NEWS > 23 July 2006

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San Jose Mercury News - CA, US
23 July 2006

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Frequent-flier data used to tr

WASHINGTON - The man and woman were pretending to be American business executives on international assignments, so they did what globe-trotting executives do. While traveling abroad they used their frequent-flier cards as often as possible to gain credits toward free flights.

In fact, the two were covert operatives working for the CIA. Thanks to their diligent use of frequent-flier programs, Italian prosecutors have been able to reconstruct much of their itinerary during 2003, including trips to Brussels, Venice, London, Copenhagen, Vienna and Oslo.

The Norway visit has assumed particular importance because it represents the first independent confirmation that CIA operatives were in that country at the same time an Oslo resident named Mullah Krekar was being warned that he was the target of a planned CIA abduction.

Weeks before arriving in Norway, prosecutors say, the two operatives were among more than two dozen CIA personnel who participated in the February 2003 abduction of a radical Islamic preacher named Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, as he walked to a mosque in Milan.

Aides to former CIA Director Porter Goss have used the word "horrified" to describe Goss' reaction to the sloppiness of the Milan operation, which Italian police were able to reconstruct through the CIA operatives' imprudent use of cell phones and other violations of basic CIA "tradecraft."

Goss ordered a sweeping review of the agency's field operations before stepping down in May, aides said.

It is unclear whether the CIA operatives intended to take advantage of the free flights garnered at government expense - CIA personnel on such assignments are permitted to fly expensive international business class_or whether they simply were attempting to bolster their covers as private-sector executives.

The Abu Omar case has resulted in criminal kidnapping charges by an Italian court against 25 CIA operatives, a U.S. Air Force colonel and at least eight senior officials of the Italian intelligence service SISMI, who allegedly assisted the American effort to put Abu Omar in the Egyptian prison where he still languishes.

A few weeks after Abu Omar was snatched off a Milan sidewalk and thrown into a waiting van, one of the alleged Milan kidnappers flew from New York to Oslo, according to frequent-flier records obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

Just days before the CIA man's arrival, Krekar's Norwegian lawyer, Brynjar Meling, wrote a letter to the Norwegian authorities stating that his client's safety was in jeopardy and asking for police protection.

"We had information from reliable intelligence sources," Meling said Friday. "We were told that it was a kidnapping plan. We were told that there were sent agents from the United States that were meant to bring Mullah Krekar to Guantanamo," the prison facility at the U.S. naval base in Cuba where hundreds of terrorism suspects are held.

Asked why he believed he had been tipped off about the Americans' intentions, Meling replied that "a lot of people with integrity in the (Norwegian) government didn't like the situation. And therefore, there was quite a lot of leaks, and some of them came to my knowledge."

The CIA man was followed by a 43-year-old female CIA operative who also is among the 26 Americans accused of kidnapping Abu Omar. The Tribune is not publishing the names of the pair because the CIA says they are still working under cover.

According to the woman's frequent-flier records, she landed in Oslo on June 3, 2003, on a flight from Washington, returning to Washington via London on Aug. 13.

At the time the CIA operators arrived in Oslo, news of Abu Omar's abrupt disappearance had not yet spread beyond his friends and family in Milan.

But, Meling said, Krekar was aware that two Egyptians living in Sweden had been seized in December 2001 and flown to Cairo, where both claim to have been tortured.

Meling asked for police protection, he said, because "Mullah Krekar was afraid that he could get the same destiny as those." Meling said he never learned whether the police added reinforcements to the officers who already had Krekar under surveillance.

Krekar also began making public statements, not taken seriously at the time, that he believed he was the target of a planned CIA "rendition," the agency's term for abducting suspected terrorists abroad and transporting them to third countries such as Egypt.

In the end, the CIA operatives flew home empty-handed. "There was too much noise," Meling said. "They couldn't do it without a lot of public mess and diplomatic trouble. Anyway, they wouldn't get any help from the Norwegian police."

Although the Iraq-born Krekar has been living in Norway as a political refugee since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, he became the focus of brief but intensive U.S. interest in early 2003.

The interest stemmed from his role as the founder of an extremist Islamic group, Ansar al-Islam, with which Abu Omar also was affiliated and which, during the run-up to the allied invasion of Iraq, began recruiting militant Islamists from Europe and North Africa willing to join the battle against the Americans.

Several members of Ansar al-Islam were subsequently arrested in Italy on charges of forging identity documents and helping recruit and transport "foreign fighters" to Iraq. A Milan judge later ruled that recruiting combatants by itself did not violate Italy's anti-terrorist laws.

More important to the Bush administration, as the invasion of Iraq drew near, was finding a link between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the terrorist organization al-Qaida, which was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

For a time it appeared that Ansar al-Islam might represent the missing link. A connection between Saddam, Ansar and al-Qaida was mentioned by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell when he addressed the United Nations on the eve of the Iraq war in February 2003.

Powell provided no details, however, and while Krekar and Ansar al-Islam have publicly supported al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden, the organization is composed primarily of Kurdish militants who opposed Saddam and wanted him dead.

"Saddam Hussein is my enemy. I have never met a member of al-Qaida," a puzzled Krekar, then 47, reportedly told the New York Times while watching Powell's speech from Oslo, where he still lives with his wife and four children while fighting a deportation order that would return him to northern Iraq.

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Article sourced from

San Jose Mercury News - CA, US23 July 2006

Frequent-flier data used to tr

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San Jose Mercury News - CA, US
23 July 2006