IT NEVER rains but it pours. Just as I arrived under grey skies for a holiday in the Italian lakes, a scandal broke.

A sudden storm over the normally tranquil Lake Maggiore on the Swiss border tipped a crowded pleasure boat into storm-tossed waters and within hours all of Italy and Israel were in the grip of speculation about the character of the event which saw four people dead — two Italian spooks, the Russian wife of the boat’s owner and an Israeli intelligence agent.

The Italian media named the Mossad man as Erez Shimoni. There are suggestions that this is not his real identity and that the description of him as retired is disinformation. 

Benjamin Netanayu’s office said that “due to his service in the organisation, it is impossible to elaborate” on his activities.

The Corriere della Sera newspaper reported that the boat trip was, in fact, a working meeting of intelligence agents — 19 of the 23 people on board were spooks from the two states, which suggests that the Israeli agent’s status was far from that of an old colleague attending a birthday celebration.

Corriere della Sera reported that the Israelis had not initially planned to board the boat but did so after a meeting they were participating in went on longer than expected and they missed their flight home.

Italy’s domestic intelligence organisation, the Agenzia informazioni e Sicurezza Interna, admitted that two of the dead — a 62-year-old man and a 53-year-old woman — worked for it and backed the cover story saying: “The two employees, belonging to the intelligence department, were taking part in a convivial meeting organised to celebrate the birthday of one of the group.”

Very quickly, according to La Repubblica, Italy’s judicial authorities cleared formalities and the Israeli’s body was spirited away on an Israeli executive jet despatched to collect the 10 Israeli survivors.

So swift was the operation that the hire vehicles were abandoned at the quayside. The Italian intelligence agency dead were named as Tiziana Barnbi and Claudio Alonzi.

Interest in the intimate relations between Italian and Israeli spooks is focused, first, on the fact that this incident revealed high-level and unusually intense co-operation between Italy’s domestic agency and Israel’s foreign intelligence organisation and, second, on the parallels with a bizarre incident two years ago at nearby Mottarone when a cable-car accident resulted in the death of five Israelis.

Miraculously a five-year thus-orphaned Italian/Israeli child survived and recovered while living with his guardian, his aunt in Switzerland.

The child’s grandfather, variously described as an Israeli Defence Force veteran and as a Mossad agent, was charged with kidnapping, briefly imprisoned and swiftly released to return to Israel.

What to make of this? Something of a consensus has emerged which suggests that this was an accident that accidentally shone a light into the usually opaque operations of the secret state.

Of course, the Meloni government is keen to strengthen its ties with Israel, partly due to the convergence of their shared, and reactionary, politics and from the imperative for the administration to exorcise, at least to the public, its fascist demons. 

In March earlier this year Netanyahu — in Rome for an economic forum involving dozens of Italian firms with interests in Israel — met Giorgia Meloni. She said the two had known and esteemed each other for a long time while Netanyahu said he was very impressed by her leadership.

But the intimacies between Italy’s intelligence services and their Israeli counterparts are a long-standing expression of the collaboration between the zionist state and Nato. 

And no-one in Italy is insensible to the role of the intelligence services in the murky interface between Nato’s cold war subversion of Italian democracy, the links between political authority, the Christian Democrats, far-right terrorists and Italy’s criminal networks.

Ammo to Ukraine

AS ANTICIPATED, the European Parliament voted with 446 votes in favour, 67 against and 112 abstentions to endorse a boost to EU ammunition production to supply the Ukrainian war effort.

ASAP is the acronym for the EU’s Act in Support of Ammunition Production, to fund war materiel for Ukraine and the rearmament of EU states.

EU internal market commissioner Thierry Breton proposed the allocation of €1.5 billion, with half supplied by the EU and half by the member states.

Italy, like all EU states, is obliged to use PNRR (the National Recovery and Resilience Plan) and the cohesion funds.

In Italy this is highly controversial. Much of the politics of the post-Covid period has centred on how to deploy these funds in supporting the economy and a green transition. The income stream is only partly a grant while the balance has to be repaid.

Amendments proposed by the Socialist and Democrats groups in the EU Parliament to exclude the use of the EU’s cohesion funds for the war effort were rejected.

The 16-strong Partito Democratico (PD) delegation split with nine voting in favour and six abstaining and just one associated independent PEP (politically exposed person) voting against. Moviemento Cinque Stella/Five Star (M5S), along with the Greens, voted against.

M5S delegation head Tiziana Beghin said: “The approval in the European Parliament of the regulation in support of the production of arms casts a long, dark shadow over the European Union and the commitment to promote the peace process in Ukraine.

“Unfortunately, our vote against did not help put a stop to this crazy measure. Choosing to finance the war economy represents a real slap in the face of the diplomatic process: today we are moving even further away from the ceasefire.”

All of this presents more problems for PD’s new leader Elly Schlein, whose surprise victory upset the party’s establishment right and the notorious bande, the “gangs” of clientelistic groupings that are characteristic of Italian political life.

She knew perfectly well that, as the amendments would fall one by one, the PD representatives in the EU Parliament would vote for the diversion of funds to the war effort. Instead of offering leadership, she stood back.

The centre-left PD suffered badly in the local elections. In the mid-may ballot the governing right-wing parties won decisively and this is expected to continue in the second rounds next week in Sicily and Sardinia and in a whole tranche of other municipalities.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni exulted: “The centre right wins these local elections and confirms its consensus among the Italians, its entrenchment, its strength.”

The government parties, Meloni’s “post-fascist” Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy); Lega and Forza Italia took the regional capitals of Latina, Ancona, Brindisi from the centre left. 

The Lega leader Matteo Salvini quipped: “There’s no denying it, a very good Schlein effect.”

Schlein's response was to double down on her basic position: “It is clear that alone you cannot win. We have to rebuild an alternative camp that credibly contends with the right for victory. But the responsibility to build this camp does not only concern the PD.”

Now relaunched under private ownership l’Unita, the paper founded by Antonio Gramsci, put the matter in brutal terms: “…if Schlein’s position was almost obligatory, it is also extremely weak. 

“The areas where the party is divided, the factions, hid their weapons for a few months after the surprise election of the outsider but never laid them down. And they start drawing them out.”

The paper makes the point that she did not take the opportunity to break through immediately after her victory, when no-one would have dared to oppose her.

The Qatargate plot thickens

REMEMBER Eva Kaili, the Greek MEP who, along with her partner Francesco Giorgi, was arrested by Belgian police in a bribery case leading to a leadership crisis in the EU’s Socialists and Democrats group and the Western-orientated International Trade Union Confederation?

Recollect that the alleged ringleader of a bribery network, former Italian MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri — whose parliamentary assistant Giorgi is — struck a plea deal with the Belgian judicial authorities in January.

The bribery allegations centred on influence peddling around the World Cup in Qatar. Kaili, the principal suspect in what is now known as the Qatargate scandal, now says she was wrongly jailed and has no role in the case. 

When she was busted the Belgian cops found €150,000 in her apartment, which she shared with Giorgi. Her father apparently had possession of another stash of cash (€750,000).

The arrest warrant identified her as “the primary organiser or co-organiser” of public corruption and money laundering.

Now, Kaili claims she only found out about the cash — in two safes in the apartment — when she was nicked. 

She now defends her partner, claiming that he was under the influence of Panzeri but adds a note of dark conspiracy to her tale. 

Her latest move is to claim that she was targeted for her EU parliamentary duties, particularly in relation to the committee of inquiry to investigate the use of Pegasus and equivalent surveillance spyware (Pega).

Pegasus is software developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group that is covertly installed on mobile phones and other devices.

She now claims her lawyers have discovered that the Belgian secret services have monitored the members of the EU Pegasus committee: “The fact that elected members of parliament are being spied on by the secret services should raise more concerns about the health of our European democracy. I think this is the real scandal,” she said.