4

MISTAKENIDENTITY: A GERMANCITIZEN'S JOURNEY TO AN AFGHAN HELL

FLIGHTLOG

Registration: N313P

Type: Boeing Business Jet (BBJ)

Operator: Premier Executive Transport, Massachusetts

Date 23 January 2004

Flight plan:

Palma, Majorca (dep. 6:40 P.M.)—

Skopje,Macedonia (arr. 8:56 P.M.)

Skopje, Macedonia (dep. 2:30 A.M.)—

Saddam International Airport, Iraq (arr. 9:53 A.M.)

Saddam International, Iraq (dep. 11:15 A.M.)—Kabul, Afghanistan(arr. 3:44 P.M.)

IN THE MORNING IN THE BALEARIC ISLANDS, OFF THE MEDITERRANEAN COAST OF SPAIN, the wind generally blows from the warmer sea onto the dry land; by midafternoon and into the evening, the winds are reversed. The breeze now blows out from the warmer island onto to the colder sea.

On the evening of January 22, 2004, a Boeing 737 Business Jet approached from the south. It then turned right into the wind onto a northeast bearing of 60 degrees. Descending from four thousand feet, it passed the city lights of Palma and its marina on the left and set an approach straight into the airport's left-hand runway, 06L. At 10:20 P.M. the plane's wheels touched down, and it taxied across to the small business aviation terminal. Ready to meet the plane were the ground crew and handling agents of Mallorcair, a company that for the previous fifteen years has provided fuel, catering, and general facilities for the VIP passengers who throng to the island by business jet, particularly during the short but hot summers. Many customers keep their multi-million-dollar yachts moored in the city's seafront marina.

According to the Spanish police, in a report compiled a year later, the name of the pilot on the plane's flight plan was Captain James Fairing, aged forty-nine. He came with a flight crew of three, and with seven passengers, all American citizens. Though his name was registered as a pilot with the Federal Aviation Administration, Captain Fairing's home address was registered as a postbox in northern Virginia. Fairing was a CIA ghost pilot. His passengers were members of the CIA's top secret Rendition Group, based in Langley, Virginia. They had no idea that within months their mission into Palma would help unleash a political scandal in Europe that would shed light on the secret world of the CIA's prisons.

One thousand miles away, after a twenty-two-day ordeal—of kidnapping, beatings, and having no contact with his family—a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri had finally won hope. Locked up in a hotel room in Macedonia in Eastern Europe, he later would recall thinking that his captors from the country's secret police had at last realized that they had captured the wrong man. So when they told him that a plane was coming to take him home, it had made sense. The mistake of his abduction would finally be corrected, he thought.¹

As they disembarked back in Palma, Fairing's crew was asked, like anyone else, to show their passports to Spanish immigration. Among them, five carried passports with numbers that began with “90,” an indicator that they were official U.S. diplomats.² “I remember the immigration officers sometimes thought it strange that they were carrying diplomatic passports. It's not ordinary for crew members,” recalled Francisco José, a manager at Mallorcair. “But they essentially shrugged their shoulders. They were obviously important people,” he said.³

The arrival of such a Boeing Business Jet (BBJ) raised some eyebrows but was not completely unusual. If you compared executive planes to executive cars, the BBJ was a sort of stretch limousine. The BBJ was rather too large to land at small airports and, even for multimillionaires, was considered something of an extravagance. “The BBJs are often used by music groups, traveling rock bands like the Rolling Stones. The idea is, they can transport everyone together,” said José. “They are also used by Arabs sometimes, so they can travel with their large families and all their wives!”⁴

With more than three thousand planes to handle each year, José and his partner, Miguel Mudoy, were not certain their staff could recall every detail of this plane's arrival, nor the other six visits of the CIA planes handled by his company. But, if their memories served them correctly, on this occasion the pilots wore blue airline-style uniforms, and were accompanied onboard by a mechanic, a normal thing on a 737. Before leaving the plane, the pilots changed out of their uniforms into casual clothes, just like the passengers. The company's minibus loaded their luggage onboard. And, after completion of formalities, they were whisked away to their chosen hotel, just fifteen minutes away down the motorway. “These people were very friendly, normal Americans. There was nothing out of the ordinary that any of us saw,” José said.

IT had been a long, grueling day of long-haul flights for Captain Fairing and his crew. Earlier that morning, they had set off in darkness on a three-stage, eight thousand-mile journey that began with a flight from Rabat, Morocco, to the Afghan capital of Kabul, continued from there to Algiers, Algeria, and then finished with a half-hour hop across to the Palma airport. Among the passengers that day was Binyam Mohamed, who after eighteen months in Morocco was being taken to a new jail cell in Afghanistan. From later police inquiries, it would emerge that there were also two women aboard the BBJ when it arrived in Palma: Patricia, who was fifty-nine years old, and Jane, whose age is unknown. Mohamed remembered one woman on his flight, possibly Jane, as one of the few people who ever seemed to care about his plight.

“There was a white female with glasses,” he recalled later at Guantá-namo. She had been taking pictures, and had been shocked by the sight of the injuries his torturers had caused with the razor blades, he said. “She was one of the few Americans who ever showed me any sympathy. She was about five feet six inches, short, blue eyes. When she saw the injuries I had, she gasped. She said, 'Oh, my God, look at that!' Then all her mates looked at what she was pointing at, and I could see the shock and horror in her eyes.”⁵

That evening the CIA crew could try to forget the traumas of the day. They settled into the five-star Marriott Son Antem golfing resort, with its well-stocked bar and thick-carpeted corridors arranged around a series of courtyards and fountains. When they awoke the following morning, January 23, most had the opportunity to relax. One passenger, John D., found time to visit the hotel's holistic health spa, with its “Therapeutic Thermal Water.” Maybe John D. had read the brochure that offered the chance to “journey to deep inner peace.”⁶ At this off-season time of year, there were few other guests. Just a party of mostly German lawyers from the legal firm of Freshfields, and from Markem, a German engineering company. The room rate was cheap for such a luxury place, only 135 euros per night. In the hotel bar,,one bartender later recalled that they used to often get pilots and aircrew. “We always ask who they work for, and they always refused to say,” she told me.⁷

Between 3:49 P.M. and 5:26 P.M. the CIA crew checked out of their ho-tel, settling their bills individually on their credit cards. The last to check out was John D., nicely relaxed after his massage.

The plane took off at 5:40 P.M., bound for Skopje, the capital of Macedonia in Eastern Europe. There, in another smart hotel, was a German citizen who was being prepared for a trip in Captain Fairing's plane. The thirty-nine-year-old had spent the previous three weeks in the room—with the curtains firmly drawn and surrounded, night and day, by armed guards.

SKOPJE, MACEDONIA, SKOPSKI MERAK HOTEL (3 STARS), JANUARY23, 2004, LATE AFTERNOON—Khaled el-Masri was looking rather pasty and weak. Normally his dark eyebrows were set in a cheery, if rather chubby, round face. But after refusing food for ten days, he was looking haggard. He had not shaved properly in the three weeks, and his thick hair was getting wild.

For all that, Khaled's spirits were now running high. After what had seemed an endless captivity, he had been told that an airplane was on its way to Skopje to take him home to Germany. A team of seven or eight Macedonians had entered his room and asked him to stand by the wall and record a video statement. They wanted him to declare, before he could return home, that he had not been harmed. Then they led him downstairs and put him into a jeep waiting outside the hotel. He was handcuffed and blindfolded. About half an hour later (just as Captain Fairing's Boeing Business Jet and its seven passengers were touching down on the runway after their two-hour flight from Majorca), Khaled arrived at the airport terminal. He could hear the sound of airplanes.

The Macedonians told Khaled he would now be receiving a medical checkup and, still blindfolded, he was led into a room. He was now in the custody of a new, unknown team of captors. “And then they beat me from all sides, from everywhere, with hands and feet.” Then using knives or something else sharp, they began to cut up his clothes. “They tried to take off my pants. I tried to stop them, so they beat me again.”⁸ Khaled heard the clicks of photographs being taken. Then they lifted his blindfold. What he saw may now sound familiar.

“There were seven or eight people.” He said that “all the people were in black clothes and black masks.”⁹ The men then put him in a dark blue suit with cutoff arms. “They put earplugs in my ears and a sack over my head.”¹⁰ After tying his arms behind his back and putting chains on his legs, they led him onto the plane that had just landed. But it was not taking him home to the wooded slopes of southern Germany. It took off in the early hours of the morning from Skopje, turned east, and set a course for Kabul, Afghanistan, with a stop off in Baghdad, Iraq. Khaled thought he was on a cargo plane. “I couldn't make out any seats and there was metal, I think. They threw me on the floor.”¹¹ At this point “[t]hey put me on the floor and injected me with something. I blacked out. At some point, I smelled the kind of alcohol they have in a hospital. I received another injection.”¹²

THE way Khaled's story began had been bizarre. A car salesman by profession, he had been struggling to find work in his home city of Ulm, in southern Germany, and he was having trouble with his marriage; he was constantly arguing with his wife. So, in an effort to gain some breathing space, he had decided to go on a few day's vacation, he said later. He found a cheap package trip to the Balkan state of Macedonia and bought a round-trip bus ticket.¹³ And this was how he disappeared for five months into the black hole that was the dark side of the war on terror.

His story seemed so strange that at first he hesitated to recount it. “One person told me not to tell this story, because it's so unreal, no one would listen,” he recalled.¹⁴

It was 3:30 P.M. on New Year's Eve 2003 when the coach full of tourists pulled up at the main border crossing into Macedonia from Serbia. Khaled was singled out. His passport was confiscated and the bus left without him.¹⁵ He was taken to a windowless room by three local men wearing civilian clothes and holstered pistols. They accused him of being a terrorist. His first response—and it was the request he repeated more than any other—was to ask to call either the German Embassy or his wife, Aischa, he recalled. (One of the worst things about his ordeal was that he had left his wife in the middle of an argument, and it plagued him.) But his request, he said, was ignored.

Instead, “they asked a lot of questions—if I have relations with Al Qaeda, Al Haramain (an Islamic charity), the Islamic Brotherhood,” he remembered later. “I kept saying no, but they did not believe me.”¹⁶ By then it was 10:00 P.M., and the Macedonians said it was time to go to a hotel. He was taken outside where a convoy of three cars was waiting, and was driven about thirty minutes to a large hotel. As he stepped in, it all seemed normal. There was a reception desk to the right, and sofas and coffee tables in the foyer. Khaled was taken up four or five floors in an elevator, and ushered into a room. It seemed quite a luxurious place. There was an en suite bathroom, a television, and an air-conditioning unit, and a computer with Internet access. It was located just two hundred yards from the U.S. Embassy, and was opposite the city zoo.¹⁷

As Khaled sat down in the hotel room, the questions continued.

It was New Year's Eve, and they started to drink champagne in my room. They offered me a glass, but it was not out of being friendly; they were trying to see if I drank alcohol …

They asked me where I came from, what I want to do in Skopje, the same questions again as earlier, whether I have connections to aid organizations, whether I am a strict Muslim, whether I drink alcohol. How many times I pray during the day, and questions like that.¹⁸

Then they started asking about the mosque where he prayed and many other details of his life.

Though born in Kuwait of Lebanese parents, Khaled had come to Germany in 1985. In the following eighteen years, he had settled, become fluent in German, and become a citizen. The couple's four sons aged seven, five, four, and two were all born in the country. But his and Ais-cha's social life was still centered around their mosque.¹⁹

Khaled continued to ask his captors whether he could phone his local consul, or his wife. But his pleas were met with blank stares.

On the third day I deliberately got off the bed, after I had to stay on the bed all the time, even when I had to go to the bathroom, I had to leave the door open and they kept looking in. So, I got off the bed, put on my shoes and then we started arguing heavily with each other. I yelled at them in German and they said something in Macedonian. I did not understand them and then they pulled their weapons and they stood around me, one at the window, the other at the door and another next to the bed. They were really threatening me. I realized that the situation was really serious.²⁰

Guarded round the clock by a team of three Macedonian security agents, the questions from his captors initially were both vague and openended; effectively, they were point-blank demands that he confess to being a terrorist. Was Khaled a member of Al Qaeda? Who did he know? Had he met Mohamed Atta (the 9/11 pilot from Hamburg)? Or Ramzi Binal-shibh, one of the 9/11 planners? But they never asked him about any particular incident or episode.

In fact, it seemed as if they had no idea who he actually was. There were things they could have asked him about. He knew people who sympathized with the goals of the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Like most men of his age from Lebanon, he had fought as a teenager in his country's civil war—in his case, for a group influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood.²¹ He also traveled frequently, to the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Jordan, and Eastern Europe. But they did not ask him about any of that. Instead they seemed to be fishing for information, he thought.

At various points the questioners did appear to have something in their head.

Somebody who appeared to be the boss visited after about a week. He was maybe fifty-five years old. … He said that I am not Khaled el-Masri and this is not my passport. I was supposedly in Jalalabad [a town in eastern Afghanistan that before 9/11 had several Islamic militant training camps], and I was seen there. And then he showed me a photo of an Arab-looking guy, and he said he had seen me there and he knows me.²²

Supposedly this man was waiting in the corridor outside. But when Khaled told them to bring him in, no one came.

Back at home in Germany, Aischa had no idea where her husband was. She was terrified, alone with her children; she spoke little German, and her husband had left on a low-cost trip to Macedonia after one of the worst fights they had ever had. She and Khaled and their sons lived off welfare in a one-room apartment.²³ Khaled had not had any work as a car dealer for over ten months. She found life in Germany difficult, and had almost never made any German friends outside of the mosque, despite living in Ulm for over seven years. She could not understand how Khaled could be so cruel, to simply not call or send a postcard or a message through one of his “brothers,” as he called his fellow believers.²⁴

Khaled was a strict Muslim, and for Aischa, the idea of going to one of his friends directly, that is, for a woman to approach a man without her husband knowing it, was unthinkable. So she went to a friend, the wife of her husband's best friend, Reda Seyam, to ask for advice. What should she do? The two women decided together that she should go and live with her parents back in Lebanon until she heard from her husband. Aischa sold the family car to a fellow Muslim, someone who attended the same mosque, to pay for her flight with the children back to Beirut.²⁵

AFTER thirteen days in the hotel room, not permitted to get up from his bed except to go the bathroom, el-Masri began a hunger strike in protest. He ate nothing more during his last ten days in Skopje. It was at this point that they told him that he was going home. Instead, the Boeing Business Jet chartered by the CIA was on its way to pick him up.

During the twenty-three days that Khaled was in Macedonia, the 737's pace had been frenetic. Leaving Dulles in Washington on January 6, it went first to Frankfurt, and then to Jordan. Here it picked up a Yemeni prisoner and flew him to Kabul.²⁶ It then returned to the Czech Republic, and back to Washington, and then to Shannon Airport, Ireland, and to Lar-naca, Cyprus. Here the CIA held a brief meeting. (The CIA's Gulfstream V arrived at the same time.) Afterward the Boeing 737 flew on to Morocco. That was where the plane picked up Binyam Mohamed and flew him to Afghanistan.

On the same day as Binyam's second rendition, Captain Fairing and his crew returned to Palma via Algiers. Nothing has yet emerged of why this journey took place. But one clue may be a file released from Bagram Air Base, referring to three “repatriations” from Afghanistan on that date.²⁷ “Repatriation” is a military euphemism for a rendition back to a detainee's home country. Captain Fairing then flew to Palma, and then on to Skopje to pick up Khaled.

ONBOARD THE CIA BUSINESS JET, JANUARY 24, 3:DDP.M.—In his cockpit, Captain Fairing began his descent for landing into Kabul. His passenger in the back, Khaled el-Masri, was feeling heavily drugged. He remembered little of this journey, a journey that he had hoped would take him home, but instead took him many thousands of miles farther east. Back in Majorca the plane had been packed with a supply of airline meals, including breakfasts and dried fruits,²⁸ but Khaled would have no memory of what fare was being offered. The plane traveled first to Baghdad, and then onward to Afghanistan. Occasionally he awoke, and then, drugged again, he said, he had drifted off back to sleep. He said his headphones slipped, and he did occasionally hear some noises. But his mind was in a haze. One thing he knew now for certain, he was not going home.

After the plane landed in Kabul, Khaled was placed in a room where, through looking at newspapers, he began to realize that he was in Afghanistan. Then he was put into the trunk of a car and driven for about ten minutes. “I awoke in a small, dirty cell,” he said. “It was like a basement room with a tiny window. There was Arabic and Farsi writing on the wall from other prisoners. It was then that I knew for sure that I was in Afghanistan.”’²⁹ The cell he was in had a small window at the top of the wall. The light of a setting sun came through. He realized he had been traveling for more than twenty hours.

Both Khaled and Binyam Mohamed were now in the hands of Americans, although their guards were often Arabs or Afghans. They were now in a network of jails controlled directly by the CIA itself.

PREVIOUS chapters have dealt largely with the outsourcing of interrogation: the transfer of suspects into the hands of foreign interrogators. But, apart from the very public Guantánamo Bay and prisons run entirely by foreign governments, such as Egypt's Torah prison, America's prison network also included a series of jails run by the CIA itself. Unlike Guantá-namo, they provided no access to the Red Cross and didn't attempt to give even lip service to the Geneva Conventions. In theory, this was because these jails catered to the real “worst of the worst of the worst,” what the administration might call the arch villains of Al Qaeda. People like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself. Rather than putting those responsible for 9/11 on a Nuremburg-style trial, they were held in top secret prison centers around the world and interrogated relentlessly. Apart from the very secret jails—the “black sites” where those like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were held—there was another category of jails controlled by the CIA, but operated by local staff. These held a lower category of prisoners, those like Khaled and Binyam. Khaled's prison came to be known as the Salt Pit, and the prison where Binyam was being held was called the Dark Prison, also known by inmates as the Music Prison. Both had Afghan guards.

On June 28, 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was subject to U.S. laws.³⁰ So did those prisons in Afghanistan where Khaled and Binyam were sent in 2004 match up to U.S. standards, such as the prohibition against the use of torture?

THE jail where Khaled was held, the Salt Pit, was an abandoned brick factory north of Kabul.³¹ It consisted of nine separate cells, as well as interrogation rooms and guard rooms. Khaled found no bed, just an old dirty blanket and some tattered clothes to use as a pillow. He was not alone in the jail. The inmates included a Pakistani, three Saudis, and two Tanzanians.

The place was run by Afghan guards, and any complaints about the conditions were directed to them. The interrogations themselves were carried out by Americans. Some spoke Arabic, and others used Palestinian or Lebanese interpreters. The prison director was also an American.

The only water Khaled had in his cell was stagnant and yellow and stood in a filthy plastic bottle; stricken with thirst, he tried some. “I really tried to drink some of that water, but it really stank, I could smell it from far away. I held my breath and took a sip. But the aftertaste stayed for more than an hour. That was really disgusting.”³²

On the night of his arrival Khaled was first taken out of his cell by some masked men to an examination room. They undressed him and took some pictures, as well as a blood sample. The doctor, who wore a mask and a pair of jeans, spoke in English, with a Palestinian interpreting into Arabic. Khaled complained about the water. The doctor said that that was a problem for the Afghans. Later Khaled was taken from his cell again to an interrogation room. Again everyone was masked. The chief interrogator spoke in Arabic with a Lebanese accent.

During the following four days there were a total of four interrogations. The questions were no different from those in Macedonia. They asked about the Multicultural Center, Khaled's mosque in Ulm, and whether he knew Mohamed Atta, but never about any specific crime or terrorist act. After a while, it seemed as though the interrogator simply gave up. “He said I wasn't being cooperative,” Khaled said, “and they would simply forget about me in the cell. He didn't have any time to play around with me any longer. For maybe three weeks or so no one ever came to my cell. I was in there all the time.”³³

The conditions in his cell were grim. Three times a day he was allowed to use the toilet, but otherwise he was left completely alone. Food came from the Afghans—boiled, skinless chicken in water. Sometimes there was some moldy yellow lettuce. “The food always caused me and the other prisoners to have diarrhea,” he said. “We were not sure if it was injected with something or if it was just bad.”³⁴

In theory, he was not allowed to communicate with other prisoners. But when the guards stepped away, whispered conversations were possible between the cells. The inmates also left notes for each other in the toilets. In this fashion, Khaled learned that there were nine of them in this section of the prison, each in a separate cell.

Although he had been beaten in Macedonia and at Skopje airport, in the prison his treatment was milder. The worst physical discomfort was caused by how the guards moved the prisoners about in chains. “They would push us around, with our arms high up, and then rush down the stairway,” Khaled reported. “I almost broke my shoulder because I simply wasn't fast enough.”³⁵ In all, he said he was roughed up in interrogations, beaten in Macedonia, photographed nude, and both injected with drugs and given suppositories against his will; later, when on a hunger strike, he was fed forcibly. Yet he makes no claim at all that he was physically tortured.

In answer to the claims of torture by many former prisoners, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and many in the U.S. government often insist that such claims have been invented, citing evidence from a jihad training manual that circulated widely on the Internet and had been found in the homes of many militants.³⁶ Khaled was an example of a prisoner who often understated his experience, never trying to suggest, for example, that he was ever beaten in Afghanistan. In fact, in his first interview, the day after his return home with his friend Reda Seyam, he emphasized that he had undergone a horrendous experience, but that the others were treated far worse than he had been, and he assumed that that was because he was a German citizen.

Khaled's ordeal was mostly psychological. All of his complaints were met with shrugs. But his troubles were “not like the others,” he said. There were people he came across who had come from much worse places in the prison network, where the treatment was more severe. These prisoners described the Music Prison, where they were held for months in complete darkness.

Said Khaled: “There was very loud and annoying music and this darkness. And they were either tied to the ground so they could not sit or stand up. … Or some had their hands chained to the ceiling, their body hanging down. All naked, no food, no water, for five days. One, when they got him down had swollen legs, he was treated with injections. Another, from Tanzania, had a broken hand, because he had been beaten up. He was also forced to crawl into some kind of a very small suitcase. In there he must have thrown up all the time; his stomach was empty after that.”³⁷

He added: “I had heard so much from the others about the Dark Prison that I came to feel personally the horrors there.”³⁸

It was to that same Dark Prison that one of Captain Fairing's other passengers had been taken in the same CIA Boeing 737: Binyam Mohamed. He arrived in Kabul just two days before Khaled. In his account of his treatment in American captivity, dictated while he was in Guantánamo, Mohamed also called the detention center the “Dark Prison.”

The primary weapon at this jail, said Binyam, was rock music played at high volume incessantly. It was a psychological tactic first used by the U.S. military to dislodge General Manuel Noriega from the Vatican Embassy in Panama in December 1989. The most repeated sound track played at the Dark Prison was “White America” by Eminem. Binyam reported: “The noises were so horrible and loud that I used to stick anything—toilet paper if I had some, or parts of the one blanket I got—in my ears just to minimize the sound. Others tried to do this, but I know at least one who got perforated eardrums from all the noise.” It was at this point that Binyam had folded and agreed to sign anything. He was soon transferred to Bagram military base, and then moved on to Guantánamo.

LEFT alone in his jail cell, Khaled felt desperate. He may not have been physically tortured, but he felt psychologically tortured. And the only way he knew to protest was to go on a hunger strike. After organizing the other prisoners around him, Khaled and they started refusing both food and water. After a while, they started drinking water, stale and smelly as it was. Many prisoners, already weakened by months of poor treatment, could not hold out for long. But Khaled kept on going and going, holding out for thirty-seven days. Finally, his American interrogators intervened to keep him alive.

“They came and told me that possibly in three weeks I could be released. I should stop [my] hunger strike. I said no, and that I wanted some kind of a guarantee. They brought me back to my cell. Maybe twenty minutes later four masked men, all in black, walked in. They handcuffed me and put on the chains, and so carried me again to the interrogation room. They tied me to a chair. One other man bent my head toward my back with his arm. Then the doctor came with some kind of a tube with a funnel on the one end. He stuck the tube through my nose down my stomach and forced some nutritious liquid through it. That really was hard and painful. And he told me, they could do it that way every time: you cannot force us to follow your wishes. So we negotiated. They promised me to from now on give me better food, especially for me. And better water and books and so on.”³⁹

Khaled had made his point. His CIA captors knew that a death in custody could be highly damaging. The case had, according to a later New York Times report, also now been raised at the highest levels. George Tenet, the CIA director was informed. So was Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser.⁴⁰ Khaled would have to be released. But here was the rub: How could they release Khaled and prevent him from exposing the CIA's secret prisons? Should the German government be offi-cially informed?

In the final days of his imprisonment in Afghanistan, Khaled was not only questioned about information from Germany, he was introduced to a new interrogator, who implied he was from the German government. It happened at the beginning of May, when Khaled was recovering from his hunger strike. In the interrogation room was the American director of the prison, another American, and a German with a northern accent. He called himself “Sam”—he was slim, maybe five feet eleven inches tall, blond, slightly long hair, maybe forty or forty-five years old—and said, Khaled reported, that they would talk about everything now, openly.

“I asked him: 'Are you from the German authorities?' He said: 'I do not want to answer that question.' When I asked him if the German authorities knew that I was there, he answered: 'I can't answer this question.' ”⁴¹

Khaled asked how they could speak openly when Sam refused to answer even the most basic of questions. But Sam said that Khaled was not to talk, only to answer his questions. “He began asking all the same questions as the Americans, about Dr. Yehia Yusuf, and about the persons at the Multicultural House in Ulm.”⁴² Dr. Yusuf was the leader of the mosque.

All this could have been a ruse. The British Guantánamo detainees, for example, described being questioned by a British Ml6 agent in Afghanistan. And yet I later met the American interrogator, who admitted he was that agent. He had pretended to be British in order to persuade those men to talk. Khaled was convinced that Sam really was German,⁴³ but the German government would deny this. The German foreign intelligence service, the BND, informed the German government in a special report that they had details describing two German-speaking Americans who had worked for U.S. intelligence in Germany. One might have been the man in question.⁴⁴ The possible identity of Sam was named in one account as someone named “Thomas V” who had worked in the American consulate in Hamburg in 2000.⁴⁵

Sam, whoever he was, told Khaled that he was finally to be released, but that America would try to keep his capture secret. “Sam told me that the Americans didn't want to admit to anyone that I had been here, and because of that the journey back to Germany would be a bit more complicated, so no one could find out where I was coming from and where I had been. That simply would take a while, but I shouldn't worry. That I was going to get free, 100 percent.”⁴⁶ Khaled's food ration changed. Through the diarrhea, lack of food and water, and the stress of not knowing why he was in prison, he had suffered a radical weight loss. But after Sam's promise, he was given milk and meat. They were clearly trying to fatten him up, he thought.

Finally, on May 28, Sam's promise came true. Khaled was taken on another ten-minute drive to the airport and placed on another executive plane. Accompanying him was Sam.⁴⁷ But rather than being flown home to Germany, Sam took him to Tirana, the Albanian capital. His captivity was still not over. He was driven six or seven hours into the countryside, down a series of bumpy, potholed roads. Eventually the car stopped, and his captors took off the rope binding his hands, and removed his blind-fold. It was here that Khaled was handed his belongings, including his money, that had been seized from him when he was arrested in Macedonia. He was told to walk down the path he saw in front of him and not to turn around once. All the way along he felt a tingle of fear in his back. “I was very much afraid,” he said later. “I thought maybe they [would] just let me walk a couple [of] steps to then shoot me. So that frightened me. But I thought, why should they do it that way? There are cheaper ways to get rid of someone.”⁴⁸

At the end of the path he found three uniformed men. They appeared to be expecting him, and had a plastic bag with a packed lunch waiting for him. They asked for his passport, and then said he was in the country illegally, and that they would drive him to Tirana. They revealed that he had been driven down to the border triangle of Albania, Macedonia, and Serbia. Departing at around 10:00 P.M., they drove him straight back to the Tirana airport. After buying his own $409 ticket at the airport, he was placed on an Albanian Airways plane to Germany. It was an ordinary civilian flight.

BORDER CONTROL, FRANKFURT AIRPORT, MAY 29, 2DD4;a:4D A.M.—Arriving home after 149 days of captivity, Khaled approached the German border guard, who, examining his passport said, “This photo is not you.” He now looked years older than his picture. “No,” said Khaled, “the photo is recent. It was taken just eight months ago.” By producing other identity cards, he convinced the guard, but he realized now how much he had changed.⁴⁹ In his captivity, he had lost more than sixty pounds.

It was late when Khaled finally got back home to Ulm. He had with him the suitcase he had packed for his short holiday six months earlier; it was almost untouched. It was eerie. His clothes were still folded as he had folded them, his toiletries were all there. Even the money he had packed and his keys were still there.⁵⁰ His first port of call was his apartment on Bahnhofstrasse 18, where he had last seen his wife and children. He first found the mailbox stuffed with advertisements and mail. There were threatening letters from bill collectors, expired deadlines for court statements, and demands from the unemployment office for his appearance. When he entered the apartment he was shocked: The entire apartment looked ransacked, the sofa ripped apart. There was no sign of his wife or his four boys.⁵¹

Not knowing what to do, he immediately ran over to the home of his friend Reda Seyam. It was 11:00 P.M. when he rang the bell. Seyam could not believe what he saw. Khaled had lost sixty pounds, and had a long beard and longer hair. But it was his sad, tired, and worn-out eyes that were the most shocking. Seyam told him to come in, and that he immediately should eat, and then get some rest. And when he awoke the next day, Khaled began to tell his story, and Reda Seyam took out his video camera and said: “You have to tell me this on camera.”⁵² This private account, which I obtained for this book, was intimate. But in its detail, it did not contradict in any way the public account Khaled later gave of his ordeal.

After a few days of sleep and recovery, Khaled el-Masri set out to try and rebuild his life. Khaled heard from Seyam that his wife, Aischa, was living with their four boys at her parents' home in Lebanon. He called her and immediately arranged for the family to return to their home in Germany. A week later there was a tearful reunion at Frankfurt Airport.

With the help of an attorney, Khaled filed an official complaint about his treatment with the German police. In June, both the German Office of the Chancellor as well as the foreign ministry received complaints describing his kidnapping.⁵³ After hours of questioning, a federal prosecutor in Munich came to believe that what Khaled was saying was true. He found corroboration of Khaled's trip to Macedonia (for example, witness statements from other bus passengers) and used a sample of his hair to determine that his account of having been on a hunger strike was likely true.⁵⁴ Flight data of the BBJ's movements matched precisely his description of his rendition from Skopje to Afghanistan. Munich prosecutor Martin Hofmann said: “I have no indication that Masri is not telling the truth.”⁵⁵

As his story emerged, the biggest puzzle for Khaled and for everyone around him was—why was he ever arrested? What was behind his rendition?

THE most convenient and well-publicized explanation for Khaled el-Masri's kidnapping to Afghanistan was that the CIA had made an innocent mistake. It was convenient, because it implied that while Khaled had regrettably suffered in error, there was nothing essentially wrong in principle with what had occurred in his case: the kidnap, covert transport, and secret imprisonment of someone without charge or legal process. In any war, innocents would always be hurt. Even when it was proven that Khaled was completely innocent it would not matter, because, as realists would argue, accidents will happen.

When Khaled first described his treatment publicly, at the beginning of 2005, and when his account was corroborated, among other things by the flightlogs, the U.S. government could no longer pretend that such renditions did not occur. The key thing was to argue that no torture was intended, and if torture did occur, it was all a dreadful mistake. After all, Bush had previously stated that the United States was “leading this fight” against torture by example.⁵⁶

Rocked on its heels, the CIA began to defend itself. In Khaled's case, it was, yes, a terrible error, a mistaken identity. In April 2005, the New York Times, quoting CIA sources, reported that “Macedonian and American authorities believed he [el-Masri] was a member of Al Qaeda who had trained at one of Osama bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan. But within several months they concluded he was the victim of mistaken identity, the officials said. His name was similar to a Qaeda suspect on an international watch list of possible terrorist operatives, they said.” The American officials acknowledged “the detention had been a serious mistake and that he had been held too long after American officials realized their error.”⁵⁷

Later the blame was pinned more firmly on officials in the CIA's Counter-Terrorist Center. One former CIA official told the Washington Post: “Masri was held for five months largely because the head of the CIA's Counter-Terrorist Center's al Qaeda unit 'believed he was someone else …. She didn't really know. She just had a hunch.' ”⁵⁸

Later the same year, when Condoleezza Rice, who was now Secretary of State, faced a storm of anger in Europe over the CIA's abductions and secret flights, she hinted at this simple error. “If mistakes have been made, they are always corrected rapidly,” she said in public. In private, while meeting the new German chancellor, Angela Merkel, she repeated the mantra, but was said by German officials to have added a specific apology for Khaled, although she denied it later.

By this time, the end of 2005, the Khaled el-Masri case seemed to me increasingly intriguing, and I set out to try to get a grasp of what had really happened. To what extent, I asked first, could Khaled's capture have been this simple error?

The most obvious reason why an innocent mistake could have been made in Khaled's case, it seemed to me, was that he shared a name with a man alleged to have assisted the 9/11 conspirators in Germany. According to the United States's 9/11 Commission Report, a “Khalid al-Masri” (let's call him “Hamburg Khalid“) was a link between the trainee pilots in Hamburg led by Mohamed Atta and the Al Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan. At the time of Khaled's arrest, this Hamburg Khalid was still listed as a wanted man. So it was plausible that when Khaled crossed the border into Macedonia his name flagged him as a suspected terrorist. This could at least explain his initial arrest.⁵⁹

Yet if the Macedonians may have believed they had captured Hamburg Khalid on the border, it was implausible to imagine the same mistake was made by U.S. intelligence for very long, and not for the five months Khaled was held in Afghanistan. He had lived openly in Ulm for many years and had a history that was easy to verify with the German government. He had attended a mosque that was under heavy surveillance. If there had been any suspicion at all of an involvement in 9/11, the German authorities would not have hesitated to arrest him. But he had faced no inquiries, not even over a parking fine.

Just say, though—in an assumption at odds with years of cooperation— that the CIA distrusted the Germans and believed it unwise to arrest him in Germany. Would they not, at least once, have asked Khaled himself if he really was Hamburg Khalid? Would they not have tried to check his identity and ask if he really was on the train in Germany when Hamburg Khalid met Atta? Yet Khaled himself remembers no such questions. He was indeed asked if he was a member of Al Qaeda. He was asked too if he knew Mohamed Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh. They were the sort of questions asked of all terrorist suspects from Germany. But there had been nothing specific. There had been no clue of what he was actually accused of.

How then did Khaled explain the events? He found the idea of a mix-up unconvincing. 'They told me that they had confused names, and they had cleared it up, but I can't imagine that. You can clear up switching names in a few minutes.”⁶⁰

Perhaps the CIA had some other specific intelligence. Perhaps they believed him guilty of some other crime, or that he had another role in Al Qaeda. Yet why was he never asked about such reports? The CIA had used extreme and expensive means to take him to Afghanistan by executive jet. And yet, when in their hands, when they got him to their prison, it was as if the CIA men then began looking for a way to justify their actions—in hindsight. Rather than defend their kidnap during his detention, Khaled had been asked to invent his own crime to justify what had happened to him. Like a scene from Franz Kafka's The Trial, when Joséf K is asked to confess to an unknown crime, Khaled remembered an exchange when he was asked to justify his detention: The interrogator, he said, started “to scream out at me and asked if I knew at all why I was there. And I said, that was actually my question. … I said I wanted to know why I was there. And he said, you are here in a country without laws and no one knows where you are. Do you know what that means?”⁶¹

So the nature of the questions asked of Khaled, I thought, pointed not to the idea that he was being held on some mistaken charge (except perhaps in his initial arrest at the border), but rather that he was being held as part of a strategy to gather information. Rather than being asked about any specific offense, still less about his intentions to commit a crime, Khaled was asked mainly about his associations. Who did he know? Who did he meet, and on what date? As Khaled said: “Nothing speaks for the mix-up theory. I think it had to do with my contacts. They wanted to know what the Multicultural Center, Dr. Yusuf and Reda Seyam, were up to. They thought, 'something is happening there. We will find out what if we put this guy in this difficult situation, then he will tell us.' ”⁶² This focus on associations was important, because it is a clue to the whole Khaled case—and a clue to a strategy that began to develop after 9/11, one that former CIA officers insisted would never previously have been sanctioned. If Khaled's contacts and friends could be considered evidence of guilt and justification enough for his lengthy detention, then his case would suddenly make sense. In the post-9/11 world, and when it came to his associates, Khaled rang nearly every possible alarm bell:

• First, Khaled was a member of a radical mosque, the Multicultural Center, which had a track record of recruiting young Muslims to fight for Islam. Two worshipers from the mosque had fought in Chechnya against the Russians and died in 2002 and 2003.⁶³
• Second, Khaled knew the mosque's leader, Dr. Yehia Yusuf. Known for his anti-Western sermons, Yusuf was described by the Bavarian interior minister as a “preacher of hate.” The minister was determined to expel him from Germany. Dr. Yusuf's son, Omar, also had militant viewpoints, and also was a friend of Khaled's. He was eventually expelled from Germany in June 2005.
• Third, and most important, one of Khaled's best friends, Reda Seyam, was an open supporter of global Islamic jihad. He had fought in Bosnia, and then had toured the Far East, making militant propaganda videos. When the Bali bomb exploded in October 2002, Seyam was arrested in Indonesia as a suspected conspirator and, though released, was deported back to Germany. His opinions did not shift. In 2005, he had a son and named him Jihad.

This, then, was how Khaled might have appeared to be a potential terrorist. It was the Ulm connection that had done for Khaled, and in particular his connection to Dr. Yusuf. “I think there is a link. Because, again and again, I was asked about him,” he said.⁶⁴ All roads then seemed to lead to Ulm.

THE SWABIAN ALPS, SOUTHERN GERMANY, MARCH 19, 2006—Driving from the city of Stuttgart across the snow-covered hills, I was headed to the medieval city of Ulm to try to reach my own conclusion about why Khaled really was kidnapped, and to what extent Germany itself was involved in the affair.

A little way to the west, in part of the same range of hills, lies the Black Forest, the source of the mighty Danube River that flows down through Ulm, and then across through central and eastern Europe to reach the Black Sea—a route that was broadly followed by Khaled's coach when he had traveled to Macedonia through Vienna and Belgrade. Within Germany, the river is also the boundary between two German states: The north part of Ulm, where Khaled lived, is in the state of Baden-Wiirttemberg. But as I crossed an old bridge across the river, I entered “New Ulm,” and found a sign that welcomed me to the “Free State of Bavaria.” It was on this Bavarian side of the city that I found the Multicultural Center, the controversial mosque that Khaled and Seyam had attended. I found it on an industrial estate, next to a center for asylum seekers. It had been closed down a few months earlier, by order of the Bavarian government; a legalized brothel had been licensed and now sat next door, with red flashing lights in the shape of a heart.

“What you must understand is that everyone wanted to follow this mosque,” a security official explained to me. “It was like an Oriental bazaar, an intelligence market, with everyone competing to recruit sources,” he said. The disaster of 9/11—led by an Al Qaeda cell in Hamburg—had put everyone in Germany on alert to find other sources of Islamic extremism. The mosque at Ulm was one of the top places of suspicion. “And everyone wanted to get in on the act; suddenly everyone decided they would start to hunt for terrorists,” he said. But the division of the city between two states, he explained, made understanding what had happened really quite complex. Under German law, each state has their own domestic intelligence agency (part of a system of checks and balances established after World War II to prevent the creation of a new Gestapo). So with the mosque in Ulm, the agencies from the two states—local police, state police, and intelligence services—all had competed to penetrate the mosque. “In all I can count at least eight German agencies involved,” he said, “and that is before we count foreign intelligence.”

The officer, who I was interviewing back in Stuttgart, one of a series of security officials who I managed to track down with a colleague, laughed as he recalled what sounded like a circus. “I'm pretty sure we had Egyptian intelligence, Saudi intelligence, and Moroccan intelligence; and that's of course excluding the Americans and Israelis, who had a close interest.” No wonder, in the months before he disappeared, Khaled and his friends had hints that there was something strange going on. “There were strange new faces in the mosque, and people taking pictures. Khaled and Seyam both had the feeling there were cars following them as well,” their lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic, told me.

But with all this attention, what intelligence had emerged? Had Khaled ever been considered a suspect? It turned out, the security officials told us, that they had known plenty about Khaled—long before he was kidnapped. They too believed he might have been captured because of his associations; but basing any assumption of guilt on these, they argued, had been exceedingly foolish. “Khaled had been in the background of the mosque for some time,” one told me, “but he really was not important. Of all the people that you might suspect of being a threat to security, he was really at the back of the list, a really minor player in the scene.” Even those characters at the mosque regarded with the greatest suspicion—those like his friend Reda Seyam and Dr. Yusuf—were generally considered a long way from being actual terrorists. Seyam might have praised or even advocated jihad, but there was no evidence of any involvement in anything more than propaganda. In Indonesia, the United States had had ample opportunity to arrest him, but they chose not to. As for Dr. Yusuf, he certainly had extremist views, but he was also someone in close dialogue with the German authorities. He had, in fact, I confirmed, been for years a paid agent of the local state security office. Who at the mosque, I asked one officer, was not working as an informer? He just chuckled.

The consensus among those who knew the most about the Ulm mosque was clear then—the pursuit of Khaled el-Masri by the CIA was a red herring, a fact explained either by misinformation or a motive other than concrete suspicion.

But what of German involvement. Had the CIA used information supplied by the Germans?

While he was being held in Afghanistan, Khaled became convinced that the information he was being asked about had to have been provided from his home country. Almost all of the questions he faced were about people he knew in Ulm and Neu Ulm, or about the Multicultural Center. The interrogators even knew fine details about what kind of food could be purchased in the mosque's shop. How could they have known to ask such detailed questions if they did not have some cooperation with the German authorities?

A pointed question about who he knew in Norway indicated to Khaled el-Masri that the interrogators—the Americans—clearly had access to information about his bank account. Norway “is the only place where I had received large sums of money. I used to have a very good customer in Norway, and he had transferred once fifty thousand euros to my account in order to buy cars for him. When they asked me about Norway, I just played dumb. But I thought, 'Aha, they know about my bank account.' Maybe the CIA has its own access to my bank account, but it seems to me that they may have gotten the information from the Germans.”⁶⁵ Another detail the American interrogators had asked Khaled about in the Salt Pit Prison in Kabul also, he said, implied German cooperation. The Americans knew his friend Reda Seyam drove a Renault that was registered to Khaled's wife, Aischa. Khaled says that virtually no one the two men associated with were informed about the arrangement. “You had to have access to official government records to know that.”⁶⁶

All these examples certainly demonstrated to me that the CIA had been closely following events and people at the mosque. Yet given what I'd heard about the scale of penetration of the mosque by multiple agencies, it would be hard to pin down who exactly had handed over the detailed files, always assuming that the CIA had stuck to the rules, which prohibited its case officers from running unilateral operations within German territory.

At a local level, the German agencies denied handing over information on Khaled. One intelligence officer said that the CIA's station chief in Munich had frequently asked for updates on information collected about the Ulm mosque—but she had never asked for specific information on Khaled. At a higher level, however, German intelligence analysts, in a series of interviews in Berlin, pointed out that given the closeness of relations between the CIA and both domestic and foreign German services, the CIA would have been given detailed access, without even asking, to a great deal of reporting about what was happening in Ulm. Whatever Germany's public disagreements over American foreign policy were at the time (for example, over the invasion of Iraq), German spies had worked hand in hand with American ones.⁶⁷ Even during the Iraq invasion, on the spot operatives from the country's foreign intelligence service (the BND) were providing detailed information to the United States. They assisted in identifying targets in Baghdad, and in ruling out non-targets, such as sensitive civilian buildings.⁶⁸ So did the United States obtain their information on Khaled from one of the local German services, from an Arab intelligence service also active in Ulm, or through a routine intelligence exchange at a national level? In each of those cases, the information would not have been hard to get.

More broadly, there was much about Germany's position in the Khaied case that was less than convincing. On the morning of May 31, 2004, just after Khaied was released in Albania, the then U.S. ambassador, Daniel Coats, went to tell Khaled's story to Otto Schily, then the German interior minister⁶⁹ and the head of the terrorism desk in the ministry's vast law enforcement unit.⁷⁰ According to the official account, the United States admitted kidnapping the German citizen, but said that he had appeared on a “Watchlist,” and that they had thought he had been carrying forged documents. Coats apologized for their mistake, but said that Khaied had been released after they had determined that his passport was genuine, receiving in turn a promise of silence from Germany.⁷¹ No notes were made of the meeting, the ministry later claimed, and when a federal prosecutor in Munich began investigating the case, and asked the government what it knew, the ministry did not tell the prosecutor about the U.S. ambassador's visit. It was strange behavior for a government that professed ignorance of the whole affair. As Khaied said in an interview for this book, if the CIA had doubts about the authenticity of his passport and his real identity, it stretches the imagination to contemplate that they would not have contacted German intelligence for help.⁷²

For years, and particularly after 9/11, the CIA had been using Frankfurt, Germany, as its main logistics base in Europe. It also served as the main staging post for rendition operations around the Middle East. Located just outside of Stuttgart in Vaihingen was the European headquarters of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)—one of German intelligence's closest partners.⁷³ Had Germany been so foolish as to allow such activity on its soil without knowing what was going on? “Of course not,” answered one former CIA operative, who had knowledge of the CIA's counterterrorist operations in the first three years after 9/11. “With the Europeans, and the Germans in particular, it was always a case of, don't ask, don't tell. They wouldn't know the specifics, but they knew the sort of things we were up to.” At the time of writing, these issues remained under investigation by the German parliament.

For all the potential complicity of the Germans, however, it was ultimately the Americans who had kidnapped Khaied, who had allowed him to be beaten by the Macedonians, who had interrogated him in secret, who had force-fed him and then dropped him in the Albanian mountains. From the evidence I saw in Germany, it seemed ever clearer that while Khaied had kept the company of some persons thought suspicious, there was never any serious evidence against him. He had been someone who, to use police jargon, “fitted the frame,” who had the right profile. It seemed an incredible basis on which to put him through that ordeal.

Ultimately, if Khaled really had been considered that important, his case could have been dealt with within days. The validity of his passport could have been verified with the Germans. Instead, after his initial interrogations, Khaled had largely been left to stew alone in his cell in Afghanistan. Much of this case was still a mystery. Yet the more I looked into the case, the more it appeared like a cover-up rather than a mix-up.

IT was in January 2006, a couple of months before this trip to Ulm, that I finally took a flight out to Majorca, Spain, to see how Khaled's rendition operation had been staged. At a late-night meeting in an air-conditioned office I was shown the documents of one of the most detailed police investigations into the CIA's aviation operations—an inquiry launched reluctantly by the local prosecutor after complaints from the island's human rights activists.

The investigation was conducted by a captain from the Guardia Civil, Antonio Tarifa. It was he who had identified the crew of the planes that transported both Khaled and Binyam Mohamed. After Khaled had begun speaking publicly, and my flightlogs had confirmed details of his flight from Macedonia, a local journalist, Matías Vallés, noticed that the same Boeing 737 was a frequent visitor to the city's airport and contacted me for more information. He also had realized that the journey to pick up Khaled el-Masri had begun in Palma. Prompted by the articles by Vallés and his colleagues, a group of campaigners and lawyers filed a complaint to the island's chief prosecutor, alleging that torture victims might have been transported through Majorca. As a result, the prosecutor in turn asked the Guardia Civil to investigate.

Captain Tarifa examined twelve visits by the CIA planes to his airport. He began his investigations at Mallorcair and Assistair, the two local ground agents for handling the arrivals of the planes. The operator of the CIA's Gulfstream V and Boeing 737 was revealed to be a company registered in Tennessee, Stevens Express Leasing. Companies like Mallorcair do not keep a record of the names of passengers and crews of visiting jets. But they did have a record of the hotels to which the crew was taken to rest overnight. These records revealed the CIA crews' visits to the Marriott Son Antem. But their most popular destination was the Gran Melia Victoria, a five-star hotel in downtown Palma that overlooks the yacht marina.

“They were all just ordinary people. They came down and drank in the bar like anyone else,” the Gran Melia's manager told me. Like ordinary guests, the CIA crews had also left their names and addresses, as well as their passport and credit card numbers. It was the first time that the crews of these CIA jets had been identified.

As the police investigation showed, after completing the renditions of both Binyam Mohamed and Khaled el-Masri, Captain Fairing and his crew returned to Majorca on January 26, 2004, for two nights of rest and recreation at the Melia Victoria. Snow and ice had sealed off Dulles airport to incoming flights.

As they prepared to return home, their jobs done, their Boeing 737 was loaded up with an unusual amount of ice—66 pounds of ice cubes and dry ice. And dipping into Mallorcair's drinks cabinet, they selected for themselves three bottles of fine Spanish wine—two of Pesquera and an Alion, along with five crystal glasses. All were charged to the CIA plane's bill.

By January 28, the weather at Dulles had cleared. At 10:09 A.M. Captain Fairing opened the throttle on his 737 and took off for Washington, D.C. The rendition group's work was over—for now.