Elisabetta Belloni who is the first woman appointed to lead the secret services

For the first time there is a woman at the top of intelligence. The Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, has appointed Ambassador Elisabetta Belloni as general director of the Department of Information for Security (Dis). He will replace the prefect Gennaro Vecchione, who was appointed in November 2018 by Prime Minister Conte and who ends his mandate early.

Belloni, born in Rome in 1958, has been a forerunner since she was a girl. It was the first student to be admitted, together with a partner, at the Istituto Massimiliano Massimo dei Gesuiti, the school where Mario Draghi also studied, and which until then had been exclusively male.

She graduated with honors in Political Science from Luiss and, three years later, in 1985, she began her diplomatic career. He held positions in the Italian embassies, in the permanent representations in Vienna and Bratislava and in the Directorates-General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From 2004 to 2008 it was at the head of the Crisis Unit of the Farnesina, managing the repatriation of Italian tourists during the tsunami emergency in Southeast Asia and the cases of kidnapping in Iraq and Afghanistan. Until 2013, she was general director of development cooperation and subsequently promoted general director for resources and innovation. Since June 2015 she has been the head of the cabinet of the then Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni and, in April 2016, she became Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the first woman to fill this role.

He will leave his post at the Farnesina (replaced by Ambassador Ettore Sequi, currently head of the cabinet of Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio) to coordinate the two operational agencies of the secret services, confronting the delegated authority Franco Gabrielli.

“Women are particularly suitable for taking on positions that involve a strong individual responsibility,” she said in an interview in which she was asked what difficulties she had encountered in her career. «Because women have almost by nature a propensity to make decisions without hesitation and to take responsibility even when this involves personal risks. I had to prove that I could do it and I had to put in perhaps a little more effort than my colleagues. On the other hand, we do not live in a society that allows a woman to make a career without having to give up a little of her femininity, her way of being, her family, her needs “.

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