SpaceX: how the military passed data to Musk's manager Andrea Stroppa

The 'internal' document labelled 'Ministry of Foreign Affairs-Defence Staff' was strategic for Elon Musk's SpaceX company. Even Andrea Stroppa, the South African tycoon's Italian plenipotentiary, recognises this when the astute former frigate captain Angelo Antonio Masala sends it to him. "It is important that it does not circulate, because it is a Ministry document", there are "their doubts and the questions they want to ask", "so I am sending you a document that is really confidential, internal, I ask you to clean it up", so as not to make it identifiable. "It's just for us (from SpaceX, ed.)," reassures Stroppa, who adds, "I'm glad, in short, that we're a bit early."

Here is the wiretap of 29 August that for the prosecutors of Rome frames Masala, who rose through the ranks with his appointment in the VI Department of the Defence General Staff and was swept up in one of the strands of the Sogei investigation.

At stake are Musk's economic interests in Italy. This is precisely what the Defence and the Farnesina were discussing, before the military zealot became Stroppa's alleged 'mole' in the General Staff and divulged information that for the prosecutors was 'confidential' in nature: the possible implementation of Starlink - SpaceX's satellite system to provide broadband internet connection - for military and diplomatic purposes, such as use in theatres of war and for embassies; but also civilian purposes, with the aim, in this case, of achieving the Pnrr objective of expanding the connection to the most remote areas of the country, compensating for the delays accumulated for the upgrading of the fibre.

Masala and Stroppa's goal was to be 'quick'. The Gdf summarises an interception of 5 June in which the two talk of 'an agreement' on Starlink to be closed 'within the year for the whole country'. Conversely, 'if they go long, they will try to do the activations for individual customers, such as the "Marina"'.

But to carry out the plan, the investigators believe, it was necessary to move the right pawns. The soldier played his game: 'to have the VI Department of the General Staff recognise a role' in the Starlink project, 'so that he himself could intervene in its implementation, mainly through the opaque interactions established with Andrea Stroppa'. An interest so pressing, on the part of the former frigate captain, that it attracted the attention of General Giovanni Gagliano himself, head of the VI Department: 'Today,' Masala told the entrepreneur Cristiano Rufini, recently dismissed from the Olidata group, 'Gagliano wanted to talk to me because he said "I wouldn't want you to have personal interests, because you are advocating the Starlink cause very strongly and so I find this very strange"'.