A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (13 page)

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 plain-clothed 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.

“Get in,” someone said to him in Egyptian Arabic.

So he knew also that he was home.

He was nudged into a microbus, and a man got in beside him. The man must have seen Abu Omar’s bleeding wrists because he severed the plastic handcuffs, replaced them with metal cuffs, then wiped the blood with tissues. Abu Omar wanted to ask him to remove the cuffs from his ankles as well, but he was too scared. The microbus drove quickly through city streets—surely Cairo’s, he thought—for half an hour. When it stopped, he was ordered out and led into a building, where his feet were cut free. Someone began to examine his body. It seemed he was checking Abu Omar’s wounds, and Abu Omar was relieved to think the examiner might be a doctor. But the man did not linger over the wounds and presently began ripping the tape from Abu Omar’s head, every rip bringing with it a piece of skin or a tuft of beard. He screamed as blood trickled down his cheeks and onto his shirt. It took many rips to finish the job. Afterward he would say that of everything that happened to him in captivity, the tape was the thing for which he most hated the CIA.