By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

MILAN, Italy — Armando Spataro has spent so much time in America that I half-expected him to greet me with a turkey drumstick when I visited him on Thanksgiving.

Here, in this cold and rainy northern industrial city, Nov. 22 was just another ordinary work day. Spataro, a motorcycle-riding, graying veteran of 33 years in the prosecutor’s office, had just wrapped up an interrogation of a suspected Islamic terrorist when I arrived. No waterboarding or even shouting. Just “a conversation,” he says, smiling coyly.

That’s just one of the things that separates him from U.S. counterterrorism practices.

But he “loves America,” he says. Indeed, icons of American art fill the walls of his cavernous office in the hulking Milan courthouse building, a model of 1930s-era fascist architecture. He has prints of Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper and Norman Rockwell, among others, and a huge color photo of Lake Michigan, picked up on his frequent trips to the United States for conferences with his law-enforcement counterparts.

“This one is my favorite,” Spataro says, gesturing at the 1964 Rockwell print depicting a little black girl in a prim white dress being escorted to school by federal marshals in segregated New Orleans.

“You see,” he says in heavily accented English, “the faces here of the marshals, you cannot see them. It makes a point that justice has no face — it does not depend on who is in charge, or who is accused. The law is the law.”

It’s a theme Spataro has been required to repeat often over the past three years since he has pursued an investigation of 26 Americans — all but one of them CIA operatives — along with seven Italian security officials in connection with the disappearance of an al Qaeda suspect off a Milan street in February 2003.

It was a kidnapping by any other name, he says.

“We are obliged to prosecute this as a serious crime,” he says, “to demonstrate the rule of law.”

PR Buzz Saw

Abu Omar, as he is known, had been watched by Italian anti-terrorist agents since he entered the country in 1997, six years before he was abducted by a CIA team from Milan and transported to Egypt via Ramstein air base in Germany, according to Spataro’s files. In Cairo he was repeatedly tortured, he claimed upon release in April 2004, saying also that a CIA man seemed to be hovering nearby.

Omar remains in Egypt. But by 2005, Italian authorities had gathered enough information on his activities to get a warrant for his arrest on terrorism charges.

In the meantime, the investigation of his 2003 disappearance, launched when an eyewitness told police she had seen Omar dragged into a white van and spirited away by unknown assailants, quickly led to the CIA’s doorstep.

Italian law, Spataro says, demanded that he continue the kidnapping investigation no matter where it led.

“A prosecutor is absolutely obliged to prosecute any crime he knows of,” he told me.

The CIA agents’ sloppy security — records of open cell phone calls, credit card transactions, car rentals and hotel registrations with passports — made it easy for investigators to identify the agents’ real names and their movements throughout the kidnapping operation. Investigators also seized incriminating documents from the home computer of Robert Seldon Lady, a CIA agent under diplomatic cover at the U.S. consulate in Milan. (Consular officials are not immune from prosecution for serious crimes such as kidnapping.)

Spataro knew his odds of ever getting Lady and the other long-departed CIA agents into a Milan courtroom were between zero and none, but he pressed the Minister of Justice for their extradition from the United States nonetheless.

That’s when he ran into a public relations buzz saw.

Rejecting his request, the Justice Minister (replaced last year when the pro-Bush Berlusconi government was defeated at the polls) labeled Spataro, who has prosecuted mafia figures, corrupt politicians and Marxist Red Brigade terrorists alike over three decades, “an activist magistrate” with a “not so unbiased” attitude toward the United States

Meanwhile, as Spataro proceeded toward a trial of the accused in absentia, the Wall Street Journal called him a “rogue” prosecutor.

He shakes his head at the mention of it. But there is no denying his intention to try the suspects whether they showed up or not.

For the moment, however, he can only wait on Italy’s Constitutional Court, which is weighing the government’s argument that an internal Italian military intelligence memorandum describing the security service’s cooperation with the CIA operation as a “state secret” that cannot be revealed in open court — even though it long ago surfaced in the press.

Whatever the court’s decision, which is due Jan. 29, Spataro told me the case will go forward.

“I have many other pieces of evidence,” he says, ticking off the trail of incriminating data the agents left behind, plus a sworn statement by an Italian official at Aviano air base who provided investigators with a list of all flights in and out of Aviano. The Lear jet transporting Abu Omar was quickly identified.

“Here, too, the code of justice requires it,” Spataro said of the trial in absentia, a procedure that is prohibited in the United States, except under certain narrow circumstances. (See Crosby v. United States, 506 U.S. 255., 1993.)

But Italy is “not like in the United States, where a U.S. prosecutor can choose the investigations,” Spataro said.

As for trials in absentia, “Italian law protects the rights of the victims as well as the rights of the accused,” he argues.

“Just because the accused does not show up for trial does not prevent us from seeking justice on behalf of the victims.”

In any event, it’s possible that the absent defendants could get a new trial, Spataro maintained, “if they show up saying they had no knowledge of the previous trial.”

Global publicity surrounding the impending trial, however, has been constant and will continue when it opens.

‘People Following Orders’

The conviction of the Americans is a virtual certainty, say legal observers here, considering the wealth of evidence Spataro has amassed, including CIA surveillance photos of Abu Omar found on Lady’s home computer.

Even Lady’s former attorney, Daria Pesce, admits Spataro’s case is strong.

“The Italian [intelligence] services talked, they confessed, they told everything” to investigators, she said with a caustic laugh.

All of which could produce an ironic result of the trial, both Pesce and Spataro acknowedge: Omar, now wanted in Milan on terrorist charges, would be eligible to collect damages from U.S. and Italian officials in the event of a guilty verdict.

And Omar, who would be arrested if he ever sets foot in Italy, “doesn’t need to come here to collect it,” said Pesce. “He could get it via anybody he appoints to represent him, through power of attorney.”

Meanwhile, any of the accused CIA agents who attempt to enter Europe would also be arrested, based on Italian warrants.

If that weren’t baroque enough, last spring Pesce resigned as Lady’s lawyer in protest against the impending trial in absentia. A public defender has been appointed.

“I believe this matter is inappropriate for a trial,” she told me, repeating what she told the court during a hearing last spring. “The question must be settled by one government to another” — Rome and Washington.

Had she continued to represent Lady, who was under diplomatic cover in the U.S. consulate in Milan at the time of the botched operation, Pesce maintains, “it would be very, very easy to defend him.”

Under Italian law, she points out, a defendant can be excused for committing a crime in the act of preventing an attack on himself or others.

Since Lady and the other CIA agents captured a terrorist with plans to attack American targets in Italy, she maintains, they should be acquitted.

She admitted, however — and Spataro confirms — that no specific American targets were discussed by the alleged plotters.

“We taped many conversations of the terrorists,” Spataro told me. “They discussed attacks in Tunisia and sending suicide bombers to Iraq, but we didn’t hear of any specific attacks on Americans, or Italians, in Italy.”

In any case, Pesce maintains, Lady and the other CIA agents accused of kidnapping should never have been prosecuted, because “they were people following orders.”

An Agitated Prosecutor

For his part, Spataro is incensed that the kidnapping disrupted a longtime investigation of Abu Omar and his associates, a dozen of whom were rounded up in 2005.

“If Omar had not been kidnapped, he would be in prison, without this breach of international law,” Spataro argues. “We could have perhaps traced many more associates of his by continuing our surveillance.”

In fact, the CIA leaned on the Italian anti-terrorist police to call off their surveillance of Omar so they could kidnap him, documents in Spataro’s possession show.

The prosecutor struggles not to pound the long conference table when discussing what might have been.

Four stories below, a drenching cold rain falls on one of those statues of the goddess of justice, blindfolded, with scales in her hand, that dignifies courthouses and justice departments the world over.

“We can’t have different kinds law for different kinds of people,” Spataro says, now exercised. “It’s not only racist, it spells the end of any cooperation from the Muslim community.”

“Relations between Italian authorities and Muslims in Milan have improved since the case against the CIA personnel was launched,” Spataro says.

His critics, Spataro says, “see a trial in absentia of the Americans as an obstacle to fighting terrorism,” meaning that it wrongly targets the CIA, one of the very agencies leading the fight against the terrorists.

“But we,” he stresses, “see following the law as central to the fight against terrorism.”

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.