. He ame
fluent in English, French, Spanish and Ar.
a c. in Giuseppe santovito, the
head of SISMI (pronounced perhaps fit-
tingly. "seize me"), the Italian military-in-
telligence organization, hired him as a top
He impressed his superiors and others
with his wide range of discreet, high-level
contacts and sources. Federico D'Amato, a
top Italian security official. who has been
called "the J. Edgar Hoover of Italy," tes-
tified at a 1982 Italian parliamentary in-
quiry that Mr. Pazienza had close contacts
with Mr. Arafat and with the Saudi Ara-
bian royal family. Mr. D'Amato said he
once met the Vatican ambassador to the
United Nations and the editor of the Vati-
can newspaper in Mr. Pazienza's home.
"He had a semiofficial mission mediat.
ing between Arafat and the Vatican, and
took several trips to Beirut," Mr. D'Amato
said. "What I mean is," he said, "that
these were not rumors about Pazienza's
ability to do such services, but facts."
The End of a Career
Mr. Pazienza's career at SISMI came to
an abrupt end in the spring of 1981. Italian
police investigating the financial affairs of
banker Michele Sindona stumbled onto rec-
ords kept by a secret Masonic lodge known
as P-2. They found a membership list of a
thousand or so businessmen and other pub-
lic figures, mostly of the political right.
The conspirators allegedly were conduct-
ing a financially corrupt "government
within the government" in Italy.
Although Mr. Pazienza's name wasn't
on the list, the name of his patron, Gen.
Continued
STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/24: CIA-RDP90-00552R000100990002-2