A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (8 page)

A way around these problems was for the CIA to collaborate with the FBI, which was used to gathering court-worthy evidence and to having its methods made public. There were drawbacks, however, to such a collaboration. For one thing, the two agencies had an old and caustic rivalry, and many of their principals detested one another. Previous attempts at cooperation had fared badly. For another, FBI director William Webster had reservations about kidnappings à la
Ker -Frisbie
by the FBI or anyone else. Although the FBI had been given authority by Congress to arrest terrorists anywhere in the world, Webster believed Congress had meant the FBI to make those arrests only with the approval of the countries where the terrorists were found or, lacking such approval, to make them in international territory. Webster may also have reasoned (and as a former judge, was in a place to know) that
Ker-Frisbie
had survived so long because it had been invoked infrequently. If the CIA and FBI began rendering alleged terrorists willy-nilly the Supreme Court might reverse parts of the doctrine. He also believed, correctly, that a rendition from a country with a functioning government was a violation of international law, whatever U.S. law had to say about it, and that it would be politically foolish to outrage other countries with renditions unless they were absolutely necessary. He said he would let the FBI help the CIA but only on his terms. The CIA agreed, perhaps reluctantly.

Their first collaboration was Operation Goldenrod. The reference—botanic? chromatic? phallic?—is unknown. Their prey was Fawaz Yunis, a Lebanese terrorist who in 1985 had hijacked a Jordanian plane and blown it up after releasing its passengers and crew. Yunis had since been seen in Beirut, where he had taken up drug dealing. In 1987 the CIA and FBI lured him to Cyprus and from there to a yacht offshore. The bait was a narcotics deal and two female FBI agents whom the bashful American press later described as “casually attired”—they were wearing shorts and halter tops. Once in international waters, the FBI put cuffs on Yunis, transferred him to a Navy munitions ship, and flew him to Andrews Air Force Base. He was tried in federal court on evidence the FBI had collected and was sentenced to thirty years. (He served half that before being deported to Lebanon in 2005.)

Although the operation had come off well, for the next few years the United States seems to have rendered minimally—partly because it was not every day that horny, avaricious terrorists could be lured to international waters and partly because Reagan appointed the cautious Webster director of the CIA. In 1992 Reagan’s successor, the first President Bush, issued National Security Directive 77, which apparently clarified and may have expanded the CIA’s authority to seize alleged terrorists abroad. NSD-77, however, remains secret. President Clinton, succeeding Bush, not only let NSD-77 stand but put it to work immediately. His national security adviser, Richard Clarke, later wrote, “The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: ‘Lloyd says this. Dick says that.’ Gore laughed and said, ‘That’s a no-brainer. Of course it’s a violation of international law. That’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.’ ” It is believed that Clinton ordered the guy’s ass grabbed but that the CIA did not succeed in the grabbing. Clinton clarified his rendition policy in Presidential Decision Directive 39, which he issued in June 1995, shortly after the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. The directive said that when the CIA, FBI, and other law enforcers wanted to bring alleged terrorists to trial in the United States, they should first seek the help, or at least the consent, of the nations where the terrorists were found. The FBI had captured Ramzi Yousef with such help from Pakistan a few months earlier. If, however, those nations did not cooperate, Clinton authorized U.S. officers to seize and render the terrorists on their own.

At about the same time the staff of Clinton issued his directive, his National Security Council conceived a new kind of rendition. Rather than catch a man and take him, as ordinarily, to the United States, the CIA could catch him and take him, extraordinarily, to a third country—an “extraordinary rendition.” The third countries would be dictatorships that could imprison or execute the victims as they chose. They might also interrogate the victims with more success than the CIA since they knew their homegrown terrorists well and could also be more savage in their questioning. Savagery, according to some (though not all) advocates of extraordinary rendition, could produce better intelligence than more-decorous questioning. But getting intelligence seems to have been a far subsidiary goal to getting rid of terrorists without due process. The promise of extraordinary rendition was that it would be swift and neat. The CIA had only to get a tip about a terrorist, snatch him, ship him, and walk away. Clinton approved, and the first victim was Abu Talal.

WHEN ABU
TALAL
left Denmark for Bosnia in September of 1995, an intelligence service tipped the CIA that he was on the move. It is not known which service gave the tip, although it seems not to have been Denmark’s. The Danes’ views on the rights of man—to wit, that every man had them—had long been a frustration to the CIA. A more likely source was Egypt’s Mukhabarat, which monitored Abu Talal closely. The CIA had been interested in Abu Talal because of the links between his cell and the World Trade Center bombing and because he was suspected of having had a hand in the near assassination of Mubarak in Ethiopia earlier in 1995. His role atop Gamaa also made him a prize. When the CIA recommended his rendition to the National Security Council, the NSC, Clinton chairing, approved. The United States seems not to have told Denmark that it was about to kidnap one of its wards.

After arriving in Zagreb, Abu Talal met with an interpreter and retired to his lodgings, where, next morning, he was arrested by Croat police. He was never heard from again. When his associates asked the government why he had been taken and what had come of him, the Croats said he had been arrested for entering the country on a false passport, had been held for six days, then had been deported. They did not say from which port. Narrowly speaking, the Croats were not lying, for they did indeed hold Abu Talal for some days, after which they deported him—to the custody of the United States. Precisely what happened next has never been discovered. Officials in the Egyptian government later said off the record that Abu Talal was taken to a U.S. warship in the Adriatic, interrogated for two days, then passed to Egypt. If it was true that the Americans held him only two days, they almost certainly had little interest in getting information from him. A thorough interrogation would have taken several days at the least and probably, given how devoted he was to his cause, weeks or months. A brief detention suggested the United States wanted him only to disappear. Whatever the case, he was given to Egypt, and Egypt advertised the fact, both to threaten other terrorists and to chide Europe for harboring them. Abu Talal’s fate is unknown, but almost certainly he was interrogated, brutalized, and destroyed. Egypt never said more about the affair, and the United States never said anything at all.

A month after Abu Talal
disappeared, in October of 1995, a suicide bombed a police station in the Croatian town of Rijeka. The assault was poorly executed. The station was perched on high ground, above Victims of Fascism Street, and the bomber could not get his homely Fiat Mirafiori with Italian license plates close enough to the building to bring it down. He wounded twenty-nine people but succeeded in killing only himself. Next day, news bureaus in Cairo received a fax from Gamaa saying the bombing was a retaliation for the capture of Abu Talal. “Close the gates of hell which you have opened upon yourselves,” the facsimilists warned. “Otherwise you will be starting a war the end of which only God knows.”

When investigators sifted through the remains of the suicide’s car, they found shreds of a Canadian passport, which, with other clues, enabled them to identify the disintegrated bomber as one John Fawzan. Fawzan had been a member of Gamaa employed by an Islamic relief agency that was later found to have paid for the training of Ramzi Yousef’s Trade Center bombers. Fawzan was also a follower of Anwar Shaaban; he had lived outside Milan and frequented the mosque on Viale Jenner. DIGOS had investigated him in Operation Sphinx, but he had left Italy before they learned much about him. His suicide had been orchestrated by another Gamaa member from Milan, Hassan al-Sharif Mahmud Saad, a favorite of Anwar Shaaban. Like Shaaban, Saad traveled often between Italy and Bosnia. It was Saad’s Fiat Mirafiori that Fawzan had used, Saad having upgraded to a Mercedes from which he watched the bombing. Investigators also learned that the device Fawzan used to blow himself up was similar to ones with which Ramzi Yousef had meant to blow up airliners over the Pacific—another sign, perhaps, of the internationalization of the Milanese network.

After Fawzan’s bombing, Shaaban and Saad aspired to another attack, probably against NATO peacekeepers, who were arriving in Bosnia because the war was at last drawing to a close. NATO’s calls for the Islamic Brigade to disband, just when it was finding its fighting form, infuriated Shaaban, who would no longer be able to train terrorists in Bosnia with impunity. As NATO moved in, some of the Brigade’s fighters left for the next great holy war in Chechnya, while some, like Karim Atmani and Fateh Kamel, settled in Western countries and others, like Shaaban, stayed in Bosnia to continue the fight. Those who remained prepared a truck bomb, apparently for NATO, but it discharged prematurely outside the Brigade’s headquarters, and other plans were made to strike NATO. Before they could be realized, however, Shaaban and other high commanders of the Brigade made a fateful road trip in December of 1995. After passing through two Croat roadblocks without incident, they were stopped at a third, ordered out of their trucks, and machine-gunned into their reward. It was the last day of the war, and the decapitated Brigade collapsed. Some Islamists speculated that the United States or another Western power had urged the Croats to execute the Brigadiers in order to obviate the hassle of arrests and trials, but it was just as likely that the Croats had retaliated on their own for the Rijeka bombing.

Hassan Saad, the tactician of the bombing, was not among the executed. He remained at large until 2001, when the Bosnian government finally arrested him and extradited him to Egypt. He too was never seen again.

MAHMOUD ABDELKADER
ES SAYED,
familiarly Abu Saleh, arrived in Milan after, it seems, forging documents for al-Qaeda in Yemen, leading a cell of Jihad in Sudan, playing a supporting role in the slaughter of tourists at Luxor, and running guns in Syria for use against Israel. He once claimed the Syrian minister of defense helped him with the gun-running. (The minister, a man of culture, was the author of a book that explained how Jews used the blood of gentiles to make matzoh.) Abu Saleh was entrusted with expanding al-Qaeda’s operations in Milan. His entruster, by one account, was Ayman al-Zawahiri; by a different account, Abu Zabaydah, another al-Qaeda chief. On arriving in 1999, Abu Saleh asked the Italians’ protection from his native Egypt.

“I told them,” he said to a friend within hearing of an Italian bug, “that my three brothers were in prison, that my wife had had a road accident—an act of fate really, but I told them it was orchestrated by Egyptian intelligence.”

“That’s beautiful,” the friend said.

“The whole thing corresponded to their idea of persecution, and consequently I was granted asylum. . . . Now there is a law in Italy that requires asylum claims, even those that have already been approved, to be reviewed every three months to see if the initial conditions are still in place.”

“This is a form of terrorism,” his friend condoled.

“Of course it is terrorism. Italy is a terrorist country. . . . The intent of the government is to take advantage of the Muslims living in this country.”

In the three or four years between the departure of Anwar Shaaban and the arrival of Abu Saleh, Milan’s terrorists had thrived. Operation Sphinx had merely slowed, not stopped, them. New cells had formed, some of which were also broken up but were succeeded in turn by other cells, some of which the police broke up too, only to see them succeeded by others. The terrorists—Egyptians, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians—were replicable. They were also growing savvier.

“Do you see this?” the police heard an instructor of sorts lecture his terrorist pupils in Milan. He was holding up a mobile phone. “This was created by an enemy of God. You can’t imagine how many operations this has made fail and how many arrests it has caused. . . . It’s nice. You can use it to communicate. It’s fast. But it causes you huge problems. They created it, and they know how to intercept it.”

Increasingly the terrorists avoided phones, and when they had to use them they tended to divulge little and to prefer either pay phones or mobile phones that they could discard after a few calls. Sometimes they communicated via e-mail or instant-messaging Web sites in short, coded phrases. To minimize the number of times their e-mails bounced from server to server (each bounce giving eavesdropping agencies a chance to intercept them), a terrorist might save a message in the draft folder of an online e-mail account, which terrorists elsewhere would check. After reading the drafts, they would delete them, then save their own drafts of reply. The system was an advance on the traditional dead drop, in which spies left messages for one another in the hollows of trees or niches of buildings. If the terrorists needed to speak in person, the smarter ones took a walk in a wide park or sat on the back of a bus with a roaring engine. On the sidewalk, they stopped abruptly to let potential tails pass them by or dropped scraps of paper while hidden comrades watched to see if anyone picked them up. If a meeting was in progress at a safe house, a lookout might loiter among the hangabouts in a kebab shop or pace the street hawking cheap umbrellas. To indicate to meeting-goers that a building was not under surveillance, a towel might be hung out a window or a shade half drawn. Some of the terrorists had learned their tradecraft, as spies call their techniques, from jihad manuals, while others had learned in the training camps of Afghanistan or Bosnia or from veterans of those camps. Austere experience had also taught veterans to reduce life to what was strictly necessary for the cause. Their apartments often had neither chairs nor tables, they slept on prayer mats or bare mattresses, they did not dress their walls or equip their kitchens, and they had no books, save
the
book. They were the heirs of Sparta not Athens.