On Sunday, an overloaded chartered houseboat on Italy’s Lake Maggiore was caught in a sudden, violent storm and capsized, killing four of the 21 passengers and two crew. Sadly, this sort of boating accident, while tragic, is not entirely out of the ordinary.
What made the accident unusual was that all of the 21 passengers aboard the boat were currently or formerly tied to Israeli and Italian defense and intelligence work, which is to say spies or former spies. Of the passengers, 13 were connected to Israel’s intelligence service Mossad, and eight were from Italian intelligence.
Of the dead, two belonged to Italy’s intelligence service, while another victim had been a retired Mossad operative. The fourth victim, a Russian woman, had been married to the boat’s skipper.
The official explanation as to the nature of the excursion was that the passengers had been celebrating a birthday. Few seem to be buying that story and the Italian press was quickly flooded with conspiracy theories.
As reported by the New York Times, the gathering was quickly labeled a “spy party” by several media outlets.
Some outlets speculated whether the Alpine boat trip had been an opportunity to swap information. Was it a coincidence that the skipper was fluent in Bulgarian, as some noted, and married to a Russian? Had the spies been scoping the lake for Russian magnates investing nearby, as the Milan daily newspaper Corriere della Sera posited on Thursday?
None of the survivors had identification documents with them when they gave statements about the accident to Italian military police officers on Sunday night. They said they had lost them when the boat capsized, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors also confirmed that the Italians told the investigators they were employees of the presidency of the Council of Ministers, a catchall government department, while the Israelis said they were part of a government delegation.
Adding to the intrigue, the surviving passengers appeared to have been spirited away from the lake within hours of the accident. The Mossad sent an aircraft to return the Israeli survivors home, and tried to prevent publication of details about the incident in Israel, according to two Israeli defense officials. (The Israeli media reported that the Israeli casualty was a Mossad veteran only on Wednesday.)
The prosecutor looking into the incident, Massimo De Filippo, and his boss, the chief prosecutor Carlo Nocerino, said such questions were outside the scope of their investigation, which is to determine what made the boat capsize and sink.
What appears certain, however, is that extreme weather was the likely cause of the accident.
The president of the Lombardy region, Attilio Fontana, said Sunday that a “whirlwind” had caused the 16-meter (52-foot) long boat to overturn. Italian investigators have reportedly said they believe the ship capsized in an accident caused by the sudden change in weather, rather than foul play.