Brodo Primordiale

The CIA agents took rooms in Milan’s 5-star hotels, including the Principe di Savoia, “one of the world’s most luxuriously appointed hotels” where they rang up $42,000 in expenses; the Westin Palace, the Milan Hilton, and the Star Hotel Rosa as well as similar places in the seaside resort of La Spezia and in Florence, running up cumulative hotel bills of $144,984.

They ate in the equivalent of 5-star restaurants in Milan and elsewhere, evidently fancying themselves gourmet undercover agents.

As a mixed team – at least 6 women took part in the operation – men and women on at least two occasions took double rooms together in these hotels. (There is no indication that any of them were married – to each other at least.)

After the successful kidnapping was done and the cleric dispatched to sunny Egypt, they evidently decided they deserved a respite from their exertions; so several of them left for a vacation in Venice, while four others headed for the Mediterranean coast north of Tuscany, all on the taxpayer dole.

They charged up to $500 a day apiece, according to Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post, to “Diners Club accounts created to match their recently forged identities”; wielded Visa cards (assumedly similarly linked to their fake identities); and made sure they got or used frequent flier miles. (The Diner’s Club, when queried by Tomdispatch, refused to comment on any aspect of the case.) Our master spies “rarely paid in cash,” adds Whitlock, “gave their frequent traveler account numbers to desk clerks and made dozens of calls from unsecure phones in their rooms.”