A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial

by Hendricks, Steve

  A couple of hours after we had begun, Abu Omar said he was fatigued and escorted us to the door. He had shown prior guests a small bag of clothes he kept in the foyer for when the police came to arrest him again. There was no bag now, from which I gathered he was gaining confidence in his emancipation.

  WHEN WE CAME back the next night, I thought Abu Omar a little less buoyant climbing the stairs, and when we sat down with the yogurt drinks before us, he declared this was our last session. I was taken aback and reminded him we had agreed to several sessions and said I had many questions left to ask. (Indeed, I had hardly asked any: when an interviewee will talk on point unprompted, as Abu Omar had the previous night, a reporter learns more by letting him speak and asking follow-ups later.) Abu Omar was unmoved by my protest. He said I could have as many hours as I liked tonight, but none beyond. I protested some more, but he held defiant. As it is rude in Egypt to show a person the sole of your shoe, I tilted a foot up to him while we bickered, giving him a little more sole with each rebuff, but after I had given all the sole I had to give, he remained as immovable as the Temple of Ptah. I finally suggested, as a temporary fix, that we start the session and see how far we got, and he agreed.

  He wanted to continue his narrative of the previous night, which had gotten as far as his first release from prison, but I preferred to ask about things he had glossed over. He tolerated my questions for a while, answering without much detail or interest, and when I pressed him about his probable terrorism (I had not yet read the transcripts of his conversations in Milan, so did not know just how likely a terrorist he was), he became still more clipped. Soon he announced he hadn’t time for minutiae and said he would tell the rest of his narrative or nothing at all. We argued some more, and after getting no further than in our last tiff, I let him go ahead. An hour or so later, he was done and asked for the rest of the money.

  Now it was my turn to refuse. I did. He insisted I pay, I refused again, and we went back and forth for some time. Eventually he turned from my interpreter, to whom he had been directing his conversation, and looked at me with the eyes of a seal pup in a Defenders of Wildlife ad.

  “Steef,” he said. “Pliz.”

  “No.”

  “Steef, pliz. I opened all. I tell you everything. Pliz, Steef. Pliz.” Reverting to the interpreter, he said that he had no job and no prospect of one, that his medical bills were enormous, and that he was so very poor that, in effect, his whole family would starve if I did not honor my commitment. I brushed away a tear and said no. He stood up and paced a few moments, then removed a skeleton key from his pocket, stuck it in the door, and locked us inside the room.

  This was a first. I had never before been locked in a room by or with a terrorist. Trying quickly to size up the situation, I decided he was unlikely to harm a reporter and an interpreter and earn himself a speedy return to prison. But this assumption was predicated on a rationality that neither I nor, by his own admission, he was certain he fully possessed. Also, I did not know what else was in his pocket, and I felt a keen obligation to my interpreter, who even before the appearance of the skeleton key had said, “This situation gives me a headache.” In the end I told Abu Omar I would pay but added that since I had only fifty dollars in my wallet (the rest being in my sock), he would need to come with us to a cash machine. He demanded to see my wallet, which I produced. He inspected it, looked sad, and said that once we were outside we would run away or summon the police, which was true. He demanded I give him the fifty dollars, leave my passport as security, and go to the cash machine and return with the rest of the money. I countered with the fifty dollars and a credit card as security, which, after more haggling, he accepted as the best deal he could get. When he showed us to the door, there hung over our little group the feeling of paramours at the end of an unsatisfying fling, each party certain of never seeing the other again.

  On the street, my translator, that honest soul, said, “There is an ATM down the block here.”

  When I said I was not going to honor my commitment, he seemed relieved. I asked him to wait a moment while I called my wife in Tennessee and told her a terrorist in Alexandria had just been enabled to buy crappy Kenmore appliances with our Sears card. She said she would cancel it. Then I took the money out of my sock, paid my interpreter the modest sum he had asked for, and offered him the hundred dollars I had not paid Abu Omar.

  “No, no, keep it,” he said. “You have been raped enough.”

  I have appreciated his hyperbole ever since. It reminds me there are people all over the world who are disturbed by even small injustices.

  “MONICA COURTNEY ADLER” grew up in a large southern city and attended one of the paradoxical country day schools (paradoxical because they are never in the country) in which the region specializes. On being graduated from high school in the mid-1990s, she entered the flagship college of her home state, where she made the dean’s list and Phi Beta Kappa and majored in international studies. Degree in hand, she moved to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, then moved across the Potomac to Arlington, much nearer CIA headquarters. When she left for Milan at the start of 2003, she was not more than twenty-five years old. She was probably a lookout on the day of the kidnapping. A year and a half after she returned, she married a young analyst who worked at a different government intelligence agency and who volunteered at a food bank (she volunteered for the Junior League) and served on the board of their neighborhood association. The neighborhood was a collection of mock townhouses marooned in a sea of parking, each home as anonymous as Monica had hoped, but failed, to be. A couple of years after the two were married, Monica’s Facebook page showed a young mother, child in arms, smiling as radiantly as the Monica on her international driver’s license in Milan. She had cut her hair since then. She seemed utterly ordinary.

  Monica could be traced because in Italy she gave information about herself that was partly true. At one hotel, for example, she gave her address as an apartment building in Virginia that stood a block or so from a building in which she had once lived. By comparing information about past residents of buildings in the area with certain information from Monica’s false identity, I found one real person who seemed to be the false Monica. In the winter of 2008 my assistant Jessica Easto called the probable Monica (whose real name was different) to ask if she was the Monica Courtney Adler of the kidnapping in Milan. The woman seemed to sputter a little, then said no.

  “Do you work for the CIA?” Jessica said.

  Monica declined to answer. “Um, you know,” she said, “I just had a baby. I can’t really talk about this right now.”

  “Do you know what an extraordinary rendition is?” Jessica said.

  “Ummm—no.”

  Jessica gave her a brief tutorial, then asked about a close friend of Monica’s who we had thought, early in our investigations, might have been Monica herself.

  “I’d rather not have her involved in this,” Monica said. “She’s one of my best friends, and she has nothing to do with this.” She suggested Jessica would do better to speak to the CIA’s public relations department than to call individuals. Then she said goodbye and hung up.

  I leave Monica her anonymity because of a law called the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which was passed in response to the publication, in 1975, of a tell-all called Inside the Company: CIA Diary. Its author, Philip Agee, was a former CIA officer who was so disturbed by the CIA’s violent subversions of Latin American democracies that he exposed dozens of the subversions and hundreds of the subverters, by name. The CIA and Ford White House wanted Agee’s throat, but although they could prosecute him for breaking his contract with the CIA (which required employees and ex-employees to send their writings through a CIA censor), there was no law against revealing the names of a CIA officer per se. Someone outside the CIA, for example a reporter, could have published the entire personnel directory of the CIA without repercussion. At the time, the CIA was not in a position to correct this legal oversight, because C
ongress and reporters had just revealed that the agency had spied illegally on thousands of Americans, had abetted the Watergate burglars, had paid Mafia wiseguys to try to assassinate Fidel Castro, had helped overthrow the freely elected governments of Guatemala, Chile, and Brazil, and had done many other ugly things besides. But by 1982 the memory of these sins had faded, the American Right was again ascendant, and Congress and President Reagan enacted the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which made it a crime to reveal the identity of an American spy. The act makes no exception for whistleblowing. A CIA officer can strangle infants in their cribs, rape whole convents of nuns, and assassinate the Queen of England, but to report the spy’s name makes the reporter a felon. There is a strong First Amendment argument that the law is so indiscriminate as to be unconstitutional, but the current Supreme Court has subordinated the Constitution to an authoritarian idea of national security, and even were the court saner, to challenge the law would be the work of many years and thousands of dollars. I therefore leave Abu Omar’s kidnappers their namelessness.

  I DO NOT, however, leave their nature unknown. I wanted to find them, partly to know who America’s warriors-on-terror were and partly to know whether they had hidden themselves at home with as little care as they had abroad. I was able to find the true identity of, I think, somewhat more than half of them. Some gave themselves away in the same way Monica had—that is, by giving out personal information in Italy that was true or nearly true. A few gave out so much true information that it took only a couple of hours to find them. One even gave an e-mail address that seemed to belong to his wife, who, consequently or not, left him after the kidnapping. Other spies betrayed themselves by calling family from Italy. Still others were undone, whether by themselves or by the CIA, by the way their fake identities were acquired. To get the components of those identities—driver’s licenses, social security numbers, passports, credit cards—they had had to give addresses to government bureaus and credit card companies, some of which addresses became part of the public record and others of which could be had for a small fee. Often the addresses were unhelpful post office boxes, but sometimes they were street addresses. Even if the spies no longer lived there, there were usually forwarding addresses, deeds of sale, or other clues that eventually led to the spies. Almost always their traceability was a testimony less to my investigative powers than to the CIA’s imprudence.

  The spies were a varied lot—white, Latino, young, old, male, female—but were bound by the cord of suburbanity. Evidently the renderer, no less than the dentist or banker, believes he has given enough to his community in his working hours and wants isolation outside them. Some of the spies, like “Victor Castellano,” who lived in a chipboard chateau on a newly divided tract of Texas scrubland near a military base, were described by their familiars in terms that suggested they were the “heavies”—the guys who, as a CIA chief of covert operations once said, would be out robbing banks if they weren’t doing renditions. But the great majority of the spies I found could have been the bromidic guy or gal next door. It took far more planners, spotters, and drivers than brutes to kidnap a man steps from one of the busiest streets in one of Italy’s biggest cities at high noon. One of the planners, who gave a name in Italy that was perhaps more true than false, inhabited an asbestos-sided Cape Cod in the Northeast, was a fan of the Beatles and old science-fiction TV serials, and seemed to have been in possession of a wife at the time he shared a room with a female colleague in Italy. Another planner, “Gregory Asherleigh,” who was one of the two kidnappers who went to Norway to scout the abduction of Mullah Krekar, once listed his address as a mansion on the Atlantic that had a lion in bas relief that spouted water from his mouth. The mansion turned out to belong to his mother, who said, I think honestly, that she was not aware that her son worked for the CIA. Gregory proved to be tall, just a bit jowly, attractively silver-haired, and devoutly Christian. He gave money to the Republican Party and lived steps from a large military base and had a business that appeared in some measure real, although nobody ever answered the company phone when Jessica or I called. One of his children, coincidentally or not, worked for an FBI counterterror squad that had been dispatched to Iraq and other countries.

  Few of the spies answered my call, e-mails, or letters. An exception was a youngish man who had perhaps been a planner in Milan and whose identity I had narrowed to one of two brothers. The brothers had grown up in a military family, enlisted in different branches, and thereafter left such a tangle of military addresses that it was hard to sort them out. One brother lived in Texas not far from “Victor Castellano,” with whom the youngish planner had traveled closely in Italy. This brother called me in response to an e-mail I sent his wife. He seemed unsure what to say, so I said I was glad he had called.

  “Well,” he said, “I just didn’t want you to waste any more time on me or my brother. You’ve got the wrong people.”

  “So you weren’t involved in the rendition?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know anything about the rendition?”

  “No, nothing. Just that the action—you know, just from what you read on CNN or Fox or anything else on the Web—the action took place in 2005.”

  I told him that while the indictments had been issued in 2005, the “action” had taken place in 2003.

  “In any case,” I said, “how can you be sure that your brother wasn’t involved and just didn’t tell you about it?”

  “No, not my brother, not my brother.”

  He reiterated that he had called only because he didn’t want me to waste my time, but then he said, a bit contradictorily, “I was just saying to my wife, ‘I’m really bored. I think I’ll just call this guy up and see what he’s got.’ ”

  “You’re interested in what I’ve got?”

  “I’d be interested in seeing what documents you have, other than just word of mouth.”

  To my ears, he sounded a bit like a sixth-grader trying to wheedle the questions that would be on the exam out of the teacher. I told him where he could find the Italian court documents discussing what seemed to be his or his brother’s involvement, and he sounded relieved that the evidence against him was merely Italian.

  Toward the close of our short conversation, he said, “You can understand my being a little bit, uh, what’s the word I should use? Cautious. It’d be like if you knocked on the door of an eighty-five-year-old man and said, ‘The Italians say you took part in this thing.’ It’s just that strange.”

  IN ITALY some of the spies had given contact phone numbers or addresses that turned out to belong to front companies. “Eliana Isabella Castaldo” gave one such number in Norristown, Pennsylvania. When Jessica called it, a woman answered.

  “Washburn and Company.”

  “May I speak with Eliana Castaldo?” Jessica said.

  The woman hung up.

  Jessica called back, and again a woman answered.

  “Washburn and Company.”

  “May I speak with Eliana Castaldo?”

  Click.

  Other reporters who called “Washburn and Company” got different responses. Sometimes the woman who answered said the caller had reached an answering service. Other times she said that the number belonged to a business that she could not name. If the conversation got so far, she said no Eliana Castaldo worked or lived there.

  The number turned out to belong to a youngish woman at a down-at-heel rowhouse who owned a “virtual assistant” business, a virtual assistant being someone who handles phones, faxes, and e-mail for other businesses without setting foot in their offices. She had been in business only six or seven months when Eliana Castaldo went to Italy and listed her phone number as her contact. A year or so after reporters started calling her, the woman’s Web site said, “I am not working with clients at this time.” Soon the site shut down entirely. The woman, however, remained active in the Virtual Assistance Chamber of Commerce, on whose Web site she described her clients as “nonprofits.”

/>   The CIA was better served by “Coachmen Enterprises,” which other spies had listed as their contact. Calls to Coachmen went straight to an answering machine and were never returned.

  I VISITED the family of another spy whom I will call Natalie because the name she used in Milan was so like her real one. She had a supporting role near Via Guerzoni on the day of the kidnapping, probably as a lookout. When not casing terrorists, Natalie lived in a Sun Belt subdivision of so sad a strain that I fancied I could smell the subprime mortgages in the cul-de-sacs. On the front door of her house were a Valentine’s Day heart made out of polyester roses, a decal of a puppy dog with a butterfly on its nose (caption: “Forever Friends”), and a cutout of a family of holiday bears—mama bear in an apron, papa bear in pink bow tie, baby bear handing a valentine (“Love U”) to mama. Natalie was not home, so I drove up the block and waited to see if she would arrive. Periodically an enormous man emerged from the house next to hers, smoked a cigarette, and glanced up the way at me. I left near midnight.

  The next morning, Natalie still not having returned, I visited the house of her parents, who lived a mile or two away. I made the mistake of lingering outside to see if anyone might come out rather than going straight to the door, and a few minutes later a man who turned out to be Natalie’s brother emerged. His musculature impressed me immediately, as did his stride, which indicated a state of upset. I got out of my car, and he demanded to know whether I was the same person who had staked out his sister’s house last night. I felt as stupid as a CIA officer in Milan—the fat man had “made” me. I pled guilty and asked if he could help me find his sister. He said no, then told me to wait a minute and stepped off a few paces to call someone on his mobile phone. It seemed to be Natalie.