Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

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 katsa said (to the author), “The danger with the torture flights is that they provide invaluable propaganda for our enemies. Where does harsh interrogation cross the borderline into torture? We are not averse to harsh questioning, but we draw the line at methods that allow prisoners to be severely beaten, sexually assaulted, and given repeated electric shocks and threats to their families. It is not that we are squeamish, but practical. That kind of interrogation does not produce credible intelligence.”

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.

Born in a village in the shadow of the Alborz, the fourth of seven children, he was a year old when his father, Ahmed, had moved the family to Tehran to work as a blacksmith. The specialists had pondered how much the poverty that had plagued his formative years had influenced his future career and shaped his radical views. The youth who had ranked 130th in the nation’s university entrance exam, sat by three thousand students, had become a committed campus activist during the reign of the shah and had gone underground from the regime’s dreaded Savak security service. After the shah was deposed Ahmadinejad had welcomed the Ayatollah Khomeini as the country’s new ruler.

The wiry, gaunt-faced, heavily bearded youth with piercing coal black eyes became a familiar figure at Tehran’s University of Science and Technology (IUST) recruiting for his student organization, the Office for Strengthening. It became world famous when it held hostage American diplomats in their Tehran Embassy in 1979 for 444 days. Ahmadinejad displayed unusual political skills in exploiting the situation to humiliate the United States. In 2006, Ahmadinejad became the focus of intense speculation when a photograph was published that claimed to identify him as the ringleader of the hostage takers and that he had personally ill-treated their captives. The CIA established there was no truth in the allegation. Long before then, he’d obtained a doctorate in engineering, joined the Revolutionary Guards, and saw action in the Iran-Iraq War. In quick succession he became vice governor of the remote province Maku and then governor of the more important Ardabil Province. The mayor’s office in Tehran was his next goal, and he was elected in 2003 with a 12 percent turnout. He canceled many reforms introduced by his predecessor, emphasized the need for religious piety, and courted popularity by setting up soup kitchens for the city’s poor. It was the platform for his campaign to become president, offering “jobs for all and oil money on your tables.” The incumbent president, seventy-year-old Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was swept from power. The world watched and hoped that the forty-nine-year-old Ahmadinejad would continue the dialogue with the West over its fears that Iran’s quest for nuclear power was really a cover for producing nuclear weapons. Rafsanjani had indicated he was prepared to give the guarantees Washington and London sought and which Israel insisted on. But the first hint that the new president would not be so malleable came when he told a Tehran rally in October 2005 that he would “develop the most powerful of forces to give us everlasting power and peace—nuclear power.”

Since then every word Ahmadinejad had spoken, every diplomatic move he had made, every escalating threat against Israel he had delivered in the harsh tones of his mountain village dialect had been carefully studied by the Mossad specialists. His biography provided a useful means for them to explore what drove Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Part of it certainly was shrewd realpolitik, designed to win approval at home and to spread fear abroad. He understood the power of Iran’s oil resources on the global market and its rising price. He also saw America had been weakened by the insurgency in Iraq. He was equally as much an Islamic fanatic as Osama bin Laden and had latched on to the appeal for Muslim fundamentalists of demanding the elimination of Israel and being a Holocaust denier. In all this Ahmadinejad was not an original thinker; many of his ideas came from radical Islamic scholars who had long advocated jihad against Israel and the West. Ahmadinejad continued to use the Koran to reach out to pious Muslims yet maintained his appeal to Iran’s militant youth. To them he emphasized the religious authority for all he said, none more so than invoking a lethal “Prophet’s Tradition” against all Jews and their motherland.