Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

by Chalmers Johnson

  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.89 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.”90 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.91 Aircraft known to be involved in CIA rendition operations have landed at British airports at least 210 times since 9/11.92

  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.93

  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.”94

  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.”95 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.96

  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.”97

  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.”98

  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).99

  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.100 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.”101 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 impro
ve 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.102

  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.103 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.)104 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.

  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 N44982.105

  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.106 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.107

  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.108 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.”109

  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.110

  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 o
ff 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.