Ran Prieur has a keen eye for top quality, critical information. He's avoiding the blow-by-blow account of events (like you get from Cryptogon and other sites) and focusing more on the philosophical underpinnings of resistance, sustainability and survival. All Cryptogon readers should visit
ranpreiur.com often. He posts very selectively, so you can take advantage of his editorial skills to glean a wealth of extremely useful information in a short time. His site should be a pre-requisite for all (especially new) Cryptogon readers.
posted by Kevin at 3:07 PM
When Cryptogon reader RS sent in an
Agence France-Presse story about CIA cutout aircraft flying U.S. detainees around the world for interrogation and torture, I didn't expect to personally find proof of the CIA with its pants around its ankles.... but it looks like I did.
Let's take it from the top:
The article RS sent me fails to mention that, almost certainly A) there is a fleet of aircraft with tail number N379P, or B) the aircraft in question has had arbitrary tail number changes applied over a period of time. (It turned out to be
B, but we'll get to that.)
Fast and loose doesn't begin to describe the manner in which the CIA uses aircraft tail numbers and the FAA Aircraft Registration database. It's almost as if they think nobody is watching. If the authors of the AFP piece had read,
Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA by Terry Reed, they might have considered these possibilities.
Compromised provides an excellent account of CIA air transport proprietaries and the associated tail number antics. See Chapter 7,
Tail Numbers Game.
AFP article posted on news.com.au:
A US jet registered to a ghost company whisked terror suspects to countries that used torture, The Washington Post reported today, based on its own investigation.
The Gulfstream V turbojet had been seen at US military bases around the world, often loading up hooded and shackled suspects and delivering them to countries known to use torture, a process the CIA called "rendition", the paper said.
The Post investigated the ownership of the jet, which had been spotted in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan and which carried the tail number N379P, according to the newspaper.
It said the officers of the plane's corporate owner, Premier Executive Transport Services, were all listed with dates of birth in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, but with social security numbers issued since 1998.
The paper was unable to locate any further business or credit information on them or on the company.
The CIA refused comment, but such "proprietary" or front corporations were standard procedure for the agency, former operatives told the Post.
Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organisation for Human Rights USA, told the daily the "rendering" of suspects to countries that employed interrogation techniques banned in the United States was worrisome and could violate the UN Convention on Torture.
The Post article confirmed much of a November 14 article published in the Sunday Times, of London, which obtained flight plans for the plane, which, the Times said, always departed from Washington, DC and had visited the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where about 550 terror suspects are held.
A Swedish television program, Cold Facts, reported that in December 2001, the jet took hooded terror suspects to Egypt, according to the Post, which said it had independently confirmed the Swedish report.
The Post said the plane, with hooded crew members speaking with US accents, loaded two Egyptian nationals and took off at 4.30am for Cairo.
It said airport officials and amateur plane spotters, some using binoculars, have logged multiple sightings of N379P at several US military airports and fuelling stations.More: N379P Becomes N8068VHere is an account of activists trying to get the Irish National Police (
Garda Síochána) to investigate the transshipment of prisoners through the Shannon airport on CIA aircraft. It looks like N379P was getting too much attention. So, CIA changed it to N8068V.
Here's where it gets
really interesting.
I just
checked N8068V on the FAA database and it now comes up as a "deregistered" Robinson R22 BETA helicopter.
But there's just one problem...
Does that Gulfstream V look like a
Robinson R22 BETA helicopter to you? Wave hello to the spooks and their busted cutout operation.
Here's a
screenshot of the FAA record for N8068V showing it to be a "Deregistered" Robinson R22 BETA helicopter. The plain text from the FAA follows:
N8068V is Deregistered
Deregistered Aircraft 1 of 1
Aircraft Description
Serial Number 2401 Type Registration Corporation
Manufacturer Name ROBINSON HELICOPTER Certificate Issue Date None
Model R22 BETA Mode S Code 52575653
Year Manufacturer None Cancel Date 12/29/1993
Reason for Cancellation Exported Exported To SOUTH AFRICA
Aircraft Registration prior to Deregistration
Name ROBINSON HELICOPTER COMPANY
Street 24747 CRENSHAW BOULEVARD
City TORRANCE State CALIFORNIA Zip Code 90505
County None
Country Unknown
Airworthiness
None
Other Owner Names
NoneIf you're wondering what N8068V looked like as N379P, here it is:
What does the
FAA N-Number inquiry show for N379P?
N379P is not Assigned/ReservedHere's a
screenshot of that result.
More: Original Washington Post ArticleJet Is an Open Secret in Terror WarBy Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 27, 2004; Page A01
The airplane is a Gulfstream V turbojet, the sort favored by CEOs and celebrities. But since 2001 it has been seen at military airports from Pakistan to Indonesia to Jordan, sometimes being boarded by hooded and handcuffed passengers.
The plane's owner of record, Premier Executive Transport Services Inc., lists directors and officers who appear to exist only on paper. And each one of those directors and officers has a recently issued Social Security number and an address consisting only of a post office box, according to an extensive search of state, federal and commercial records.
Bryan P. Dyess, Steven E. Kent, Timothy R. Sperling and Audrey M. Tailor are names without residential, work, telephone or corporate histories -- just the kind of "sterile identities," said current and former intelligence officials, that the CIA uses to conceal involvement in clandestine operations. In this case, the agency is flying captured terrorist suspects from one country to another for detention and interrogation.
The CIA calls this activity "rendition." Premier Executive's Gulfstream helps make it possible. According to civilian aircraft landing permits, the jet has permission to use U.S. military airfields worldwide.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, secret renditions have become a principal weapon in the CIA's arsenal against suspected al Qaeda terrorists, according to congressional testimony by CIA officials. But as the practice has grown, the agency has had significantly more difficulty keeping it secret.
According to airport officials, public documents and hobbyist plane spotters, the Gulfstream V, with tail number N379P, has been used to whisk detainees into or out of Jakarta, Indonesia; Pakistan; Egypt; and Sweden, usually at night, and has landed at well-known U.S. government refueling stops.
As the outlines of the rendition system have been revealed, criticism of the practice has grown. Human rights groups are working on legal challenges to renditions, said Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA, because one of their purposes is to transfer captives to countries that use harsh interrogation methods outlawed in the United States. That, he said, is prohibited by the U.N. Convention on Torture.
The CIA has the authority to carry out renditions under a presidential directive dating to the Clinton administration, which the Bush administration has reviewed and renewed. The CIA declined to comment for this article.
"Our policymakers would never confront the issue," said Michael Scheuer, a former CIA counterterrorism officer who has been involved with renditions and supports the practice. "We would say, 'Where do you want us to take these people?' The mind-set of the bureaucracy was, 'Let someone else do the dirty work.' "
The story of the Gulfstream V offers a rare glimpse into the CIA's secret operations, a world that current and former CIA officers said should not have been so easy to document.
Not only have the plane's movements been tracked around the world, but the on-paper officers of Premier Executive Transport Services are also connected to a larger roster of false identities.
Each of the officers of Premier Executive is linked in public records to one of five post office box numbers in Arlington, Oakton, Chevy Chase and the District. A total of 325 names are registered to the five post office boxes.
An extensive database search of a sample of 44 of those names turned up none of the information that usually emerges in such a search: no previous addresses, no past or current telephone numbers, no business or corporate records. In addition, although most names were attached to dates of birth in the 1940s, '50s or '60s, all were given Social Security numbers between 1998 and 2003.
The Washington Post showed its research to the CIA, including a chart connecting Premier Executive's officers, the post office boxes, the 325 names, the recent Social Security numbers and an entity called Executive Support OFC. A CIA spokesman declined to comment.
According to former CIA operatives experienced in using "proprietary," or front, companies, the CIA likely used, or intended to use, some of the 325 names to hide other activities, the nature of which could not be learned. The former operatives also noted that the agency devotes more effort to producing cover identities for its operatives in the field, which are supposed to stand up under scrutiny, than to hiding its ownership of a plane.
The CIA's plane secret began to unravel less than six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
On Oct. 26, 2001, Masood Anwar, a Pakistani journalist with the News in Islamabad, broke a story asserting that Pakistani intelligence officers had handed over to U.S. authorities a Yemeni microbiologist, Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, who was wanted in connection with the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.
The report noted that an aircraft bearing tail number N379P, and parked in a remote area of a little-used terminal at the Karachi airport, had whisked Mohammed away about 2:40 a.m. Oct. 23. The tail number was also obtained by The Post's correspondent in Pakistan but not published.
The News article ricocheted among spy-hunters and Web bloggers as a curiosity for those interested in divining the mechanics of the new U.S.-declared war on terrorism.
At 7:54:04 p.m. Oct. 26, the News article was posted on FreeRepublic.com, which bills itself as "a conservative news forum."
Thirteen minutes later, a chat-room participant posted the plane's registered owners: Premier Executive Transport Services Inc., of 339 Washington St., Dedham, Mass.
"Sounds like a nice generic name," one blogger wrote in response. "Kind of like Air America" -- a reference to the CIA's secret civilian airlines that flew supplies, food and personnel into Southeast Asia, including Laos, during the Vietnam War.
Eight weeks later, on Dec. 18, 2001, American-accented men wearing hoods and working with special Swedish security police brought two Egyptian nationals onto a Gulfstream V that was parked at night at Stockholm's Bromma Airport, according to Swedish officials and airport personnel interviewed by Swedish television's "Cold Facts" program. The account was confirmed independently by The Post. The plane's tail number: N379P.
Wearing red overalls and bound with handcuffs and leg irons, the men, who had applied for political asylum in Sweden, were flown to Cairo, according to Swedish officials and documents. Ahmed Agiza was convicted by Egypt's Supreme Military Court of terrorism-related charges; Muhammad Zery was set free. Both say they were tortured while in Egyptian custody. Sweden has opened an investigation into the decision to allow them to be rendered.
A month later, in January 2002, a U.S.-registered Gulfstream V landed at Jakarta's military airport. According to Indonesian officials, the plane carried away Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, an Egyptian traveling on a Pakistani passport and suspected of being an al Qaeda operative who had worked with shoe bomber suspect Richard C. Reid. Without a hearing, he was flown to Egypt. His status and whereabouts are unknown. The plane's tail number was not noted, but the CIA is believed to have only one of the expensive jets.
Over the past year, the Gulfstream V's flights have been tracked by plane spotters standing at the end of runways with high-powered binoculars and cameras to record the flights of military and private aircraft.
These hobbyists list their findings on specialized Web pages. According to them, since October 2001 the plane has landed in Islamabad; Karachi; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Dubai; Tashkent, Uzbekistan; Baghdad; Kuwait City; Baku, Azerbaijan; and Rabat, Morocco. It has stopped frequently at Dulles International Airport, at Jordan's military airport in Amman and at airports in Frankfurt, Germany; Glasglow, Scotland, and Larnaca, Cyprus.
Premier Executive Transport Services was incorporated in Delaware by the Prentice-Hall Corporation System Inc. on Jan. 10, 1994. On Jan. 23, 1996, Dean Plakias, a lawyer with Hill & Plakias in Dedham, filed incorporation papers with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts listing the company's president as Bryan P. Dyess.
According to public documents, Premier Executive ordered a new Gulfstream V in 1998. It was delivered in November 1999 with tail number N581GA, and reregistered for unknown reasons on March 2000 with a new tail number, N379P. It began flights in June 2000, and changed the tail number again in December 2003.
Plakias did not return several telephone messages seeking comment. He told the Boston Globe recently that he simply filed the required paperwork. "I'm not at liberty to discuss the affairs of the client business, mainly for reasons I don't know," he told the Globe. Asked whether the company exists, Plakias responded: "Millions of companies are set up in Massachusetts that are just paper companies."
A lawyer in Washington, whose name is listed on a 1996 IRS form on record at the Secretary of the Commonwealth's office in Massachusetts -- and whose name is whited out on some copies of the forms -- hung up the phone last week when asked about the company.
Three weeks ago, on Dec. 1, the plane, complete with a new tail number, was transferred to a new owner, Bayard Foreign Marketing of Portland, Ore., according to FAA records. Its registered agent in Portland, Scott Caplan, did not return phone calls.
Like the officers at Premier Executive, Bayard's sole listed corporate officer, Leonard T. Bayard, has no residential or telephone history. Unlike Premier's officers, Bayard's name does not appear in any other public records.
Researchers Margot Williams and Julie Tate contributed to this report. Williams has since left The Washington Post.More: Is N8068V Now N44982?I've blown an entire afternoon on this story. Wake me up if you see hooded and shackled men being loaded or unloaded from N44982...
posted by Kevin at 6:30 PM
