Ghost Plane - New book on rendition

[GoneOffShore]

Newsweek

Updated: 11:51 a.m. ET Oct 12, 2006

Oct. 12, 2006 - An unsolicited remark from Porter Goss, then chairman House Intelligence Committee, led a British journalist to unravel many of the details of the CIA’s controversial “extraordinary rendition” program, according to a new book. The disclosure of this highly sensitive operation later prompted a major leak investigation that roiled the agency.

The surprising role of Goss, who later became director of the CIA, in setting London-based reporter Stephen Grey on the trail of the rendition program is revealed in “Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program,” to be published this week by St. Martin’s Press.

Grey’s dogged legwork—which started by tracing the tail numbers of mysterious aircraft ultimately linked to the CIA—eventually enabled him to piece together the story of how agency officials were abducting terror suspects and flying them to secret prisons around the world.

Yet, in an ironic twist, Grey reports that his initial tip-off to what the CIA was doing came during a Dec. 14, 2001, interview he had with Florida Congressman Goss on Capitol Hill about the war on terror. At the time, Grey, a veteran reporter who wrote for The Sunday Times of London, asked the House Intelligence Committee chairman about the prospect that Osama bin Laden might be captured and turned over to the U.S. government.
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Grey played a key role in assisting European governments and many Western journalists to discover the CIA’s role in these and other renditions through his investigative efforts. What Grey did was to take scraps of information about planes linked to the disappearances of Islamic militants around the world and vigorously trace the aircrafts’ origins. Local journalists in Sweden, for example, acquired the tail number of a plane believed to have been involved in the mysterious abduction of an Islamic militant in Stockholm in early December 2001. (Ironically this occurred only a few days after Grey interviewed Goss.)

Using the tail number and public databases—including databases maintained by the Federal Aviation Administration—Grey eventually was able to trace the ownership and licensing of the plane to companies and air-transport operations based at an obscure airport in North Carolina. Later, Grey acquired the numbers of other *suspected CIA rendition aircraft <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10468556/site/newsweek/>*, including a Boeing 737 passenger jet. He also managed to acquire unclassified flight-plan records tracking the movements, or at least the intended movements, of the suspected CIA planes around the world. By matching the dates of suspected renditions—or known disappearances—of Islamic militants with the flight plans of CIA planes, Grey not only put together detailed chronologies of how specific renditions apparently took place, but also built up a picture of how the agency moved suspects around the world, where they moved them to and how they apparently used sites in unlikely places—such as Eastern Europe—as part of the secret operation. The Washington Post later built on the raw information assembled by Grey to produce its now famous expose of alleged CIA secret prisons in Eastern Europe, which later triggered a major CIA leak investigation under Goss’s tenure as agency director.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15236104/site/newsweek/