While European politicians in Copenhagen were setting the date for Poland’s admission to the EU, in Stare Kiejkuty, CIA agents were getting to work on Abu Zubayda, al-Qaida’s no. 3 man. This is Part 1 of a three-part Gazeta Wyborcza series.
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. As a result, it is a certainty that yet another installment of material about these prisons will leak to the media.
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 an American Senate committee, which has investigated the CIA prisons. The report from its investigations has not yet been published, but we already know what it contains. The senators accuse U.S. intelligence of having misled the White House by sending it enthusiastic reports about how many attacks were averted thanks to “enhanced” interrogation.
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 first part of a series that looks at the story from behind the scenes.
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“Why didn’t it land in Warsaw?” wondered Mariola Przewłocka, manager of the Szczytno-Szymany airport, as she looked puzzled over the documents of the airplane standing at the end of the runway. Not much could be seen, as the pilots had positioned the plane in such a way that the fuselage hid the waiting line of vans with darkened windows. People were bustling around the hatches, unloading something. From over a kilometer away one couldn’t tell what it was. Why had vehicles driven onto the landing strip, anyway? Did they drop someone off or pick someone up? As usual, stairs were brought to the door of the plane, but no passenger showed up at the airport terminal. These were not the only things that seemed strange to Przewłocka….
A Flight from Kabul
Szymany is a tiny airport, even by Polish standards. It is also located off the beaten track. It is made up of a two-kilometer landing strip and a small building, formerly military, housing the terminal and the control tower. This airport in the midst of the Mazurian wilderness was built by the Germans for the Luftwaffe. After the war, the two-kilometer-long airstrip was taken over by the Polish military, but airplanes only came here rarely. Szymany was just a reserve airport. In the middle of the 1990s, it became a civilian airport. But there was still no traffic — flight records show that the airport serviced at most 2,000 passengers each year. Most of them were German tourists who flew in on ATR-72 turboprops to visit their native parts. Little private planes also landed in Szymany occasionally.
But what landed on the airstrip on the hot Sunday evening of Sept. 22, 2003 was a 30-meter Boeing 737 with the American registration number N313P on the fuselage. Documents indicated that the plane belonged to a company registered in Massachusetts with the unrevealing name of Premier Executive Transport Services. The plane had taken off from Kabul eight hours earlier.
Thus Przewłocka and other airport employees were surprised. Such a large plane with an American registration number, which in addition had come from halfway across the world, landing in tiny Szymany, and not in the capital? It proved impossible to approach the plane and talk to the pilots. Only two Border Guard officers had access to the plane standing at the end of the runway; as they said, they had come especially for the purpose from Kętrzyn — an hour and a half away. Airport employees were barred from approaching the Boeing, and most of the staff had even been asked to leave the control tower. The tank-truck with jet fuel didn’t approach the plane either. The plane didn’t fuel up.
Less than an hour after it had arrived, the plane was back in the air. Its crew gave Bucharest as their destination. Several days later, a polite American showed up to settle the bill for using the airport. He paid over $2,650 in cash, a sum that was several times higher than the usual fee. This was supposed to be a bonus for the rush, because the airport had been informed of the plane’s arrival at the last minute. The bill bore the name of the mysterious American firm.
In Szymany, rumor had it that the mysterious flight was related to the intelligence school in nearby Stare Kiejkuty. The vans that had driven up to the Boeing had military license plates. One of the airport employees saw them later on the road leading to Kiejkuty. People speculated that perhaps the plane had brought an FBI or CIA delegation, particularly as, in addition to the Boeing, other smaller planes with American registrations had landed in Szymany during this period. The people in Szymany had other things on their minds, however: Fewer and fewer planes were coming to Szymany, and the airport was facing bankruptcy.
150 Kilograms of Green Bills
Exactly who was landing in Szymany and why was very well known to a handful of people working at 55 Miłobędzka Street in the Warsaw quarter of Mokotów. At this address, behind a two-meter-high hedge and a row of poplars, stands a building which houses the headquarters of the Intelligence Agency. This 40-year-old building covered in green slabs is the most hermetic facility in the sphere of Poland’s secret services. No journalist has ever been further than the guardhouse. We don’t therefore know what the corridors looked like along which, in early 2003, two high-ranking CIA operatives walked to the office of Colonel Andrzej Derlatka, the deputy head of Polish intelligence. It is clear, however, that they didn’t haul a special shipment, which had come by diplomatic baggage, upstairs with them. They most probably handed the cardboard boxes filled with banknotes to Derlatka in some underground garage. In this manner, Polish intelligence acquired $15 million, which at the time was an enormous sum for the agency. The budget of the Polish secret services is kept secret, but according to unofficial information, even today the bills in the cardboard boxes would suffice to cover half its yearly expenditures.
The colonel did not take delivery of the money alone because he wouldn’t have been able to. A million dollars in $100 bills weighs 10 kilograms. The Americans thus brought 150 kilograms of bills in all. Part of it was paid into the secret accounts of the Intelligence Agency; part was deposited in a safe where money from the operational fund was kept. Having finalized this transaction, Derlatka treated the Americans to a sumptuous dinner.
$15 million is the amount the United States paid so that Poland would allow CIA officers to use a villa located on the grounds of Military Unit No. 2669. This is the number of the intelligence school in Stare Kiejkuty. Just like the agency headquarters, the villa is separated from the outside world by a double barbed-wire fence patrolled by armed guards and monitored by hundreds of cameras. Beyond the fence is picturesque scenery: a lake, a forest and meadows. Before the war this was the training facility of the Nazi security service (SD). At the end of 2001 and beginning of 2002 the facility caught the eye of the CIA resident in Warsaw. He must have noticed that the facility is in the wilderness, under strict supervision, 20 kilometers from the nearest airport and, in addition, in a country with hardly any Muslims.
The Intelligence Agency readily handed the villa over to the Americans. But it did more than that. Poland undertook to help the Americans transport the prisoners from the airport, to provide the vans, the security, and to ensure that everything remained secret.
The CIA Black Site Archipelago
On Nov. 2, 2005, the Washington Post disclosed that “[m]ore than 100 suspected terrorists have been sent by the CIA into the covert system…” The newspaper added that over 30 of the most important prisoners were held in Eastern Europe. “The Eastern European countries that the CIA has persuaded to hide al Qaeda captives are democracies that have embraced the rule of law and individual rights after decades of Soviet domination. Each has been trying to cleanse its intelligence services of operatives who have worked on behalf of others — mainly Russia and organized crime.” The prisoners were kept in dark underground cells; they could not see a lawyer and had no visitation rights. Red Cross representatives were not allowed to see them.
The Poles never let a peep out about the affair. Dana Priest, the Washington Post reporter who uncovered the secret prisons, received information from CIA employees. Her informers — U.S. intelligence operatives — had had it with their superiors, especially with Porter J. Glass, who proved obedient to the White House and forced them to break the law. As had already happened at the CIA, they went to complain to the press.
Dana Priest’s text caused a political tsunami. Since her article, it has become clear that American intelligence detained captured al-Qaida combatants not solely at the camp in Guantanamo in Cuba, as had earlier seemed to be the case. Instead, it sent them to new allied countries so they could, on territory not subject to American jurisdiction, be tortured into giving evidence. Only a week after the attacks on the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush authorized such procedures by means of a special executive order. Details were ironed out later among trusted Justice Department advisers and experts. The CIA was entrusted with the job of hunting down, imprisoning and interrogating terrorists. But as it turned out, the agency didn’t have a clue about such work.
Unanimous Denials
Soon after the president’s order, a network of secret prisons, spread around the world, and a so-called Air-CIA were set up. The airline was made up of planes belonging to various front companies, and transported captured terrorists from country to country. It was an analysis of the itineraries of 16 CIA planes making over 1,200 flights between 2002 and 2007 that provided the chief evidence for the existence of the secret prisons, even though many planes flew empty — such flights were intended to confuse the tracks, just in case anyone thought of investigating them in the future.
As early as the beginning of 2005, journalists had begun to mutter about “black sites” in Morocco, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria or Pakistan — countries where torturing prisoners during interrogation is the norm. The article in the Washington Post cast an entirely new light on the matter, however. At the last moment, the paper’s editors decided to redact the names of the European countries that had worked with the CIA. They did this under pressure from the American administration — President Bush personally called the editor-in-chief about it.
But Human Rights Watch, a global human rights group, disclosed that the countries in question were Poland and Romania (Lithuania was later added to the list). In December 2005, the German weekly Stern found out — supposedly from a Polish intelligence worker — that the CIA prison in Poland was located in Stare Kiejkuty.
Old Europe shook in indignation. Franco Frattini, the EU commissioner for justice, made no bones about it and stated that should the information be confirmed, the EU countries that had worked with the CIA should lose their vote in the community.
In Poland, all that could be heard were unanimous denials. Ministers in the Law and Justice (PiS) and former Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) governments gave assurances that there were no secret prisons in Poland. “And there never were any,” added ex-president Aleksander Kwaśniewski. He was seconded by Zbigniew Siemiątkowski, an earlier Intelligence Agency chief.
“In the military facilities of the Mazurian district there is no place to locate such a prison,” added General Jan Szałaj, chief of staff of the Pomeranian Military District.
“It would have been discovered 15 minutes after it was established,” one intelligence officer told Gazeta Wyborcza. Another stated that locating a prison in Stare Kiejkuty was an absurd idea. Convoys with prisoners would have to drive through the center of Szymany, a town of 25,000 inhabitants. How could anything be kept secret in such conditions?
“The Americans would have to be idiots to build a prison in a country where they have no bases. On territory they do not control?” said a high-ranking employee of the Ministry of National Defense in surprise, asking why the world’s media wasn’t looking for prisons in Germany, where Americans have been based since the end of WWII. “The Boeing landed in Szymany not to pick up prisoners, but CIA officers who had visited the center in Kiejkuty,” he assured.
Siemiątkowski spoke in a same manner: “It’s no secret that Poland works closely with the CIA. Visits by its agents to Stare Kiejkuty are one of the forms of this cooperation. There are other secret facilities in Poland to which the CIA has access.”
Behind the scenes, the Polish government and the White House promised each other they would hush everything up. But the Council of Europe decided the matter needed to be thoroughly clarified. The investigation was entrusted to Dick Marty, a former Swiss prosecutor who had become famous for his fight against organized crime.
The Poles Knew What Would Happen
In keeping with Polish law, all facilities of key importance for national security have to be redacted from publicly available maps and satellite imagery. Therefore, the grounds surrounding the Polish intelligence training center in Stare Kiejkuty are blurred out on Google Maps. Nevertheless, one can see the shape of a roof in the forest on its periphery. The mysterious building is located 455 meters from the Intelligence Agency campus. American investigative journalists have found that a separate road leads to it, however.
It is known that the CIA gave the Polish secret prison the code name of Quartz. Did the Poles also give it a designation? This remains a secret. What is known, however, is that the Poles at first attempted to arrange everything in a civilized manner. With this in mind, they negotiated with the CIA a secret agreement that included, among other things, guidelines to be followed in case any guest of the former Nazi Sicherheitsdienst villa were to die. Given that such a scenario was taken into account on Miłobędzka Street, Polish intelligence had to be aware of what would be taking place at the Quartz facility. People did die in the “black sites,” as the prisons were called in the secret-service jargon.
In the winter of 2001, several people suffocated at the American Air Force base in Bagram in Afghanistan. Prisoners were kept then in steel containers. After this tragedy, the survivors were transferred to a prison made in an old brick factory near Kabul. One CIA officer there decided to soften up a resistant Taliban member. He had him undressed and chained to the floor for the night in an unheated cell. In the morning it turned out the prisoner had frozen to death.
Delta Force Rescues Jerzy Kos
The agreement for the rental of the villa was signed for Poland by Siemiątkowski himself. But the CIA chiefs to whom the document was sent for signing laughed at the idea. The prisons were to be secret, so there could be no paper trail, they argued. The Poles swallowed this and began to prepare for the Americans’ stay.
But the American millions were legalized. Initially, the donation transaction was illegal. Polish law made no provision for payments to be made by foreign allies to Polish special services. But six months before Derlatka met with the Americans, a provision allowing for financing from abroad appeared in the law on the Intelligence Agency. In addition, the authorities of the Warmińsko-Mazurskie Province, where Szymany and Stare Kiejkuty are located, unexpectedly received an additional $2.65 million from the state budget (this was established by journalists of the weekly Wprost). The sum was used, among other things, to purchase an ILS guidance system for the Szymany airport. Thanks to this, planes carrying CIA prisoners could land there even during blizzards and rainstorms.
In addition, the Intelligence Agency had placed its man in Szymany. As the Polish media later reported, his name was Jerzy Kos, the chairman of the airport. One of his first moves was a reduction of personnel, especially of security people. Did he wish in this manner to reduce the number of witnesses to the landings of U.S. planes? We can only guess. We know, however, that in 2004 he traveled to Iraq, liberated from Saddam Hussein, in order to arrange reconstruction contracts for the Polish building company Jedynka Wrocławska. He was abducted by Iraqi rebels, but rescued a few days later by commandos of the famous American Delta Force unit. The Americans were not as eager to rescue other foreigners who met similar difficulties.
From Thailand to the Mazurian District
The weather was freezing in Szymany on Dec. 5, 2002. The snow was thick on the runway. The strip was not cleared of snow because there was no reason to do so. No one expected guests in the Mazurian District in the middle of winter. In the afternoon, however, the monotony at the airport was broken by a phone call from the Main Border Guard Headquarters in Warsaw.
“Prepare the airport for a landing,” said a voice in the receiver. The approaching airplane had the status of a government flight — as if some official foreign delegation was coming to Szymany. The plows went to work immediately. The snow covering the runway had had time to freeze, however, and the machines had to tear off the ice. They managed to finish just in time.
When the American business-class Gulfstream V with registration N63MU was making its approach, the commanding officers asked the airport employees not to leave the building. The “Border Guards from Kętrzyn” showed up at the airport. They were, in fact, intelligence agents wearing Border Guard uniforms. Only they could approach the plane.
On board the Gulfstream were Abu Zubajda, considered by the CIA to be al-Qaida’s no. 3 man, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, suspected of having organized the attack on the American destroyer USS Cole. They had been flown from the “Cat’s Eye,” a secret prison near Bangkok in Thailand. It isn’t known if they exited onto the runway on their own feet. According to the reports of other Air CIA passengers, prisoners were drugged to unconsciousness for the time of the flight, in order to confuse them additionally. If they knew how long the flight had been, they would be able to tell how far they had been taken.
Five days later, the interrogations using so-called “enhanced techniques,” i.e., torture, began. At the same time, at the EU summit in Copenhagen, the date of Poland’s admission to the EU was being set. Just prior to Christmas, the Rywin Affair* broke out.
Coming and Going at the Airport
Stare Kiejkuty was the most important link in the CIA’s secret prison system. It wasn’t just anybody who ended up there — only terrorists whom the Americans considered to be at the very top in al-Qaida. The most important of them at the time was 37-year-old Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He is an operational commander and the alleged mind behind the attacks on the World Trade Center. He arrived in Szymany on March 5, 2003 in a Gulfstream with registration no. N379P. Also on board was his collaborator, Mustafa al-Hawsawi.
There was no need to drug Mohammed for the flight. When he was tied to his seat, with his back in the direction of the flight, he immediately closed his eyes. The Americans had not allowed him to sleep since they captured him in Pakistan five days previously. After the landing, the string of vans must have made a deliberate detour, because Mohammed later claimed the drive to the prison took over an hour.
Three months later, the same airplane (that Gulfstream would come to Poland three more times), brought Walid bin Attash, a Yemeni who was bin Laden’s bodyguard and supposedly personally chose the terrorists to take part in the attack on the World Trade Center, from Afghanistan. On the runway in Szymany, he crossed paths with al-Nashiri, whom the CIA was transferring to a secret prison near Rabat in Morocco, along with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, another terrorist involved in the September 11 attacks. It is probable they didn’t see or hear each other. Before they went outside, prisoners were blindfolded and had ear muffs placed on their ears.
Al-Shibh was interrogated more brutally in Stare Kiejkuty than in Africa.
Poland as a US State
American journalists estimate that about 10 prisoners went through “Quartz.” It is not known how precise this figure is. The prison’s span of operation was short. Already in the summer of 2003, the CIA decided to transfer its prisoners to a facility referred to as “Bright Light.” This was the designation of a secret prison located in Romania, on the grounds of a guarded complex of the National Register of Secret Information in Bucharest. The prisoners were taken there by the aforementioned Boeing 737. According to documents released by the Polish Border Guard, five persons boarded the airplane in Poland. In one sweep, the plane visited the most important secret prisons — besides Stare Kiejkuty and Bucharest, it landed in Kabul and Rabat in Morocco. The five-day long journey ended at the American base in Guantanamo where — next to the prison for terrorists already known to the entire world — there was also a secret prison designated by the code-name “Strawberry Fields.”
It would seem the CIA closed down the Polish prison because it feared that the program would be compromised. The agency was aware that, sooner or later, someone in Poland might start asking inconvenient questions about their planes. The facility in Romania was more recent, meaning that for some time, the risk of the operation being outed was much smaller. Later, the prisoners from “Bright Light” were transferred to Lithuania. The secret prison in Lithuania — designated by the code-name “Amber Rebuff” — was built on the grounds of a former riding school 20 kilometers from Vilnius. Both facilities were built by Kyle Foggo, the head of the CIA’s support base in Europe. The prisons looked identical on the inside, in order to further confuse the detainees.
The Romanians and Lithuanians were as earnest to work with the CIA as the Poles. “They were so grateful to us for inclusion in NATO that they would have agreed to anything,” said a high ranking CIA employee to American journalists. “Poland was the 51st U.S. state. The only ones not to know about it were ordinary Americans,” said another.
No Final Confirmation for the Time Being
In the spring of 2006, Dana Priest received the Pulitzer Prize and several other prestigious awards for having uncovered the CIA prisons. The CIA was looking for the source of the leak; Director Porter J. Goss ordered hundreds of persons to undergo a lie-detector test. Mary McCarthy, 61, a senior analyst at the CIA inspectorate — the internal U.S. intelligence police — failed to pass it. The woman admitted her guilt and the agency fired her as a disciplinary measure. But it was the turn of Director Goss to leave in May. He left in an atmosphere of civil war, which he had brought about by running secret prisons and by ruthlessly searching for the leak afterward.
Meanwhile, Dick Marty promised he would eventually discover the CIA’s secret prisons by analyzing satellite images of the suspected locations. But this wasn’t as simple as it seemed. His requests for the images remained unanswered for months, and certain EU countries (including Poland) refused to assist him in any manner. In January 2006, Marty admitted to the European Parliament that the only evidence he had was that CIA planes used European airports. He had been unable to confirm the information about the existence of the secret prisons. It seemed that, once again, a mountain had given birth to a mouse….
I used materials that appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times and Gazeta Wyborcza, among other sources.
PART II: The CIA’s secret prison in Poland was overseen by Mike Sealy, a CIA officer of 20 years. His subordinates included analyst Deuce Martinez and Albert El Gamil, originally from Egypt. The latter treated the prisoners worst. He used a drill during interrogations.
PART III: In a case like this, every other American lawyer would make millions, but he is representing Abu Zubayda free of charge. As he says, he feels sorry for his client. The torture he was subjected to, including in Poland, caused permanent brain damage. “But he is innocent!” Interview with Joseph Margulies, counsel of the person considered by the CIA to be al-Qaida’s no. 3 man.
*Editor’s note: The Rywin Affair was a corruption scandal involving Poland’s largest newspaper and the minority social democratic government.
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