A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (30 page)

I DO
NOT,
however, leave their nature unknown. I wanted to find them, partly to know who America’s warriors-on-terror were and partly to know whether they had hidden themselves at home with as little care as they had abroad. I was able to find the true identity of, I think, somewhat more than half of them. Some gave themselves away in the same way Monica had—that is, by giving out personal information in Italy that was true or nearly true. A few gave out so much true information that it took only a couple of hours to find them. One even gave an e-mail address that seemed to belong to his wife, who, consequently or not, left him after the kidnapping. Other spies betrayed themselves by calling family from Italy. Still others were undone, whether by themselves or by the CIA, by the way their fake identities were acquired. To get the components of those identities—driver’s licenses, social security numbers, passports, credit cards—they had had to give addresses to government bureaus and credit card companies, some of which addresses became part of the public record and others of which could be had for a small fee. Often the addresses were unhelpful post office boxes, but sometimes they were street addresses. Even if the spies no longer lived there, there were usually forwarding addresses, deeds of sale, or other clues that eventually led to the spies. Almost always their traceability was a testimony less to my investigative powers than to the CIA’s imprudence.

The spies were a varied lot—white, Latino, young, old, male, female—but were bound by the cord of suburbanity. Evidently the renderer, no less than the dentist or banker, believes he has given enough to his community in his working hours and wants isolation outside them. Some of the spies, like “Victor Castellano,” who lived in a chipboard chateau on a newly divided tract of Texas scrubland near a military base, were described by their familiars in terms that suggested they were the “heavies”—the guys who, as a CIA chief of covert operations once said, would be out robbing banks if they weren’t doing renditions. But the great majority of the spies I found could have been the bromidic guy or gal next door. It took far more planners, spotters, and drivers than brutes to kidnap a man steps from one of the busiest streets in one of Italy’s biggest cities at high noon. One of the planners, who gave a name in Italy that was perhaps more true than false, inhabited an asbestos-sided Cape Cod in the Northeast, was a fan of the Beatles and old science-fiction TV serials, and seemed to have been in possession of a wife at the time he shared a room with a female colleague in Italy. Another planner, “Gregory Asherleigh,” who was one of the two kidnappers who went to Norway to scout the abduction of Mullah Krekar, once listed his address as a mansion on the Atlantic that had a lion in bas relief that spouted water from his mouth. The mansion turned out to belong to his mother, who said, I think honestly, that she was not aware that her son worked for the CIA. Gregory proved to be tall, just a bit jowly, attractively silver-haired, and devoutly Christian. He gave money to the Republican Party and lived steps from a large military base and had a business that appeared in some measure real, although nobody ever answered the company phone when Jessica or I called. One of his children, coincidentally or not, worked for an FBI counterterror squad that had been dispatched to Iraq and other countries.

Few of the spies answered my call, e-mails, or letters. An exception was a youngish man who had perhaps been a planner in Milan and whose identity I had narrowed to one of two brothers. The brothers had grown up in a military family, enlisted in different branches, and thereafter left such a tangle of military addresses that it was hard to sort them out. One brother lived in Texas not far from “Victor Castellano,” with whom the youngish planner had traveled closely in Italy. This brother called me in response to an e-mail I sent his wife. He seemed unsure what to say, so I said I was glad he had called.

“Well,” he said, “I just didn’t want you to waste any more time on me or my brother. You’ve got the wrong people.”

“So you weren’t involved in the rendition?”

“No.”

“Do you know anything about the rendition?”

“No, nothing. Just that the action—you know, just from what you read on CNN or Fox or anything else on the Web—the action took place in 2005.”

I told him that while the indictments had been issued in 2005, the “action” had taken place in 2003.

“In any case,” I said, “how can you be sure that your brother wasn’t involved and just didn’t tell you about it?”

“No, not my brother, not my brother.”

He reiterated that he had called only because he didn’t want me to waste my time, but then he said, a bit contradictorily, “I was just saying to my wife, ‘I’m really bored. I think I’ll just call this guy up and see what he’s got.’ ”

“You’re interested in what I’ve got?”

“I’d be interested in seeing what documents you have, other than just word of mouth.”

To my ears, he sounded a bit like a sixth-grader trying to wheedle the questions that would be on the exam out of the teacher. I told him where he could find the Italian court documents discussing what seemed to be his or his brother’s involvement, and he sounded relieved that the evidence against him was merely Italian.

Toward the close of our short conversation, he said, “You can understand my being a little bit, uh, what’s the word I should use? Cautious. It’d be like if you knocked on the door of an eighty-five-year-old man and said, ‘The Italians say you took part in this thing.’ It’s just that strange.”

IN ITALY
some of the spies had given contact phone numbers or addresses that turned out to belong to front companies. “Eliana Isabella Castaldo” gave one such number in Norristown, Pennsylvania. When Jessica called it, a woman answered.

“Washburn and Company.”

“May I speak with Eliana Castaldo?” Jessica said.

The woman hung up.

Jessica called back, and again a woman answered.

“Washburn and Company.”

“May I speak with Eliana Castaldo?”

Click.

Other reporters who called “Washburn and Company” got different responses. Sometimes the woman who answered said the caller had reached an answering service. Other times she said that the number belonged to a business that she could not name. If the conversation got so far, she said no Eliana Castaldo worked or lived there.

The number turned out to belong to a youngish woman at a down-at-heel rowhouse who owned a “virtual assistant” business, a virtual assistant being someone who handles phones, faxes, and e-mail for other businesses without setting foot in their offices. She had been in business only six or seven months when Eliana Castaldo went to Italy and listed her phone number as her contact. A year or so after reporters started calling her, the woman’s Web site said, “I am not working with clients at this time.” Soon the site shut down entirely. The woman, however, remained active in the Virtual Assistance Chamber of Commerce, on whose Web site she described her clients as “nonprofits.”

The CIA was better served by “Coachmen Enterprises,” which other spies had listed as their contact. Calls to Coachmen went straight to an answering machine and were never returned.

I VISITED
the family of another spy whom I will call Natalie because the name she used in Milan was so like her real one. She had a supporting role near Via Guerzoni on the day of the kidnapping, probably as a lookout. When not casing terrorists, Natalie lived in a Sun Belt subdivision of so sad a strain that I fancied I could smell the subprime mortgages in the cul-de-sacs. On the front door of her house were a Valentine’s Day heart made out of polyester roses, a decal of a puppy dog with a butterfly on its nose (caption: “Forever Friends”), and a cutout of a family of holiday bears—mama bear in an apron, papa bear in pink bow tie, baby bear handing a valentine (“Love U”) to mama. Natalie was not home, so I drove up the block and waited to see if she would arrive. Periodically an enormous man emerged from the house next to hers, smoked a cigarette, and glanced up the way at me. I left near midnight.

The next morning, Natalie still not having returned, I visited the house of her parents, who lived a mile or two away. I made the mistake of lingering outside to see if anyone might come out rather than going straight to the door, and a few minutes later a man who turned out to be Natalie’s brother emerged. His musculature impressed me immediately, as did his stride, which indicated a state of upset. I got out of my car, and he demanded to know whether I was the same person who had staked out his sister’s house last night. I felt as stupid as a CIA officer in Milan—the fat man had “made” me. I pled guilty and asked if he could help me find his sister. He said no, then told me to wait a minute and stepped off a few paces to call someone on his mobile phone. It seemed to be Natalie.

“Yeah, the guy’s here. . . . Yeah, he’s the same one.”

He hung up without, as I had hoped, handing me the phone. We then had a rather tense discussion about why I was looking for his sister, and he expressed surprise, which I believed genuine, to hear she might be working for the CIA.

“Impossible,” he said. “Just impossible.”

But when I asked whether she worked for the military or for a company that contracted with the military, he did not answer. When I suggested such an employer might have sent her on a mission like the one in Milan, he said that was far-fetched, but he started to seem reflective. A little later he said he and his sister had been raised by hard-working parents with good American values, and I said I had no doubt their values were American. He took my card, and I left.

An hour later he called me from a blocked phone number. He said he had been researching the kidnapping on the Web, and he sounded a little troubled by what he had found. He said he was truly sorry that anyone might have gotten tortured out of this thing. That was bad. But he added with a sudden flash of anger that I had done bad too. My surveillance had violated his family. I had
terrorized
them, did I understand?
Terrorized
. And what did I think of that?

“JAMES ROBERT
KIRKLAND”
grew up in the Ohio Valley, took a bachelor’s degree in a state adjoining his own, and dabbled in journalism and public relations before joining a police force. He served in many of the United States and rose through the ranks until, after twenty-five years, he was appointed the director of a force in a jurisdiction of a couple of million people. A few years later he left public service to become a consultant in private security and resettled in his homeland, where cottontails and Pentecostals were thick on the ground. (
if god is your co-pilot
, a church marquee near his home proclaimed,
change seats. the ten commandments aren’t multiple choice
, a rival offered.) From a colonnaded ranch house he and his wife commanded a substantial acreage on which stood a great barn in fine trim and a taut wooden fence painted a crisp, happy color. The sum bespoke a well-ordered prosperity. After the kidnapping, the Kirklands bought a nearby colonial manor and turned it into a tastefully appointed country lodge, which seemed mainly the project of Mrs. Kirkland. Using the alias of one of her farm animals, she reviewed the lodge favorably on a travel Web site. (The hosts, she said, were superlatively nice.) Her day job, which I am reluctant to divulge specifically, involved evacuation flights not dissimilar to the ones on which Abu Omar was rendered.

One of the two SIMs that Mr. Kirkland had used in Italy had been activated at the start of December of 2002, which made him one of the earliest-arriving spies, which in turn suggested he was a senior planner. During his more than two months in Italy, he or someone using his SIM had been a prolific caller to the United States, calling numbers that belonged to his octogenarian mother, his then girlfriend (the present Mrs. Kirkland), the veterinarian who cared for their farm animals, an apparent stockbroker, an apparent accountant, and himself, which is to say the landline in his (and now Mrs. Kirkland’s) home. He or someone using his SIM had also called an unregistered mobile phone in his home area code, which phone Jessica called five years later. A man answered, and Jessica told him about our search for a CIA officer or CIA hireling named James Robert Kirkland. The man replied that he didn’t know anyone named James Robert Kirkland and that if he himself was a CIA agent, he didn’t know that either.

“We think,” Jessica said, “that this Kirkland might know someone who uses this cell phone. Have you had it since 2003?”

“Yes.”

“Would you tell me your name?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Do you know anyone named——————?”—here mentioning Kirkland’s real name.

There was a very long pause.

“Yes, I do,” the man finally said. He sounded to Jessica, who has the exuberance of youth, “creeped the fuck out.”

“Alright, well—” she began.

“Thank you,” the man said, “goodbye.”

We were pretty sure we had our Kirkland. I was further encouraged in this belief by a photo I had found of the real Kirkland that compared favorably with the very dark (and therefore indeterminate) copy of the photo on the passport he had used in Italy. The two men, or, rather more probably, one man, of the photos had the same shape of head, which was more long than round; the same ears, long also; the same hair, close-cropped or lacking; the same unobtrusively sized nose; the same distance between the eyes; the same crease running from a spot between the eyebrows down the bridge of the nose; and the same crooked smile, which tugged up at the left side. I traveled to the Kirklands’ farm to see for myself.

When I arrived at the front door, Mrs. Kirkland, a slender woman of middle age, motioned through a window that I should walk around to the side of the house, where a large den had been added. Her first words on opening the side door were “How did you find us?” It didn’t seem like the greeting of an innocent.

I explained that I was interested in speaking with her husband about some of his law enforcement work, and she asked me to wait and left me in the den. It was homey—every surface draped in shawls, a watercolor in progress in one corner, a blaze in the hearth. Presently Mrs. Kirkland returned with her husband and a more composed countenance. The former was absurdly well preserved. On an earlier attempt that day to find them at home, I had spied a bench press in one of the outbuildings, and it was not hard to imagine Mr. Kirkland using it to ward off his more than sixty years. He was more agile than brawny, however, and he spent half the interview with his legs draped over the side of an armchair.