By now there are so many scandals around the secret services that it is easy to get lost. But in reality, every case that emerges, from journalistic or judicial investigations, helps to clarify an increasingly clear and understandable picture: in Italy, for years and perhaps still operating, there have been subjects carrying out the same activities as the official intelligence but doing so on their own, to sell the information collected illegally or to use it for building power and influence.
However, these are not parallel services, but a sort of external offshoot of the official intelligence that often involves the same subjects, sometimes as actors in illicit operations and sometimes as targets.
Money circulates at this level, that is, in the buying and selling of dossiers constructed by putting together documents, wiretaps, data that by law should only be available to those who have first obtained authorization from a magistrate.
Money also circulates at another level, that of contracts awarded without tender and without competition in the opaque world of security, where confidentiality becomes a convenient excuse to do business that would never be considered lawful if carried out in full transparency.
All this does not happen in the shadows, unknown to the leadership, but is the ground for a frontal clash between two power chains that have a clearly identifiable political apex.
On one side, the Minister of Defense Guido Crosetto and on the other, the Undersecretary with intelligence delegation Alfredo Mantovano.
For this reason, parallels with the 1970s do not make much sense: here there are no rogue services.
There are services that, after the 2007 reform, have a fairly defined relationship with politics: the responsibility for their actions lies with the President of the Council of Ministers, therefore Giorgia Meloni, who can delegate it to an undersecretary, in this case the former magistrate Mantovano, while operational coordination is entrusted to the Department for Information and Security, the DIS, which oversees the activities of the two agencies AISI and AISE, internal and external, precisely to prevent them from becoming too autonomous and doing things the political leadership does not agree with.
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?
The secret services are a delicate political tool, so when problems like those now evident emerge, it should be politics that answers for them, since operational leaders can always take refuge behind the argument that their task is only to execute someone else’s instructions.
Many should therefore be held accountable for the events that emerged from the latest investigation, starting precisely with Giorgia Meloni and Alfredo Mantovano.
The Rome prosecutor’s office is investigating former secret agent Giuseppe Del Deo for the two strands mentioned above: because while he was at the top of AISI, the internal service, he was also trafficking with other former agents and ex-military to collect and distribute illegal information through the so-called “Fiore team” in Rome, and because meanwhile he had Palazzo Chigi buy, perhaps at inflated prices, the services of a security software company called SIND in which men close to Minister Crosetto were active.
In 2023, SIND signed a significant contract worth about 10 million euros with its only client, the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, to sell software called Nexus.
Exactly what it is, no one knows, the investigators are also trying to understand, especially whether it was worth all that money.
Based on some wiretaps, it appears that SIND’s parent company Maticmind has an expert report describing Nexus as a simple “university open source software,” thus sold at an inflated price.
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The connection holds until April 2025 when the Council of Ministers approves a law ad personam to retire Giuseppe Del Deo at only 51 years old, who in the meantime had been promoted and removed from AISI to DIS, the coordination of the services.
Once out of Palazzo Chigi, Del Deo’s contracts with SIND for its Nexus software are terminated, as if they were linked only to the secret agent himself.
A POLITICAL CHOICE
That sudden, unjustified removal which even required a specific measure – a decree from the Presidency of the Council – ties the entire Meloni government to this story.
There are at least two episodes that have come to light and concern her: between November 30 and December 1, 2023, two people tampered around Andrea Giambruno’s Porsche, at that time already Meloni’s ex-partner. A traffic warden stopped them, they identified themselves as secret service agents.
Then the versions will change several times and those first ascertained facts will dissolve into a fog of misdirection.
Del Deo himself began investigating within AISI. The news was revealed by the newspaper Domani. And precisely from a lawsuit against Domani started, in February 2025, the other case involving Del Deo: Giorgia Meloni’s chief of staff, Gaetano Caputi, felt defamed by some articles, sued Domani’s journalists, and in the documents of the proceeding, the Chief Prosecutor of Rome Giuseppe Lo Voi included evidence that some AISI agents, again Del Deo’s body, had in 2023 accessed databases to investigate Caputi, it is unclear on whose orders.
The government first targeted prosecutor Lo Voi, having him reported even by the newly appointed DIS director, Vittorio Rizzi, for revealing confidential information, but everything ended archived. Then Del Deo’s head fell, retired early by a decree of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.
Both the operations around Giambruno and the accesses on Caputi date back to 2023, when the appointment of the new AISI director was being discussed. Del Deo, who was deputy director responsible for the economic-financial part, was among the favorites, but in the end Bruno Valensise was chosen.
FROM BUSINESS TO BUSINESS
Just outside Palazzo Chigi, despite the traumatic exit, Giuseppe Del Deo went to work in the private sector, at the presidency of CERVED, a company managing data and analysis related to businesses.
CERVED is part of the group led by Andrea Pignataro, ION. Pignataro appears in Forbes rankings as the richest man in Italy, with a fortune of 42.8 billion euros, which however depends on the value of the companies of which he is a shareholder and which are heavily indebted.
In recent years, especially between 2023 and 2025, ION’s expansion under Pignataro has often clashed with political assessments, with the government trying to use the golden power in 2023 to influence the terms of the acquisition of CEDACRI and in 2024 seeing the purchase of PRELIOS as potentially critical before giving the green light.
It is therefore clear that a figure with the contacts and information of Giuseppe Del Deo can be valuable for Pignataro.
But some questions are unavoidable.
What did Giorgia Meloni, Alfredo Mantovano, and Guido Crosetto know about Del Deo’s operations now under investigation by the Rome Prosecutor’s Office? They certainly did not retire him at 51 for age limits, they kicked him out. But if they were aware of potential crimes, why reward him with an early pension of 12,000 euros a month and not report him?
One imagines that even someone with Pignataro’s means and knowledge had an idea of whom he was hiring, even as president of one of the group’s most important companies.
But is it normal to entrust the leadership of a company dealing with confidential business information to a recently ousted former secret agent who dealt, first at AISI then at DIS, with using the powers and tools of intelligence precisely to oversee companies and business?
No transparency on the reasons for Del Deo’s exit, we must wait for the judiciary, no limits to revolving doors between activities on behalf of the State and activities in the interest of a private party.
Also in Del Deo’s case, as in that of the Milanese company Equalize which sold information obtained illegally and from which investigations started, it is clear that there was very little secret in these activities and even less rogue.
It seems clear that many knew a lot, perhaps too much, but that there was some form of resignation to the fact that in Italy political struggle works like this: with dossiers, blackmail, millions of public euros that it is normal to occasionally disappear into someone’s pockets.
(Excerpt from Appunti)
