Tip Off

“Well, there is a polite way to take people out of action and bring them to some type of justice,” Goss then says. “It’s generally referred to as a rendition. It's what I would have preferred to do with [former Yugoslavian president Slobodan] Milosevic instead of bombing the hell out of a sovereign nation we're not at war with. It probably would have been smarter to think of a rendition."

Grey writes that it was this offhand comment by Goss that alerted him to the existence of the highly classified CIA program of “snatches and imprisonment that operates outside normal rules.”

“It gave me the germ of the idea,” Grey said in an interview. “This is where I heard about it. He set me on the trail.”

Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, a spokeswoman for Goss, dismissed the idea that Goss had disclosed anything classified or sensitive when he made his remark about rendition to Grey.

“Although that may have been the first time Mr. Grey heard the term, it certainly is not the first time the U.S. government publicly discussed this decades-old tool,” she said in an e-mail response to NEWSWEEK.

“In the ’80’s, [director of Central Intelligence William] Webster discussed rendering terrorists with The Washington Post,” Dyck continued. “During public testimony in 2000, which is easily found on CIA’s public website, Director [George] Tenet openly touted the work done with foreign governments to render terrorists to justice including associates of Usama [sic] Bin Laden. And after 9-11, the U.S. has continued to publicly site [sic] renditions as a critical tool in the War on Terror.”