A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  In the meantime, there were daily hardships. Food in the Salt Pit was unpleasant. Breakfast was a cup of unsweetened tea and a piece of bread. Lunch consisted of rice, adulterated with foreign objects such as sand, gravel and insects. The prisoners figured that this was done deliberately, to break them. Occasionally, they were given fruit, usually oranges. Invariably, these were so mouldy that inmates were unable to work out whether they were blue or green. Sometimes there was chicken, apparently the pre-picked bones of meals eaten by the Afghan guards.

  Many of the prisoners had health problems. It was freezing cold. Diarrhoea was common. Still the al-Qaeda man refused to break. In fact, over time his resolve appeared to strengthen. Repeatedly, he lambasted the Americans through his cell door for their arrogance. He demanded an audience with a German diplomat, demanded to meet the man in charge of the prison, demanded to know why he was being held in Afghanistan, demanded proper food and water, clean blankets and better treatment. When he was ignored, he went on hunger strike again.

  This time it was more serious. Somehow, The Egyptian managed to persuade everyone in the Salt Pit to participate. Not all of them were as strong as he was: having been incarcerated for longer, they had less stamina. Six days into the strike, the others gave up. The Egyptian refused, but, following a promised improvement in food quality, he agreed to drink water. Guards noted that he might be beginning to buckle. He complained of headaches. On a couple of occasions, they observed him trying to pray standing up, and saw him collapse. He was becoming depressed, losing hope. This was good. At night, he whispered to his fellow inmates, asking whether perhaps hunger striking was against Islam. This was progress.

  Still he held out. By 28 March, after twenty-three days without food, he began screaming ‘Allahu akhar!’ at all hours, through the grille of his cell door.

  ‘I am a German,’ he told his captors four days later. ‘You’re Americans and this is not your country. Why did you bring me here?’ Repeatedly, he shouted abuse from his cell. ‘Did you treat the Americans responsible for the Oklahoma terror attack this way? Is this the peace and civilized manners that you want to spread and teach Afghans and Iraqis?’

  If things were not going entirely to plan at the Salt Pit, back at Langley there was at least progress regarding The Egyptian’s true identity. Shortly after he had been rendered to Afghanistan, the al-Qaeda man’s passport had been forwarded to the CIA’s Technical Services division. Macedonian border officials had noted that something appeared wrong with it; as a result, they had concluded it was a forgery. Technical Services’ job was to establish whether this was true. By the end of February 2004, the analysis was complete. The passport was genuine.

  There are two versions of what happened next. The first, widely circulated in later days, revolves around a growing realization within the CIA that The Egyptian was not ‘The Egyptian’ at all: his name, Khaled el Masri, meant ‘The Egyptian’. The 9/11 plotters may have been recruited by a man called el Masri – but it wasn’t this one.

  The Agency had rendered the wrong man.

  One senior officer in the Counter-Terrorism Center briefed on the case at the time confirms that this is exactly what happened. ‘There was no proof that he had done anything,’ he says of el Masri. ‘There was a similarity in the name compared to one of the names of a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist in our databases.’

  According to this individual, the head of the Agency’s al-Qaeda Unit – a senior female officer renowned for her ‘gung-ho’ attitude – had seized on the operation and decided, single-handedly, that el Masri was guilty. Other officers had advised strongly that, in these circumstances, where the only evidence available was a simple name correlation, rendition was a bad idea.

  ‘From the very beginning people had doubts,’ he says. ‘There were people around her saying, “What’s your proof? We have no proof that this guy is connected to anything.”’

  The head of the al-Qaeda Unit was not cowed. ‘We’ll get our proof she assured her colleagues. ‘Once we start debriefing him, once the interrogations begin, we’ll get our proof

  The officer, now ex-CIA, was appalled. ‘The guy was an innocent,’ he says. ‘There was never any hard proof that he was anyone other than who he said he was.’

  By the spring of 2004, the Agency was aware it had made a terrible mistake. Jailers at the Salt Pit, convinced that el Masri was innocent, had raised the alarm. Even the rendition team sent to pick him up from Macedonia had voiced their doubts, warning the CIA’s Kabul station that all was not right. On 31 March, the day he had castigated his American jailers for their treatment of Iraqis and Afghans, el Masri was pulled into another cell and shackled to a chair. Two Americans showed up, without masks this time, to ask why he was on hunger strike. One was the Salt Pit’s chief administrator. The American tried to reason with el Masri, promising to send a report to his superiors in Washington.

  ‘This is not the appropriate place for you,’ he told him. ‘We all agree.’

  After another outburst, an American guard shouted at him: ‘I don’t think you belong here. I will call Washington again.’

  But Washington didn’t know what to do. Debate inside the Counter-Terrorism Center appears to have heated up at the end of the month, some officers actively lobbying for el Masri’s release. ‘Is that guy still locked up in the Salt Pit?’ asked one. Eventually, even the head of the al-Qaeda Unit agreed that el Masri might be released, on the condition that once back in Germany he was placed under surveillance by German intelligence. This was deemed impossible; el Masri remained where he was.

  The Agency was already in a state of quiet panic regarding the Salt Pit anyway. As the debate over what to do with Khaled el Masri raged inside the CIA, another error at the site was referred to the Justice Department for investigation. In November 2002, a young Afghan under interrogation by CIA agents had been left chained to the floor of his cell, naked, without a blanket. The next morning he was dead. News of the death – apparently the result of a decision made by an inexperienced CIA officer – was hushed up and the corpse was buried anonymously. No records were kept. Although the Justice Department eventually decided not to prosecute, clearly this was the kind of incident that could come back to bite the Agency. The el Masri case offered more of the same, only this time it might be harder to hush up. This wasn’t some Afghan nobody. This was a German citizen.

  In April, according to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, Counter-Terrorism Center officers from within the CIA, shocked that nothing was being done about el Masri, started plotting to obtain his release. When nothing happened, Jose Rodriguez, the Head of the Centre, and James Pavitt, the Deputy Director of Operations, were told that something was seriously awry.

  ‘It’s the wrong Khaled el Masri,’ a European officer told Rodriguez. Not only had the CIA kidnapped and imprisoned an entirely innocent man in a dungeon in Afghanistan, he had been on hunger strike for a month. Nobody wanted another death in CIA custody. Something had to be done.

  But by now el Masri’s health was failing. By 8 April, after thirty-five days without food, he was too weak to get out of bed to use the lavatory. Medical examination revealed that during his time in the CIAs custody he had lost 60lbs in weight. The next day, Afghan staff again tried to get him to eat. Again, he refused. At 10 p.m. on 10 April, the Salt Pit’s warder and a doctor demanded point blank that el Masri take food, telling him that, if he did, he would be released in three weeks. When they were unable to offer him any proof of this, he refused.

  That night, hooded men re-entered el Masri’s cell, pulled him out of bed, bound his hands and feet and dragged him to the interrogation room, where he was tied to a chair. One grabbed his head and forced a feeding tube into his nose. Liquid was then pumped directly into el Masri’s stomach.

  In May 2004, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet was finally briefed on the el Masri situation.

  ‘Are you telling me we’ve got an innocent guy stuck in prison in Afghanistan?’ the DCI asked his
briefer. ‘Oh shit! Just tell me – please – we haven’t used enhanced interrogation techniques on him, have we?’

  Tenet had more to worry about than el Masri’s health: he now had to explain to his superiors what had happened. Later that month, he briefed Condoleezza Rice on the situation, suggesting that the best course of action might be simply to return el Masri to Germany and deny everything. After some debate, it was decided this was not a good idea. The German government would have to be informed about the error.

  In Afghanistan, the prison director took el Masri into a cell where he was introduced to an American who said he was a psychologist and explained that he had flown from DC to meet the German. At the end of their session, el Masri was told that he would be released soon. He wasn’t.

  Two weeks later, a new character appeared: a tall German-speaking man in a military uniform. Identifying himself as ‘Sam’, he said that he wanted to speak frankly. El Masri thought this unlikely. Each time he spoke, Sam appealed to the two Americans accompanying him as to what he should – and should not – say. Nevertheless, it was worth a try. Commenting that Sam appeared to know who he was, but that he didn’t know who Sam was, el Masri asked whether the German could enlighten him: perhaps he could state who he was working for and reveal his full name?

  ‘I can’t answer those questions,’ said Sam.

  Had he been sent by the German government? Sam refused to answer. Did the German government know that el Masri was being detained in Afghanistan? Sam refused to answer. Did el Masri’s wife know what had happened to him? Sam shook his head.

  Over the next few days, Sam appeared regularly, each time assuring el Masri that repatriation was imminent, but had been delayed. Once he brought cookies and a German magazine and asked if he needed anything ‘from home’. On 20 May, after nearly five months of incarceration, el Masri lost his temper and told Sam he was sick of broken promises. He planned to restart his hunger strike.

  ‘Please don’t,’ Sam told him. ‘Give me two days. I will talk to my German superiors.’ But el Masri had had enough. The next day he stopped eating again. Another meeting took place, with two Americans and Sam, promising that he would be going home within eight days.

  Finally, on the morning of 28 May, el Masri’s hands were secured with plastic cuffs, his legs were shackled, a blindfold was placed over his eyes and he was led outside into a jeep. After a ten-minute drive to the airport, he was escorted into a shipping container, sat down and instructed to face the wall. His blindfold was removed and his personal possessions were returned. His hands were then retied, he was blindfolded and his ears filled with cotton wool. Headphones were placed over the top. He was driven to an aeroplane, led up the steps and chained to a seat.

  After a six-hour flight, the plane touched down. El Masri was bundled into the back of a minivan and driven for around three hours. The van stopped and three new men, speaking with Slavic accents, climbed in. They then drove for another three hours, at the end of which he was helped out and told to turn around. One of the men instructed him to walk away from the vehicle. Under no circumstances was he to look back.

  To el Masri, who now found himself on top of a desolate mountain in a country he didn’t recognize, the next step was obvious: one of the officers was about to shoot him. He closed his eyes and started to walk. Nothing happened. Behind him, he heard the van speed away. Around the corner he bumped into three armed soldiers who demanded his passport, examined it and asked him what he was doing in Albania without a visa.

  The four men tramped to a single-storey building with a flag on top where el Masri was asked who he was. Having lost a considerable amount of weight, grown a thick beard and long hair during the course of his incarceration, he was told that he looked like a terrorist. When he tried to explain what had happened to him, the men laughed and asked him if he thought they looked stupid. No one would believe a story like that.

  To the German it was clear the Albanians had struck a deal with the CIA. They clearly knew exactly who he was. On the table in the office was a small stash of food they had prepared for him. Bread, potato chips and cheese: the exact same food, in the exact same packaging, that he had been given on his journey The officers drove him to Tirana International Airport and one of them requested his passport and wallet, removing 320 euros. He then disappeared into the terminal, to re-emerge fifteen minutes later with a boarding pass.

  El Masri was ushered into the airport and escorted through immigration control, where his passport was stamped with an exit visa: a curious technicality, since he had never officially entered Albania. He was put on to a commercial plane. Finally, he began to accept that he might survive his ordeal.

  After 149 days of incarceration without trial, charge or access to a lawyer, Khaled el Masri landed in Frankfurt at 8.45 a.m. on 29 May 2004. Immigration authorities immediately seized on the dishevelled Arab with the long beard who did not in the least resemble his passport photograph and told him that he was an impostor. Only after considerable efforts did he convince them that he should be allowed to re-enter his own country.

  El Masri finally made it home to Neu-Ulm that afternoon to find his flat abandoned. The postbox was stuffed full of unopened junk mail, along with month-old warnings from the German authorities that his social security benefits would be cut if he failed to attend regularly scheduled interviews. Inside the house most of his family’s possessions were gone; others had been loaded into removal boxes and abandoned. Tired of waiting for him to get in contact, his wife had left him, taking the children to Lebanon to live with her parents.

  In the local Islamic Centre, the German found a friend who filled him in on the details. His wife had sold the family car to pay for the plane tickets. El Masri telephoned his family, tried to explain to his children why their father had abandoned them and promised that they would all see each other soon. A week later, he made an appointment with a local lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic, sat down, took a deep breath and told him a long, extraordinary, story.

  Disbelieving at first, Gnjidic told him to write down his story, draw a picture of every place he had been during his incarceration and to collate any evidence that might validate his account. As it happened, there was quite a lot: a return bus ticket to Macedonia; an exit stamp in his passport from Albania; a boarding pass from Albania to Frankfurt. Then there was the biological evidence. Samples of his hair were sent to the Bavarian Archive for Geology where isotope analysis indicated that he had indeed been severely malnourished and had spent a number of months in South Asia.

  Gnjidic went to the police, who opened a formal investigation into the kidnapping and incarceration of Khaled el Masri, ‘The Egyptian’.

  The exposure of the CIAs rendition programme began with the planespotting community. Six weeks after 11 September, chatrooms on the Internet were humming with speculation about ‘ghost flights’. Tail numbers of suspect planes were exchanged; it wasn’t long before mainstream journalists became intrigued.

  Their first stop was the US Federal Aviation Authority database, which listed the companies that owned and flew the jets, many of which appeared to operate out of North Carolina. Searches of the companies’ public accounts revealed incongruities: their addresses were post office boxes. There were no phone records, business, corporation records or previous addresses. Staff at the companies were middle-aged, but their social security numbers had all been issued after 1998. The mysterious flights appeared to be operated by people who did not exist.

  One company that came up again and again was Premier Executive Transport Services Ltd (PETS), based in Dedham, Massachusetts. Its vice-president Colleen A. Bornt was not only untraceable, but changed her signature every time she handled a pen. According to company records, in December 2001 PETS had purchased a Boeing 737 Business Jet with the tail number N313P. To planespotters, the number was familiar. N313P had been spotted in some pretty far-flung places, including Glasgow, Guantanamo Bay, Tripoli, Poland and RAF Northolt. It had also been spotted in a rather m
ore salubrious location: the Ballearic Islands. Specifically, Mallorca.

  Planespotter Josep Manchado was at home when he received the call. ‘They were Germans,’ he recalls. ‘They said they were from television.’ Initially, Manchado didn’t believe them – they mentioned the CIA – but, when they phoned back with a Spanish translator, he took them more seriously. The journalists had an unbelievable story, they told him. They had a German citizen who appeared to have been kidnapped by the CIA. They were trying to stand the story up.

  Verifying a story such as el Masri’s was always going to be difficult: certainly, the CIA wasn’t about to explain what it had done. However, one thing the Germans did have (from contacts with British and American journalists) was a list of planes that appeared to be involved in the rendition programme. One of them was the Boeing Business Jet N313P. They also had the date of el Masri’s abduction from Macedonia: 23 January 2004. The day before his flight to Afghanistan, Josep Manchado had seen and photographed N313P at Palma Mallorca International Airport. Perhaps there was a correlation?

  ‘They told me that they wanted to talk about this picture because they had a man there telling them he had been kidnapped in this plane,’ says Manchado. ‘They wanted to ask me some questions.’

  The story now unfolded fast. With solid proof that N313P had been in Mallorca the morning of el Masri’s kidnap, journalists began digging to see what else they could find. Germany’s ZDF Television showed Manchado’s photograph to Macedonian air traffic control and persuaded them to hand over a copy of N313P’s flight plan for 23 January. There it was in black and white: Palma – Skopje – Baghdad – Kabul. The story stood up.

  The first stop, Palma, appeared to be a hub for other CIA flights, too. Alerted to the fact that a foreign intelligence service had been kidnapping civilians through Mallorca, the local police were called in. An enterprising Mallorcan journalist contacted the ground crews at Palma Airport and asked them if they had ever dealt with the Boeing Business Jet N313P. They had. One company Mallorcair, had catered for seven CIA jets as they passed through the island.