A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial

by Hendricks, Steve

  Megale’s investigators were able to discover Adler’s lodgings by examining where her SIM stopped for the night, the same technique they had used to learn that Bob Lady was using Barbara Suddath’s SIM. Lady’s case had been much simpler, however, because DIGOS already knew where Lady lived and had only to see that Suddath’s SIM was connecting to cell towers near his homes. In Adler’s case, though, the DIGOS investigators had no idea where she was sleeping. But they assumed she was staying in hotels, so each time they found a tower to which her SIM connected overnight, an officer visited the hotels within the tower’s range and looked at their guest registries. Invariably, one hotel within the range contained Adler’s name. She could have made DIGOS’s work harder by changing her name from hotel to hotel, but she never did. DIGOS found the hotels of several of the other Americans in the same manner; they did not change their names either. Nearly all of their hotels were as immoderately priced as Adler’s.

  DIGOS also put names to some of the dozens of SIMs that either had not been registered to anyone or had been registered to stolen identities. These cases were more complicated than Adler’s because although the nameless SIMs connected to cell towers overnight, their namelessness meant that the investigators could not simply match them to hotel registries. DIGOS overcame the problem by tracing the SIMs’ movements more minutely and comparing those movements with the precise checkin and check-out times of hotel guests. In a relatively simple case, a SIM might have connected to a cell tower at 9:00 p.m. on a certain night, then disconnected at 8:00 a.m. the next morning. On checking the hotel records, DIGOS would find only a few guests—Tim Davis, Lena Kohl, and Stefania Ragusa, say—who had arrived around 9:00 and left around 8:00. DIGOS would follow the SIM to its next hotel, and when Davis turned up there but Kohl and Ragusa did not, the investigators could be sure Davis was the user of the nameless SIM. A few of the users of nameless SIMs made some of this detective work unnecessary by giving their phone numbers (i.e., their SIM numbers) to their hotels when they gave their names at checkin, thereby making their anonymous SIMs onymous—which rather undid the trouble someone had gone to to get them a nameless SIM in the first place.

  Seven Americans were newly unmasked by DIGOS’s hotel work. Four of them—Lorenzo Gabriel Carrera, a thirty-two-year-old from Texas; Vincent Faldo, fifty-two and from Massachusetts; Michalis Vasiliou, forty and born in Greece; and Betnie Medero-Navedo, thirty-five and of unknown nativity—had traveled in the escorting caravan to Aviano on the day of the kidnapping. Medero-Navedo, like Sabrina De Sousa, was a second secretary at the U.S. embassy and was the only diplomat accused of a hands-on role in the kidnapping proper. (She was eventually exonerated, in a manner to be discussed.) Two more of the seven newly discovered Americans—Gregory Asherleigh, a forty-seven-year-old Marylander, and George Purvis, forty-three and born in China—had been in Dergano during the kidnapping. Purvis, it seemed, was a leader. He had arrived in Milan in September of 2002, months before most of the other spies, presumably to plan the kidnapping. He had also exchanged calls with Bob Lady, who kept his distance (at least telephonically) from most of the spies. The last of the seven Americans newly discovered, John Thomas Gurley, a thirty-two-year-old claiming residency in Orlando, seemed to have been a lesser planner and was not in Dergano or Cormano on the day of the kidnapping.

  As the investigators studied the SIMs, they also noticed that some of them traveled always and exactly in pairs, from which they deduced that each pair belonged to one spy. Often one of the paired SIMs was registered in the spy’s name, or at any rate in his American alias, while the other was unregistered or falsely registered to an Italian. Possibly the spy had used the unregistered SIM for more-sensitive calls and the registered SIM for less-sensitive calls. If so, he was unaware that the SIMs’ joint movements would tie the pair together. Some of the spies were more foolish still, using both SIMs in the same phone. Perhaps they thought only a SIM, not the phone it was in, could be traced. But the serial number of the phone showed up in the call logs with both SIMs and betrayed their user. By these means, DIGOS learned that four spies—Harbaugh, Harbison, Rueda, and Sofin—who till that point had been implicated only by their named SIMs and only in the planning stages had in fact been in Dergano with their nameless SIMs when Abu Omar was kidnapped. The discovery was particularly damaging for the sixty-four-year-old Harbaugh, who was revealed as a probable co-leader of the kidnapping with Purvis. Harbaugh had arrived in Milan in August, a month before Purvis, and to judge from his calls was a frequent go-between between Lady and the rest of the kidnapping team. None of the other spies had more than two SIMs, but Harbaugh had a prodigious five, one of which was the SIM that called Lady several times on the afternoon of the kidnapping, presumably to update him on its progress.

  In all, DIGOS tied thirty-four of the fifty-four conspiratorial SIMs to twenty-five Americans.

  This, however, was not all that DIGOS learned. Several of the Americans, when checking into hotels, gave out addresses, almost all of which were post office boxes not far from the CIA’s headquarters. Evidently the CIA could not be bothered to rent a box or two in Wichita and have the contents forwarded. A few of the spies also listed employers, which, with very little investigation, were discovered to be fronts. One was Coachmen Enterprises—aptly named for the rendering trade. When the spies settled their hotel bills, many paid with Visa, MasterCard, and Diners Club accounts whose numbers were so unsubtly similar—sharing the first eight, eleven, or fourteen (of sixteen) digits—as to betray a common origin.

  The spies did not bare themselves only to DIGOS. They also bared themselves to each other. When Monica Courtney Adler took her break by the sea at La Spezia, John Kevin Duffin shared her room. Ben Amar Harty and Eliana Castaldo shared another room in the same hotel. Two nights later Raymond Harbaugh and Pilar Rueda recreated together in a chamber in the Alpine resort of Chiesa di Valmalenco. After the kidnapping, many of the spies passed a few nights (not necessarily in the same room) in Venice’s more exquisite hotels, like the fourteenth-century Danieli, off Piazza San Marco, and the Europa and Regina, on the Grand Canal. The frolics and the regal bills were manna to headline writers, the best of whom wrote, “The Spies Who Came in From the Hot Tub” and “Be All That You Can Charge” and “Ask Not What Your Country Can Bill to You, But What You Can Bill to Your Country.”

  Then there were the frequent-flyer numbers. On checking in to hotels or renting cars (which DIGOS also identified and which, after the splendor of the lodgings, were an anti-climax: gray Fiat compacts and such), several of the Americans gave account numbers for United Mileage Plus, Delta Sky Miles, Northwest WorldPerks, Hilton HHonors, and the Starwood Special Preferred Guest Program. They perhaps thought Abu Omar should not be the only one to get a free trip out of the job. When investigators looked into the accounts, they learned that two months after the kidnapping, Gregory Asherleigh flew from New York to Oslo, stayed a month, then returned. He banked the miles from his flights on his Northwest WorldPerks account. Two weeks after he came back, Cynthia Dame Logan flew from Washington to Oslo, stayed two months, and banked her miles on her United Mileage Plus account.

  Almost certainly, Asherleigh and Logan had been scouting another rendition. Their target, almost as certainly, was Mullah Krekar, the co-founder of an Iraqi group that evolved into Ansar al-Islam—the same group for which Abu Omar had allegedly recruited suicide bombers. Krekar had fled Iraq for Norway in 1991 and been granted asylum on grounds of persecution under Saddam Hussein. Later he was suspected of traveling back to Iraq to help Ansar al-Islam, and his asylum was revoked. Norway did not expel him, however, because he might have been put to death if sent home. As the Iraq War drew near in 2003 and the United States worried increasingly about Ansar al-Islam, the CIA weighed whether to render Krekar. Asherleigh and Logan, it seems, were sent to Oslo to scout the possibility. But the rendition did not come to pass, partly because someone in Norway’s intelligence services tipped Krekar’s lawyer to the plan. “A lot of peo
ple with integrity in the government didn’t like the situation,” the lawyer, Brynjar Meling, later explained, “and therefore there were quite a lot of leaks.” Meling begged the police to protect his client, but they apparently declined. When Krekar took to denouncing the CIA’s plan in public, he was generally dismissed as paranoid. He was vindicated a few years later when Norway’s main intelligence service admitted it had known that CIA officers had come to Norway with illicit intentions.

  DIGOS could not trace the rest of Abu Omar’s kidnappers beyond a day or two of the kidnapping. (The exceptions were the accused kidnappers in the diplomatic corps, but their movements after the kidnapping proved uninteresting.) A few of the kidnappers returned their rental cars in Munich or Frankfurt, but DIGOS could not learn why. Sometimes CIA officers traveled to and from covert jobs through irrelevant countries where they changed and then changed back their identities. Perhaps Abu Omar’s kidnappers had been muddying their trail.

  All of the non-diplomats’ SIMs were abandoned (or at least disused) after the kidnapping, but the same could not be said of their phones, four of which had an afterlife. Each of the four was used more than a year after the kidnapping for a week or two in Rome with a new SIM, each bought by a different American. Each connected multiple times to a cell tower a few blocks from the U.S. embassy. Spataro theorized the phones were office phones, the office being the CIA, and that the officers were in Italy on short assignments. It was uncharacteristically frugal of the CIA to have recycled the phones.

  Chapter 7

  Flight

  AVIANO AIR BASE has a history of renditions, although before the kidnapping of Abu Omar they seem to have been only of a leporine kind. On the lands around Aviano, rabbits have bred like, well, rabbits and have become aeronautical hazards, chiefly by turning the air-intake valves of jets into rabbit-intake valves. The rabbits are also terrestrial hazards. Pilots of F-16s have returned to Aviano from dropping five-hundred-pound bombs on an al-Qaeda safehouse or a Baghdad hospital, gotten in their cars, and headed home, whereupon bunnies have hopped in front of them. Warriors have been known to swerve off the road to save the innocents. Consequently, the air base instituted an annual rabbit roundup in which hundreds of volunteers form a line on a runway and march as a wall on the adjoining fields, driving the rabbits before them into a long net. The detainees are then transferred to vehicles and rendered to the forests and mountains beyond U.S. jurisdiction, where they are set free—a testimony to American mercy. An Italian would have turned the captives into coniglio fritto dorato, which is rabbit that has been chopped, marinated in olive oil and lemon, slathered with egg and flour, and dropped in a pan of boiling oil, the result of which is a convincing argument against animal rights.

  After Magistrate Spataro and DIGOS followed the trail of Abu Omar to the hermetic American enclave at Aviano, there were fewer ways to trace him. The trail did not vanish entirely, however. All planes that take off in Italy must follow either a civilian or a military protocol. Under the civilian protocol, a pilot files a flight plan with her originating air-traffic control tower, the tower in turn guides the flight through takeoff, then, once the plane reaches a certain altitude, a regional control center takes responsibility for guiding and monitoring it. If the plane leaves one region of Italy for another, the responsibility passes to another control center, and if it leaves Italy altogether, the responsibility passes to the new country. At the same time that the regional centers are tracking the flight, an international aviation authority in Brussels called Eurocontrol does the same. All civilian flights and some military flights fly under civilian protocol. Other military flights may be declared “on mission” and exempted from the civilian protocol. In those cases, the pilot files no flight plan with Italian authorities, and military rather than civilian air-control centers guide the plane. The flight still shows up on civilian radar, but civil authorities essentially ignore it.

  Spataro asked all of the civilian and military monitoring agencies for records of flights that left Aviano between 5:00 P.M. on February 17, 2003, and midnight on February 18. He hoped the agencies would have flight plans and radar traces, maybe even recordings of conversations with the pilots, but he learned that such data were purged every few months unless there was a reason, like a crash, to keep them. There had been no reason to keep the data on flights from Aviano on February 17 and 18. Several of the authorities did, however, have scaled-down flight plans known as departure logs, and these showed that in the period of Spataro’s request, six flights left Aviano under civilian protocol and thirteen under military protocol. All of the militarily protocoled flights were made by F-16s, which had room only for their pilots, so Spataro ruled those out. Of the civilian flights, only one had an itinerary that matched what Abu Omar had described to his wife and his friend Elbadry.

  That flight was made by a Learjet 35 that left Aviano at 6:20 P.M. and landed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany at about 7:40 P.M. Ramstein, which Hitler had carved from his southern forests to aid in the annihilation of Western Europe and from which the United States, having carved it from him, had meant to annihilate the Soviet Union if things came to that, was the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force in Europe. The Learjet had a capacity of ten passengers and used as its call sign SPAR 92. “SPAR” was short for Special Air Resources, which meant a military flight carrying senior officers or other VIPs. A call sign is the name air-traffic controllers call a plane by, and it is sometimes identical to the plane’s tail number. SPAR 92, however, was not the Learjet’s tail number, and Spataro never learned what it was. Earlier on February 17, while the kidnappers were en route to Aviano with Abu Omar, SPAR 92 flew from Ramstein to Aviano, arriving at 5:14, just a few minutes after the kidnappers. The timing suggested the coordinators of the rendition did not want their torture taxi idling on an Italian runway should the kidnappers get stuck in traffic or run into other trouble. SPAR 92 left Aviano for Ramstein an hour after it had arrived. Six minutes later, the SIM of Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Romano, the security chief at Aviano, called a mobile phone registered to the U.S. Air Force at Ramstein. Presumably he was letting someone know the plane was on its way.

  Spataro asked Eurocontrol for the logs of flights that departed Ramstein in the following twenty-four hours. There were several, but only one had been bound for Egypt: a Gulfstream IV, tail number N85VM. It departed at 8:31 P.M., less than an hour after Abu Omar arrived, again neatly matching the account he had given his wife and Elbadry, and landed in Cairo at 12:32 A.M. Spataro could learn no more about N85VM, but other investigators did.

  A MAN RICH enough to own a jet hates to think of it hangared. Hangared, it is an investment earning no dividends, like money under a mattress. Many men of means will therefore lease their planes. There are companies that will make the arrangements—finding the clients, handling the money, maintaining the plane, providing the crew. The owner of the plane may place limits on the clientele, for example by disallowing flights from the Colombian highlands to private airstrips along the Rio Grande. On the other hand, he may not scruple over the details, like an investor in Liggett or Blackwater. The interests of the less preoccupied man align with those of the CIA, which needs secret jets for its secret work with few questions asked. The CIA owns jets of its own, but with ownership comes maintenance of plane and crew, and if a plane is exposed as the CIA’s, it will have to be sold and another will have to be bought, which is onerous. The CIA can change a plane’s tail number, and sometimes does, but the change will be registered with the Federal Aviation Administration and linked to the old tail number, which may defeat the change. By contrast, if a leased plane is exposed as a spy craft, the CIA can walk away from it and lease another. Then too after September 11, 2001, the White House demanded far more missions from the CIA than its small in-house fleet could handle. So the agency leased planes.

  Phillip H. Morse was a rich man, an ex–insurance salesman who had founded a business that invented a device that catheterized blood vessels serving the heart.
The Morse manifold, as the device is known, made Morse flush—the catheter king, some called him. He summered in Lake George and wintered in Palm Beach, where he built a golf course with his friend Jack Nicklaus. He liked to play the links of Scotland. He bought himself a vice-chairmanship in the Boston Red Sox (having grown up in Danvers) and traveled to and from Sox games in season. He also collected coins around the world, including two hundred and forty Double Eagles, which were magnificent twenty-dollar gold pieces in Beaux Arts style that President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned of the artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The sale in 2005 of the Morse Double Eagle Collection, as the coins are known in collecting circles, set several price records; one of the Eagles fetched $3 million. A lifestyle such as Morse’s is insupportable without a private craft, so he bought a Gulfstream IV from El Paso Gas and Electric. The jet could seat eleven in leathered comfort, and a six-foot-tall man could stand in its aisle without stooping. The catheter king put Red Sox logos on its fuselage.

  For accounting purposes, Morse created a company called Assembly Pointe Aviation, which owned the plane and little or nothing else and whose terminal e in “Pointe” carried a faint odor of new money. Assembly Pointe leased the plane to intermediary companies that covered the Red Sox logos and leased it in turn to clients. One of the intermediary companies was Richmor Aviation of Hudson, New York, which advertised the plane at $5,365 an hour, which was to say $129,000 a day (if not discounted), or just under $900,000 a week. Richmor middlemanned for the CIA.