Behind the Curtain: The Rise of Tomorrow’s Spy Elite

The names of new spies, meetings between spies, telephone conversations between officials. Everything is in the new documents of the investigation, more than ten thousand pages, including annexes, handed over Monday morning by the Perugia public prosecutor, Raffaele Cantone, to the parliamentary anti-mafia commission, chaired by Chiara Colosimo. A huge amount of documents, which were made public when I arrived at Palazzo San Macuto, but which the commission has banned from being published, so that they can be consulted by the commissioners but not end up in the hands of the press.

Among those who have already begun to study them is Democratic Party representative Debora Serracchiani, who was taking notes in anticipation of the upcoming hearings that were scheduled. Under pressure from the persistent requests of journalists seeking the documents, Serracchiani hastened to declare that she would not provide any information about their contents. However, the folder reconstructs in detail the wormhole planted in the Anti-Mafia and the thousands of misused accesses to the databases, with the subsequent download of the confidential documents, carried out by the financier at the head of the DNA SOS group, Pasquale Striano, in some cases in collaboration with the former deputy anti-mafia prosecutor Antonio Laudati, and passed on to the three journalists of the daily Domani, Giovanni Tizian, Nello Trocchia and Stefano Vergine, who then allegedly used the secret information to fabricate articles aimed at attacking the Meloni government and the politicians of the center-right, in particular the Lega.

The charges are written down in black and white, reconstructed in detail during four months of intensive investigations, carried out in the utmost secrecy by the Currency Police Unit of the Guardia di Finanza in Rome, or rather by the same group to which Striano constantly went, without the knowledge of his superiors in the Fiamme Gialle, to penetrate the analysts’ systems to satisfy friends who asked for information. The screening of the constant activity with which Striano interrogated the systems allowed the investigators, who searched through the thousands of SOS messages opened by the spy with his unique access key, to distinguish between legitimate checks relating to service operations and illegal intrusions in the names of politicians, VIPs and entrepreneurs who were above suspicion and who were therefore absolutely not involved in any mafia or terrorism investigation.

“The investigations have allowed us to establish that Striano had unauthorized access to as many as 172 politicians, celebrities, ministers, entrepreneurs and footballers,” wrote Perugia’s investigating judge, Elisabetta Massini, in the order in which she rejected the request for the arrest of Striano and Laudati, a decision against which prosecutor Cantone has appealed to the Court of Appeal, which has set the hearing for September 24, when it will have to decide whether precautionary measures are necessary for the two suspects.

The circumstances that led the Public Prosecutor to identify the risk that Striano would repeat the crime and manipulate evidence, which was also assumed for Laudati, are also included in the new documents. Because the investigation has revealed that, despite the notifications of investigation and the transfer of the financier, the illegal access to the system would not have stopped, which would have increased the number of spies. In addition, the wiretaps, meetings and telephone conversations that the two protagonists would have had with state apparatuses, magistrates, officials, journalists and even with some politicians have been certified. In short, the investigation is expanding and is far from being completed.