From there the information was distributed within the U.S. intelligence community and sent to selected foreign intelligence services, including Mossad. In Tel Aviv it was carefully tested against other material gathered by the service’s own network of agents and informers.
By late 2005, the “torture flights” (the description was coined by Amnesty International) had flown hundreds of suspects to the secret black sites far beyond the public eye and the U.S. justice system. In December, Swiss intelligence—a small but well-respected spying organization—intercepted a fax sent by Ahmed Abdul Gheit, Egypt’s foreign minister, to its London Embassy’s intelligence chief. The minister wanted to know the fate of twenty-three detainees rendered from Afghanistan to a black site on Romania’s Black Sea coast. Swiss intelligence, whose relationship with Mossad is close, sent a copy of the fax to Tel Aviv, where the authenticity of the fax was quickly established. In it the minister had referred to “similar interrogation centres in Ukraine, Kosovo, Macedonia, and in Bulgaria.”
By late December 2005, the torture flights had made more than two hundred flights in and out of Britain and close to four hundred through German airspace. Other flights had passed through Spanish airports and Shannon, Ireland’s international airport. The logs kept by air traffic controllers in those countries listed more than seven hundred flights of CTIC aircraft. One of those who survived a flight was Kuwait-born Khaled al-Masri, who had become a German citizen. He had gone on holiday to Macedonia in 2003 when the local police took him off a bus and held him for three weeks in a windowless cell. One night he had been taken to Skopje airport and handed over to CTIC officers. Al-Masri claims this is what happened to him then.
“I was taken to a room at the airport and injected with drugs. I was then put on an aircraft, it was a Gulfstream I think. On the flight I was told that I was going to a special place where no one would find me. I still have no real idea where it was. But after a long flight I was hooded and driven to a prison. I found myself among prisoners from Pakistan, Tanzania, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. I was there for five months, regularly beaten, and told to confess I was a terrorist. Then one day I was dragged from my cell, put inside a closed truck, and driven to a plane. It was the same one that had brought me there. After a flight, I was taken from the plane. An American told me that a mistake had been made. He put me in a car with more Americans. They drove for a while, told me to get out, and drove off. I found out I was in Albania. I made my way back to Germany.”
He reported his story to the police in Frankfurt. The details were passed on to the kriminalamt, the country’s equivalent of the FBI. Al-Masri was interviewed by two agents. Satisfied, they informed the Bundesamt Fur Verfassungschatz, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. It contacted the CIA station chief in Berlin. He sent a report to Langley. He was told, according to a German police file on the case, there “was a mistake, a confusion of names.” The German interior minister, Otto Schily, on a visit to Washington, raised the matter with Condoleezza Rice. She offered him the same response. Officially the matter ended. Al-Masri’s attempts to obtain compensation have failed at the time of this writing and he has been told there is no point in pursuing it.
In Tel Aviv, senior members of Mossad began to view rendition as an embarrassing sideshow that was obstructing the CIA’s real work and was unable to provide reliable intelligence. A veteran Mossad
But the torture flights continued in the closing days of 2005. At the time of this writing there were no plans to stop them. An intelligence source in Washington told the author, “They will continue as long as Bush’s war on terrorism.”
More certain, the flights were illegal and broke every United Nations convention against torture.
As New Year’s Day, 2006, dawned over Tel Aviv, Mossad’s specialists—its psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioral scientists, and psychoanalysts—continued to evaluate the mind-set of Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. For weeks, often working from dawn until midnight seven days a week, they had studied his speeches and watched videos of his public appearances to get a fix on his personality and the world he had come from.
