We will never know how or why Litvinenko came into contact with this substance, because all the evidence that might answer our questions, such as the autopsy report, is locked away in the realm of national-security secrecy. A British inquest may reveal further details of the crime, but in the cases of such sensitive political crimes, evidence that vanishes seldom reappears in a creditable form. As a result, the radioactive death of Litvinenko likely will remain an unsolved crime.
CHAPTER 28
THE GODFATHER CONTRACT
On March 20, 1979, Carmine “Mino” Pecorelli, a fifty-year-old journalist who was paid not to publish unsavory news in his scandal sheet, was assassinated in his office on the Via Orazio in Rome. When the gunman entered, Pecorelli was editing the next week’s issue of his Osservatorio Politico. The assassin killed him with four well-placed bullets, and, Mafia-style, left the shell casings next to the body. The casings established that the bullets were of the Gevelot brand, which is not commonly used. The Gevelot brand was used, however, by an organized group of killers called the Magliana gang. The police assumed that this was a professional contract killing, and learned from their informers in the Rome underworld that the contract to kill Pecorelli had come from the Sicilian Mafia. At the time, there was no shortage of people with a motive. Any of the well-connected politicians and power brokers that Pecorelli was either blackmailing or threatening to expose could have put a contract out on him. In view of this surfeit of motives, and the lack of witnesses to the murder itself, the police did not pursue the case.
After fourteen years, however, a sensational lead emerged that would strike at the heart of the Italian political establishment. It came from a Mafia “pentito,” or former Mafia member who was now cooperating with the police in return for leniency. This turncoat was Tomasso Buscetta, and on April 6, 1993, Italian investigating magistrates announced that Pecorelli’s murder contract had been arranged by the Mafia on behalf of one of Italy’s most important political leaders, Giulio Andreotti. Buscetta said that Andreotti wanted to eliminate Pecorelli because Pecorelli was planning to publish documents that would implicate Andreotti in the death of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped by the Red Brigade in 1978, held in captivity for sixty-four days, and then executed. The request came to the Mafia via two Sicilian politicians, according to Buscetta.
If there was a political Godfather of postwar Italy, it was Andreotti. He had served as Prime Minister three times between 1972 and 1992. He also had been minister of the interior in 1954 and 1978, defense minister from 1959 to 1966 and again in 1974, and foreign minister from 1983 to 1989. He had made the Christian Democratic party into America’s key ally in Italy. Even though many of his colleagues had been indicted in the infamous Tangentopoli, or “bribe city,” in the early 1990s, Andreotti was not himself implicated and was elected a senator for life.
Now he was accused of complicity in murder. His accuser, Buscetta, had had a bloody criminal career in the Mafia. He was a major heroin trafficker in South America and implicated in two murders in the United States. After being extradited to the United States from Brazil in 1984, he agreed to provide information to U.S. authorities about Mafia activities in return for his freedom, and was subsequently given a new identity and put into the U.S. Witness Protection Program. According to Buscetta, Andreotti had been the Mafia’s “man in Rome” for decades, using his immense power to “adjust,” or reduce, Mafia prison sentences. In return, the Mafia, according to Buscetta, did his dirty work, which included murder. Buscetta himself did not claim to have ever met or even seen Andreotti. His allegations proceeded from stories relayed to him by other Mafia members, all of whom were either dead or silent.
Two separate magistrates, one in Rome, the other in Palermo, were unable to even establish that Andreotti, or any of his associates, had ever adjusted any Mafia sentences, so the magistrates developing the case relied on the accounts of two other imprisoned pentiti. Both of these men had been convicted of murder, and by testifying against Andreotti, they both literally got away with murder.
The first witness was Baldassare Di Maggio, who had admitted murdering fifteen people before he was arrested in 1993. He alleged that in September 1987 he had witnessed Andreotti receive a “kiss of honor” from the top Mafia leader in Sicily, Toto Riina, in the Palermo apartment of Sicilian politician Ignazio Salvo. There were two immediate problems with his story. For one, the entrance to Salvo’s apartment was guarded by police because Salvo was under house arrest in September 1987, so it seemed highly unlikely that Riina, who was then the most wanted fugitive in Sicily, would choose a venue under police surveillance for a Mafia gathering. Second, Andreotti was foreign minister in 1987 and had a twenty-four-hour security detail that kept detailed records, which do not show that Andreotti was in Palermo at the time of the meeting. To attend, he would have had to elude his security detail. As the inquiry proceeded, Di Maggio’s credibility was further damaged when investigators discovered that he had committed a murder after he had been admitted to the Italian witness protection program and then falsely claimed that he had been given permission to commit the homicide by Italian authorities. The investigating judges concluded that Di Maggio’s “kiss of honor” story was a total fiction. The other witness in 1993 was Marino Mannoia, who claimed that in 1980 he had personally witnessed Andreotti arrive in a bulletproof Alfa Romeo sedan at a villa in Sicily in the company of several Mafia leaders. Since none of these leaders was alive, there were no witnesses who could confirm or disprove the putative meeting. In addition, Mannoia was unable to recall the exact place or date of this alleged meeting, so his story could not be checked against the records of Andreotti’s security detail. Aside from these two witnesses, the magistrates heard a number of secondhand stories recounted in prison. While such hearsay testimony is ordinarily not admissible in court because it denies the accused the ability to confront the accuser, the magistrates made an exception here on the grounds that “one of the inflexible rules of the Mafia is that men of honor must tell the truth when speaking of facts relating to other men of honor.” This rule turned out to be flawed, because one of the hearsay stories told by Buscetta about a Mafia heroin trafficker proved to be untrue.
For his part, Andreotti denied all the charges and pointed out that the Mafia had reason to discredit him. He had been personally responsible for initiatives against the Mafia, such as the international bilateral agreements that allowed the United States to extradite mafiosi (including Buscetta); the Decree-laws that prevented the release of Mafia suspects before trial; and the dissolution of twenty-nine Mafia-penetrated municipal councils in Sicily. His party had also passed laws allowing the internal exile of Mafia suspects without trial, which led the Mafia to engage in a full-scale attack on civil authorities in the early 1990s and blowing up anti-Mafia investigators.
In 1996, Andreotti was formally charged, on the basis of the pentiti evidence, with complicity in Pecorelli’s murder, and, after a long trial, fully acquitted. In Italy, the prosecution can appeal jury verdicts, and in an appeal the verdict was overturned, and Andreotti was convicted of complicity of murder in 2002. But then that verdict was quickly overturned by the superior appeals court, and Andreotti was again declared innocent. As a result of these trials, the murder of Pecorelli remains an unsolved crime.
Almost all the theories about the murder proceed from possible motives. Since Pecorelli had been in the political-blackmail business for a decade, it is not difficult to identify parties that might have a reason to put out a contract on his life. The theory that Andreotti was the culprit has persisted even after his acquittal. The 2008 movie Il Divo makes the case that Andreotti’s allies in Sicily had made deals with the Mafia to win elections, and that they used the Mafia to eliminate Pecorelli when he threatened to link Andreotti to the death of Moro. Other theories focus on groups involved in major scandals in the late 1970s, such as Licio Gelli’s Propaganda Due lodge (of which Pecorelli was reportedly a member), the Gladio paramilitary
networks, and the beneficiaries of the secret accounts in Panama of the Banco Ambrosiano. Indeed, almost any shadowy group with a secret to hide could be considered to have a motive in silencing Pecorelli.
My own assessment is based on documents that I received in Rome from lawyers involved in the case against Andreotti. From them, I conclude that the charges against him were politically motivated and with little, if any, basis in fact. The most likely killer of Pecorelli is one of the individuals from whom he was attempting to extort a price for his silence. Such a party, rather than paying him for his silence, could have decisively gained his silence by having him killed.
The lesson is that while it is possible to elicit stories from sociopaths, especially if they are provided with incentives, the resulting testimony cannot be relied on in the service of truth. Magistrates concocted the case against Andreotti almost entirely out of Mafia turncoat stories that could not be corroborated. Almost all of it was hearsay, allowed because of the myth that ex-Mafia men cannot lie to one another. Yet, this myth is refuted by numerous cases in which Mafia members have lied to each other. By casting suspicion on the man responsible for the extradition agreement with America, they diverted attention from others in the Mafia who were their criminal allies.
CHAPTER 29
THE VANISHINGS
In the 2004 film The Forgotten, a seemingly delusional mother played by Julianne Moore discovers that the government is part of an elaborate conspiracy to abduct children. Even in the fictional realm of Hollywood, this notion of alien abduction might have qualified as the height of political paranoia, but that same year, Japanese parents whose children had left home and disappeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s learned that the children had been systematically abducted by an alien state, North Korea. This revelation came in September 2002 when Kim Jong-Il, North Korea’s supreme leader, admitted to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that his intelligence service had carried out abductions of Japanese youth. What remained a mystery even after the admission of this political crime was how many people were kidnapped in this state-sponsored program, and why.
Initially, police in Japan understandably viewed these vanishings as isolated incidents. After all, the 1970s in Japan, as in the United States, was a time of drugs, rock music, and youth rebellion, and missing youth were not necessarily victims of forcible abductions. When parents persisted in believing that their children had been kidnapped, they themselves were often considered out of touch with reality.
One such incident occurred in the rural prefecture of Niigata on the Sea of Japan. On November 15, 1977, Megumi Yokota, a thirteen-year-old student, left badminton practice at school, and never arrived home. The local police conducted a massive search for her, and they called in a team of underwater divers to scour areas along the shore in which she might have drowned. They found no trace of her. Nor did any witnesses come forward when her photo was published in local newspapers.
Many of the Japanese who disappeared after Megumi were young couples. In these cases, the police could not discount the possibility that they had run away to Tokyo or another large city to get married. In all of that year, more than a dozen people were reported missing in northern Japan. Then, on August 15, 1978, an incident occurred on a beach outside Takaoka City that suggested that these vanishings might be part of a conspiracy. A twenty-eight-year-old man and his twenty-year old-fiancée, returning from a swim on a solitary beach, were attacked by six men. The man was handcuffed, gagged, and forced into a body bag; the woman had her arms and legs tied and was gagged with a towel. Then, a barking dog distracted the kidnappers long enough for the woman to escape and obtain help. Her fiancée was found still in the bag. Even though the six kidnappers escaped, police discovered equipment at the scene that appeared to be designed to kidnap people without injuring them, including a gag that allowed breathing, ear covers to prevent hearing, handcuffs, binding material, and green nylon body bags. The girl also told police that the men seemed to be speaking a foreign language.
At this point, Japanese security officials suspected that the six abductors were agents for a foreign intelligence service that for unknown reasons had orders to kidnap Japanese youth. Since they fled the beach, they also probably had orders not to allow themselves to be seen or captured.
The next piece of the puzzle emerged nine years later on November 29, 1987, when Korean Air Lines flight 858 blew up in midair, killing all 115 people aboard. The attack had been the work of the North Korean intelligence service. It dispatched two North Korean agents, a man and a woman, disguised as Japanese tourists, who carried a bomb aboard concealed in a Japanese-made Panasonic radio. They stored it, together with liquid explosives concealed in a liquor bottle (which would intensify the explosion), in the overhead storage compartment. They then deplaned at a stopover in Abu Dhabi and went to Bahrain, where police became suspicious of their forged Japanese passports. They both attempted suicide by smoking cyanide-laced cigarettes. The man died, but the woman survived and confessed. During her interrogation, she said she had been employed by the “investigation department” of North Korea’s intelligence service and had been taught Japanese for the mission by a thirty-year-old Japanese women at its headquarters in Pyongyang. The description that she provided matched that of Yaeko Taguchi, who had disappeared from Tokyo in June 1978 after dropping her young children off at a day-care center. If this story is true, at least one of the abductees was working in Pyongyang for North Korean intelligence.
The next piece of the puzzle fell into place in 1994 with the defecting of a North Korean intelligence officer to South Korea. He told South Korean debriefers about a Japanese girl, used as an instructor by the North Korean intelligence service in Pyongyang, whose age and physical description matched that of Megumi Yokota. In addition, he provided details, such as the fact that she had been abducted after badminton practice, that left no doubt as to her identity, or that these abductions were part of a North Korean operation.
Japan was outraged when this information about Yokota was reported in the press. Even though North Korea categorically denied any involvement for another eight years, the Japanese government blocked any further consideration of World War II reparations until this issue was resolved. It was only in 2002, with a famine-starved North Korea expecting $10 billion in reparation payments, that its dictator acknowledged that his intelligence service had abducted Japanese citizens. Even so, many questions were left unanswered. For instance, North Korea claimed that it had abducted only thirteen people, yet in Japan alone there were more than one hundred unexplained disappearances and police investigations attributed at least seventeen of them to state-sponsored abductions. Moreover, North Korea said that eight of the thirteen abductees had died, including the two who been previously identified in Pyongyang, Megumi Yokota and Yaeko Taguchi. As proof, it supplied death certificates from a North Korean hospital and the cremated ashes of Megumi Yokota. But when Japanese forensic experts examined the death certificates, they found so many irregularities that they could not preclude the possibility that some of them were forgeries. Even more disturbing, DNA taken from supplied ashes did not match that of Megumi Yokota. The North Korean explanation was further undermined by reported sightings of abductees, including Megumi Yokota, after their supposed deaths.
Once it was unambiguously established that state-sponsored abductions were not a paranoid fantasy, Western intelligence services began to examine missing-person cases outside Japan, and they found that in more than a dozen countries North Korean agents had either abducted or attempted to abduct individuals, including a movie star and director in Hong Kong, a violinist in Croatia, and five businesswomen from Singapore. It was not clear when, or even if, this abduction program has been ended. Intelligence analysts suspect that the vanishing of David Sneddon, a twenty-four-year-old American hiker from Utah, on August 13, 2004, in the city of Shangri-la in western China may have been an abduction by North Korea. If so, the 2002 admission by Kim Jong-Il had not ended state-
sponsored abductions.
Since North Korea is a closed society in which even the movements of foreign diplomats are tightly controlled, the purpose behind this program of international kidnappings remains elusive. One theory is that North Korean agents initially snatched young people abroad to “re-educate” them for intelligence tasks or to use them to force their relatives to cooperate, and then, as the program expanded, found other uses for them, such as language instruction. A second theory, provided by a CIA analyst, suggests that the 2002 return of five language instructors was at best a “limited hang-out” meant to divert attention from North Korea’s employment of unknown abductees for more sinister operations, including assassinations, sabotage, smuggling, and other covert actions.
My own assessment is that North Korea engaged in an extensive program of abductions, of which the Japanese abductions may be just the tip of the iceberg. We do not know how many other missing persons were in fact abducted. During this period, it has been established that North Korea was using its intelligence apparatus for a wide range of criminal enterprises, including counterfeiting money, drug trafficking, prostitution, and money laundering. I assume that the purpose behind these and other abductions was to supply the country’s criminal networks with false identities. As with many political crimes, the full extent and purpose of these state-sponsored abductions remains a mystery.
What is clear, however, is that because a theory appears to be paranoid does mean that it is wrong. In this case, the parents who believed that their missing children had been kidnapped by an alien government turned out to be right in a spectacular way: The alien government, North Korea, returned some of the victims.
PART FIVE
The Annals of Unsolved Crime Page 20