Justice demands the truth

Claudio Gatti, an Italian and American journalist, has updated the results of his decades-long inquiries into an incident known often in Italy simply as “Ustica” (or the strage di Ustica). That refers both to a small Italian island about 49 miles north of Palermo and the crash nearby of an Itavia DC-9 on June 27, 1980. The crash killed all 81 people aboard.

Forty-four years later, the cause of the Ustica crash is still unknown. The crew had no warning. There is no evidence of mechanical failure. Experts have (mostly) discarded the hypothesis of a bomb on board. Gatti examines other hypotheses involving a American, French, Italian, or Libyan missile. Justice demands the truth.

What didn’t happen

He concludes that none of these hypotheses is valid.

There is technical evidence favoring a missile. The downing of the aircraft might have been a mistake. I often noted while Deputy Chief of Mission in Rome 1990-93, and still believe, the Americans could not have kept such a mistake secret. The French or Italians, who some imagine to have mistaken the plane for one in which Qaddafi was traveling, had other, better options for killing him. Qaddafi himself claimed to be the target, but the Libyans have never provided evidence that he was flying (or planned to fly) in the area that night. The Libyans had no motive, even if the later crash in Sicily of a Libyan MIG raised questions about their possible involvement.

The decades since the incident are replete with suspicious behavior, missing data, allegations of coverups, military and technical incompetence, and conspiracy theories. These are standard in Italy. The judiciary, sometimes more serious than the journalism, has failed to elucidate the cause.

What might have happened

Gatti, whom I have known for decades (caveat emptor), thinks he knows the answer: Israel. His theory is that Prime Minister Begin, worried (literally) sick about Iraq’s acquisition of nuclear technology from France and Italy, authorized the downing of a plane carrying weapons-grade enriched uranium fuel for the Osiraq reactor. The Israelis destroyed that in an air raid a year later. Gatti thinks the Israeli pilots, operating in low-visibility conditions at the outer limits of their capabilities, mistook the Itavia plane for one that was supposed to be traveling a similar route.

I won’t rehearse all the details. This RAI documentary by Luca Chianca deals with some of them. I play a minor role there saying no more than intended here. I don’t believe the Americans did it. The Israelis had the technical means to do it. But I have no idea whether they did.

Caveat emptor here as well. I was involved in the late 1970s in American diplomatic efforts to prevent the Italians from transferring nuclear technology to Iraq. I now wonder whether preventing Israel from taking military action motivated my vigorous State Department instructions.

Gatti offers much more in his Il Quinto Scenario: Atto Secondo, but that is available only in Italian. The evidence for an Israeli missile downing the DC-9 is compelling. But not quite a smoking gun. It passes what the experts term a “hoop test.” As in jumping through a hoop. The facts, as best he thinks them determined, are consistent with Israeli culpability. The hypothesis thus fulfills a necessary but not sufficient criterion.

More investigation is needed

In the absence of competitive hypotheses, more investigation is warranted. It is appalling to think any state would down a passenger plane. But of course it has happened in the past. The Israelis downed a Libyan Arab Airlines Boeing 727 in 1973 when it unintentionally flew over Israeli-occupied Sinai. And it could happen again.

The Ustica mystery needs a solution. The families of 81 people should not have to live with uncertainty about what happened. Justice demands the truth, whatever it may be.