Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (22 page)

As far as is publicly known, the first CIA rendition was a sting operation carried out jointly with the FBI in September 1987. Code-named “Operation Goldenrod,” it occurred in the wake of a series of airplane hijackings between 1984 and 1986. Congress had passed laws making air piracy and attacks on Americans abroad federal crimes, and in 1986 President Reagan signed a finding authorizing the CIA to kidnap foreigners
wanted for terrorism and return them for trial in the United States. On June 11, 1985, Fawaz Yunis and four other heavily armed Lebanese took control of Royal Jordanian Airlines Flight 402 in Beirut. They ordered it flown out over the Mediterranean as far as Tunis, beat the Jordanian sky marshals on board, and returned to Beirut where they released the hostages, blew up the plane, and escaped. American hostages had been on board but were not harmed. Two years later, the CIA and FBI lured Yunis to a yacht in international waters off Cyprus with the promise that he would be part of a big drug-smuggling deal. Instead, he was taken into U.S. custody and transported to Washington. On March 14, 1989, he was convicted in federal court of aircraft piracy, hostage-taking, and conspiracy. On March 28, 2005, after sixteen years in an American prison, he was released and deported to Lebanon. There have been various legal challenges to the precedent set by this case, but it is generally regarded as a well-conducted law-enforcement operation.
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The Clinton-Bush version of extraordinary rendition is far more sinister. Michael Scheuer, the former CIA official who criticized the agency and the Bush administration for their alleged timidity in pursuing terrorists, takes credit for creating the program. In an interview with the
New Yorkers
Jane Mayer, he claimed: “In 1995, American agents proposed the rendition program to Egypt, making clear that [the CIA] had the resources to track, capture, and transport terrorist suspects globally— including access to a small fleet of aircraft.”
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At the time, Scheuer was in charge of the Bin Laden Unit in the CIAs Counterterrorism Center and was extremely frustrated by his inability to move against al-Qaeda operatives whom the agency had identified and located.

On the basis of the new agreement with Egypt, between 1995 and 1998 the CIA carried out a series of renditions aimed particularly at Islamic freedom fighters working in the Balkans, many of them originally from Egypt. Virtually all the people the CIA kidnapped in these operations were killed after being delivered into Egyptian hands. Predictably enough, these kidnappings generated blowback, although ordinary Americans did not perceive it as such because the actions that provoked the retaliation were, of course, kept totally secret. On August 5, 1998, the International Islamic Front for Jihad, in a letter to an Arab-language newspaper in London, promised a reprisal for recent U.S. renditions from Albania. Two days later, al-Qaeda blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania with a loss of 224 lives.
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The U.S. renditions continued with the CIA and FBI carrying out some two dozen of them in 1999 and 2000.
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These, in turn, helped provoke the attacks on the navy destroyer USS
Cole
in the Yemeni port of Aden on October 12, 2000. Former CIA director George Tenet testified before the 9/11 Commission that there were more than seventy renditions leading up to 9/11.

Within days of the September 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush expanded the original finding Bill Clinton had signed, giving the CIA authority to act without case-by-case approval from Washington.
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No one knows the exact number of renditions after that date, but the
New York Times
quotes “former government officials” as saying, “Since the September 11 attacks, the CIA has flown 100 to 150 suspected terrorists from one foreign country to another.”
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These numbers are probably a significant underestimate. Using methods I shall describe below, the
London Times,
CBS News’s
60 Minutes,
and other sources were able to identify at least 600 flights of CIA airplanes to forty different countries, including 30 trips to Jordan, 19 to Afghanistan, 17 to Morocco, 16 to Iraq, with stops in Egypt, Libya, and Guantanamo.
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Aircraft known to be involved in CIA rendition operations have landed at British airports at least 210 times since 9/11.
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In April 2006, investigations ordered by the European Parliament upped the number of such flights significantly beyond what had been previously imagined by anyone. According to Dan Bilefsky of the
New York Times,
“data gathered from air safety regulators and others found that the Central Intelligence Agency had flown 1,000 undeclared flights over European territory since 2001.” After this disclosure, the Council of Europe ordered its own investigation based mostly on flight logs provided by the European Union’s air traffic agency, Eurocontrol. Its sixty-seven-page report concluded that fourteen European nations, including Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Romania, and Poland, had colluded with the CIA to seize and hold terror suspects without filing charges against them, fly them to secret detention centers, and establish prisons for them in Europe and elsewhere. The report concluded that the United States and its collaborators had violated international human rights law, including the European Convention on Human Rights.
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We have a few hints from official statements about the possible size of the rendition program. In his 2003 State of the Union address, President
Bush said that some terrorism suspects who were not caught and brought to trial had been “otherwise dealt with,” and he then observed that “more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries, and many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.” In April 2003, Cofer Black, who from 1999 to 2002 had been head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, added: “A large number of terrorist suspects were not able to launch an attack last year because they are in prison. More than 3,000 of them are al-Qaeda terrorists and they were arrested in over 100 countries.”
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According to Dana Priest and Joe Stephens of the
Washington Post,
“Much larger than the group of prisoners held by the CIA are those who have been captured and transported around the world by the CIA and other agencies of the U.S. government for interrogation by foreign intelligence services.”
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If this statement is true, the number of post-9/11 renditions could be quite large. Human Rights Watch has identified at least twenty-four secret detention and interrogation centers worldwide operated by the CIA. These include: al-Jafr prison in the southern desert of Jordan; Kohat prison in Pakistan; holding sites in Afghanistan including in Kabul and Kandahar, at Bagram Air Base and Camp Salerno, near Khost; at least three locations in Iraq, including CIA-controlled parts of Abu Ghraib prison; at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Camp Echo complex, and the new Camp 6; a secret location at Al-Udeid Air Base, Qatar; prisons in Egypt, Thailand, and in brigs on U.S. ships at sea; at least two CIA prisons in the old Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, probably in Poland and Romania; in Morocco at secret police headquarters in Temara, near the capital, Rabat, and at a new CIA torture center under construction at Ain Aouda, south of Rabat’s diplomatic district; and possibly at the U.S. naval base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
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The people held in this U.S. version of the gulag are known as “ghost detainees,” completely off-the-books. No charges are ever filed against them, and they are hidden away even from the inspectors of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In an unusual typology of rendition sites, Robert Baer, a former CIA operative in the Middle East and the author of
Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude,
has commented, “We pick up a suspect or we arrange for one of our partner countries to do it. Then the suspect is placed on a civilian
transport to a third country where, let’s make no bones about it, they use torture. If you want a good interrogation, you send someone to Jordan. If you want them to be killed, you send them to Egypt or Syria. Either way, the U.S. cannot be blamed as it is not doing the heavy work.”
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Despite a near fanatical desire for secrecy, the CIA’s rendition capers began to be exposed to public scrutiny less than six weeks after 9/11. This was almost inevitable, although completely unanticipated by the agency, when it chose to conduct abductions via the world of civil aviation. The CIA’s operatives seemed not to understand that international airports are simply loaded with knowledgeable people at all hours of the day and night—aircrews, flight controllers, ticket clerks, baggage handlers, refuelers, airplane cleaners, police and customs officers, and passengers—many of whom are alert to everything going on around them.

The agency also appears to have been totally ignorant of the world of hobbyist airplane spotters or the fact that the Federal Aviation Administration’s registry of all airplanes licensed to American owners is Internet accessible, as is its archive of airplane logs and flight plans, or the degree to which the CIA’s criminal activities over several decades have mobilized a large cadre of amateur intelligence analysts. According to Mark Hosenball of
Newsweek,
“U.S. intel sources complain that ‘plane spotters’—hobbyists who photograph airplanes landing or departing local airports and post the pix on the Internet—made it possible for CIA critics to assemble details of a clandestine transport system the agency set up to secretly move cargo and people—including terrorist suspects— around the world.”
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On October 26, 2001, a Pakistani journalist named Masood Anwar broke a story in an Islamabad newspaper. Pakistani intelligence officers, he reported, had handed over to U.S. authorities a Yemeni microbiologist named Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed. He was allegedly wanted in connection with the bombing of the USS
Cole.
The handover occurred early in the morning of October 23 in a remote area of Karachi Airport, where airport staff nonetheless observed and reported to Anwar that the captive was hustled aboard a white, twin-engined, turboprop Gulfstream V executive jet with the registration number N379P—and this is crucially important—painted on its tail. It took off at 2:40 a.m. for an unknown destination. As the
Washington Post
later reported, at 19:54:04 on October 26, Anwar’s story was posted on the
FreeRepublic.com
Web site. Thirteen
minutes later a blogger provided the aircraft’s registered owner—namely, Premier Executive Transport Services, Inc., 339 Washington Street, Dedham, Massachusetts. Shortly after, another reader posted a message saying, “Sounds like a generic name. Kind of like Air America” (the CIA’s secret airline, not shut down until 1976, which had flown weapons and supplies into, and heroin out of, Laos during the Vietnam War).
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I happen to know something about airplane spotting because from 1947 until the early 1960s, I was a passionate participant in this activity. In 1956,1 was one of three cofounders of the American Aviation Historical Society, the leading organization of airplane spotters and photographers in the United States, which in 2005 published the fiftieth volume of its journal.
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Dana Priest describes airplane spotters as hobbyists “standing at the end of runways with high-powered binoculars and cameras to record the flights of military and private aircraft.”
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This is accurate enough as far as it goes, but there is more to airplane spotting than just collecting raw information. Watching airplanes closely and recording the squadron markings and serial numbers on them goes back to the last days of the London Blitz during World War II.

On January 2, 1941, with official support, Temple Press Ltd. published the first issue of the
Aeroplane Spotter,
a twelve-page newspaper intended to improve the quality of aircraft recognition among British civilian air defense volunteers. It ceased publication on July 10, 1948, after 217 issues. This legendary periodical included photos and silhouettes of the major aircraft types, both friend and foe, and was the first publication to pay attention to military serial numbers, changes in the registry of civilian aircraft, camouflage schemes, squadron markings, and unusual personal insignia. Such markings are important because, once a data base has been compiled, an analyst can use it to infer the number of a particular aircraft or its variant in service, to deduce the size and composition of squadrons, and to keep track of sales, modifications, and losses. The
Aeroplane Spotter
remains to this day an invaluable historical reference on the aircraft of the Luftwaffe, the Royal Air Force, and the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. Its legacy lives on in the activities of today’s airplane spotters, including their Web sites that publish not just photos and data but also search engines that can trace virtually any aircraft through its serial or registration number.
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Based on the work of spotters, journalists, and airport workers around the world, many crucial details about the CIA’s rendition fleet have been made public. As of late September 2005, the CIA had leased a fleet of perhaps thirty-three aircraft that it has used for various purposes but particularly for extraordinary renditions.
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Most of these planes have been identified and their “N” numbers recorded.
(N
is the international civil aviation code letter assigned to American airplanes, just as
G
stands for British planes,
F
for French,
D
for German, and / for Japanese.) The CIA acquired its fleet through classified contracts issued by an obscure military agency called the Navy Engineering Logistics Office (NELO) located in Arlington, Virginia. (NELO is not even listed in the
U.S. Government Manual
the official compilation of federal departments, agencies, and offices.)
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The registered owners of the planes are some ten fake aviation companies with untraceable executives, many of whose addresses are post office boxes in northern Virginia (near CIA headquarters in Langley). The listed officers of the companies have social security numbers all issued when they were over fifty years old, strong evidence of the creation of a new or fake identity.