Blog Post

AEIdeas

The Washington Post reports that a former CIA officer named Sabrina De Sousa, now living in Portugal, is facing extradition to Italy after being tried in absentia for playing a minor role in the rendition of a radical cleric in Milan. The Post reports:

The Italians never produced hard evidence proving De Sousa was involved, other than showing calls made from her phone to one of the kidnappers several months before and around the time of the rendition. Armando Spataro, the Italian prosecutor who handled the case, told The Post in 2012, “To pass a sentence, the court doesn’t need the smoking gun!” On the day of the kidnapping, De Sousa was chaperoning her son’s high school ski trip in northern Italy. De Sousa, who speaks Italian, said her only involvement with renditions came in early 2002, about a year before Abu Omar’s kidnapping. That is when CIA officers flew to Italy to meet with their intelligence counterparts to discuss the logistics of renditions. De Sousa said she served as an interpreter between the services. “But at that point, rendition was just a concept,” she said. Abu Omar, she stressed, was not even discussed.

No matter, she now faces a four year prison sentence. Not only was her role in the rendition minor, she was working in Italy at the time as a declared State Department official, an accredited diplomat who should have full diplomatic immunity.

During her CIA tenure, De Sousa was registered in Italy as a State Department officer at the US Consulate in Milan. She did not work as a “NOC,” a covert operative with “non-official cover” status who lacks diplomatic protection. “Those of us who were convicted were accredited diplomats and declared to the Italian government,” De Sousa said. “We instead find ourselves treated like NOCs with our US government affiliation disavowed.”

But in 2009, despite her repeated request, the Clinton State Department declined to grant her diplomatic immunity. She resigned from the CIA and, the Post reports, “Later that year, De Sousa sued her former employer, the Justice Department and the State Department to force the government to confer diplomatic protection. But it was too late. By November 2009, De Sousa and multiple other CIA officers were convicted in absentia in Italy on aggravated kidnapping charges.”

De Sousa would have been safe if she had remained in the US but she is a dual citizen of Portugal with close family in Lisbon, a sister in Germany, and a 90-year old mother who lives in Goa, India. “If I was a natural-born US citizen and my entire family lived in Kansas, for example, then maybe I wouldn’t need to worry about going to Europe again,” she told the Post, adding “I would have never joined the CIA if I was told there was a remote possibility that I would never see my mother in Goa again and not travel abroad.”

She continued trying to persuade Clinton to grant her the diplomatic protection she deserved. The Post reports:

In late 2012, after Italy’s highest criminal court upheld her conviction, De Sousa’s attorney at the time wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, asking her to authorize an inquiry into the case. De Sousa said she never heard back.

Clinton did not even have the courtesy to respond.

It is simply outrageous that Clinton would leave a loyal CIA officer, who was serving as an accredited US diplomat, out to dry this way. De Sousa played a tangential role, if any, in the abduction of a cleric with ties to terrorist organizations. The operation was approved not only by her own government, but by senior officials in the Italian government. And she was serving in Italy as a declared State Department official with full diplomatic status.

And yet she is in danger of going to prison — because Hillary Clinton betrayed her.

What signal does that send to American diplomats and intelligence operatives about how she would behave if she ever became commander in chief?