Scant though the details from Jamal were, nevertheless Meir Dagan sent an encrypted message to Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5. The months of frost between Mossad’s and Britain’s intelligence services, caused by MI6’s presence in Gaza to try and broker a deal with Hamas, was returned to normal after Meir Dagan had flown to meet with MI6 director John Scarlett. The two men and Eliza Manningham-Buller met in a private room in the Traveller’s Club over lunch. Details of their discussion would remain secret. But shortly afterward, the MI6 agents left Gaza and Nathan, Mossad’s London Station chief, received details of the interrogation by two MI5 officers who had flown to Pakistan to question Siddiqui and Khan. Both admitted being close associates of two other young British Muslims who had launched a suicide bomb attack on a Tel Aviv nightclub two years before. They had also provided further details about the extent of al-Qaeda’s network throughout Britain’s Muslim community.
Collecting the daily editions of the city’s newspapers published in Arabic, Urdu, and other Middle East languages remained part of the daily routine for Mossad’s London Station because the capital remained a center for radical Islamists to fulminate against Israel and the West.
After an initial assessment by the London Station analysts, the material was sent by the embassy’s daily diplomatic bag to Tel Aviv. There it was cross-checked for published names against those on the growing list of captured al-Qaeda operatives who had been spirited away by the CIA to secret interrogation centers where the rules of the Geneva Convention and American law did not apply. Sometimes the relatives of the suspected terrorists gave the Arab-language newspapers details of where they had been captured, which helped the Mossad analysts build up a picture of the CIA’s activities. It was doing so not because Mossad disapproved of torture—far from it—but for Israel’s self-protection. For years Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, and other human rights organizations had condemned the Jewish state for its harsh interrogation methods and prison conditions. If the day should come when the United States would be forced to support an investigation into Israeli methods of coercive interrogation, then the file Mossad was accumulating would show that it was not alone in such methods.
Central to the CIA operation were two aircraft it had hired from a private company in Massachusetts, Premier Executive Transport Services. One was a fourteen-seater Gulfstream, with registration number N379P, the other a white-painted Boeing 737, with the registration number N313P (the company later declined to discuss the leasing with the author). Mossad had obtained both aircraft’s flight logs detailing the journeys the planes had made to countries with poor human rights records; by October 2005, there had been forty-nine flights to Jordan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, and Guantánamo Bay. Rob Baer, a former CIA intelligence officer in the Middle East, would later claim (to
An MI6 officer told the author, “I have personal knowledge that the prisoners are shackled to their seats and are often gagged and drugged during their flights.”
Some of the flights had been cleared to overfly Israeli air space from the CIA secret interrogation center in Kabul known as “the Pit.” It was part of a constellation of worldwide secret detention centers that were sometimes as small as shipping containers or as large as the complex at Guantánamo Bay. Majeed Nuaimi, a former justice minister of Qatar who represented the families of dozens of what he called “the disappeared,” said (to the author), “No one will ever know how many have gone. But probably many thousands.”
The conditions under which they were incarcerated were identified by the New York–based Human Rights Watch. “They are shackled continuously, intentionally kept awake for extended periods of time, and forced to kneel or stand in painful positions for extended periods.”
