A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (21 page)

The great majority of the fifty suspect SIMs were either registered in this manner or not registered at all. Some, however, were registered to people with American names and addresses, and some of the Americans had even shown passports or international driver’s licenses when they bought their SIMs. One seller had made a photocopy of one of these licenses. It had been issued by the American Automobile Association to a Monica Courtney Adler, who, so the license claimed, was born in Seattle in 1973 and lived in Arlington, Virginia. The grainy copy of the license showed a cheerful, big-toothed woman, full of cheek and long of dark hair, which she had either drawn back over her high forehead or had closely banged. Her attire was conservative but not too, and she had signed her first name with a magnificent lasso that flew off the
a
and doubled back over the rest of the letters, as if to capture them. On the whole, she could have been a young Xerox manager delighted to be leaving Stamford to run the Milan accounts. It was doubtful her real name was Monica Courtney Adler or that the other data on her license were strictly correct, but since she had bought the SIM in person, her photo was probably genuine, and the year of her birth could not have been far off 1973. Her SIM had been in Dergano at the moment Abu Omar was kidnapped.

The other shops that sold SIMs to Americans only transcribed the data from their IDs rather than photocopying them. But Megale’s investigators, by means presently to be described, ferreted out copies of several of the SIM-holders’ passports and driver’s licenses, all of which were presumably falsified in one degree or another. Thus:

Ben Amar Harty, whose SIM had been in Dergano at the moment of the kidnapping, was forty-nine and claimed nativity in Iowa Falls and residence in Washington, D.C. His heritage seemed Arab or similar, but large glasses, darkened by photocopying, obscured his staid, round face.

Cynthia Dame Logan and Drew Carlyle Channing had both been in the Cormano-to-Aviano group. Logan, forty-two, had a smile as be-cheeked as Adler’s, dark hair that ran in two streams down her chest, and no fear of lipstick. She alleged Maryland for her birthplace. Channing was thirty-seven and a New Yorker by birth, but photocopying had turned him into a silhouette, and about all one could say of his person was that it was thick of neck.

John Kevin Duffin had not been in either Dergano or Cormano on the day of the kidnapping but in a distant part of Milan. After the kidnapping, he had traveled separately from the caravan to Aviano, perhaps in some unknown supervisory or supporting role. He lived in King of Prussia, outside Philadelphia, and if his fifty years had brought him wrinkles, not many survived the photocopier. He was perky and a touch doughy, styled his hair
alla
coconut—short and bristly—and wore a striped knit shirt with a wilted collar that would have been at home on a King of Prussian fairway.

James Robert Kirkland, Anne Linda Jenkins, and James Thomas Harbison had not been in Dergano or Cormano during the kidnapping but had visited one or both many times before. Kirkland, sixty, was trim as a colonel and had a face as poker—mouth zipped, eyes narrowed. He claimed a Milanese address, Via Washington 39, which turned out to be a park. Maybe he was homeless. More likely he was uninventive: DIGOS eventually learned that he had stayed at the Milan Marriott, at Via Washington 66, which suggested he could concoct no better cover address than one down the block. “Washington” was also easy for an American to remember and, perhaps, patriotically satisfying. Anne Jenkins, a fit fifty-six, had good teeth, the practical short hair of a gym teacher, an equally sensible mock turtleneck, and an air of efficient friendliness. Her passport originated in Washington. She had originated in Florida. Harbison was two years her junior, native to New Jersey, and had also been passported in Washington. His face was another silhouette, although his natty striped Oxford and impeccably knotted tie survived the copying. Like Kirkland, he claimed a Milanese address, Via Mac Mahon 109, which was a block of flats not far from Dergano that yielded no sign of his residency.

Six other SIMs were registered to Americans for whom DIGOS could find only transcribed data, no photocopies. None of these SIMs was in Dergano or Cormano on the day of the kidnapping. Their owners were Raymond Harbaugh, a sixty-three-year-old native of Alaska; Joseph Sofin, fifty and born in Moldova; Brenda Liliana Ibanez, a native New Yorker of forty-three years; Pilar Maria Rueda, a native Californian of forty-one; Victor Castellano, Texan and thirty-four; and Eliana Isabella Castaldo, Floridian and thirty-three. Castaldo said she lived or worked in Norristown, Pennsylvania, not far from Duffin in King of Prussia. The others claimed residency in greater Washington.

MONICA COURTNEY
ADLER
first arrived in Milan on January 9, 2003. She spent three nights in room 1027 of the Westin Palace, then decamped to the Principe di Savoia, room 704. The Savoia occupies the pinnacle of the Milanese hostelry and is perhaps best known for its presidential suite, in whose pool have dipped Frank Sinatra and Madonna (separately), to say nothing of mere presidents. The establishment’s other rooms, a touch less luxurious, still qualify as opulent. By day Adler scouted Dergano and its environs, and by night she repaired to the Savoia, in whose glass-domed, crystal-suffused, winter-gardened bar she perhaps refreshed herself. After three weeks, she was apparently permitted a break from this taxing regimen, because on the morning of February 1 she checked out of the Savoia, drove to the coastal resort of La Spezia, and checked in to the Hotel del Golfo. The next day, she went to Florence and put up at the Grand Hotel Baglioni, in which she meant to stay two nights, but she returned to Milan the following day and checked in to the Hilton, room 869, where she remained until February 18, the day after the kidnapping. Then she vanished. She had not been easy on the American taxpayer. Her nightly rate at the Savoia was
€
344, about $400, for a total bill of nearly $8,000. The Hilton’s rate was
€
300, about $350, for a total of nearly $5,000. The going rate for a good room in Milan was about half that.

Megale’s investigators were able to discover Adler’s lodgings by examining where her SIM stopped for the night, the same technique they had used to learn that Bob Lady was using Barbara Suddath’s SIM. Lady’s case had been much simpler, however, because DIGOS already knew where Lady lived and had only to see that Suddath’s SIM was connecting to cell towers near his homes. In Adler’s case, though, the DIGOS investigators had no idea where she was sleeping. But they assumed she was staying in hotels, so each time they found a tower to which her SIM connected overnight, an officer visited the hotels within the tower’s range and looked at their guest registries. Invariably, one hotel within the range contained Adler’s name. She could have made DIGOS’s work harder by changing her name from hotel to hotel, but she never did. DIGOS found the hotels of several of the other Americans in the same manner; they did not change their names either. Nearly all of their hotels were as immoderately priced as Adler’s.

DIGOS also put names to some of the dozens of SIMs that either had not been registered to anyone or had been registered to stolen identities. These cases were more complicated than Adler’s because although the nameless SIMs connected to cell towers overnight, their namelessness meant that the investigators could not simply match them to hotel registries. DIGOS overcame the problem by tracing the SIMs’ movements more minutely and comparing those movements with the precise check-in and check-out times of hotel guests. In a relatively simple case, a SIM might have connected to a cell tower at 9:00 p.m. on a certain night, then disconnected at 8:00 a.m. the next morning. On checking the hotel records, DIGOS would find only a few guests—Tim Davis, Lena Kohl, and Stefania Ragusa, say—who had arrived around 9:00 and left around 8:00. DIGOS would follow the SIM to its next hotel, and when Davis turned up there but Kohl and Ragusa did not, the investigators could be sure Davis was the user of the nameless SIM. A few of the users of nameless SIMs made some of this detective work unnecessary by giving their phone numbers (i.e., their SIM numbers) to their hotels when they gave their names at check-in, thereby making their anonymous SIMs onymous—which rather undid the trouble someone had gone to to get them a nameless SIM in the first place.

Seven Americans were newly unmasked by DIGOS’s hotel work. Four of them—Lorenzo Gabriel Carrera, a thirty-two-year-old from Texas; Vincent Faldo, fifty-two and from Massachusetts; Michalis Vasiliou, forty and born in Greece; and Betnie Medero-Navedo, thirty-five and of unknown nativity—had traveled in the escorting caravan to Aviano on the day of the kidnapping. Medero-Navedo, like Sabrina De Sousa, was a second secretary at the U.S. embassy and was the only diplomat accused of a hands-on role in the kidnapping proper. (She was eventually exonerated, in a manner to be discussed.) Two more of the seven newly discovered Americans—Gregory Asherleigh, a forty-seven-year-old Marylander, and George Purvis, forty-three and born in China—had been in Dergano during the kidnapping. Purvis, it seemed, was a leader. He had arrived in Milan in September of 2002, months before most of the other spies, presumably to plan the kidnapping. He had also exchanged calls with Bob Lady, who kept his distance (at least telephonically) from most of the spies. The last of the seven Americans newly discovered, John Thomas Gurley, a thirty-two-year-old claiming residency in Orlando, seemed to have been a lesser planner and was not in Dergano or Cormano on the day of the kidnapping.

As the investigators studied the SIMs, they also noticed that some of them traveled always and exactly in pairs, from which they deduced that each pair belonged to one spy. Often one of the paired SIMs was registered in the spy’s name, or at any rate in his American alias, while the other was unregistered or falsely registered to an Italian. Possibly the spy had used the unregistered SIM for more-sensitive calls and the registered SIM for less-sensitive calls. If so, he was unaware that the SIMs’ joint movements would tie the pair together. Some of the spies were more foolish still, using both SIMs in the same phone. Perhaps they thought only a SIM, not the phone it was in, could be traced. But the serial number of the phone showed up in the call logs with both SIMs and betrayed their user. By these means, DIGOS learned that four spies—Harbaugh, Harbison, Rueda, and Sofin—who till that point had been implicated only by their named SIMs and only in the planning stages had in fact been in Dergano with their nameless SIMs when Abu Omar was kidnapped. The discovery was particularly damaging for the sixty-four-year-old Harbaugh, who was revealed as a probable co-leader of the kidnapping with Purvis. Harbaugh had arrived in Milan in August, a month before Purvis, and to judge from his calls was a frequent go-between between Lady and the rest of the kidnapping team. None of the other spies had more than two SIMs, but Harbaugh had a prodigious five, one of which was the SIM that called Lady several times on the afternoon of the kidnapping, presumably to update him on its progress.

In all, DIGOS tied thirty-four of the fifty-four conspiratorial SIMs to twenty-five Americans.

This, however, was not all that DIGOS learned. Several of the Americans, when checking into hotels, gave out addresses, almost all of which were post office boxes not far from the CIA’s headquarters. Evidently the CIA could not be bothered to rent a box or two in Wichita and have the contents forwarded. A few of the spies also listed employers, which, with very little investigation, were discovered to be fronts. One was Coachmen Enterprises—aptly named for the rendering trade. When the spies settled their hotel bills, many paid with Visa, MasterCard, and Diners Club accounts whose numbers were so unsubtly similar—sharing the first eight, eleven, or fourteen (of sixteen) digits—as to betray a common origin.

The spies did not bare themselves only to DIGOS. They also bared themselves to each other. When Monica Courtney Adler took her break by the sea at La Spezia, John Kevin Duffin shared her room. Ben Amar Harty and Eliana Castaldo shared another room in the same hotel. Two nights later Raymond Harbaugh and Pilar Rueda recreated together in a chamber in the Alpine resort of Chiesa di Valmalenco. After the kidnapping, many of the spies passed a few nights (not necessarily in the same room) in Venice’s more exquisite hotels, like the fourteenth-century Danieli, off Piazza San Marco, and the Europa and Regina, on the Grand Canal. The frolics and the regal bills were manna to headline writers, the best of whom wrote, “The Spies Who Came in From the Hot Tub” and “Be All That You Can Charge” and “Ask Not What Your Country Can Bill to You, But What You Can Bill to Your Country.”

Then there were the frequent-flyer numbers. On checking in to hotels or renting cars (which DIGOS also identified and which, after the splendor of the lodgings, were an anti-climax: gray Fiat compacts and such), several of the Americans gave account numbers for United Mileage Plus, Delta Sky Miles, Northwest WorldPerks, Hilton HHonors, and the Starwood Special Preferred Guest Program. They perhaps thought Abu Omar should not be the only one to get a free trip out of the job. When investigators looked into the accounts, they learned that two months after the kidnapping, Gregory Asherleigh flew from New York to Oslo, stayed a month, then returned. He banked the miles from his flights on his Northwest WorldPerks account. Two weeks after he came back, Cynthia Dame Logan flew from Washington to Oslo, stayed two months, and banked her miles on her United Mileage Plus account.

Almost certainly, Asherleigh and Logan had been scouting another rendition. Their target, almost as certainly, was Mullah Krekar, the co-founder of an Iraqi group that evolved into Ansar al-Islam—the same group for which Abu Omar had allegedly recruited suicide bombers. Krekar had fled Iraq for Norway in 1991 and been granted asylum on grounds of persecution under Saddam Hussein. Later he was suspected of traveling back to Iraq to help Ansar al-Islam, and his asylum was revoked. Norway did not expel him, however, because he might have been put to death if sent home. As the Iraq War drew near in 2003 and the United States worried increasingly about Ansar al-Islam, the CIA weighed whether to render Krekar. Asherleigh and Logan, it seems, were sent to Oslo to scout the possibility. But the rendition did not come to pass, partly because someone in Norway’s intelligence services tipped Krekar’s lawyer to the plan. “A lot of people with integrity in the government didn’t like the situation,” the lawyer, Brynjar Meling, later explained, “and therefore there were quite a lot of leaks.” Meling begged the police to protect his client, but they apparently declined. When Krekar took to denouncing the CIA’s plan in public, he was generally dismissed as paranoid. He was vindicated a few years later when Norway’s main intelligence service admitted it had known that CIA officers had come to Norway with illicit intentions.