SpyTalk

DeSousa, a young-looking 53, sips her coffee. She knows the routine. She mechanically denies her alleged CIA employment and other evidence connecting her to the abduction,gathered by local police.

"I had nothing to do with the planning, and nothing to do with the kidnapping, of this guy," she says.

To the contrary, however, intelligence sources say she was part of a team conducting surveillance on the target, a Muslim preacher and al Qaeda suspect known as Abu Omar.

Italian press accounts, based on interviews with local intelligence officials who say DeSousa treated them with disdain, described her as "Sabrina the tiger, with stiletto heels and fists of steel."

But Matthew Cole, who is writing a book on the Milan caper for Simon & Schuster, describes her as far less than a current-day Mata Hari.

"Sabrina De Sousa was brought into CIA in the mid-1980's by her then-husband, a career CIA officer named Mike Herbert," he said. "Before becoming a field officer, she was part of a freelance surveillance team that the Counter Terrorism Center then called 'Snapshots.'

"It was contract work that allowed her entry into getting a full-time job with the agency," Cole continued. "Several Italian intelligence and counter- terrorism officers told the Milan prosecutor that they were introduced to De Sousa as their new CIA liaison in Milan."

And she didn't leave a good impression, Cole said.

"One Italian intelligence official complained that she treated him like 'a Third World general'."

In any event, DeSousa has credit card records showing she wasn't even in Milan on the kidnapping, Feb. 17, 2003. She was on a skiing vacation 130 miles away.

Cole, who has spent hours interviewing Italian officials, agrees.

"She was involved in the early planning and preparatory stages of the Abu Omar rendition, and had some logistical role in the days leading up to the rendition, but she was not present when the abduction took place."

DeSousa dismisses all questions about her close relations with Italian intelligence officials, explaining them as nothing more than a routine part of her job as a U.S. diplomat with responsibility for "political and military relations" in Milan.

To a dozen more questions about her CIA employment and activities in Milan, she answers, in friendly resignation, "I can't really comment."

"You can keep hammering away at me, but all I will say is I was a former federal employee," she added. "I worked for the State Department. I was second secretary at the American embassy in Rome and the consulate in Milan."

And as such, DeSousa argues, the State Department should have wrapped her and the other American defendants listed officially as foreign service officers in diplomatic immunity, putting them beyond the reach of Italian prosecutors.

"Why isn't President Obama protecting us?" she asks, not entirely rhetorically.

On Wednesday, May 13, DeSousa put teeth to her question, filing a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to force the State Department to invoke diplomatic immunity to halt the Italian prosecution, provide her with legal counsel in Italy and pay her legal bills and other costs associated with the case, reported The New York Times.

She said she knew of no other such suits by U.S. embassy personnel named in the Milan case.

State Department officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, say they are diligently working behind the scenes for DeSousa and other such defendants, for whom the CIA routinely forces American embassies to provide cover -- much to their irritation.

But DeSousa has gotten nothing but grief from the State Department, she says.

Last year Foggy Bottom cancelled her official diplomatic passport, not only ending any chance of another foreign assignment -- a professional death knell -- but leaving her even more vulnerable to arrest and extradition by Italian authorities should she travel abroad.

Officials told her she could not keep her job if she ignored their instructions not to visit her mother in India.

In February, she quit.

"Abandonment and betrayal is what this is all about," interjects her attorney, Mark S. Zaid.

"In this administration," DeSousa says, "we have Obama saying he's not going to hold anyone responsible, he's not going to allow anyone to be prosecuted ... So why isn't Obama protecting us over here?"

"And why is it that Congress blows us off as well?" she adds.

(A request for comment from the office of John Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was not answered.)

"And who is going to fight this war?" DeSousa adds. "That's really the principle here."

"What does this administration plan to do about all the men and women out there working on the counterterrorism effort?" she adds.

Zaid was quoted by the Italian news service ANSA saying that Italian authorities "must not use people as political pawns in every quarrel with the American Government."

But the Milan prosecutor, Armando Spataro, rejected Zaid's suggestion that the case is being driven by anti-American politics.

The law is the law, Spataro said. It does not allow U.S. consular officials to commit crimes under diplomatic cover.

"Italian Justice deserves respect and not innuendos," Spataro said by email. "Maybe attorney Zaid doesn't understand the legal proceedings now ongoing in Milan."

He quotes the Vienna Convention of 1963, ratified by Italy in 1967, which says, "Consular officers can be arrested or placed in preventive detention only in case of serious crimes and as a result of a ruling issued by the judicial authority."

Kidnapping is a serious crime, he says, "punishable with detention of not less than five years."

Knowledgeable observers say it's unimaginable that Washington would turn over De Sousa and other CIA defendants to Italy, if they are convicted in absentia.

Meantime, DeSousa, who is unemployed, wonders how the CIA or Defense Department can keep persuading U.S. operatives to conduct counterterrorism operations if they know they're on their own if they get caught.

"Who," she asks, "is going to do stuff?"

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.