A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (22 page)

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 round-up 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.

For two and half years starting in June of 2002, the CIA used Morse’s plane for dozens of flights around the globe: to Afghanistan and Azerbaijan, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Japan, the Czech Republic and Romania, Switzerland and Guantánamo. The plane often landed on Spain’s Majorca and Canary Islands, both of which were eventually recognized as rest-and-refueling stops for rendition flights. It also called eighty-two times on Dulles International Airport, just down the road from CIA headquarters. When the CIA was not using the plane, Morse or the Red Sox usually were. Once, Morse lent it to the Sox’s manager so he could fly to his son’s high school graduation. More than once, Morse flew on it with his friend the first President Bush. One of their trips was to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Torture, one might conclude from the Gulfstream’s overlapping uses, was as American as baseball and apple pie.

When it was reported in 2005 that the Gulfstream was a torture taxi, the president of Richmor Aviation, Mahlon Richards, said he knew nothing about the transport of “detainees,” as the kidnapped and tortured are tepidly called by U.S. reporters. He knew only that the Gulfstream was flying federal workers. As to their purpose, he said, “I don’t ask my customers why they go anywhere, whether it’s West Palm Beach or the moon.” In his youth, Richards had been a recipient of his church’s God and Country Award for a Boy Scout. His fidelity to Country, at least, had remained true.

Morse rather undermined Richards’s disavowals by saying, “It just so happens, one of our customers is the CIA. I was glad to have the business, actually. I hope it was all for a real good purpose.” Told by a reporter that the plane might have been used for kidnappings, he said he was stunned.

It was Morse’s Gulfstream that flew Abu Omar from Ramstein to Cairo. The jet did not tarry in Egypt. A few hours after landing, it left for Shannon, Ireland, another way station for torture taxis, and from Shannon it continued to Dulles, then returned home to Hudson.

It is unclear why Abu Omar was flown first to Ramstein, then to Cairo. Maybe his conveyors preferred to launder him rather than fly him directly from Italy to Egypt. Or maybe he needed to be photographed and re-packaged in Ramstein for some reason. It was a mystery.

TO BE
CHIEF
of the CIA in Milan is to have done well for oneself. It is to have escaped Dili and Guatemala City, dysentery and uncertain electricity, and to have landed among ossobuco and opera and the Pinacoteca di Brera. Bob Lady got to Milan in 2000. He was born Robert Seldon Lady in Tegucigalpa in 1954, the son of a Honduran mother and an American father. The latter, William Lady, was an Arkansan who seems to have been a mining engineer, although he may also have worked in some capacity with the U.S. military. Bob Lady considered himself a Southerner, notwithstanding that his first language was Span-ish. In high school in Honduras, when a group of students with wild Che Guevara beards taunted him with cries of
Gringo!
Imperialista!
Yanqui!
, he replied that he might well be a gringo, and he might well be an imperialist, but he wasn’t no goddamned Yankee. His self-assessment would prove accurate on all counts. After high school, he settled in New Orleans, where he may have joined the New Orleans Police Department (by another account, he headed north and joined the New York Police Department) and where he married Martha Coello, late of Redemptorist Boys and Girls High. They raised two children. In the late 1970s or earliest 1980s, Lady joined the CIA, where his fluency in Spanish and ease among Latin Americans must have been appreciated. For the next two decades, he served in the region of his birth, the gringo imperialist.

In Milan the Ladys lived on Via Cimarosa, a wide boulevard that was planted in atypically neat hedges. Their small apartment building was detached from the rest of the conjoined city and surrounded by high walls—a suburban privacy for Milan. Bob Lady’s employer of record was the U.S. State Department, and his official title was deputy consul, but all of the Italian counterterror police knew Mr. Bob, as they called him, for the CIA officer he was. He liked his Italian counterparts as much as they did him, and he understood that the hundred small considerations he extended them were as important as the dozen big ones. He was liberal, for example, with mugs and pens from the CIA, whose cachet was considerable. Only rarely did the Italians refuse his overtures, as when he offered to pay for a hotel room from which the Carabinieri were staking out an apartment. The Carabinieri, not wanting to be unnecessarily dependent on the CIA, gently declined.

Lady was fond of his work, but by the time he had come to Italy, he had given half his life to the CIA, and he did not mean to give the rest of it. Nearly a quarter century of service had endowed him with a substantial pension, which, if supplemented with private consulting, could provide him a comfortable income indeed. He had encouraging leads on a contract to help protect celebrities at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, and he was confident that other lucrative, if not quite Olympic, consultancies would follow. He and Martha looked for a place to pass their seniority and found it in the gentle hills of the Asti wine country, just outside the hamlet of Penango. It was an old farmhouse with walls in a shade of terra cotta, a roof of red tile, and ten acres of orchards. Via Don Bosco, on which the farmhouse fronted, honored a priest who espoused the theory, perhaps novel to a CIA man, that love was a better educator than punishment. No matter. From the fruits of an antithetical career, Bob and Martha would bottle their Barbera and live in graceful repose. They left Milan for Penango in late 2003, a few months before Bob turned fifty. Their peace did not last long.