Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (23 page)

When the press identifies one of these aircraft and tries to contact the company that allegedly owns it, the aircraft is usually quickly “sold” to another shell company and the registration number changed. Thus, for example, the Gulfstream V, N379P, spotted at Karachi Airport in October 2001, was manufactured in 1999 (constructor’s number 581, the only identification on an aircraft that never changes and is always listed on registers) and initially licensed as N581GA. After the CIA acquired it, the number was changed to N379P and its phantom owner became Premier Executive Transport Services of Dedham, Massachusetts. It was engaged in several important renditions from 2001 to 2003. In December 2003, the Shannon Peace Campers, an antiwar group of airplane spotters at Shannon International Airport in Ireland, outed it on the Internet as the “Guantanamo Bay Express.” The same month N379P became N8068V, still owned by Premier Executive Transport. The Shannon spotters saw it three more times during 2004 in its new livery; then, on December 1, 2004, the plane was “sold” to Bayard Foreign Marketing, LLC, 921 S.W. Washington Street, Portland, Oregon, another CIA front company, and relicensed as N44982.
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The CIA’s known fleet consists of two Gulfstreams, a small Cessna, three Lockheed Hercules cargo aircraft, a Gulfstream 1159a, a Learjet 35A, an old DC-3, two Boeing 737s, and a fifty-three-passenger De Havilland DH8. The De Havilland was photographed by plane spotters in Afghanistan.
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The agency’s second Gulfstream was registered N829MG when it was used on October 8, 2002, to fly the Canadian citizen Maher Arar from John F. Kennedy Airport, New York, to Jordan and on to Syria, where he was held in a coffin-sized cell and tortured for ten months before being told that his arrest had been a mistake. After the exposure of this disgraceful incident, the Gulfstream’s registration was changed to N259SK.
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The main base for these aircraft is a remote corner of Johnson County Airport in Smithfield, North Carolina, where they are serviced by Aero Contractors Ltd., a company founded in 1979 by Jim Rhyne, a legendary CIA officer and the former chief pilot for Air America.
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The airport is convenient to nearby Fort Bragg, headquarters of the Special Forces, and has no control tower that would allow unauthorized persons to see into the enclave. The fact that Aero’s aircraft have permission to land at any U.S. military base worldwide is a dead giveaway to their provenance, since, according to the
Chicago Tribunes
John Crewdson,”Only nine companies [including Premier Executive Transport Services] ... have Pentagon permission to land aircraft at military bases worldwide.”
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The CIA’s transfer of two Egyptian refugees from Bromma Airport, Stockholm, to Cairo on December 18, 2001, using Gulfstream N379P, is one of the best-documented renditions on record. On May 17, 2004, Stockholm’s TV4 program
Kalla Fakta {Cold Facts)
aired a more or less complete expose of what happened. The broadcasters obtained on-camera statements from many of the participants, including Sven Linder, former Swedish ambassador to Egypt; Arne Andersson, the Swedish Security Police (SAPO) officer in charge; Mary Ellen McGuiness, spokesperson for Premier Executive Transport Services; Hans Dahlgren, Swedish vice foreign minister; and above all Paul Forell, a police inspector with twenty-five years’ experience who was on duty at Bromma Airport that day. Many others spoke to TV4 on an anonymous basis.
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The Swedish case is of major political importance because it revealed that Swedish authorities collaborated with the CIA. It is now clear that in a number of European countries, some of the local intelligence people were in on these renditions to one degree or another and that throughout
Europe several governments pretended ignorance and simply looked the other way. Given the one thousand CIA flights to European destinations, it is hard to imagine that local governments could have been completely ignorant of their purposes. Whether all Western European governments were involved; whether some of their intelligence services were functionally working for the CIA rather than their own governments; or whether deniability had been built into their arrangements with the CIA, we do not know. But obviously more was going on than merely bad Americans and good but ignorant Europeans.

No evidence has ever been offered that the two men the CIA kidnapped from Sweden and then delivered to the tender mercies of the Egyptians had participated in terrorist activities. In September 2000, after many years as a fugitive from the Egyptian dictatorship, Ahmed Agiza, age thirty-nine, with his wife and four children, arrived in Sweden (his fifth child was born after they were admitted). Muhammed al-Zery, age thirty-three, fled Egypt illegally in 1991, having been tortured by the authorities. He entered Sweden in August 1999. The Swedish Migration Board judged in both cases that the men, who were acquainted with each other but did not live in the same Swedish city, needed protection and should be granted asylum.

At about 5:00 p.m. on December 18, 2001, the Swedish secret police picked up Agiza on a street on his way home from a Swedish-language class in Karlstad; minutes later they nabbed al-Zery in a shop in Stockholm. Kjell Jönsson, al-Zery’s attorney, testified that he received a call from his client that afternoon, only to be interrupted when someone said, “Put the receiver down.” He promptly called the officials in charge of al-Zery ’s case at the Foreign Office but got only busy signals; the rest of the ministry was at a Christmas party. The police transported the two Egyptians to the Stockholm city airport, Bromma, an hour before it was scheduled to close. The police cars were quickly admitted and drove to the office of Police Inspector Paul Forell, who was on duty. There, obviously by prior agreement, they were met by eight balaclava-wearing Americans in business suits who had landed a few minutes earlier in N379P. The Americans used scissors to cut the clothes off Agiza and al-Zery, who were still in handcuffs and ankle chains. They then inserted suppositories presumably containing tranquilizers into their anuses, dressed them in diapers and jumpsuits, and took them out to the Gulfstream. At 21:49, the Egyptians, Americans, and two SAPO officers took off for Cairo.

The decision to expel the two Egyptians had been made at noon that same day by Prime Minister Goran Persson and his government, although there is some reason to believe that they thought they were merely extraditing the two at Egypt’s request and had no knowledge of the American involvement. The Swedish government received formal assurances from the Egyptians that the two men would be treated fairly and would not be harmed. TV4 claimed that the Americans had supplied evidence that the two Egyptians were terrorists. The TV journalists concluded, “A few months after the attack on the World Trade Center, Sweden accepted to become a pawn in the United States’ worldwide manhunt.” They traced the Gulfstream back to Premier Executive Transport Services in Massachusetts and, when they inquired about chartering the plane itself, were told: “It only flies for the U.S. government.” Arne Andersson of SAPO refused to supply details about the operation, saying to TV4 only, “This could disturb our relations with another service, and it could also affect the foreign relations of Sweden. As a nation.”

As details of what had happened began to leak out, embarrassing the Swedish government, its ambassador in Cairo was ordered to look into the matter. He discovered that after some two years of intermittent torture of both men, the Egyptian authorities decided that al-Zery was innocent and sent him back to his native village, ordering him not to leave it without official permission. They sentenced Agiza to twenty-five years in Masra Tora Prison for membership in a radical organization, presumably the Muslim Brotherhood. Visits to the prison by the Swedish ambassador produced only meetings with the warden and no interviews with Agiza, whose wife and five children remain in Sweden but are faced with the continual threat of deportation.

In the weeks immediately after 9/11, it seems that the CIA conducted a global vacuuming operation seeking to “disappear” suspicious young Islamic men from various countries, including our own. In the course of these activities the agency acquired the names of Agiza and al-Zery, then pressured the SAPO to arrest them and turn them over to a rendition team. At least some Swedish authorities involved knew that transferring any prisoner to a country where he might be tortured was a violation of Swedish law as well as of article 3 of the 1984 U.N. Convention Against Torture, which Sweden had signed and ratified. This case damaged Sweden’s reputation as a champion of the international protection of human rights.

In the spring of 2004, a Swedish parliamentary investigation concluded that CIA agents had indeed broken the country’s laws by subjecting the two Egyptians to “inhumane treatment.” The Swedish security police chief Klas Bergenstrand assured the press that his agency would never again allow foreign agents to interfere in Swedish affairs. In August 2005, the neighboring Danish government announced that it was prohibiting CIA flights of any sort through its airspace. The CIA has never said anything about this case.
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The Swedish affair accomplished nothing other than ruining the lives of two men, a wife, and children, for no reason other than showing off the hubris of the CIA. By contrast, the CIA caper that began in Milan, Italy, on February 17, 2003, would be a farce—but one that severely worsened U.S. relations with a long-standing ally, interrupted an ongoing Italian intelligence operation, led to the disappearance and possible death of an Islamic imam, and politically weakened the then Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The bunglers who thought up and executed this escapade have aptly been termed “the spies who came in from the hot tub.”
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On June 24, 2005, an Italian judge signed a 213-page criminal arrest warrant for thirteen CIA operatives, including the former Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady, charging them with kidnapping an Egyptian in Milan who held political refugee status in Italy. The victim was also under Italian police surveillance as a possible recruiter of mujahideen for service in Afghanistan and Iraq, although recruiting fighters for foreign battles is not illegal in Italy. The warrants for the thirteen CIA men and women, together with their photos, were forwarded to the European police authority, which authorized their arrest anywhere on the continent. It is the first time that a fellow NATO member has ever filed criminal complaints against employees of the United States government acting in an official capacity. In late July, another Italian court issued arrest warrants for six more CIA operatives, bringing the total number to nineteen (thirteen men and six women). Ultimately, the Italians issued extradition requests to the United States for twenty-two CIA operatives based on a 477-page police analysis of what they had done.
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All of them except for Station Chief Lady were working under assumed names and had left Italy.

The abductee in this case is (or was) a forty-two-year-old Islamic cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as “Abu Omar.” In 1991, if not
earlier, Omar fled Egypt for Albania because he belonged to the outlawed Muslim organization Jamaat al-Islamiyya and the police were after him. In Tirana, the Albanian capital, he worked for four years for various Islamic charities, but did not himself participate in any illegal activities. After 9/11, the Bush administration labeled the charities he worked for as supporters of terrorists. While in Tirana he married an Albanian woman, Marsela Glina, and they had a daughter and a son.

In 1995, at the urging of the CIA, the Albanian National Intelligence Service recruited Omar as an informer. He readily agreed to cooperate. The Albanians did not pay him, but they did help smooth out a dispute he had with the landlady of the bakery he had opened, and they fixed his residence permit after his marriage. Abu Omar was the first Arab willing to betray his colleagues to the Albanians, and the information the Albanians supplied to the CIA, thanks to him, greatly elevated the CIAs respect for their service. However, after a few weeks for unknown reasons—perhaps his fellow Islamic exiles got wind of his cooperation with the police—he and his family fled the country. The CIA later informed the Albanians that he was living in Germany. In 1997, he surfaced in Rome where he was granted political refugee status. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Milan, the center of radical Islamist activities in Italy, and began preaching at a mosque that had a reputation as a gathering place for religious and political extremists. The Italian counterterrorism police placed a tap on his telephone, while hiding microphones in his apartment and at another mosque where he preached. Although the police believed they had enough evidence to arrest him for “associating with terrorists,” they held off because the information they were gathering via the wiretaps was proving valuable and they were sharing it with the CIA.
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On Monday, February 17, 2003, shortly after noon, Abu Omar was walking down the Via Guerzoni toward a mosque to attend daily prayers when he was stopped by an officer of Italy’s paramilitary carabinieri police force. According to the Milan prosecutor, Armando Spataro, the Italian carabiniere had been hired by the CIA to approach Abu Omar and conduct a routine documents check. The participation of the Italian police officer, code-named “Ludwig,” has raised suspicions that the Sismi, the Italian intelligence service, was cooperating with the Americans. Former prime minister Berlusconi’s office has repeatedly denied any role, but the Milanese prosecutors are doubtful and are continuing their investigation.
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According to a passerby’s account, two men speaking “bad” Italian then emerged from a parked white van, sprayed a chemical in Abu Omar’s face, and hustled him into the van, which drove away at high speed followed by at least one and possibly two other cars. Between 2 and 5 p.m., the van drove northeast to the NATO air base at Aviano where it was met by a U.S. Air Force officer, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Romano, who escorted it to the flight line. Abu Omar was put aboard a civilian Learjet and flown to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. There, he was transferred to a civilian Gulfstream, which departed at 8:30 that night for Cairo. When Omar’s plane arrived in Cairo early on the morning of February 18, Egyptian authorities took him into custody. Accompanying Omar to Egypt in the Gulfstream was CIA Milan station chief Robert Lady.
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