When he was brought in for interrogation, he at first refused to cooperate, but in the story told by the SHIK officers he soon changed his mind and talked—a lot. One of the officers described Abu Omar as “smooth and calm, probably because he wasn’t under pressure from us. He was never aggressive with us. We didn’t use a lot of physical pressure on him. He was well-behaved and gentle.” What a SHIK officer might mean by “We didn’t use a lot of physical pressure on him” is probably very different from what an FBI agent, or even a Chicago cop, might mean by the same phrase. Supposedly Abu Omar told the officers that he had been a member of Gamaa in Egypt and had come to Albania because it was a “safe hotel”—a place where exiled Islamists could stay a few years without fear of persecution. He said that Gamaa members in Albania would not attack the visiting minister because they did not want to invite reprisals that would shut down their hotel. He also identified the employees of Islamic charities in Tirana who belonged to Gamaa and told what he knew of their duties. Some of the charities, the CIA would eventually conclude, financed terrorism.
Abu Omar’s chattiness surprised the SHIK officers. They had never had an Arab informer before. Now they had one who practically would not stop talking. “After a week,” one interrogator said, “we had a full file.” The CIA verified much of what was in the file and congratulated the SHIK men on their catch. The CIA’s praise was greater still when SHIK asked Abu Omar to inform on his colleagues after his release and he said yes. Let go, he was true to his word. In return, SHIK helped him resolve a problem with his residency permit and may have helped settle a dispute with the landlord of the building where his bakery was to open. About three months into his career as an informer, however, he packed up his family and fled to Germany. The SHIK officers were surprised. They had thought him an essentially willing collaborator, but he had either fooled them to win his release or had a change of heart after he got out.
This history, if true, may explain why when the CIA rendered Abu Omar to Cairo in 2003 the Egyptian basha offered to return him to Italy if he would become an informer. Having once betrayed his friends, he might have been expected to recidivate. Certainly with the Iraq War about to start, the CIA would have appreciated an inside man who could say when and how Europe’s Islamists were sending suicides to Iraq.
But the Tribune’s story is not a sure thing. For one reason, the CIA seems not to have told DIGOS, the Carabinieri, or SISMI that Abu Omar had informed in Albania, which is odd because there was little reason to hide his collaboration. Odder still, if Bob Lady can be believed, even he did not know Abu Omar had been an informer. It is hard to imagine why the CIA would have kept the fact, if fact it was, from its own officer assigned to monitor the man. It is possible, then, that the CIA and SHIK concocted the informer story, although why they might have done so is not clear. One theory is that the CIA wanted to suggest that Abu Omar had not been kidnapped but had gone willingly to Cairo with the CIA, in which case Spataro’s prosecution was moot. At the time the Tribune published the story, Spataro’s first warrants had just been made public, and it was far from certain that his charges would advance to trial. Abu Omar, incommunicado in prison, could not offer his competing story of abduction and torture. It is a riddle that remains to be solved.
IN THE SPRING of 2007, a few weeks after Abu Omar was released from prison the second time, he began talking with reporters against the advice of the State Security Service. Clearly he was gambling that international celebrity would keep the government from rearresting him, and in the first days at least, his gamble worked. I decided to go to Egypt to speak with him before his luck ran out. Before I left, I contacted his lawyer, Montasser El-Zayat. El-Zayat had once been Ayman al-Zawahiri’s lawyer and had helped broker the nonviolence accords between Gamaa and the Egyptian government. Now he was brokering audiences with Abu Omar as tight-fistedly as a press agent for Angelina Jolie. He said through a translator that I could interview Abu Omar in Alexandria, but I must first visit him, El-Zayat, in Cairo, and I could not contact Abu Omar in the meantime. I arrived in Cairo and waited several days for him to honor our appointment. When finally he did, I beheld a mountain of a man in a finely tailored suit of light gray pinstripe that had required the sacrifice of two or three bolts of tropic-weight wool. He loomed over a computer desk and answered my translated questions tersely while checking his e-mail. His manner implied a robust estimation of his own worth. At the end of the interview, he surrendered Abu Omar’s mobile phone number.
Out on the street, my translator called Abu Omar in Alexandria and asked to set a date for the interview. Abu Omar replied, the translator told me, that he usually charged €4,000 for an interview but that since I was a freelancer he would talk to me for only €2,000.
I was not sure I had understood right.
“Did he say he’s charging for the interview?”
“He did.”
“Did he say two thousand euros?”
“He did.”
The translator gave me a look that communicated both sympathy for me and a suspicion that he might have grossly undercharged for his services, which, however, had not been a bargain.
“Please tell him,” I said, “that El-Zayat said nothing about paying for an interview, either just now or when I e-mailed him from home.”
This was communicated, and a reply given.
“He says,” my translator said, “that he doesn’t know anything about the arrangements with El-Zayat. He says if you want to talk to him, you have to pay.”
It was an excellent bait and switch. El-Zayat knew, as I later verified, that his client was selling his interviews, and Abu Omar knew that El-Zayat was letting him set the price.
I asked the translator to wait a moment while I debated whether to pay. The question was not whether to pay €2,000—that figure was obviously a starting point from which Abu Omar expected to be bargained down and which, in any event, I could not afford. The question was whether to pay something less. Over the years, I had always turned down such requests, mainly because paying can corrupt. Give a man $3,000 to tell you whether he was kidnapped by the CIA, and he may tell you he was kidnapped whether he was or not. Then, too, a reporter who pays $3,000 may be more inclined to hear what he hopes to hear. He wants his money’s worth. In Abu Omar’s case, however, there was already independent evidence attesting to his story, and I was not interested in breaking news that might be corrupted. I wanted chiefly to take the measure of the man and to get clarifying details about mostly undisputed events. Additionally, although most American publications refused to pay sources—partly to guard against corruption but also to guard their profits—some made exceptions. In 2001, for example, the Wall Street Journal paid $1,100 to the looter of a bombed al-Qaeda compound in Kabul who had retrieved a computer with important files that revealed how al-Qaeda worked. The Journal reported the contents of the files, acknowledged having paid $1,100 to get them, and let readers decide if it had done right. I thought the Journal had.
Reporters who interviewed Abu Omar before me had not. They had paid him, then neglected to report the fact. One international news network, I later learned off the record, paid €7,000 for an early interview. Other reporters paid from a few to several hundred euros. One reporter for a prominent European journal made a gift of some hundreds of euros to Abu Omar’s wife to maintain the fiction that the interview had not been bought. My colleagues had betrayed their readers, to say nothing of setting me up.
It seemed to me, both in the seconds I thought this through and on later reflection, that Abu Omar was historically unique—in the class of the computer from Kabul. He was the only person in more than five years of the “War on Terror” to have been snatched by the CIA and to have emerged to tell the tale. (Two innocents, Khaled ElMasri and Maher Arar, had also survived rendition, but they had been arrested almost gently, not kidnapped, and could say nothing of the “black ops” aspect that seemed central to renditions. They also had not been taken to Egypt, America’s leading o
ffshore torture center.) If I could have been certain that Abu Omar would not have been arrested again soon, I would have waited a few months until his news value had cooled and he was willing to speak gratis to keep his story alive. But I could not be certain that Egypt would leave him be. My chief remaining concern was whether, if I paid him, he might convert his honorarium to terrorism. But I decided the possibility was an unlikely one. No doubt he was closely watched by the Egyptians, and in any case they would not have let him go if they suspected he was a serious threat.
“Tell him,” I told my translator, “that I won’t pay for just a single interview. Tell him I’m writing a book and need to hear his story in depth. I’ll need many interviews—half a dozen or maybe even a dozen. If he’ll agree to that, I’d give him a few hundred dollars.”
This was relayed.
“He says a thousand dollars.”
“Less.”
“Seven hundred.”
We settled on four hundred, the first interview to be the next evening, half the money to be paid at the outset. It added new meaning to “paying a visit.”
I FOUND ALEXANDRIA bedraggled but not, despite the prevailing Islamism, disagreeable. There were a few inviting hookah bars, though their invitations were extended to men only, the street stalls bustled, and the breeze off the Corniche reached even the dismal, bug-ridden closet where I lodged to save money to pay Abu Omar’s tithe. At the appointed hour, I walked with a new interpreter to Abu Omar’s flat, which lay inland on a quiet side street. Chunks of plaster had fallen off nearby edifices, but the neighborhood was less shabby than most in town, and there were signs of a modest prosperity, like a tiny Internet café and pedestrians in clothes not long off the rack. The children who minded the small shop near Abu Omar’s building had grown used to reporters standing puzzled in the street, trying to discern which building was his. “Abu Omar?” they said, and pointed to the right one. We rang him, and he said he would be down directly.
A minute later the great wooden door at the base of the building swung open, and in the doorway stood a tiny man in a gray galabia. He seemed a miniature copy of the Abu Omar I had seen in pictures, and I realized later that his reputation as a man of violence, combined with a fieriness of eye in the pictures, had enlarged him in my mind. (A woman who sat next to me on the flight to Egypt had caught a glimpse of one of those pictures and said, “Something is not right with that man.”) There was no fire in Abu Omar’s eyes today. His greeting was all smile.
Reporters who had interviewed him before me had described a near invalid who walked only with the greatest labor and was gasping before he reached the top of the four flights of stairs to his apartment. But the Abu Omar before us today practically leaped up the steps. Perhaps he had healed or, alternatively, had been lightened by the prospect of the two hundred American dollars that would greet him at the top. (Then, too, perhaps my colleagues had struck a better bargain than I.) If he had healed, he may subsequently have had a setback, whether to his health or to his fee, because reporters who came after me also saw more enfeeblement than I did. In general, few reports I read described his pain with nuance, I suppose because doing so might have made him seem less devastated by all he had endured. Reporters also tended to describe his apartment as cramped and its furnishings, save for two large, gold-colored chairs in the room where he held court, as spare. But the apartment I saw would have been considered normal in size in a comparable Western city, its crisply painted walls were probably adorned lightly because of Islamist views on art, not because of poverty, and among its fittings were a large, ornately carved dining room table and a desktop computer that was literally sparkling new: it had a transparent casing with innards that lit up when the machine whirred (the screen saver was a photo of Mecca). By the standards of Egypt, Abu Omar was making out, and even by the standards of the First World he was doing well.
We had not been seated a minute when he asked for the earnest money and reminded me he was doing me a favor by cutting his normal rate. I handed over two hundred and fifty dollars, the extra fifty a demonstration of good faith, unwarranted though it was. He counted the bills with the proficiency of a bank teller.
I asked how much English he spoke, and he said, “A lee-tul.” I asked about Italian, and he said, “Un po’.” So we proceeded through my interpreter, a kindly medical student who was one of few Egyptians who did not try to extort the last dollar from my wallet.
Abu Omar spoke with his eyebrows, which had natural peaks, like accents circonflexes, that became exaggerated when he was impassioned. In extreme passion they crested to Matterhorns. He could also compress a lot of expression into the sweep of an arm or the stiffening of his spine. But although he told some parts of his story with animation, for long stretches of time he sank deep into his chair, flapped his legs idly together, and narrated without heat. If he had once been warmed by more of his tale, repetition had cooled him. He may also, like other survivors of trauma, have disassociated himself from the pain of the events. Perhaps because of this detachment and also because his voice had a thin, top-of-the-throat quality, I had a hard time imagining his captivating the Islamic flocks of Italy, no matter how much expression he packed into his gestures. I wondered if something was being lost in translation, but my interpreter later said he did not find Abu Omar eloquent in Arabic or charismatic in general. He did, however, have a clear, linear style of speech (this happened, then that happened, then that) and a gallows humor, as when he said of the tendency of the Egyptian police to beat first and ask questions later, “Violence is the Egyptian way of showing love.” Both traits must have served him well in the pulpit.
Early in our interview, there came a gentle knock at the door of our room, and Abu Omar went out and returned with tasty yogurt-based drinks and cookies. His wife was our unseen hostess. A couple of hours later, there was another soft knock, and he disappeared and came back with more drinks. The courses, if not quite a bargain at $125 each, were still a nice touch.
Abu Omar’s story was that which I have told in preceding chapters, fleshed out by and checked against other sources where possible. More than once he stressed that he had never been involved with terrorists and had always loved Americans and other Westerners. Indeed, he still did, even after all he had been through, though he thought less highly of their governments. Not long before my arrival, he had called on terrorists in Iraq to release two German hostages. “What are the German mother and the son guilty of?” he had pled. “What have they got to do with the foreign policy of their country?” (The mother was released.) He would later show a visitor a bag of Christmas cards from well-wishers in Britain and said it gave him strength to know such people existed.
He also emphasized that he had never informed for Albania’s SHIK or any other government, although during his torture in Egypt he had blurted out all kinds of things, which he did not now want to elaborate, that he thought his torturers might want to hear. I asked him about a recent report in GQ, anonymously sourced, that he had collaborated more willingly than that after his rendition. The report said that CIA officers had watched the first days of his interrogation in Cairo on a video feed outside the interrogation room. He had not yet been tortured. From time to time his Egyptian interrogators emerged from the room and consulted with the CIA officers on how to get him to talk. During one of these consultations, the Americans said that before Abu Omar was kidnapped, his stepson, Nabila Ghali’s son by prior marriage, had gotten into a fight with a friend and had asked Abu Omar what to do. Abu Omar told his stepson he must apologize. The CIA officers suggested that the interrogators tell Abu Omar they had a message from his stepson: he had heeded Abu Omar’s advice and apologized. It might soften Abu Omar, somehow, to hear it. Sure enough, in the GQ story, when Abu Omar heard his son’s “message,” he wept and was moved to cooperate with his questioners. He talked for days. Torture had not been necessary. When he had talked himself out, the CIA officers left, and only then did the torture begin, apparently more for ret
ribution than for information. To me, the GQ story sounded awfully convenient in exempting the CIA and more particularly Bob Lady—who had been in Cairo during this period and who was the source of other material in the article—from direct involvement in torture. In answer to my question, Abu Omar said his interrogators had indeed told him of his stepson’s apology, but their disclosure had been preceded by torture and, rather than prompting him to talk, had caused him only to wonder why they had brought up this irrelevant vignette. It was bizarre. He assumed that since the information must have been obtained via a bug in Milan, a foreign intelligence agency must have been cooperating in his interrogation.
As for his current state, he said—and I believed—that he was depressed and had trouble concentrating, that he still awoke screaming at night and broke out trembling during the day, that the smallest irritant could send him into a rage, and that the tranquilizers he took afforded him only slight relief. He also took medicine for his heart, which apparently had been damaged by the electroshocks and other horrors of prison, and his bones and joints ached even at rest. If he was like other victims of torture, most of what ailed his body would heal, but his troubles of mind and spirit would persist. “Twenty-two years later,” wrote Jean Améry, a Jew who was tortured by the Nazis in the Second World War, “I am still dangling over the ground by dislocated arms, panting and accusing myself.” Améry eventually killed himself.
A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial Page 25
