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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
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June 25th,
2007 - CIA Arrest Warrants Strain US-German Ties |
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CIA Arrest Warrants Strain
US-German Ties By John Goetz, Marcel Rosenbach & Holger Stark Spiegel Magazine June 25, 2007 The arrest warrants German
authorities have issued against 10 CIA agents have strained German-American
relations. Now, prosecutors in Munich want the agents extradited to Germany
so they can stand trial for their alleged roles in the illegal kidnapping of
terror suspects. The 11-story apartment
complex on Washington Boulevard in Arlington, Virginia, couldn't be in a more
pleasant location. The buildings offer distant views across the Potomac
River, all the way to the Lincoln Memorial and the White House. The residents
here live both discreetly and within a stone's throw of the halls of power in
Washington. There are no names, only numbers, on the mailboxes and apartment
doors, and when visitors arrive unannounced, a uniformed woman at the
reception desk shows them politely but firmly to the door. There is a good reason for
this secrecy in Washington. The buildings are home to many employees of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, which is headquartered a short five-minute drive
from Washington Boulevard. Other residents include CIA officers like Lyle L.,
who lives in apartment 801 and also has a short commute to his office at his
agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. But the orderly world of a
handful of US intelligence agents is about to be turned upside down. The
district attorney's office in Munich has filed international warrants with
Interpol for the arrest of Lyle L., 51, and nine other CIA employees. Lyle
L., also known as "Uncle Bud," a former member of the elite Green
Berets combat unit, is alleged to have been part of a group of agents who
kidnapped Khaled el-Masri, a Lebanese-born German citizen, in Macedonia in
January 2004 and flew him to Afghanistan via the Mediterranean island of
Mallorca. A trained medic, Lyle L. was probably the one who administered
sedatives to Masri on board the Boeing 737. Difficult Deliberations in Berlin Officials in Washington have
since realized that the German investigation is more than just a symbolic
act. This week in Berlin, a group of senior officials from the interior,
foreign and justice ministries will meet to discuss the sensitive issue of
how the German government should handle the Munich petition for "arrest
for the purposes of extradition." There is general agreement within the
government in Berlin that the request should be promptly delivered to the
Bush administration, which would be tantamount to an official request for the
arrest of the men being sought. Lyle L. was probably the
only person who would have had reason to be concerned about this request
until now because he was the only member of the CIA team that allegedly
abducted Masri who could be identified by his real name. But now the German
investigators are in the process of uncovering the identities of the
remaining CIA kidnappers, an effort that will further strain an already tense
German-American relationship. At a recent lunch in the
German Embassy in Washington, Michael Hayden, the new CIA director,
complained about the "bottomless criticism" from Europe that the US
government faces for abducting suspicious Islamists. One US diplomat calls
Germany's approach the "German double standard." On the one hand,
he says, the Germans seek to benefit from information gleaned by the CIA. On
the other, they are careful to keep their hands clean. According to US
diplomats, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has made it clear to her
German counterpart, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, that the
investigations of the agents present a serious problem. Even before the warrant was
issued for the arrest of the agents, John Koenig, a representative of the US
embassy in Berlin, had met with German officials at the Chancellery and the
Justice Ministry and lodged an official diplomatic protest. Newsweek magazine
fears a "US-European showdown" that could jeopardize "US
cooperation with German intelligence agencies." A German government
official also describes the investigations as "one of our main problems
at the moment," which, in light of currently elevated threat levels,
couldn't have happened at a more inopportune time. The German government could
have put a stop to the arrest warrants in the first stage. It would simply
have had to refer to Paragraph 153c of the German Code of Criminal Procedure,
which states that a legal proceeding can be terminated by official decree if
this is in the "prevailing public interest." But a group of senior
officials meeting at the Justice Ministry rejected a government veto, arguing
that any government efforts to apply the brakes on the investigation would be
too difficult for the public to swallow. As a result, the cabinet decided to
allow the Munich prosecutors' petition for the issuance of international
arrest warrants to stand. Tracking the Agents Initially the effort seemed
almost pointless for the Germans because, with the exception of Lyle L., the
names on all of the arrest warrants were aliases. At Langley, false
identities are seen as an effective intelligence tool that normally puts a stop
to any investigation. But the US agents were not
as smart as the police had assumed - or perhaps criminally negligent. Thanks
to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), all it took was a simple
computer search for the investigators in Old Europe, without any official assistance
from the US Department of Justice, to determine the real names of
"Captain James Fairing," "Eric Fain" and "Kirk James
Bird." In its database of
registered pilots, the FAA keeps careful track of who registers, under what
names and when they register. The database includes the names of anyone who
ever acquired a pilot's license in the United States. It even includes
Mohammed Atta, one of the suicide pilots of the Sept. 11 attacks. Munich district attorneys
knew the captain of the Boeing 737 which carried Khaled el-Masri to
Afghanistan after a stopover in Palma de Mallorca had the fictional name of
"Fairing." Discovering his real identity became a matter of simple
detective work. All a researcher had to do was enter the name "Fairing,"
along with other details - such as his licenses to fly certain aircraft
models, or special personal characteristics - into the FAA database. The
system soon produced the pilot's real name. That was how the German
investigators discovered that Captain James Fairing's real name is James K.
And because K., 53, called his wife in North Carolina from a hotel in
Mallorca, the investigators managed to track down his address. The captain
lives in Johnston County, in a nice single-family home with a huge patio and
garden. A look at another database
reveals that he drives a Toyota and has a college degree in biology. But
anyone driving through the North Carolina tobacco fields to Johnston County
to ask James K. about his work as a CIA pilot will encounter a man in a straw
hat who threatens, furiously: "Get off my property or I'll call the
police!" The example of Eric Fain
also demonstrates what a lousy job the CIA did in attempting to cover up the
identity of its agents. Fain's fake flight instructor's license is dated
March 13, 1999. His real one is dated March 31, 1999, a simple transposition
of numbers. A similar approach was taken to construct the supposed covers of
a number of the CIA pilots. The modern world of
databases, which stores information about everyone and everything, especially
in the United States - and which the intelligence agencies use all too often
themselves - is proving to be the undoing of agents who are no longer as
secret as they would like to be. CIA employees at all levels are increasingly
nervous about the fact that their involvement in the so-called war on
terrorism has made them potential targets. At CIA headquarters in Langley,
most are now familiar with the details of the case of Robert Lady, the former
CIA station chief in Milan. Lady is one of the 26
Americans charged by Italian courts with involvement in the abduction of Imam
Abu Omar in Milan in February 2003. Lady was officially accredited as a
diplomat at the US consulate in Milan, but in fact he was in charge of the
Abu Omar operation. In 2003 he was on the verge of retirement and had already
bought a country house in Italy's Piedmont region. When Italian prosecutors
learned about the kidnapping and even traced it to the nights the CIA agents
spent in Milan luxury hotels, Lady became the fall guy. He was forced to
disappear from Italy and go into retirement, and he is unlikely to ever see
his country house in the Piedmont again, for which he is still paying the
mortgage. The house was seized by the authorities. If Lady is found guilty,
it will be confiscated. Robert Lady is now pinning
his hopes on the Italian courts. A Milan judge has temporarily suspended the
case because it deals with state secrets. Now the Italian constitutional
court will have to decide whether the indictment may contain state secrets.
If Lady is found guilty, he could be sentenced to up to four years in prison. Lady's fate is now believed
to have set a precedent in Langley. A number of agents who are stationed in
Europe or took part in the kidnappings have since obtained private insurance
policies to protect them against their victims' claims for damages. Those who, unlike Lady, are
not old enough to retire, face another problem. Because global warrants have
been issued for their arrest, the affected CIA agents face the risk of
detention upon crossing almost any border outside the United States. For Lyle L., a.k.a.
"Uncle Bud," who has been stationed in Bavaria and Brussels and
served in special units in Bosnia and Afghanistan, there will be only one
safe way to reach international hot spots in the future: He can travel with
the US Air Force, whose passenger lists are generally not checked. Ironically, this mode of
travel will tend to take him through the US Air Force base in Ramstein,
Germany - where "Uncle Bud," because of his involvement in the
Masri kidnapping, is currently the most wanted. © Spiegel Online 2007 External link: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,490514,00.html |