Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

them to Egypt or Syria. Either way, the U.S. cannot be blamed as it is not doing the heavy work.”⁹⁷

Despite a near fanatical desire for secrecy, the CIA’s rendition capers began to be exposed to public scrutiny less than six weeks after 9/11. This was almost inevitable, although completely unanticipated by the agency, when it chose to conduct abductions via the world of civil aviation. The CIA’s operatives seemed not to understand that international airports are simply loaded with knowledgeable people at all hours of the day and night—aircrews, flight controllers, ticket clerks, baggage handlers, refuelers, airplane cleaners, police and customs officers, and passengers—many of whom are alert to everything going on around them.

The agency also appears to have been totally ignorant of the world of hobbyist airplane spotters or the fact that the Federal Aviation Administration’s registry of all airplanes licensed to American owners is Internet accessible, as is its archive of airplane logs and flight plans, or the degree to which the CIA’s criminal activities over several decades have mobilized a large cadre of amateur intelligence analysts. According to Mark Hosenball of Newsweek, “U.S. intel sources complain that ‘plane spotters’—hobbyists who photograph airplanes landing or departing local airports and post the pix on the Internet—made it possible for CIA critics to assemble details of a clandestine transport system the agency set up to secretly move cargo and people—including terrorist suspects— around the world.”⁹⁸

On October 26, 2001, a Pakistani journalist named Masood Anwar broke a story in an Islamabad newspaper. Pakistani intelligence officers, he reported, had handed over to U.S. authorities a Yemeni microbiologist named Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed. He was allegedly wanted in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole. The handover occurred early in the morning of October 23 in a remote area of Karachi Airport, where airport staff nonetheless observed and reported to Anwar that the captive was hustled aboard a white, twin-engined, turboprop Gulfstream V executive jet with the registration number N379P—and this is crucially important—painted on its tail. It took off at 2:40 a.m. for an unknown destination. As the Washington Post later reported, at 19:54:04 on October 26, Anwar’s story was posted on the FreeRepublic.com Web site. Thirteen minutes later a blogger provided the aircraft’s registered owner—namely, Premier Executive Transport Services, Inc., 339 Washington Street, Dedham, Massachusetts. Shortly after, another reader posted a message saying, “Sounds like a generic name. Kind of like Air America” (the CIA’s secret airline, not shut down until 1976, which had flown weapons and supplies into, and heroin out of, Laos during the Vietnam War).⁹⁹

I happen to know something about airplane spotting because from 1947 until the early 1960s, I was a passionate participant in this activity. In 1956,1 was one of three cofounders of the American Aviation Historical Society, the leading organization of airplane spotters and photographers in the United States, which in 2005 published the fiftieth volume of its journal.¹⁰⁰ Dana Priest describes airplane spotters as hobbyists “standing at the end of runways with high-powered binoculars and cameras to record the flights of military and private aircraft.”¹⁰¹ This is accurate enough as far as it goes, but there is more to airplane spotting than just collecting raw information. Watching airplanes closely and recording the squadron markings and serial numbers on them goes back to the last days of the London Blitz during World War II.

On January 2, 1941, with official support, Temple Press Ltd. published the first issue of the Aeroplane Spotter, a twelve-page newspaper intended to improve the quality of aircraft recognition among British civilian air defense volunteers. It ceased publication on July 10, 1948, after 217 issues. This legendary periodical included photos and silhouettes of the major aircraft types, both friend and foe, and was the first publication to pay attention to military serial numbers, changes in the registry of civilian aircraft, camouflage schemes, squadron markings, and unusual personal insignia. Such markings are important because, once a data base has been compiled, an analyst can use it to infer the number of a particular aircraft or its variant in service, to deduce the size and composition of squadrons, and to keep track of sales, modifications, and losses. The Aeroplane Spotter remains to this day an invaluable historical reference on the aircraft of the Luftwaffe, the Royal Air Force, and the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. Its legacy lives on in the activities of today’s airplane spotters, including their Web sites that publish not just photos and data but also search engines that can trace virtually any aircraft through its serial or registration number.¹⁰²

Based on the work of spotters, journalists, and airport workers around the world, many crucial details about the CIA’s rendition fleet have been made public. As of late September 2005, the CIA had leased a fleet of perhaps thirty-three aircraft that it has used for various purposes but particularly for extraordinary renditions.¹⁰³ Most of these planes have been identified and their “N” numbers recorded. (N is the international civil aviation code letter assigned to American airplanes, just as G stands for British planes, F for French, D for German, and / for Japanese.) The CIA acquired its fleet through classified contracts issued by an obscure military agency called the Navy Engineering Logistics Office (NELO) located in Arlington, Virginia. (NELO is not even listed in the U.S. Government Manual the official compilation of federal departments, agencies, and offices.)¹⁰⁴ The registered owners of the planes are some ten fake aviation companies with untraceable executives, many of whose addresses are post office boxes in northern Virginia (near CIA headquarters in Langley). The listed officers of the companies have social security numbers all issued when they were over fifty years old, strong evidence of the creation of a new or fake identity.

When the press identifies one of these aircraft and tries to contact the company that allegedly owns it, the aircraft is usually quickly “sold” to another shell company and the registration number changed. Thus, for example, the Gulfstream V, N379P, spotted at Karachi Airport in October 2001, was manufactured in 1999 (constructor’s number 581, the only identification on an aircraft that never changes and is always listed on registers) and initially licensed as N581GA. After the CIA acquired it, the number was changed to N379P and its phantom owner became Premier Executive Transport Services of Dedham, Massachusetts. It was engaged in several important renditions from 2001 to 2003. In December 2003, the Shannon Peace Campers, an antiwar group of airplane spotters at Shannon International Airport in Ireland, outed it on the Internet as the “Guantanamo Bay Express.” The same month N379P became N8068V, still owned by Premier Executive Transport. The Shannon spotters saw it three more times during 2004 in its new livery; then, on December 1, 2004, the plane was “sold” to Bayard Foreign Marketing, LLC, 921 S.W. Washington Street, Portland, Oregon, another CIA front company, and relicensed as N44982.¹⁰⁵

The CIA’s known fleet consists of two Gulfstreams, a small Cessna, three Lockheed Hercules cargo aircraft, a Gulfstream 1159a, a Learjet 35A, an old DC-3, two Boeing 737s, and a fifty-three-passenger De Havilland DH8. The De Havilland was photographed by plane spotters in Afghanistan.¹⁰⁶ The agency’s second Gulfstream was registered N829MG when it was used on October 8, 2002, to fly the Canadian citizen Maher Arar from John F. Kennedy Airport, New York, to Jordan and on to Syria, where he was held in a coffin-sized cell and tortured for ten months before being told that his arrest had been a mistake. After the exposure of this disgraceful incident, the Gulfstream’s registration was changed to N259SK.¹⁰⁷

The main base for these aircraft is a remote corner of Johnson County Airport in Smithfield, North Carolina, where they are serviced by Aero Contractors Ltd., a company founded in 1979 by Jim Rhyne, a legendary CIA officer and the former chief pilot for Air America.¹⁰⁸ The airport is convenient to nearby Fort Bragg, headquarters of the Special Forces, and has no control tower that would allow unauthorized persons to see into the enclave. The fact that Aero’s aircraft have permission to land at any U.S. military base worldwide is a dead giveaway to their provenance, since, according to the Chicago Tribunes John Crewdson,”Only nine companies [including Premier Executive Transport Services] ... have Pentagon permission to land aircraft at military bases worldwide.”¹⁰⁹