ROME (Reuters) -- Italian spies working for the Soviet KGB infiltrated the hub of the interior ministry, gaining access to top secret encrypted NATO messages, Italian newspapers said Thursday.
The existence of a network was reported to be among the revelations made by top Soviet defector Vasili Mitrokhin, a senior KGB officer, to the British secret service after he defected to Britain in 1992.Quoting unnamed sources close to the office of Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema, Corriere della Sera newspaper said they could not rule out that the spy network, or at least part of it, was still operational.
The sources also said neither Britain nor the Italian secret services had informed the D'Alema government of any of the details relating to Italy made by Mitrokhin.
The network was believed to include interior ministry workers, scientists, diplomats and journalists, the paper said.
"The spies had access to the special office attached to the interior minister's cabinet, and particularly to the "cipher office," which encrypts and decrypts classified messages," Corriere della Sera said.
Franco Frattini, chairman of the parliamentary committee that oversees the secret services, said D'Alema and the government should make an immediate request to Britain and Russia for the names of those who passed information on to the KGB over the years.
Mitrokhin's revelations, which have sparked one of the biggest spying scandals in Britain for years, were triggered by newspaper reports of a forthcoming book and BBC television program on the dissident KGB officer.
Italy's national journalists' association president Mario Petrina said he was writing to D'Alema and other government ministers for further clarification on the spying allegations relating to journalists.
"It is not a witch hunt, but the journalists' association has a duty to act with all due rigor," Petrina said.
Government ministers have not made any immediate comment on the spy revelations.
The book entitled "The Mitrokhin Archive" co-authored by Cambridge academic Christopher Andrew, was also said to include details of why the Kremlin was suspicious over the appointment of Enrico Berlinguer in 1972 as head of the Italian Communist Party--once the biggest Marxist party in the West.
Mitrokhin also revealed that Italy's ultraleft Red Brigades guerrillas were helped in the 1970s by the Czechoslovak StB secret police.
Italian communists feared that the link might come to light in the investigations that followed the 1978 kidnapping and murder by guerrillas of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
The KGB officer also said that the feared Soviet secret police had regarded Pope John Paul as one of the biggest threats to communism in Eastern Europe but it had no hand in the assassination attempt on the Polish Pontiff in May 1981.
"If the Pope had died," the book is quoted as saying, "the KGB would have been without doubt in seventh heaven, but in the documents seen by Mitrokhin there was no evidence that the Soviet secret services were involved in the attempt on his life."