The police never saw Rezk again. The day after they questioned her, she and her children returned to Egypt.
IN ITALY criminal investigations are conducted by a magistrate, in whose person is combined the roles of prosecutor and chief investigator. This arrangement differs from that of the United States, where the roles are separated: an American prosecutor may advise the police, but he does not direct them. Stefano Dambruoso began his magisterial career in the early 1990s prosecuting Mafiosi in the Sicilian city of Agrigento, which was a bit like running an anti-gang squad in East Los Angeles. After some success, he received a gift box containing half a pig’s head. The chief of police got the other half. The Mafia, who do not deal in subtlety, were threatening death. Dambruoso stayed three more years and put more mobsters away. In 1996 he transferred to Milan and became the city’s sole prosecutor detailed full-time to Islamic terrorism. Milan was a generally safer posting than Agrigento, although on one occasion police overheard terrorists speaking of “guys from Japan”—meaning kamikazes, suicide bombers—who seemed to be planning to assassinate Dambruoso. Two guards with submachine guns were stationed outside his apartment, and three bodyguards traveled with him until the threat dissipated.
Dambruoso convicted many terrorists, but a frustration of his work was that he rarely convicted them of terrorism per se because in the absence of an attack, conspiracy to commit a specific terrorist act could be hard to prove. Usually he convicted for ancillary crimes like forgery and illegal immigration, which carried lamentably short sentences—two or four or seven years, say. None of the terrorists of Abu Saleh’s cell or those arrested in Operation Sphinx was sentenced to more than a decade, and several beat the immigration and forgery raps entirely. Italy would somewhat solve this problem after September 11 by criminalizing witting association with terrorists, which was much easier to prove than terrorism proper. But the sentences for associational terrorism could also have been stiffened, and as a fallback, Italy took to deporting terrorists after their sentences had run. The terrorists about to be deported, men who, given a little more opportunity, would have murdered Italians by the dozen, often made touching pleas to their hosts not to return them to the lash of their native governments.
Dambruoso had directed DIGOS’s surveillance of Abu Omar, so the investigation into his disappearance fell to him as well. After Rezk’s interview with the police, he sent investigators to question the twelve members of the Croce Viola who had been on duty on February 17, but none had seen or heard a thing. He also sent investigators to ask Abu Omar’s associates in Milan, Varese, Como, and Cremona whether he had talked of leaving town, but none had heard him say anything of the kind. One administrator at Via Quaranta reported that Abu Omar’s wife had once said that Abu Omar thought he was followed on trips to mosques in Gallarate and Varese. His followers had driven either a car or a white Fiat Fiorino, which is a hybrid between a car and a van. Dambruoso did not know whether Abu Omar had imagined the surveillance, or had spotted the police who sometimes followed him, or had spotted someone else, perhaps his kidnappers. Dambruoso maintained the tap on the phone in Abu Omar’s apartment, but the calls Nabila Ghali made and received revealed nothing of interest, and bugs of Abu Omar’s associates revealed nothing either. The tap on Abu Omar’s mobile phone, silent since the morning of his disappearance, remained so.
Because Rezk had said that the Westerner standing with Abu Omar on the sidewalk had been using a mobile phone, Dambruoso asked the phone companies with nearby cell towers for logs of the calls routed by the towers between 11:00 A.M. and 1:00 P.M. on February 17. The logs would not contain the actual conversations, but they would show which phones had been used in the area, from which Dambruoso hoped to learn something useful. Italian bureaucracy, however, be it public or private, moves grudgingly, and half a year passed before the logs arrived. When they did, Dambruoso discovered he had erroneously requested them for 17.03.03—March 17—instead of 17.02.03. He corrected the digit, re-requested the logs, and awaited the new ones.
He had only one other clue of note. On March 3, two weeks after Abu Omar disappeared, Italy’s Central Directorate for Anti-Terrorism Police, the body that coordinates DIGOS offices around the country, received a brief teletype from the CIA. It was labeled secret//release to italy only and read in full:
WE HAVE INFORMATION SUGGESTING THAT USAMA MUSTAFA (NASR) AKA (ABU ’UMAR) AKA ABU OMAR AL-(ALBANI) MAY HAVE TRAVELED TO AN UNIDENTIFIED COUNTRY IN THE BALKAN REGION. TO DATE WE HAVE BEEN UNABLE TO VERIFY THESE ACCOUNTS; HOWEVER, WE WILL KEEP YOU INFORM [SIC] SHOULD HIS LOCATION BE FURTHER IDENTIFIED.
The CIA offered nothing more, and Dambruoso’s investigation came to a standstill.
Chapter 5
Torment
A FAST-DRIVING VAN, or any other machine with a wheel or two, arouses no interest in the Milanesi, who have yet to discover brakes and who regard traffic lights as suggestions. Red is a goad to charge, as with the bull. Stripes down the middle of a road are aids for centering the car, which is useful when passing one vehicle while dodging an oncoming one. A sidewalk may be used by a motorist in a like manner. It is the merest oversight of the law that pedestrians who get in the way are not fined for impeding the flow of traffic.
The van into which Abu Omar disappeared at noon on February 17 sped north on Via Guerzoni in Milanese fashion. It threaded through the diminishing city and its suburbs until, just before reaching the A4 autostrada, a car that had been waiting there for a couple of hours slipped in front of it. Both vehicles got onto the A4 eastbound. Six or seven minutes later, a second van, also having waited for a couple of hours near the on-ramp, followed. The car and the first van passed walled Bergamo, high on its promontory, forty-five minutes after the kidnapping. The other van passed several minutes later. Half an hour after that, in similar formation, they passed Brescia, known as the Lioness for its resistance to Austrian tyrants. Forty minutes later, they passed Verona, fair; then Vicenza, porticoed and proportionate; then Padova, arcaded; then Venice, subsiding. At four o’clock in the afternoon, two hundred miles beyond Via Guerzoni, the caravan left the A4 at the town of Portogruaro, in Friuli–Venezia Giulia, the northeasternmost of Italy’s twenty regioni, and headed north on the A28. Twenty minutes later, they left the A28 to wind along a modest provincial road through pretty hill towns, their narrow buildings framed in timber and rock, their campaniles built with the care, if not the budget, of Piazza San Marco’s.
Amid these, Aviano Air Base lay like a pockmark. The barracks and office boxes in which Aviano manifested itself suggested the offspring of a prison that had mated with a dumpster, probably in Lubbock, and the imported commerce in its strip malls ran to Pizza Hut (in the land of pizza) and Bud Lite (in the land of vineyards). The base seemed to betray a wish by its American inhabitants to get back home, though they had hardly left it, and implied a foreign policy both suburban and incurious. Technically Aviano was not solely an American base. Italy owned the land and the airport proper and garrisoned a few hundred airmen and a handful of jets there. But the American complement was the entire Thirty-first Fighter Wing of the U.S. Air Force, with 3,500 airmen, 5,000 staff and dependents, and aircraft by the score.
Shortly before five o’clock on February 17, the three vehicles arrived, still in formation, at a section of the base controlled by the Americans.
It had been a long afternoon for the cargo. From the moment the plainclothed policeman stepped out of the car and stopped him with a sharp “Polizia!” Abu Omar had suspected something was not quite right. It was less the stop itself that aroused his suspicion—document checks were routine enough—than its coming on the heels of several unsettling weeks in which he thought he had noticed people spying on him. When he walked down the street, it had sometimes seemed as if someone were following him, though never the same person twice, and when he traveled out of town, he thought cars tailed the ones he rode in. Sometimes when he answered his phone, nothing but silence greeted him, and, once, a man called from a hidden
number and asked for him in Arabic, but when Abu Omar said it was he, the man hung up. Another time, an e-mail attachment made his computer crash, and he wondered (probably without cause) whether someone had sent an electronic worm to upload data from the computer. Another day, he returned to his apartment and thought some of his things had been rearranged, as if someone had gone through them.
The policeman on the street that afternoon had flashed his credentials so quickly that Abu Omar hadn’t been able to see which branch of police he was with. His blond hair, pale face, and command of English made Abu Omar think he was not Italian. Later events made him certain the man was an American. He had walked Abu Omar to the sidewalk and stood by a van that Abu Omar had paid no attention to, then looked through Abu Omar’s papers and called his dispatcher. As he did, an Egyptian woman and her child walked by on the opposite sidewalk. Abu Omar knew the woman by sight—she lived nearby—but he had never spoken to her. Not long after she passed them, the car that had brought the American began to turn around. While Abu Omar was watching it, the world exploded.
One moment he was waiting on the American, concerned but not alarmed. The next, the side door of the van opened with a thundering tear and he was hauled into the air. He flailed instinctively, and he thought later that he had yelled, but he wasn’t sure. It was like in a nightmare, where it is hard to say what screams were in one’s head and what came out of one’s mouth. At the moment, he understood dimly that his hoisters were two hulks, six feet tall if an inch, which gave them half a foot on him. They were muscled like stallions. As he was pulled inside, he caught the briefest of glimpses of their faces and would later say their owners seemed Italian in complexion and about thirty years old. They threw him against the side of the van, one of them slammed the sliding door shut, and everything went dark. The whole thing could not have taken three seconds.
The hulks hit and kicked him with quick, sharp blows to his head, chest, stomach, and legs, and he fell to the floor on his face. The blows kept coming. He was so at their mercy, which was so obviously small, that he was certain he would be killed. Abruptly, however, the beating stopped, a gag was stuffed roughly in his mouth, something—he thought it was the winter hat he was wearing—was pulled over his eyes, and cords were cinched tightly around his wrists and ankles. He was trussed like a slaughterhouse pig. While all this was happening, he heard the squeal of tires and felt the van moving fast, but his pain and shock were too great for him to think about where they might be going. His mouth was filled with blood and mucus, and he could tell he was bleeding from his nose and knees. Several parts of him felt the way a thumb does when it is smashed by a hammer. He was sure he had several broken bones, and he tried not to shift his position, since even slight movements hurt.
After some minutes he became overwhelmed with the sensation that his body was imploding. He heard strange burbling noises come from his throat and felt foam ooze out of his mouth around the gag. He couldn’t breathe, and his muscles became rigid. He wet his pants. It occurred to him that this was what dying must be like. One of the hulks noticed his throes and gave a loud scream. If there was a word in the scream, or a language suggested by it, Abu Omar was too stupefied to notice. Quickly the men tore off his galabia, and one of them massaged his chest while the other lifted the fabric covering Abu Omar’s head and pointed a flashlight at one of his eyes. His pupil must have reacted as expected, because the man grunted confidently, pulled the fabric back down, and let Abu Omar be. He could feel himself breathing again, and he knew then that he would not die in the van. They wanted him alive, but the thought did not lessen his terror.
The van drove many hours. It felt like four or more, but it was hard to say, he was so dumb with pain. The hulks stayed in the cargo hold with him the whole time, and two other men, whose forms he had noticed earlier, stayed in the cab, which was separated from the hold by a metal screen. None of the four said a word the entire trip. Abu Omar remembered that not long after he left his apartment that morning, he had walked by a light-colored van that was parked on the street, and a minute later the same van had driven by him. He wondered now if that van and this one were the same. He also wondered whether the Egyptian woman on the street had seen the kidnapping. For the most part, though, he did not think. He feared, and the fear crowded out his thoughts and made him very tired. When he was able, he prayed.
At last the van stopped and the door was opened. Two men—he wasn’t sure if they were the hulks—carried him out like a sack of sugar and put him inside another kind of vehicle that might have been an automobile or a small plane. It could not have been a large plane because they did not carry him up more than a step or two, if that, when they put him inside. Soon the vehicle began to move. He did not feel anything like a takeoff or turbulence and did not notice the changes in breathing that come with flight, but neither did he feel the hum a car makes when its engine is on or the small shudders of a car hitting bumps in the road. He did not sense any people with him. He felt sedated, only half conscious—sixty percent, he would later say. He thought that maybe during the initial beating or maybe when they had given him first aid, they had jabbed a needle into him or sprayed something in his nose—he would hardly have noticed. But it could have just been pain and dread that blunted his senses.
The ride in the second vehicle seemed to last an hour, although it might have been as much as three. Again he was carried out. He knew he was at an airport this time because he could hear airplane engines. He was taken inside a cold building and dropped on the floor and left there a while, maybe ten minutes, before he heard the footsteps of many people coming toward him. A couple of them stood him up and cut the restraints from his ankles so he could stand on his own. Then someone began to cut away his clothes. It was a skillful job: the cuts were swift but did not nick him, and he never felt the cutter’s hands. He was denuded in less than a minute. Without warning, something was shoved roughly up his anus, which hurt terribly, then a diaper was put on him, then he was dressed in what felt like pajamas. To get the pajama top on him, they had to cut his hands free, but as soon as the shirt was on, his hands were again cinched behind his back with plastic cords. Then the covering over his head was yanked off. The light that greeted him, after so many hours in the dark, was blinding. When his eyes adjusted, he could make out a group of eight or ten men outfitted in black balaclavas and khaki uniforms with many pockets on the arms and legs for holding small tools like flashlights and truncheons. Some of the men had knives in sheaths strapped to their thighs. They looked exactly as Special Forces do in movies. One of them photographed him, then they covered his face again, only this time with wide tape, like duct tape, which they wrapped round and round his head, leaving small openings at his nose and mouth. He tried not to think about how much it would hurt when the tape was pulled off. The interval in which his eyes were uncovered lasted only a few seconds, which amazed him. Their speed in everything amazed him. They had obviously planned and rehearsed every detail. They had no need for words and did not use them.
After cinching plastic strips around his ankles, they carried him outside and loaded him into another vehicle of some kind and set him down roughly, although whether on the floor or across a couple of seats, he could not tell. The air was extremely cold, like inside a freezer, and he soon began to lose feeling in his extremities and thought he was becoming hypothermic. He could hear classical music playing lightly, as if far away, which was surreal, but then nothing about his afternoon had been real. The vehicle started to move, and he could tell now that it was an airplane, because he felt a slight pressure on his chest and a rolling in his stomach from the climb to altitude. Just after takeoff, or perhaps just before, someone put headphones on him. The classical music streamed through and drowned out all other sound except the occasional back-and-forth of footsteps. Someone also attached a wire to the big toe of his right foot, he assumed for monitoring his pulse or oxygen. Other wires may have been attached elsewhere, but he could not be sure later if he had
only imagined them. After the plane had been aloft a while, it began to warm up, and he deduced that it had been sitting on a frozen runway with its door open when he was loaded. It took a long time for the feeling of being frozen to leave him.
He had not been able to swallow all of the blood and mucus that had pooled in his mouth that afternoon, and at some point in the flight it congealed into a kind of paste that seemed to glue his airway shut. He began gasping for breath, but no one came to his aid, and again he felt as if he might die. When his chest started heaving crazily, someone finally leaned over him, put an oxygen mask to his nose, and stuck a water tube in his mouth. The paste was so thick that he vomited the water back out, which earned him slaps to his face and kicks to his ribs. But the water seemed to have cleared his airway and he could breathe again.
The plane was in the air a long time, he guessed seven or eight hours. Maybe it landed once or even twice, but he was too groggy to say. He wondered if the thing they had shoved up his anus had been a sedative. Thoughts of death overwhelmed him, and he tried to recite the Quran to push them away, but they kept returning. Finally he felt the plane circling, then descending. Someone put more plastic bands around his wrists and ankles, cinching them so tight that they felt like knives cutting through his skin. He screamed, but his caretaker did not loosen the cords. He felt the plane land, then someone removed his headphones and he heard the plane’s engines and people moving about. Soon he was heaved to his feet and shoved down the aisle, which felt, to his bruised body, like being battered all over again. A muggy heat greeted him at the door. He was led down a short flight of steps—he had not noticed them on being carried aboard—so he knew now that the plane was small.
A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial Page 12