“Yeah, the guy’s here… . Yeah, he’s the same one.”
He hung up without, as I had hoped, handing me the phone. We then had a rather tense discussion about why I was looking for his sister, and he expressed surprise, which I believed genuine, to hear she might be working for the CIA.
“Impossible,” he said. “Just impossible.”
But when I asked whether she worked for the military or for a company that contracted with the military, he did not answer. When I suggested such an employer might have sent her on a mission like the one in Milan, he said that was far-fetched, but he started to seem reflective. A little later he said he and his sister had been raised by hard-working parents with good American values, and I said I had no doubt their values were American. He took my card, and I left.
An hour later he called me from a blocked phone number. He said he had been researching the kidnapping on the Web, and he sounded a little troubled by what he had found. He said he was truly sorry that anyone might have gotten tortured out of this thing. That was bad. But he added with a sudden flash of anger that I had done bad too. My surveillance had violated his family. I had terrorized them, did I understand? Terrorized. And what did I think of that?
“JAMES ROBERT KIRKLAND” grew up in the Ohio Valley, took a bachelor’s degree in a state adjoining his own, and dabbled in journalism and public relations before joining a police force. He served in many of the United States and rose through the ranks until, after twenty-five years, he was appointed the director of a force in a jurisdiction of a couple of million people. A few years later he left public service to become a consultant in private security and resettled in his homeland, where cottontails and Pentecostals were thick on the ground. (if god is your co-pilot, a church marquee near his home proclaimed, change seats. the ten commandments aren’t multiple choice, a rival offered.) From a colonnaded ranch house he and his wife commanded a substantial acreage on which stood a great barn in fine trim and a taut wooden fence painted a crisp, happy color. The sum bespoke a well-ordered prosperity. After the kidnapping, the Kirklands bought a nearby colonial manor and turned it into a tastefully appointed country lodge, which seemed mainly the project of Mrs. Kirkland. Using the alias of one of her farm animals, she reviewed the lodge favorably on a travel Web site. (The hosts, she said, were superlatively nice.) Her day job, which I am reluctant to divulge specifically, involved evacuation flights not dissimilar to the ones on which Abu Omar was rendered.
One of the two SIMs that Mr. Kirkland had used in Italy had been activated at the start of December of 2002, which made him one of the earliest-arriving spies, which in turn suggested he was a senior planner. During his more than two months in Italy, he or someone using his SIM had been a prolific caller to the United States, calling numbers that belonged to his octogenarian mother, his then girlfriend (the present Mrs. Kirkland), the veterinarian who cared for their farm animals, an apparent stockbroker, an apparent accountant, and himself, which is to say the landline in his (and now Mrs. Kirkland’s) home. He or someone using his SIM had also called an unregistered mobile phone in his home area code, which phone Jessica called five years later. A man answered, and Jessica told him about our search for a CIA officer or CIA hireling named James Robert Kirkland. The man replied that he didn’t know anyone named James Robert Kirkland and that if he himself was a CIA agent, he didn’t know that either.
“We think,” Jessica said, “that this Kirkland might know someone who uses this cell phone. Have you had it since 2003?”
“Yes.”
“Would you tell me your name?”
“I’d rather not.”
“Do you know anyone named——————?”—here mentioning Kirkland’s real name.
There was a very long pause.
“Yes, I do,” the man finally said. He sounded to Jessica, who has the exuberance of youth, “creeped the fuck out.”
“Alright, well—” she began.
“Thank you,” the man said, “goodbye.”
We were pretty sure we had our Kirkland. I was further encouraged in this belief by a photo I had found of the real Kirkland that compared favorably with the very dark (and therefore indeterminate) copy of the photo on the passport he had used in Italy. The two men, or, rather more probably, one man, of the photos had the same shape of head, which was more long than round; the same ears, long also; the same hair, close-cropped or lacking; the same unobtrusively sized nose; the same distance between the eyes; the same crease running from a spot between the eyebrows down the bridge of the nose; and the same crooked smile, which tugged up at the left side. I traveled to the Kirklands’ farm to see for myself.
When I arrived at the front door, Mrs. Kirkland, a slender woman of middle age, motioned through a window that I should walk around to the side of the house, where a large den had been added. Her first words on opening the side door were “How did you find us?” It didn’t seem like the greeting of an innocent.
I explained that I was interested in speaking with her husband about some of his law enforcement work, and she asked me to wait and left me in the den. It was homey—every surface draped in shawls, a watercolor in progress in one corner, a blaze in the hearth. Presently Mrs. Kirkland returned with her husband and a more composed countenance. The former was absurdly well preserved. On an earlier attempt that day to find them at home, I had spied a bench press in one of the outbuildings, and it was not hard to imagine Mr. Kirkland using it to ward off his more than sixty years. He was more agile than brawny, however, and he spent half the interview with his legs draped over the side of an armchair.
The Kirklands encouraged me to sit, and while Mrs. Kirkland fetched me a Diet Coke, I told Mr. Kirkland about my search. He said he guessed he ought to ask if I had some identification to prove I was who I said I was, and I gave him my business card. He looked at it, then he guessed he ought to ask if I had other identification—a driver’s license, say—and I gave him that too. He studied the watermark before transcribing my vitals, which I was sure were bound for the CIA. It was the only time in my career I have been carded.
Mrs. Kirkland returned, and both Kirklands professed great surprise that I had come to talk about a rendition. They knew almost nothing about renditions except that a movie called Rendition had been recently released. Was that the case I was looking into?
I said the movie seemed to be a composite of cases, but it had been poorly reviewed, so I hadn’t seen it. I explained the essentials of Abu Omar’s rendition and the phone calls that James Robert Kirkland had made from Italy to the family and associates of the real Kirkland in the Ohio Valley.
Mr. Kirkland said he had no idea why someone in Italy might have called his mother, his home, his wife, and other people he knew. For a few minutes he and Mrs. Kirkland hypothesized explanations. Finally he remembered that in or around 2003 his wallet had been stolen from a hotel room near Miami Beach. He had reported the robbery to the police, but nothing had come of it. Not long later, someone had tried to use his stolen credit cards, and he had had to change all of them and also several other accounts and his driver’s license. I knew the passport of the Italian Kirkland had been issued in Miami, and I wondered if this story was meant to explain the new identity he had acquired there.
Mr. Kirkland also said that after his wallet was stolen, he and Mrs. Kirkland got a lot of strange phone calls. I asked what was strange about the calls, and he uhhhed and errred for a while, from which I surmised that he was unable to manufacture an answer. Eventually he said that, well, Mrs. Kirkland had said she received some strange calls. I turned to Mrs. Kirkland and asked what was strange about them, but she could offer nothing either—not that the callers hung up as soon as she answered, not that there was heavy breathing, not that someone asked her to describe her undergarments. The calls were just strange. Notwithstanding his decades in law enforcement, Mr. Kirkland never tried to find out whether the caller could be identified, let alone traced to the person who stole his wallet. As for how Ki
rkland’s mother or his veterinarian or the others had come to be called, he now remembered that he kept in his wallet a list of numbers of people he often called. Evidently he had failed to memorize his mother’s number, though it seems she had had it for many years.
I wasn’t sure why the robber would want to call people close to Kirkland. “Wouldn’t that just increase the chances the robber would be caught?” I said.
He explained that the robber was probably trying to establish himself in Kirkland’s identity.
“From Italy?”
“It could happen.”
A little later he said, “So tell me again what was the name of the man who was captured?”
“Abu Omar.”
“Abu—Abu what?”
“Omar.”
“Omar, Omar. You spell that “O-M?”—he searched his mind for what might come next—“A? R?”
“Yes.”
“So where did all this take place, again?”
“Milan. Then they drove him to Aviano.”
“What’s Aviano?”
“An air force base.”
“Oh, it’s an air force base? Is it ours?”
He was trying too hard. But I was not actually embarrassed for him until he said, “And what will happen if the accused are tried in, in”—he paused and searched for the term. “In absentia? Is that what you call it?” There were not many senior law enforcers who, after a quarter century in the field, were unfamiliar with the term.
At another point he fretted that if I had been led to him in error, terrorists could be as well.
“It might sound paranoid,” he said, “but we don’t give them enough credit for how smart they are. No one thought 9/11 would happen, but it did.”
I agreed.
“So what can we do about it?” he said. “How can we put this to bed?”
“I suppose you could contact the CIA.”
“No, I don’t want to get involved with the CIA. What else can we do?”
I suggested that a man with his years in law enforcement might know people better able than I to answer the question. He seemed to see reason in this, then said, “You seem responsible. You’re not going to use our names, right?”
“How about I print your names and say you deny any involvement in the kidnapping?”
He did not think this sounded like a good idea. He said he and Mrs. Kirkland would just be tarred by association, and he quoted a famous law enforcer he once worked with who said of such denials, “The truth never catches up to the lies.” He did not seem to see the irony of deploying the aphorism in the present context.
Before I left, both Kirklands urged me to see Vantage Point, another recently released movie. In this one, swarthy terrorists killed Europeans by the hundred and nearly assassinated the visiting American president before being undone by a resourceful federal agent who, even before the movie began, had taken a bullet for the commander-in-chief. The Kirklands found it compelling in the utmost. I did not rush out to see it, as it had been even more poorly reviewed than Rendition, but on a plane home from Kirkland’s trial in Milan, I saw it in all its dumbed-down glory and had no trouble seeing Kirkland picture himself as the heroic agent saving Western Civilization to presidential admiration.
I bade the Kirklands goodbye. To leave their property, I had to continue up the long driveway past the den to a turnaround loop, then drive back down past the den before heading out the front gate. On my first pass, the Kirklands stood by the fireplace and waved pleasantly, if restrainedly. On my second pass, Mrs. Kirkland had dropped to a chair and put a fist to her mouth, as though biting her knuckles. As I continued down the drive, I glanced over my shoulder and saw her head drop into her hands.
ON LEAVING her second-secretaryship at the U.S. embassy in Rome, Sabrina De Sousa bought a townhouse on a dead-end street off the Dulles Parkway, added a deck, and held her peace for several years. But in May of 2009, a year after her trial started in earnest, she brought suit against the State Department for neither defending her in court nor invoking diplomatic immunity on her behalf. She then gave unenlightening interviews to reporters in which she maintained she was not a spy. “You can keep hammering away at me,” she told Congressional Quarterly’s espionage reporter, Jeff Stein, “but all I will say is I was a former federal employee. I worked for the State Department.” She said her superiors at “State” had urged her not to travel abroad because she might be arrested, which, were that to happen, would put the United States in a difficult position. But she had family who lived overseas (she had been born in India), and she found it intolerable not to visit them, so she had resigned and brought suit. Three months after she did, Barack Obama’s Justice Department said it would hire a lawyer of her choosing for the remainder of the trial, which, however, was by then only a few weeks from its end. But the administration would not invoke diplomatic immunity for her, no doubt because to have done so would have been construed a stronger endorsement of the kidnapping and would have provoked bigger headlines. She therefore continued her suit and denounced a government that let little people like her take the fall while the brass at Langley and the White House who had ordered the rendition got off. She had a point.
Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Romano, the security chief at Aviano, returned to the Pentagon after the kidnapping, was promoted to full colonel, then was posted to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Some months into his trial in Milan, while the other American defendants ignored the proceedings, he prevailed on the Air Force to give him a lawyer, who in turn argued that the NATO Status of Forces Agreement barred Italy from prosecuting him. SOFA, in the lawyer’s opinion, gave the United States the primary responsibility for trying U.S. servicemen in Europe who were accused of crimes like those with which Romano was charged. Spataro rejoined that SOFA did not apply to the crimes in question and that in any case the United States, by ignoring the case for years, had abdicated its responsibility to try Romano. Judge Magi agreed, and the case against Romano continued.
Jeff Castelli, the CIA chief of station in Rome, also returned home to a promotion, in his case at headquarters in Langley. By some reports, he was being groomed to take over the CIA’s important New York station. But after news of the sloppy rendition broke, he was admonished by a CIA review board and exiled to the Air War College in Alabama. Off the record, some CIA officials said that to win approval for the rendition, Castelli had misled headquarters into believing that DIGOS was keeping so poor a watch on Abu Omar that he could have pulled off a terrorist attack before anyone knew what was happening. The officials who said so, however, had an interest in throwing blame off headquarters and onto Castelli. Eventually Castelli quit the CIA and joined a private firm that, it seems, analyzed propaganda for the U.S. government.
IT IS BAD to lose your Italian estate but worse to lose it to the terrorist you kidnapped—a prospect that confronted Bob Lady because of an Italian law that let victims of crimes recover damages from their victimizers. If Lady were convicted at trial, and if the conviction withstood appeal, the Italian government would sell his villa and send the net to Abu Omar. A man could live in Alexandria like a pharaoh on the equity from a Piedmontese manse. The prospect must have been all the more depressing to Lady because for some time after he left Italy it was uncertain whether the trial would occur and he continued to pay the estate’s mortgage of $4,000 a month.
After Lady was indicted, reporters from all over the world wanted to talk to him, but initially he spoke to no one. In late 2006, however, freelance reporter Matthew Cole achieved a fine trionfo by chatting with him over coffee in a Florida strip mall. Cole’s eventual portrait, published in sorrowful strokes in GQ, was of a martyred spy who had fought the good fight only to be abandoned by his country. The govenment had not helped him with a lawyer, had not contributed to his mortgage, and, so far as he could see, had not pressed the Italians for a diplomatic solution. Sadder still, his wife had abandoned him too, although Lady said he could not blame her: he was powerless, frustr
ated, and had little to offer. He told Cole he was speaking out at last because he had nothing left to lose and hoped to shame the CIA into helping him. Also, he wanted it known that the kidnapping was not his fault. He had warned Castelli of its foolishness, but Castelli had not listened.
After leaving Italy, Lady earned his living by consulting on security matters, mostly in Latin America. He was also spotted visiting the Libyan mission to the United Nations in Geneva. The Swiss government had known he was in the country and ordered the federal police to watch him, but since Switzerland was not a member of the European Union, it was not compelled by Spataro’s warrants to arrest him.
For avocation, Lady essayfied. At least, it seemed to be he who published online, under the nom de plume of his dead father, a meditation on American leadership in time of war, with lessons culled from his upbringing in Honduras. Although the author of the tract did not mention the CIA, he seemed to have in mind a certain botched mission when he wrote, “At this time, we can’t help but vote for a party that knows how to deal with the uncertainties, the mistakes, and the sacrifices of real warfare.” That party, he clarified, was not the Democratic, which had become “flimsy, senseless, and prone to the vapors … in the perfumed salons of Manhattan and academia” and “whose notion of warfare is to wallop Christmas trees and boy scouts with stacks of legal papers.” He allowed, however, that in a time of peace one might consider whether the Republicans had screwed the working class, for example by repealing the estate tax.
Lady disappeared again from public view, but toward the end of 2007 his name appeared as the co-purchaser on a deed of sale of a house in Abita Springs, a mossy suburb of New Orleans where the driveways tended to dirt and a double-wide would not have insulted the prevailing architecture. Some people might have thought it a comedown from the estate in Penango. No one was home when I visited, nor did anyone answer queries I sent.
A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial Page 27
