Italian emerges as an odd footnote in Litvinenko case (IHT)

He has claimed to be a professor at the University of Naples, which in turn claims never to have heard of him. He was caught on a tape bragging that Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister, was considering him for a top job at the United Nations. He later had to admit that he never even met Berlusconi.

And so, a slew of media reports about him and his career here -- which included trying to prove that some top Italian center-left politicians, including Prime Minister Romano Prodi, are Russian spies -- have invariably included unflattering adjectives. They include: "incurable liar," "wannabe 007," "braggart," "bumbler" and "swindler" -- not to mention "fool" and "mental case."

Those last two descriptions come from Oleg Gordievski, the highest- ranking known KGB defector, who has known Scaramella for years. His opinion of Scaramella is so low that he could not even consider him as a suspect in Litvinenko's poisoning, even after Litvinenko himself raised the possibility in a conversation with Gordievski.

"I said, 'Who poisoned you? Who did you have a meal with?'" Gordievski recalled in a telephone interview Friday. "He said, 'I had a meal with Scaramella. He was very nervous. He was very strange, but he is always strange.'"

"I said, 'Sasha, it could not be Scaramella because he has nothing to do with the KGB business,'" Gordievski said.

He concluded: "He is just a soap bubble. He doesn't know anything."

The interest in Prodi appears to have been the major tie between Scaramella and Litvinenko. Both Litvinenko and Gordievski have recounted in interviews Scaramella's deep interest in proving that Prodi was a KGB agent. Accounts differ. But Gordievski said Friday that he was present when Litvinenko, who moved to Britain in 2000, recounted for members of the U.K. Independence Party a conversation with a sympathetic Russian general where to go if he defected.

"He said, 'I was speaking to the deputy head of the KGB, General Such- and-Such,'" Gordievski recalled. "And he told me, 'If you intend to go to the West, don't go to Italy because it is full of our agents.'" And he said, 'For example, Prodi is our man.'"

The transcripts between Scaramella and Guzzanti show a particular interest in this conversation, and Scaramella repeatedly pressed Gordievski and Litvinenko for any further information.

Gordievski said he told Scaramella that he never heard anything about Prodi and the KGB -- but that Scaramella later said in an e-mail message that Gordievski had, in fact, confirmed a link.

"I nearly fell from my chair," he said. "He wrote it in that stupid e-mail to me. I didn't write it. He wrote it as mental aberration in him."

In a 2005 interview with La Repubblica, an Italian daily newspaper, Litvinenko recounted how he had traveled to Naples in 2004 to give a deposition to the commission, taken by Scaramella, on KGB activity in Italy.

"I said to Mario I had never heard Prodi spoken of," Litvenenko told La Repubblica.

At the end of several days of interviews, on a balcony overlooking the sea, Litvenenko said that Scaramella put in his hand some stationery from his private business and several hundred euros.

"I felt humiliated," he told the newspaper. "I told him he was mistaken if he thought Colonel Litvinenko was reduced to selling his information."