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CIA widens war on terror with secret flights
By Scott Shane, Stephen Grey and Margot Williams
The New York Times
05/31/05 "IHT" - - SMITHFIELD, North Carolina The airplanes of Aero Contractors Ltd. take off from Johnston County Airport here, then disappear over the scrub pines and fields of tobacco and sweet potatoes. Nothing about the sleepy Southern setting hints of foreign intrigue. Nothing gives away the fact that Aero's pilots are the discreet bus drivers of the battle against terrorism, routinely sent on secret missions to Baghdad, Cairo, Tashkent and Kabul.
When the CIA wants to grab a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another country, an Aero Contractors plane often does the job. If agency experts need to fly overseas in a hurry after the capture of a prized prisoner, a plane will leave Johnston County and stop at Dulles Airport outside Washington to pick up the CIA team on the way.
Aero Contractors' planes dropped CIA paramilitary officers into Afghanistan in 2001; carried an American team to Karachi, Pakistan, right after the U.S. Consulate there was bombed in 2002; and flew from Libya to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the day before an American-held prisoner said he was questioned by Libyan intelligence agents last year, according to flight data and other records.
While posing as a private charter company - "aircraft rental with pilot" is the listing in Dun & Bradstreet - Aero Contractors is in fact a major domestic hub of the CIA's secret air service. The company was founded in 1979 by a legendary CIA officer and chief pilot for Air America, the agency's Vietnam-era air company, and it appears to be controlled by the agency, according to former employees.
Behind a surprisingly thin cover of rural hideaways, front companies and shell corporations that share officers who appear to exist only on paper, the CIA has rapidly expanded its air operations since 2001 as it has pursued and questioned terrorism suspects around the world.
An analysis of thousands of flight records, aircraft registrations and corporate documents, as well as interviews with former CIA officers and pilots, show that the agency owns at least 26 planes, 10 of them purchased since 2001. The agency has concealed its ownership behind a web of seven shell corporations that appear to have no employees and no function apart from owning the aircraft.
The planes, regularly supplemented by private charters, are operated by real companies controlled by or tied to the agency, including Aero Contractors and two Florida companies, Pegasus Technologies and Tepper Aviation.
The civilian planes can go places U.S. military craft would not be welcome. They sometimes allow the agency to circumvent reporting requirements most countries impose on flights operated by other governments. But the cover can fail, as when two Austrian fighter jets were scrambled on Jan. 21, 2003, to intercept a CIA Hercules transport plane, equipped with military communications, on its way from Germany to Azerbaijan.
"When the CIA is given a task, it's usually because national policy makers don't want 'U.S. government' written all over it," said Jim Glerum, a retired CIA officer who spent 18 years with the agency's Air America but says he has no knowledge of current operations. "If you're flying an executive jet into somewhere where there are plenty of executive jets, you can look like any other company."
Some of the CIA planes have been used for carrying out renditions, the legal term for the agency's practice of seizing terrorism suspects in one foreign country and delivering them to be detained in another, including countries that routinely engage in torture.
The resulting controversy has breached the secrecy of the agency's flights in the past two years, as plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements.
The authorities in Italy and Sweden have opened investigations into the CIA's alleged role in the seizure of suspects in those countries who were then flown to Egypt for interrogation. According to Georg Nolte, a law professor at the University of Munich, under international law, nations are obligated to investigate any substantiated human rights violations committed on their territory or using their airspace.
Nolte examined the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who U.S. officials have confirmed was pulled from a bus on the Serbia-Macedonia border on Dec. 31, 2003, and held for three weeks.
Then he was drugged and beaten, by his account, before being flown to Afghanistan.
The episode illustrates the circumstantial nature of the evidence on CIA flights, which often coincide with the arrest and transporting of Al Qaeda suspects. No public record states how Masri was taken to Afghanistan. But flight data show a Boeing Business Jet operated by Aero Contractors and owned by Premier Executive Transport Services, one of the CIA-linked shell companies, flew from Skopje, Macedonia, to Baghdad and on to Kabul on Jan. 24, 2004, the day after Masri's passport was marked with a Macedonian exit stamp.
Masri was later released by order of Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser at the time, after his arrest was shown to be a case of mistaken identity.
A CIA spokesman declined to comment for this article.
Representatives of Aero Contractors, Tepper Aviation and Pegasus Technologies, which operate the agency planes, said they could not discuss their clients' identities.
"We've been doing business with the government for a long time, and one of the reasons is, we don't talk about it," said Robert Blowers, Aero's assistant manager.
Most of the shell companies that are the planes' nominal owners hold permits to land at U.S. military bases worldwide, a clue to their global mission. Flight records show that at least 11 of the aircraft have landed at Camp Peary, the Virginia base where the CIA operates its training facility, known as "the Farm."
Several planes have also made regular trips to Guantánamo.
But the facility that turns up most often in records of the 25 planes is Johnston County Airport, which mainly serves private pilots and a few local corporations.
Aero's much-larger ancestor, Air America, was closed down in 1976, just as the U.S. Senate's Church Committee issued a mixed report on the value of the CIA's use of proprietary companies. The committee questioned whether the United States would ever again be involved in covert wars. One comment appears prescient.
When one CIA official told the committee that a new air proprietary should be created only if "we have a chance at keeping it secret that it is CIA," Lawrence Houston, then the agency's general counsel, objected.
In the aviation industry, said Houston, who died in 1995, "everybody knows what everybody is doing, and something new coming along is immediately the focus of a thousand eyes and prying questions."
He concluded: "I don't think you can do a real cover operation."
Ford Fessenden contributed reporting.
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