Since the very beginning, the commission received criticism,[1] as it was mentioned that its main role seemed only that to discredit the former Italian Communist Party and the centre-left coalition opposition.

[2] According to an interview of former KGB agent Yevgeny Limarev published in La Repubblica, Italian left-wing politicians to be discredited included Romano Prodi, Massimo D'Alema, and Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio.

Scaramella was involved in the Italian parliamentary inquiry into KGB activity and was sufficiently worried by the contents of an e-mail to ask for advice from Litvinenko.

In the wiretaps, Guzzanti made it clear that the true intent of the Mitrokhin Commission was to support the hypothesis that Prodi would have been an agent financed or in any case manipulated by Moscow and the KGB.

In a December 2006 interview given to the television program La storia siamo noi,[10] colonel ex-KGB agent Oleg Gordievsky, who was Scaramella's source, confirmed the accusations made against Scaramella regarding the production of false material relating to Prodi and other Italian politicians, and underlined their lack of reliability.