Al-Qaida Terrorists in Poland, Part 2: The Wet Work

The cash that the CIA gave to Poland “for the prisons” was defrauded. The testimony extracted under torture turned out to be fairly worthless. The airport in Szymany went under despite U.S. financing. What’s left is a big stench.

Everything We Were Afraid To Know

This was, and remains, one of the Third Republic’s most closely guarded secrets. For the past eight years, we have been uncovering it piece by piece thanks to CIA operatives who have decided to tell American journalists about the torturing. This year, more information will be coming to light. A week ago, a U.S. military judge presiding in the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (an al-Qaida member who was also imprisoned and tortured in Poland) demanded that the U.S. government present in court all its information concerning the secret prisons.

Three weeks ago, it also became known that the secret prisons — in Poland, among other locations — were ... useless. The testimony extracted by CIA agents using “enhanced techniques” was worthless. This was established by the U.S. Senate committee that has investigated the CIA prisons.

The Polish authorities have been consistently silent. So has the prosecutor’s office as it extended its secret investigation. The story still has many lacunae, but we know one thing: For $15 million in cash, which the intelligence agency’s treasurer defrauded in any case, Poland got itself into a stinking mess.

This is the second part of a series that looks at the story from behind the scenes. In the first, we wrote about what happened at the airport in Szymany and the secret prison in Stare Kiejkuty, to which the CIA gave the cryptonym “Quartz,” and for which the Americans gave $15 million — 150 kg of money.

The third part will follow on Wednesday.

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"What a tough guy." The small group of CIA agents standing next to the bench was simply amazed. On the bench, tied down with straps, was a naked man with a hood over his face. The hood was already entirely wet. "Where are you intending to strike next?" asked the American intelligence officer. He stood leaning over the prisoner’s left side. "You'll soon find out," answered the naked man. The interrogating agent gnashed his teeth. At his signal the second of the interrogators, standing above the prisoner’s head, began to tilt a pail filled with water and slowly poured it onto the hood-covered face. The naked man strained and snarled. After several dozen seconds, when the stream of water stopped, he gasped for breath, coughing. But he still wouldn't answer the question asked by the agents. Back to the water ....

The so-called "enhanced interrogation technique" that the Americans were applying is called waterboarding. Its initial version was used by the helpers of the notorious Spanish inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada. Eight liters of water were poured into the victim’s stomach (Torquemada warned that no more should be poured), after which they were forced to throw up by means of blows to the abdomen. The excruciating pain the victims felt as their stomach was distended by the fluid inclined them to testify. A similar path to the truth was used by French courts in the 17th and 18th centuries. As late as the 1930s, water treatment, as this torture was called, was used by the American police and the U.S. Army in the Philippines. The same, only more brutally, was done by the Japanese. Decades later, IRA terrorists were waterboarded.

Over the centuries, the treatment has evolved. The point was no longer to cause pain. Now water is poured into the victim’s mouth and nostrils to induce in him the sensation of drowning. Unable to catch his breath, the victim begins to panic and cracks. The CIA agents who, after the 9/11 attacks, sought effective and safe methods to extract information from captured terrorists, discovered that waterboarding has a number of fundamental advantages. Above all, it is trivially simple and can be used in practically any conditions. All that’s needed is a bench and access to water. The interrogators didn’t need any special qualifications, and this was a major problem at the CIA. At the end of the Cold War, the dirty-work personnel had left the agency. Those who stayed were analysts and functionaries.

The agency became toothless. During a White House meeting after the World Trade Center attacks, someone suggested that death squadrons be organized to hunt down al-Qaida members, just as Israel had hunted down the Munich attackers. The idea was rejected. "The CIA boys would most likely harm themselves," said one of the experts. His opinion was shared by the rest of the gathering. The wet-job unit was set up later, when professionals from other services were hired.

Welcome to the Mazurian District

Waterboarding leaves no traces on the body. At the very worst, an examining doctor will only find abrasions on the wrists in places where the prisoner was strapped down to the bench. The sense of drowning is, in turn, an illusion. The board to which the victim is strapped is tilted backward 20 degrees, thanks to which the water flows into the victim’s nose and throat, irritates its mucus membranes and induces vomiting, but nothing reaches the lungs. Despite this, the body puts up a fight.

I know how it is. During training at the Peace Forces Training Center in Kielce, our abductor-instructors placed a bag on my face, drove me for 15 minutes in an unknown direction, then dragged me out of the jeep and laid me on the hood with my head hanging. They began to waterboard me. A moment later I was ready to admit to anything. There was no air in my lungs and I was confused. Waterboarding is a nightmare. However, in August 2002, the White House, on the basis of a memo from legal advisors in the Department of Justice, allowed the CIA to torture apprehended al-Qaida members in this manner. Usually, pouring water on someone’s face once was enough to loosen his tongue.

But the naked man over which the CIA agents were now standing didn’t belong to this group. He resisted repeated waterboarding sessions. He was about 37 years old, and his name was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. From March to September 2003, he was a guest at the “Quartz” facility — a secret prison of the American intelligence service, located in Stare Kiejkuty in the Mazurian District.

Kill John Paul II and Crash a Small Plane into Langley ...

"I don’t feel sorry for him in the least," says Jose Rodriguez Jr., the former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, who supervised the secret prisons. "We treated him much better than al-Qaida treated its prisoners. Not to mention Daniel Pearl …."

Pearl, a correspondent of The Wall Street Journal in Asia, traveled to Pakistan in late 2002 to write about terrorists. He quickly met them up close. On Jan. 23, 2002, he was abducted on a Karachi street. Nine days later, his abductors sat him down before a camera and told him to recite his personal details, admit his Jewish background, and condemn U.S. policy toward Muslims. After a few minutes, a hand holding a huge knife appeared in the frame. A moment later, the journalist’s severed head rolled onto the floor. The bloody execution was carried out by Mohammed.

Mohammed was raised in Kuwait and studied engineering in the U.S. He witnessed the Soviet invasion and cruelties in Afghanistan in the 1980s. A decade later, he observed the war in Bosnia. He didn’t fight himself at the time, but distributed humanitarian aid as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1994, as a supporter of Osama bin Laden, he started to plan his first terrorist attack. He intended to kill Pope John Paul II during his visit to the Philippines, to crash a small plane loaded with explosives into the CIA complex in Langley, and to blow up 12 passenger aircraft.

Mohammed, along with a partner, also tested homemade bombs. In December 1994, they placed one on board a jumbo jet en route from Manila to Tokyo. The timing mechanism worked, but the bomb was too weak to destroy the plane. When a fire broke out in the apartment where they built their bombs, the police stumbled across his trail. Mohammed fled; American and Filipino investigators didn’t think to connect him with al-Qaida at the time. He was now disillusioned with bomb building and decided to use speeding airplanes instead. This latter plan played out on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Three thousand Americans perished.

Mohammed fell into the hands of the CIA on March 1, 2003, when a unit made up of Pakistani intelligence and CIA agents raided the house at 18A Nisar Road, in a rich neighborhood of Rawalpindi in northern Pakistan, at two in the morning. Mohammed was dragged out of bed. A compatriot whom he trusted had turned him over to the Americans.

The earlier stages of the operation looked as follows: When Mohammed stepped into his friend’s elegant house, the latter went into the bathroom for a moment and from there sent a text message to the American agents: "I am with KSM."

A few hours later, it was all over. In order to humiliate Khalid, one of the American agents took a picture of him after having first ruffled his hair so he would look wilder. A week after he was apprehended, Mohammed landed in Szymany on board a Gulfstream belonging to one of the companies set up by the CIA. An hour after having landed, he was stretched out on a bench in Stare Kiejkuty. The interrogations began immediately.

The First Investigation Is Filed

"Those are slanders unsupported by any facts," said an irritated Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, the Polish prime minister. The date is June 7, 2006. News has just reached the Polish parliament (the Sejm) that Dick Marty, the Swiss senator who is investigating the matter of secret CIA prisons on behalf of the Council of Europe, has accused Poland of having allowed the Americans to open such a facility on their territory. Marty has no proof on hand, only circumstantial evidence, including records of American planes landing in Szymany and satellite images. Nevertheless, he claims the CIA held prisoners in Poland. A second "black site" was in operation in Romania (the world would only find out about the prison in Lithuania in 2009), and a dozen other European countries collaborated with the CIA in the transfer of prisoners, allowing agency planes to land at their airports. Sweden and Italy turned a blind eye to the abduction of terror suspects on their territory.

Politicians of the opposition Civic Platform (PO) Party all backed up the Polish prime minister. “This report spreads lies and exposes us to a terrorist attack,” said Paweł Graś, a member of the Parliamentary Secret Services Commission at the time. Marek Siwiec from the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) took Marty to court because the Swiss senator had written in his report that Siwiec — as head of the National Security Office at the time of the secret prisons — had known about them.

No one at the time knew that the customs chamber in Olsztyn had been investigating the matter since January. Customs agents had not been allowed near the CIA planes which had landed in Szymany, and no one had even informed them of the landings. Such an obstruction of customs inspection is punishable by a heavy fine. The chamber’s officials had established a list of the airplanes that had landed in Szymany without their knowledge, as well as their numbers. They reported the offense to the prosecutor’s office, but the prosecutors in Szczytno filed the case, having come up against a wall of obstruction. The CIA flights to Poland were a state secret.

A Dozen Narrow Cells

Polish intelligence operatives referred to the part of the training center in Stare Kiejkuty as simply "the forest." They only met the Americans who worked there at the canteen. They were forbidden to approach the villa occupied by the Americans. Both groups were professionals and no questions were asked about what went on in "the forest." In any case, there was nothing unusual about the presence of CIA people at the center. They had been there before. In the fall of 2005, long after the secret prison affair broke out, Polish officials argued that American agents had come for training or conferences with their Polish colleagues. This explanation made sense.

"Conditions in Stare Kiejkuty were Spartan," said The Washington Post’s informer, describing the "Quartz" facility. But in comparison with the secret prisons in Asia, the Polish prison at least provided some luxuries for the personnel. The prison established by the CIA in Thailand, an hour’s drive from Bangkok, resembled a chicken coop, despite all the investment. The villa the CIA had rented in Stare Kiejkuty for $15 million had air conditioning, and the doors to the windowless cells slid to the side automatically. The only drawback was that conditions were awfully cramped.

In order to convert the villa — which had previously been used, among other things, as the residence of presidents Wałęsa and Kwaśniewski — the CIA spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. The building was littered with cameras; $300,000 went on that alone. Inside, and in a nearby shed, over a dozen very narrow cells were installed. In one of them the Americans placed a treadmill and an exercise bicycle. Those prisoners who decided to cooperate could enjoy some relaxation as a reward.

"Quartz" was run by Mike Sealy, who had spent over 20 years at the CIA. He had begun as a rank-and-file field operative and clambered to the rank of SIS-2 (senior intelligence service), which is the equivalent of a two-star general. As a smokescreen, in Stare Kiejkuty he was made program manager. He commanded six guards and the hastily assembled interrogation team.

Sealy had taken part in many secret operations. But his knowledge of extracting testimony drew on the experience of CIA agents who had served in South America, where the U.S. had helped friendly dictators fight communist partisans. Detainees weren’t treated lightly there; there had been no time for exerting psychological pressure or engaging in good cop/bad cop games. Testimony had been extracted along with fingernails. Sealy had no intention of going easy on the terrorists in "Quartz" either.

Abu Zubayda in a Cage, Like a Dog

The CIA had paid $10 million to Pakistan’s intelligence service (ISI) for Abu Zubayda, thought to be al-Qaida’s third most important figure and an adjutant of bin Laden. For this money, the ISI built new headquarters and bought a helicopter. But the money came very close to being wasted. On March 28, 2002, during an operation of ISI agents and a CIA/FBI team in Fasailabad, in northeastern Pakistan, Abu Zubayda was seriously injured. That he survived is a miracle.

The CIA transferred him from Pakistan to the "Cat’s Eye" secret prison in Thailand. There, without being beaten, he told investigators (he was first interrogated by FBI agents) about Mohammed and another terrorist who intended to blow up an airplane using a bomb hidden in his shoe. The FBI people were quite happy with the results. Then CIA investigators came to Thailand. They thought that Zubayda was not telling the whole truth and decided to reach for "enhanced techniques."

The refinement of these techniques in the early years of the 21st century is the work of two psychologists — James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Previously, they had, among other things, instructed pilots on how to resist brutal interrogations if they were ever shot down over, for example, North Korea. Both had left the service prior to 9/11. A few months later, they both signed contracts with the CIA. As consultants, they were expected to create effective methods to extract secrets from al-Qaida members. This was a particular type of opponent: motivated, believing that a reward awaited him in heaven, and trained to lead investigators down the garden path. The two psychologists drew up a catalogue of "techniques" they thought would break the detainees. The fact that neither had ever conducted an interrogation (Mitchell and Jessen were typical academics) did not discourage the CIA.

The mildest “technique” was grabbing the detainee by the shirt and shaking him. Second on the list was face slapping. Then came hitting the abdomen with an open hand (punching with the fist was forbidden because this could lead to internal injuries), and forcing a shackled prisoner to stand for hours, including in a freezing cell. He wouldn't be allowed to sleep; if he lost consciousness, the instructions called for cold water to be poured on him. Waterboarding was at the bottom of the list.

Abu Zubayda became Mitchell and Jessen’s guinea pig. Among other things, he was used to test how detainees' morale was affected by nonstop listening to loud music or by being locked in a crate filled with insects (which Abu Zubayda was afraid of). Mitchell directly oversaw Abu Zubayda’s interrogation in Thailand and said that a captured terrorist should be treated like a dog in a cage. This was a reference to an experiment conducted in the 1970s, in which a dog kept in a tight cage was given electric shocks at irregular intervals, until he stopped showing resistance. The same was to be accomplished with the people of al-Qaida.

The green light for torturing Abu Zubayda was given by the most senior American politicians: President George W. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. When, in the end, he was strapped to a bench and waterboarded, he screamed loudly and vomited. According to one of the agents, he began to talk after the first time — after 35 seconds, to be exact. Everything was recorded on camera. In December 2002, the CIA transferred him to Stare Kiejkuty. There the use of "enhanced techniques" continued. In all, Abu Zubayda was waterboarded 83 times.

Only Lepper Wants To Speak

"The Polish authorities are not treating us seriously," said MEP Józef Pinior. In November 2006, a 60-member special commission of the European Parliament conducting an investigation into the CIA secret prisons arrived in Warsaw. The deputies asked to meet with several dozen people, including Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński and Minister of Foreign Affairs Anna Fotyga. The situation had changed since the beginning of the year. In July 2006, the U.S. president had admitted that the secret prisons existed. "They were necessary in the war on terror," he declared, and stated that thanks to the "black sites" valuable information had been obtained and, in this manner, other attacks had been averted. "Enhanced interrogation techniques were legal," Bush added. He didn’t betray the location of the prisons.

Prime Minister Kaczyński sent Marek Pasionek, deputy coordinator of secret services and later prosecutor, to meet the commission. He didn’t have much to say. Politicians from all parties were unanimous in their assurances that there had been no CIA prisons in Poland. Marek Biernacki (PO), the chairman of the parliamentary secret services commission, gave assurances that the entire issue was the "ricochet of an internal struggle within the U.S. services." Former Prime Minister Leszek Miller (SLD) called journalists inquiring about Stare Kiejkuty "useful idiots." But Andrzej Lepper, in contrast, wanted to meet with the commission. He intended to tell it about the Taliban landings in Klewki, a locality situated about 50 km from the airport in Szymany, but no one treated him seriously.

An-Nashiri in the Hands of El Gamil

"We could drag your mother here," says Albert El Gamil through his teeth, in Arabic with an Egyptian accent. The CIA operative then draws on his cigar and blows the smoke directly onto the face of the naked prisoner. "We could arrest your entire family," he adds. It is the end of December 2002 and all the trainees at the center in Stare Kiejkuty have gone home for the holidays. But work proceeds full steam in “Quartz.” El Gamil is facing 40-year-old Abd ar-Rahim an-Nashiri, responsible for the death of 17 American sailors who perished in October 2000 on board the destroyer USS Cole. It was he who thought up the idea of the attacking the ship with an explosives-filled motorboat. Exactly two years later, al-Qaida attacked the French tanker Limburg in a similar manner. That was also supposed to be An-Nashiri’s work.

An-Nashiri was apprehended in the United Arab Emirates in November 2002 and was handed over to the Americans a month later. He went through the secret prisons in Afghanistan and in Thailand, from whence he was taken to Stare Kiejkuty. Even prior to the transfer to Poland, CIA investigators were arguing about whether he was truly whom they thought he was. One of the operatives thought he was a moron and incapable of planning a bold operation like the attack on the U.S. warship. The view that carried the day in the end was that An-Nashiri was a dangerous terrorist who only feigned stupidity.

An-Nashiri was first dealt with by Deuce Martinez, a 40-year-old analyst who had investigated narcotics cartels before 9/11. Martinez agreed to join the secret prisons program on one condition — that he would neither be trained in "enhanced interrogation techniques" nor have to use them. The analyst had evidently decided he was not fit to be a torturer. When Abu Zubayda was brought to him between waterboarding sessions, the terrorist talked like a wound-up toy; he identified individuals on photos, and spoke of al-Qaida’s plans. He was even willing to try to persuade other detainees to collaborate with the Americans.

In contrast to Abu Zubayda, An-Nashiri was haughty, so he landed in the hands of Albert El Gamil. This Arab translator of Egyptian origin had worked for the FBI and had also had no experience with the treatment of suspects. He was bursting with enthusiasm and creativity, however. As he threatened the prisoner with his mother’s arrest, he suggested that one of the guards would rape her before his very eyes. Such is the way the secret police in the Middle East operate. Even this did not incline An-Nashiri to talk.

So El Gamil brought a machine gun to the next meeting. He loaded it and put it to the prisoner’s head. Sitting naked on a chair and blindfolded, An-Nashiri only heard the clang of the lock bolt and El Gamil’s threats, spoken in Arabic, that he was about to pull the trigger. The investigator also made use of a drill. He put the vibrating implement to the blindfolded prisoner’s head and warned him that his brains were about to be spilled onto the floor. Dr. Mitchell’s catalogue had not included such methods.

The prisoner finally cracked. At the same time, El Gamil’s career in Poland came to an end. A colleague who had been horrified with his goings on with the prisoner denounced him. Both the "translator" and the “program manager” — Sealy — were recalled to the U.S.

Sheikh Mohammed Also Cracks

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed seemed resistant to waterboarding. CIA agents poured water on his face, and when they stopped, he would recite verses of the Koran or talk nonsense. Once, when the water stopped pouring, he fell asleep strapped to the bench.

Deuce Martinez made no impression on him either. Verbal skirmishes with the analyst gave him pleasure. At times, the atmosphere during the conversations even became friendly. "Can’t Muslims and Christians live in harmony?" asked Mohammed. When he got pen and paper, he wrote letters to Bush, the Red Cross or paeans directed at Martinez’s wife. In this manner, he wished to express his respect.

In the end, he was broken by lack of sleep. He admitted to Martinez that he was the one who had beheaded Daniel Pearl — because he wanted to show his people he was a leader who would stop at nothing.

In the end, the CIA transferred Mohammed from Poland to the "Bright Light" secret prison in Romania. The other terrorists from Stare Kiejkuty were also transferred.

The Second Investigation: Everything Is Secret

Sealy left the CIA in June of last year. If his profile on LinkedIn is to be believed, he now works for the Giant Eagle store chain on the U.S. East Coast. He is responsible, among other things, for security, good practices and ethics. On his profile, he boasts that at one time he was very successful in that area. El Gamil now lives in a cozy house in Chantilly, in the state of Virginia. He has also left the CIA, but works for the agency as an outside instructor. He drives 30 minutes on the highway to work. Neither should leave the U.S., though, and certainly not travel to Europe. Poland has most likely issued arrest warrants for them.

I have written "most likely" because everything about the second investigation is secret. It was launched in 2008 by the prosecutor’s office in Warsaw. Nothing happened for three years because the intelligence agency, hiding behind state secrecy, refused to cooperate with investigators. It only handed over documents concerning cooperation with the Americans when ordered to do so by the head of the Supreme Court, to which the investigators had turned in despair. We know that among the materials that landed on the investigators’ desks, there is information about the manner in which the prison was to be run.

The Americans have ignored Poland’s request for legal assistance in the investigation. The CIA became offended by the intelligence agency: The Romanian and Lithuanian investigations had been quashed from the top, and here the Poles were making fools of themselves. Not to mention the constant leaks to the media .... In March 2012 it transpired that investigators have laid charges — or intended to do so — against the persons who allowed the prison to be set up in Poland. The persons are Zbigniew Siemiątkowski, then head of the intelligence agency, and, perhaps, Colonel Andrzej Derlataka, who took delivery of the $15 million for use of the villa in Kiejkuty. Also concerned is former Prime Minister Leszek Miller, who is possibly facing trial by the tribunal of state. The list of charges against the politicians is long: illegal deprivation of liberty, torture and breach of sovereignty of the Republic of Poland.

At this moment, the investigation has been transferred to Krakow. When it will end is a secret. We know that An-Nashiri, Abu Zubayda and another presumed terrorist have been granted the status of victims. Regardless, they have filed a suit against Poland at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, in connection with the protracted nature of the proceedings. The hearings before the tribunal, in contrast to the Polish investigation, will be public.

... Same as Usual

A separate issue is the fate of the funds the CIA paid for using the villa in Kiejkuty. In March, Gazeta Wyborcza found out that the intelligence agency had transferred part of the cash to its accounts at the National Bank of Poland. The rest was placed in a safe in which the agency’s operational fund was kept. The agency’s treasurer, A.W., in whose custody the money was, simply embezzled it. This was discovered in 2012. The investigation against him is secret.

What’s worse, the Obama administration has serious doubts about whether the testimony extracted in Stare Kiejkuty has any value at all, and about whether Abu Zubayda and An-Nashiri were truly as highly placed in the al-Qaida hierarchy as was thought. Much seems to indicate that they weren’t.

The recordings made of the torturing of terrorists (in Poland and elsewhere) are probably gone. The CIA destroyed them a few days after The Washington Post’s uncovering of the secret prisons.

The airport in Szymany went bankrupt in 2004. A few years later, lightning destroyed the ILS system emitters installed especially for the CIA planes. Two years ago, over the course of five days, thieves dug out the electrical cables powering the runway lights.

I used material from The Washington Post, The New York Times, Rzeczpospolita and Gazeta Wyborcza (Wojciech Czuchnowski, Agnieszka Kublik).