Tip Off

In Senate testimony last February, before he resigned as director, Goss said leaks had caused “severe damage” to the agency’s operations and called for full-fledged grand-jury investigations to find the leakers. "It is my aim, and it is my hope, that we will witness a grand-jury investigation with reporters present being asked to reveal who is leaking this information. I believe the safety of this nation and the people of this country deserves nothing less."

As part of an internal CIA probe into leaks about the CIA’s secret prison program, one senior officer, Mary O. McCarthy, was fired last April after agency officials said she acknowledged “unauthorized contacts with the media and discussion of classified information.” McCarthy’s lawyer, Ty Cobb, later denied she had been the source of the leak and no criminal charges have been filed against her.

Grey estimates in his book that there have been between 100 to 150 CIA renditions under the secret program, some of which have earned global notoriety. Indeed, in Italy prosecutors have filed criminal charges against more than a dozen suspected CIA officers accused of involvement in the rendition of an Islamic militant known as Abu Omar , who was allegedly apprehended off the streets in Milan and flown to Egypt. Prosecutors in Munich are conducting a similar inquiry into the case of Khalid al-Masri, a German citizen who was abducted while on vacation in Macedonia, held and questioned in a secret prison in Afghanistan and later released without explanation. A former German counterterrorism official recently told NEWSWEEK the abduction of al-Masri was a case of “mistaken identity” by the CIA; agency officials thought he was someone else.

Grey played a key role in assisting European governments and many Western journalists to discover the CIA’s role in these and other renditions through his investigative efforts. What Grey did was to take scraps of information about planes linked to the disappearances of Islamic militants around the world and vigorously trace the aircrafts’ origins. Local journalists in Sweden, for example, acquired the tail number of a plane believed to have been involved in the mysterious abduction of an Islamic militant in Stockholm in early December 2001. (Ironically this occurred only a few days after Grey interviewed Goss.)

Using the tail number and public databases—including databases maintained by the Federal Aviation Administration—Grey eventually was able to trace the ownership and licensing of the plane to companies and air-transport operations based at an obscure airport in North Carolina. Later, Grey acquired the numbers of other suspected CIA rendition aircraft , including a Boeing 737 passenger jet. He also managed to acquire unclassified flight-plan records tracking the movements, or at least the intended movements, of the suspected CIA planes around the world. By matching the dates of suspected renditions—or known disappearances—of Islamic militants with the flight plans of CIA planes, Grey not only put together detailed chronologies of how specific renditions apparently took place, but also built up a picture of how the agency moved suspects around the world, where they moved them to and how they apparently used sites in unlikely places—such as Eastern Europe—as part of the secret operation. The Washington Post later built on the raw information assembled by Grey to produce its now famous expose of alleged CIA secret prisons in Eastern Europe, which later triggered a major CIA leak investigation under Goss’s tenure as agency director.

© 2006