(4 of 5)
On the day Drogoul was to be sentenced, Congressman Henry Gonzalez, who had been looking into the case for two years, announced that he had a summary of classified CIA cables regarding B.N.L.-Rome's knowledge of the banker's activities. Judge Shoob immediately asked for an explanation. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Urgenson requested that the CIA declassify the Sept. 4 letter so it could be given to Shoob along with the report and the cables that had gone to Gonzalez. According to Urgenson, CIA counsel George Jameson acknowledged that the letter was misleading and asked whether the CIA should redraft it. Urgenson says he replied that if the CIA wrote a new letter, the agency should "be mindful of the fact that if you change ((it)), you have to explain why you made the change."
CIA lawyers would later claim that Urgenson's statement was a form of political pressure. Urgenson denied the assertion. Meanwhile the Senate intelligence committee had begun looking into the obvious contradictions between what the CIA was telling the Justice Department and what it was telling Gonzalez. Boren was not pleased with the agency's apparent dissembling. He was even more upset when he learned that on Sept. 30, the day before Drogoul's sentencing hearing ended, the CIA had discovered six more classified documents relevant to the case. By this time Drogoul had a flamboyant new Georgia attorney named Bobby Lee Cook, who argued that the banker was an innocent pawn of Rome and Washington. An investigation by an Italian parliamentary committee leaned toward the same conclusion. Shoob thus allowed the Justice Department to cancel its plea-bargain agreement with Drogoul. But U.S. prosecutors still believe they were right. Says Brill: "((Drogoul)) had confessed to the crime over and over again. It was only when Bobby Lee Cook came in that he denied he was guilty."
But, if guilty, did he act alone? In July 1990 B.N.L.'s president, Giampiero Cantoni, approached U.S. Ambassador Peter Secchia in Rome and asked whether the ambassador could persuade Washington to elevate the U.S. investigation to the "political level." Secchia forwarded the request to Washington by cable. In an interview last week with TIME's Rome bureau chief John Moody, the ambassador insisted that neither he nor Cantoni had meant to interfere with the investigation. Said Secchia: "Taking it to a 'political level' meant that it should go to the Cabinet level. Taking it to a political level doesn't mean take it to a higher level so they can squash it. It means taking it to a higher level that will understand how damaging this can be to the Italian- American relationship. That's how Cantoni intended it. In my 3 1/2 years here, not once did anyone pressure me or ask me to do anything other than what was reported in that Cantoni cable. They simply wouldn't risk it."