Death muddies Greek spy probe
A senior aide to the Greek prime minister is expected to be the next person to testify before a parliamentary committee investigating what is believed to be the worst espionage scandal in the country's history.
Last month, the government admitted that the mobile phones of the prime minister, the most senior members of the cabinet and top security officials had all been tapped in 2004 - the year Athens hosted the Olympic Games.
The committee in Athens has been questioning executives from two of the world's leading mobile phone companies, Vodafone and Ericsson, about the scandal.
But attention is also increasingly focusing on the alleged suicide of a senior Vodafone manager just after the phone-tapping operation was discovered on the Vodafone network last year.
In a serene but cramped graveyard in the western suburbs of Athens, lies the body of Costas Tsalikidis, a network manager for Vodafone Greece.
He is buried with other members of his family. But his gravestone shows he died aged just 38. He was found hanged in his apartment on the morning of 9 March last year.
The next day, the head of Vodafone Greece walked into the office of one of the prime minister's top aides to inform the government that its phones had been bugged for at least eight months.
The official verdict was that Mr Tsalikidis had committed suicide.
Suspicions
In a statement issued last month, just after the story about the phone-tapping operation first broke, Vodafone categorically denied there was any connection between his death and the scandal.
"Any attempt to connect these two is, to say the least, irrelevant," it said
But his family believe his death is suspicious and are calling for his body to be exhumed so a second post-mortem can be carried out by one of the world's leading forensic pathologists, Dr Michael Baden of the United States.
"They believe they will find new evidence," says the family lawyer, Themis Sofos.
Dr Sofos adds that other parts of the original investigation were weak.
"No one went to the house of Costas, no one took photos and to see the circumstances of his death... no one took fingerprints."
Official inquiry
Mr Tsalikidis' family recently took matters into their own hands, filing a lawsuit against "persons unknown" for complicity in his murder or suicide.
They allege that even if he was not murdered, he may have faced threats which left him with no choice but to take his own life.
Meanwhile, their lawyer has been handing evidence to a prosecutor in Athens, who is now carrying out an official inquiry into the death of Mr Tsalikidis.
The prosecutor is expected to announce his conclusion within the next few weeks.
Family and friends of Costas Tsalikidis believe there are strong indications he was the person who first discovered that highly sophisticated software had been secretly inserted into the Vodafone network in 2004, enabling at least 100 phone lines to be constantly tapped.
"The end of January or early February (2005) I think is the time Costas had access or took knowledge of the interception system and he (re)searched about its function and origin," says lawyer Themis Sofos.
"He was not the kind of man to keep secret about something. He would not have co-operated with criminals or criminal acts."
Text messages
According to Dr Sofos, Mr Tsalikidis told his fiancee at this time that it was a "matter of life and death" that he leave his job.
The lawyer also says they have looked at text messages he received on his mobile from colleagues in early February 2005, including one which apparently urges him to keep working and offers him support.
But there is another theory about Costas Tsalikidis: that he was allegedly the person who actually inserted the software setting up the phone-tapping operation.
"It is possible," says Themis Sofos. "I cannot exclude anything."
The theory is put forward by John Brady Kiesling a former American diplomat who worked at the US embassy in Athens until resigning in 2003 over the US-led invasion of Iraq.
He is convinced American intelligence agents were behind the whole bugging operation and he says it is possible they used Mr Tsalikidis to install the software.
"I believe he committed suicide to protect his professional honour," says Mr Kiesling.
As for why the Americans would tap the phones of the political and security elite of a country regarded as an ally, Mr Kiesling says there is a simple answer.
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Because of its unique politically hybrid nature -- Italy contains both a strong Christian Democrat constituency as well as the largest Communist Party of a Western country -- the nation has as been at the crossroads of political exchanges between East and West. This has been true since the end World War II and remained so until the fall of the Berlin Wall. The crossroads was economic, too; affinities between Christian Democrats, Italian Socialists and Communists and political parties and leaders in the Middle East and the socialist countries made it easy for Italy to win strategically important contracts in the field of energy, construction and telecommunications.
Some of those contracts are still operative, like those international telecommunications routing through Italian networks coming from North Africa, the Middle East and some of the world's remaining Communist countries. Telecommunications apparatus that formerly belonged to STET, the Italian state-owned telephone company, today are owned by Telecom Italia.
Italy is not new to convoluted networks that bind security and military elites to conservative business leaders in long-term secret pacts to carry out subversive activities. Historically such networks have morphed into massive bribing machines.
The Masonic Loggia P2 and Gladio are just two examples. The first, a network comprised of about 2,000 military officers, public servants, bankers, journalists and business-people, operated between the 1970s and the '80s, some say in concert with the CIA. Its secret goal was to keep Italy solidly in the hands of center-right administrations. The P2 network is reputed to have begun the "Strategia della Tensione," a concoction of terrorist attacks, political unrest and economic crises that created a feeling of uncertainty among Italians, which in turn led them to vote for centrist administrations.
In the case of Gladio, a much wider intelligence and military net was created to prevent the rise to power of the Communist and Socialist Parties in Italy. Although supposedly disbanded at the beginning of the 1990s, this network is said to have transformed into the Department of Anti-terrorism Strategic Studies, a neo-fascist organization that in 2004, to benefit economically from funding made available to fight al-Qaeda, didn't hesitate to disseminate false information about an impending attack on Milan's Linate International Airport and on the city's historical Duomo.
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