AISE (Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna)

A hundred years of intelligence

The Italian services date their history from the SIM, created on 15 October 1925 as the first joint (inter-service) intelligence service and dissolved after the war. In 1949 the SIFAR was set up under the Chief of Defence Staff; in 1966 it was transformed into the SID. Law No. 801 of 1977 replaced the SID with the military SISMI and the domestic SISDE, plus the coordinating body CESIS.²

According to the Servizio Studi (Research Service) of the Chamber of Deputies, under the 1977 system the SISMI reported to the Minister of Defence and the SISDE to the Minister of the Interior; responsibilities were divided according to the interest being protected, not by territory.¹

Law No. 124 of 2007

The Law entrusts the President of the Council of Ministers with the high direction of, and overall responsibility for, intelligence policy for security, matters of state secrecy and the appointment of directors (Article 1). The system consists of the Prime Minister, the interministerial committee CISR, where applicable a delegated authority (Autorità delegata), the coordinating department DIS and the agencies AISE and AISI (Article 2).^1,3

AISE operates outside national territory to defend the Republic against threats from abroad, including in countering the proliferation of strategic materials; it answers directly to the Prime Minister and keeps the Ministers of Defence, Foreign Affairs and the Interior informed. Its director is appointed by the Prime Minister after consulting the CISR for a maximum of four years, renewable once (Article 6). No other body may perform the functions of the DIS, AISE and AISI; the military RIS remains outside the system (Article 8).¹

Parliamentary oversight

The COPASIR committee consists of five deputies and five senators, with equal representation of majority and opposition; its chair must come from the opposition. The committee continuously checks that the system operates in accordance with the Constitution and the law (Article 30). Its 1977 predecessor, COPACO, could request information but had no power to compel the production of documents or to carry out inspections.¹

The Abu Omar case

On 17 February 2003 the imam Osama Mustafa Nasr (“Abu Omar”) was abducted in Milan and flown via the Aviano and Ramstein bases to Cairo. In 2009 a Milan court convicted 22 US agents in absentia; the convictions of SISMI officers were quashed by the Court of Cassation on 24 February 2014, which applied state secrecy following Constitutional Court judgment No. 24/2014.⁴

In its judgment of 23 February 2016 (Nasr and Ghali v. Italy) the European Court of Human Rights found violations of Articles 3, 5, 8 and 13 of the Convention. It held that state secrecy had been applied so that those responsible would escape punishment, even though the information in question was widely known from the media; it also noted the presidential pardon of three convicted US citizens.⁵