Immoral but Inevitable

Americans visiting Paris or Rome this spring have been a bit surprised to discover that most Europeans do not seem particularly interested in--let alone shocked by--the Watergate scandal. "They think wiretapping is immoral but inevitable," says a French journalist. It may also be, however, that Europeans are more intrigued by a spate of stories about illegal bugging closer to home. Items:

> In Italy 25 private detectives and telephone company employees have been arrested so far in a widening scandal involving the tapping of perhaps 1,000 telephone lines in Rome, including those of politicians, businessmen and call girls.

> In France the left-wing weekly Nouvel Observateur charged recently that at least 1,500 Parisians "are being listened to by the police, espionage and counterespionage services." The government has not bothered to deny the Observateur's accusation.

> In Britain the editor of the Railway Gazette, Richard Hope, was suspected of passing on to the London Times a secret government report that revealed plans to phase out 60% of the present railway system. Hope soon discovered that both his home and office phones had been tapped, and it was only when he publicized the taps that the government announced that it was dropping the investigation.

The current furor in Italy derives from a complaint by a Roman journalist last fall that his telephone was being tapped. A crusading investigator named Luciano Infelisi, 33, who works for the Rome Magistrature as a sort of district attorney, decided to check further. With two aides, he equipped an unmarked van with a pair of antennas and it toured the center of Rome, trying to pick up the signals of transmitters hidden in phones or cables. Eventually the investigators concluded that hundreds of lines were being tapped, including those of the Bank of Italy, the Communist Party, various newspapers and companies, the Knights of Malta legation to the Vatican and Actress Silvana Mangano.

Investigators discovered that the Interior Ministry alone had bought "several hundred" bugging devices since 1969, but their search concentrated primarily on private detectives. When one of them was found to have two microtransmitters in his office, the head of the Italian detectives association, Pier Davide Tavazzi, called a press conference to denounce the culprit for damaging the good name of the profession. Last week Tavazzi himself was implicated in a tapping case and was hauled off to Milan's San Vittore Prison.

So far, Infelisi and a growing number of other investigators have failed to net any really big fish, but they have obviously made a lot of people nervous. Last week two masked men broke into Infelisi's apartment and told a maid: "It was the little girl we were after." Luckily, Infelisi and his wife had taken their infant daughter for a walk. But at last the government is tightening its laws against bugging. According to a draft put before the Cabinet last week, sentences will be increased drastically --from as little as 15 days in jail at present to three years' imprisonment.

Italians are presumably no more vulnerable to bugging than are other Europeans. The French National Assembly passed a law forbidding all phone tapping three years ago, but, as Nouvel Observateur notes, "nothing has changed since the law was passed." The government goes right on bugging, with the help of some of the equipment that the Gestapo left behind in 1944. Not only do the authorities tap the phones of specific suspects, but there are permanent taps even on public phone booths in cafes near major ministerial offices. Tapping is limited, according to one expert, only by a "shortage of funds for employing enough personnel to type up the taped conversations, and, above all, to know what should be typed."

The West Germans, ever mindful of the shadow of the Gestapo, have particularly strict laws governing official wiretapping, and there have been no bugging scandals for a long time. But few observers doubt that in a country that shelters the largest number of foreign agents in Europe, a formidable amount of illegal wiretapping goes on. Curiously enough, all kinds of spying devices are legally on sale in West Germany, but they cannot legally be used or even tested. Some manufacturers protect themselves by labeling their products "for export only."

Of Europe's major countries, Britain offers its citizens the least legal protection against wiretapping and yet is probably the least afflicted by it. As a

Royal committee on privacy concluded last year, the British still remain largely free of the suspicion that there is a Big Brother somewhere listening in. When a newspaper reported that 1,250 telephones in Britain were legally bugged, the Home Office dismissed the estimate as "ludicrously high."

The Briton's endearing assumption that gentlemen do not tap each other's telephones is, naturally, the despair of merchants like Mr. X, who sells all sorts of bugging gadgets to overseas clients. "I find it horrifying," he says, "that we are in the Common Market with the Germans, the French and the Italians, who know all about this equipment and don't feel too many moral qualms about using it." There are probably no more than 20 British companies, he laments, that even bother to "sweep" their board rooms for bugs that have been planted by their competitors. "Britain is virgin territory," he concludes, "and it had better wake up!" No doubt, it will.

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