A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (29 page)

I asked how much English he spoke, and he said, “A lee-tul.” I asked about Italian, and he said, “
Un po’
.” So we proceeded through my interpreter, a kindly medical student who was one of few Egyptians who did not try to extort the last dollar from my wallet.

Abu Omar spoke with his eyebrows, which had natural peaks, like
accents circonflexes
, that became exaggerated when he was impassioned. In extreme passion they crested to Matterhorns. He could also compress a lot of expression into the sweep of an arm or the stiffening of his spine. But although he told some parts of his story with animation, for long stretches of time he sank deep into his chair, flapped his legs idly together, and narrated without heat. If he had once been warmed by more of his tale, repetition had cooled him. He may also, like other survivors of trauma, have disassociated himself from the pain of the events. Perhaps because of this detachment and also because his voice had a thin, top-of-the-throat quality, I had a hard time imagining his captivating the Islamic flocks of Italy, no matter how much expression he packed into his gestures. I wondered if something was being lost in translation, but my interpreter later said he did not find Abu Omar eloquent in Arabic or charismatic in general. He did, however, have a clear, linear style of speech (
this
happened, then
that
happened, then
that
) and a gallows humor, as when he said of the tendency of the Egyptian police to beat first and ask questions later, “Violence is the Egyptian way of showing love.” Both traits must have served him well in the pulpit.

Early in our interview, there came a gentle knock at the door of our room, and Abu Omar went out and returned with tasty yogurt-based drinks and cookies. His wife was our unseen hostess. A couple of hours later, there was another soft knock, and he disappeared and came back with more drinks. The courses, if not quite a bargain at $125 each, were still a nice touch.

Abu Omar’s story was that which I have told in preceding chapters, fleshed out by and checked against other sources where possible. More than once he stressed that he had never been involved with terrorists and had always loved Americans and other Westerners. Indeed, he still did, even after all he had been through, though he thought less highly of their governments. Not long before my arrival, he had called on terrorists in Iraq to release two German hostages. “What are the German mother and the son guilty of?” he had pled. “What have they got to do with the foreign policy of their country?” (The mother was released.) He would later show a visitor a bag of Christmas cards from well-wishers in Britain and said it gave him strength to know such people existed.

He also emphasized that he had never informed for Albania’s SHIK or any other government, although during his torture in Egypt he had blurted out all kinds of things, which he did not now want to elaborate, that he thought his torturers might want to hear. I asked him about a recent report in
GQ
, anonymously sourced, that he had collaborated more willingly than that after his rendition. The report said that CIA officers had watched the first days of his interrogation in Cairo on a video feed outside the interrogation room. He had not yet been tortured. From time to time his Egyptian interrogators emerged from the room and consulted with the CIA officers on how to get him to talk. During one of these consultations, the Americans said that before Abu Omar was kidnapped, his stepson, Nabila Ghali’s son by prior marriage, had gotten into a fight with a friend and had asked Abu Omar what to do. Abu Omar told his stepson he must apologize. The CIA officers suggested that the interrogators tell Abu Omar they had a message from his stepson: he had heeded Abu Omar’s advice and apologized. It might soften Abu Omar, somehow, to hear it. Sure enough, in the
GQ
story, when Abu Omar heard his son’s “message,” he wept and was moved to cooperate with his questioners. He talked for days. Torture had not been necessary. When he had talked himself out, the CIA officers left, and only then did the torture begin, apparently more for retribution than for information. To me, the
GQ
story sounded awfully convenient in exempting the CIA and more particularly Bob Lady—who had been in Cairo during this period and who was the source of other material in the article—from direct involvement in torture. In answer to my question, Abu Omar said his interrogators had indeed told him of his stepson’s apology, but their disclosure had been preceded by torture and, rather than prompting him to talk, had caused him only to wonder why they had brought up this irrelevant vignette. It was bizarre. He assumed that since the information must have been obtained via a bug in Milan, a foreign intelligence agency must have been cooperating in his interrogation.

As for his current state, he said—and I believed—that he was depressed and had trouble concentrating, that he still awoke screaming at night and broke out trembling during the day, that the smallest irritant could send him into a rage, and that the tranquilizers he took afforded him only slight relief. He also took medicine for his heart, which apparently had been damaged by the electroshocks and other horrors of prison, and his bones and joints ached even at rest. If he was like other victims of torture, most of what ailed his body would heal, but his troubles of mind and spirit would persist. “Twenty-two years later,” wrote Jean Améry, a Jew who was tortured by the Nazis in the Second World War, “I am still dangling over the ground by dislocated arms, panting and accusing myself.” Améry eventually killed himself.

A couple of hours after we had begun, Abu Omar said he was fatigued and escorted us to the door. He had shown prior guests a small bag of clothes he kept in the foyer for when the police came to arrest him again. There was no bag now, from which I gathered he was gaining confidence in his emancipation.

WHEN WE
CAME
back the next night, I thought Abu Omar a little less buoyant climbing the stairs, and when we sat down with the yogurt drinks before us, he declared this was our last session. I was taken aback and reminded him we had agreed to several sessions and said I had many questions left to ask. (Indeed, I had hardly asked any: when an interviewee will talk on point unprompted, as Abu Omar had the previous night, a reporter learns more by letting him speak and asking follow-ups later.) Abu Omar was unmoved by my protest. He said I could have as many hours as I liked tonight, but none beyond. I protested some more, but he held defiant. As it is rude in Egypt to show a person the sole of your shoe, I tilted a foot up to him while we bickered, giving him a little more sole with each rebuff, but after I had given all the sole I had to give, he remained as immovable as the Temple of Ptah. I finally suggested, as a temporary fix, that we start the session and see
how far we got, and he agreed.

He wanted to continue his narrative of the previous night, which had gotten as far as his first release from prison, but I preferred to ask about things he had glossed over. He tolerated my questions for a while, answering without much detail or interest, and when I pressed him about his probable terrorism (I had not yet read the transcripts of his conversations in Milan, so did not know just how likely a terrorist he was), he became still more clipped. Soon he announced he hadn’t time for minutiae and said he would tell the rest of his narrative or nothing at all. We argued some more, and after getting no further than in our last tiff, I let him go ahead. An hour or so later, he was done and asked for the rest of the money.

Now it was my turn to refuse. I did. He insisted I pay, I refused again, and we went back and forth for some time. Eventually he turned from my interpreter, to whom he had been directing his conversation, and looked at me with the eyes of a seal pup in a Defenders of Wildlife ad.

“Steef,” he said. “Pliz.”

“No.”

“Steef, pliz. I opened all. I tell you everything. Pliz, Steef. Pliz.” Reverting to the interpreter, he said that he had no job and no prospect of one, that his medical bills were enormous, and that he was so very poor that, in effect, his whole family would starve if I did not honor my commitment. I brushed away a tear and said no. He stood up and paced a few moments, then removed a skeleton key from his pocket, stuck it in the door, and locked us inside the room.

This was a first. I had never before been locked in a room by or with a terrorist. Trying quickly to size up the situation, I decided he was unlikely to harm a reporter and an interpreter and earn himself a speedy return to prison. But this assumption was predicated on a rationality that neither I nor, by his own admission, he was certain he fully possessed. Also, I did not know what else was in his pocket, and I felt a keen obligation to my interpreter, who even before the appearance of the skeleton key had said, “This situation gives me a headache.” In the end I told Abu Omar I would pay but added that since I had only fifty dollars in my wallet (the rest being in my sock), he would need to come with us to a cash machine. He demanded to see my wallet, which I produced. He inspected it, looked sad, and said that once we were outside we would run away or summon the police, which was true. He demanded I give him the fifty dollars, leave my passport as security, and go to the cash machine and return with the rest of the money. I countered with the fifty dollars and a credit card as security, which, after more haggling, he accepted as the best deal he could get. When he showed us to the door, there hung over our little group the feeling of paramours at the end of an unsatisfying fling, each party certain of never seeing the other again.

On the street, my translator, that honest soul, said, “There is an ATM down the block here.”

When I said I was not going to honor my commitment, he seemed relieved. I asked him to wait a moment while I called my wife in Tennessee and told her a terrorist in Alexandria had just been enabled to buy crappy Kenmore appliances with our Sears card. She said she would cancel it. Then I took the money out of my sock, paid my interpreter the modest sum he had asked for, and offered him the hundred dollars I had not paid Abu Omar.

“No, no, keep it,” he said. “You have been raped enough.”

I have appreciated his hyperbole ever since. It reminds me there are people all over the world who are disturbed by even small injustices.

“MONICA COURTNEY
ADLER”
grew up in a large southern city and attended one of the paradoxical country day schools (paradoxical because they are never in the country) in which the region specializes. On being graduated from high school in the mid-1990s, she entered the flagship college of her home state, where she made the dean’s list and Phi Beta Kappa and majored in international studies. Degree in hand, she moved to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, then moved across the Potomac to Arlington, much nearer CIA headquarters. When she left for Milan at the start of 2003, she was not more than twenty-five years old. She was probably a lookout on the day of the kidnapping. A year and a half after she returned, she married a young analyst who worked at a different government intelligence agency and who volunteered at a food bank (she volunteered for the Junior League) and served on the board of their neighborhood association. The neighborhood was a collection of mock townhouses marooned in a sea of parking, each home as anonymous as Monica had hoped, but failed, to be. A couple of years after the two were married, Monica’s Facebook page showed a young mother, child in arms, smiling as radiantly as the Monica on her international driver’s license in Milan. She had cut her hair since then. She seemed utterly ordinary.

Monica could be traced because in Italy she gave information about herself that was partly true. At one hotel, for example, she gave her address as an apartment building in Virginia that stood a block or so from a building in which she had once lived. By comparing information about past residents of buildings in the area with certain information from Monica’s false identity, I found one real person who seemed to be the false Monica. In the winter of 2008 my assistant Jessica Easto called the probable Monica (whose real name was different) to ask if she was the Monica Courtney Adler of the kidnapping in Milan. The woman seemed to sputter a little, then said no.

“Do you work for the CIA?” Jessica said.

Monica declined to answer. “Um, you know,” she said, “I just had a baby. I can’t really talk about this right now.”

“Do you know what an extraordinary rendition is?” Jessica said.

“Ummm—no.”

Jessica gave her a brief tutorial, then asked about a close friend of Monica’s who we had thought, early in our investigations, might have been Monica herself.

“I’d rather not have her involved in this,” Monica said. “She’s one of my best friends, and she has nothing to do with this.” She suggested Jessica would do better to speak to the CIA’s public relations department than to call individuals. Then she said goodbye and hung up.

I leave Monica her anonymity because of a law called the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which was passed in response to the publication, in 1975, of a tell-all called
Inside the Company: CIA Diary.
Its author, Philip Agee, was a former CIA officer who was so disturbed by the CIA’s violent subversions of Latin American democracies that he exposed dozens of the subversions and hundreds of the subverters, by name. The CIA and Ford White House wanted Agee’s throat, but although they could prosecute him for breaking his contract with the CIA (which required employees and ex-employees to send their writings through a CIA censor), there was no law against revealing the names of a CIA officer per se. Someone outside the CIA, for example a reporter, could have published the entire personnel directory of the CIA without repercussion. At the time, the CIA was not in a position to correct this legal oversight, because Congress and reporters had just revealed that the agency had spied illegally on thousands of Americans, had abetted the Watergate burglars, had paid Mafia wiseguys to try to assassinate Fidel Castro, had helped overthrow the freely elected governments of Guatemala, Chile, and Brazil, and had done many other ugly things besides. But by 1982 the memory of these sins had faded, the American Right was again ascendant, and Congress and President Reagan enacted the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which made it a crime to reveal the identity of an American spy. The act makes no exception for whistleblowing. A CIA officer can strangle infants in their cribs, rape whole convents of nuns, and assassinate the Queen of England, but to report the spy’s name makes the reporter a felon. There is a strong First Amendment argument that the law is so indiscriminate as to be unconstitutional, but the current Supreme Court has subordinated the Constitution to an authoritarian idea of national security, and even were the court saner, to challenge the law would be the work of many years and thousands of dollars. I therefore leave Abu Omar’s kidnappers their namelessness.