Plane Spotting
How aviation hobbyists put vital evidence about secret CIA flights on the Web—and provided evidence for lawsuits about detainee abuse.
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Updated: 3:54 p.m. ET Dec. 14, 2005
Dec. 14, 2005 - When I finally got him on his cell phone, Javier Rodríguez had his Canon trained on Tenerife airport in the Canary Islands, and he was zooming in with a 500mm lens. Rodríguez normally works at a bank, but his passion is hunting aircraft, taking pictures, checking tail numbers, posting his findings on the Web. The hobby of plane spotting is sort of like jet-fueled bird-watching; you look for variety, color, rarity. You click off a few shots; you share them with friends. Apart from an occasional scare when a pilot confuses a long lens with a rocket launcher and radios the tower, this is a pretty innocuous obsession. Or so it was until the beginning of this year, when reports in NEWSWEEK and other publications caught up with “Air CIA.”
Ever since, plane spotters have played a key role keeping the issue of so-called “torture flights”—and images of the aircraft themselves—in front of the public eye. Last week, they and their pictures were more in demand than ever as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice toured Europe and found herself dogged at every stop by questions about the aircraft—Boeings and Gulfstreams—using European airports and transiting European airspace.
After countless refusals to talk about the planes and their destinations because, er, they were secret, and repeated denials that the United States practices torture, as narrowly defined by the Bush administration, Rice did quell some of the criticism from NATO allies. After all, many European governments seem to have known what was going on in their air space, or at least knew enough not to want to know. Yet this issue won’t go away. The plane spotters took it out of the hands of government, in fact. They put vital evidence on the Web, unwittingly at first, that human-rights organizations and parliamentarians have used to launch lawsuits and demand explanations.
The Bush administration, as we know, wants to put alleged evildoers beyond the reach of the U.S. Constitution, the Geneva Conventions and, in some cases, common decency. The lucky ones get sent to the legal limbo of Guantánamo. Others wind up being worked over in secret at foreign sites by un-American inquisitors that Rudyard Kipling might have called “lesser breeds without the law.” Of course, if terrible things are done in these places, Washington deplores them and denies responsibility.
“We rely on our law to govern our operations,” Rice said last week as she started on her European tour. The full text, available on The Shadowland Journal, cynically obscures questions of responsibility behind a cloud of noble intentions (to spread freedom and human rights) and pragmatic purpose (to squeeze vital information out of presumed terrorists at almost any cost).
According to Rice, “renditions” of one sort or another have been used “for decades” by “the United States and other countries” (a bit of condoweasel-wording that thus neatly fudges any discernible timeline). “Renditions take terrorists out of action, and save lives,” she claimed. Former CIA director George Tenet listed “the rendition of many dozens of terrorists prior to September 11, 2001” as “earlier counterterrorism successes,” Rice noted. Of course she ignored the most salient fact about those rendition “successes”: they did nothing to stop 9/11. She also failed to mention that two alleged Egyptian terrorists rendered from Albania to Cairo in 1998 were not just detained incommunicado and tortured, according to Human Rights Watch, they were put to death.
Since 2001, the Bush administration has made “extraordinary renditions,” well, pretty ordinary. When a radical Islamist preacher known as Abu Omar was snatched off the street in Milan in February 2003, the team that grabbed him treated the event so casually it left an extensive paper trail and incriminating phone records that tracked straight to the American airbase at Aviano. Italian judges have now issued arrest warrants for a total of 22 known and presumed CIA agents charged with kidnapping and related crimes.
Rodríguez and his buddies in the Majorca chapter of the "Iberian Spotters” club say they really had no idea they were plunging into the middle of this mess when they photographed some of the nondescript corporate planes that touched down at their local airport. “Business jets don’t attract a lot of attention,” Rodríguez shouted over his cell phone as an airliner roared above his head last weekend. “We’d take pictures of them when there really was not much else to do.”
Then, in January 2004, club member Josep Manchado snapped a white Boeing 737 with the tail number N313P. Soon after he posted the picture on a site called Airliners.net, Manchado started to get strange e-mails from what purported to be news organizations in Sweden, Germany and the United States. They seemed to be more interested in him than in actually buying the photographs. “They were crude,” Manchado told me over the phone this morning. “They were asking me for the number of my identity card, my address, my phone number.” Manchado, whose day job is urban planning, says he was puzzled by so much interest in this particular picture, and in him. Then—no more inquiries for almost nine months.
The next contact came at the beginning of this year when a German television network contacted Manchado while looking into the case of a naturalized German citizen who told a horrific tale of abduction and torture. On Dec. 31, 2003, Khaled el-Masri had taken a bus from the Germany city of Ulm to Macedonia, where he thought he was going to spend his holiday. Instead, he was detained at the Macedonian border and held incommunicado in a Skopje hotel for 23 days, under interrogation by local security forces. On Jan. 23, 2004, he says he was driven to an airport, handcuffed and blindfolded. There he was beaten by men using their fists and what felt like a stick.
According to a complaint filed last week in U.S. Federal Court by the American Civil Liberties Union on al-Masri’s behalf, “his clothes were sliced from his body with scissors or a knife, leaving him in his underwear. He was told to remove his underwear and he refused. He was beaten again, and his underwear was forcibly removed. He heard the sound of pictures being taken. He was thrown to the floor. His hands were pulled back and a boot was placed on his back. He then felt a firm object being forced into his anus.”
The complaint says el-Masri was dragged to a corner of the room and his blindfold removed. A flash went off in his face, but he was able to see seven or eight men dressed in black and wearing ski masks. “One of the men placed him in a diaper,” according to the ACLU filing. “He was then dressed in a dark blue short-sleeved track suit, and placed in a belt with chains that attached to his wrists and ankles. The men put earmuffs and eye pads on him, blindfolded him, and hooded him.” He was marched to a waiting plane where he was “thrown to the floor face down and his legs and arms were spread-eagled and secured to the sides of the plane. He felt an injection in his shoulder, and became lightheaded. He felt a second injection that rendered him nearly unconscious.”
That same day, Jan. 23, 2003, Manchado had taken his picture of N313P on the ground at Palma, Majorca. Aviation records show that it took off that afternoon and landed at Skopje at 8:51 p.m. “The jet left Skopje more than three hours later,” according to the ACLU complaint, “flying to Baghdad and then on to Kabul, the Afghan capital.” It appears that by coincidence, Manchado had taken a picture of that particular Boeing on its way to becoming el-Masri’s torture flight. No wonder he started getting mysterious e-mails.
For almost four months, el-Masri was held and grilled at a CIA facility known as the “Salt Pit” in an old brickworks outside Kabul. Eventually his captors concluded they had the wrong man. They put him on another secret flight, flew him to Albania, drove him out into the countryside, and abandoned him there. When el-Masri finally got home to Ulm and started to tell his tale, it seemed scarcely credible—until Manchado’s picture of N313P, along with Federal Aviation Administration records, provided vital corroboration.
Today you can see snapshots of the aging 737 when it was still in the fleet of Piedmont Airlines during the 1980s; or more recently, in its nondescript white guise, at Frankfurt; Geneva; Oporto, Portugal, and over Tulsa, Okla., in 2003 and 2004. But the story at Palma, Majorca, wasn’t quite over.
On March 10, 2004, Machado noticed N313P again when he was taking a flight to a nearby island. On March 12, it was still there, and another Iberian Spotter named Toni Marimon photographed it taking off. Why it stayed for so long is unknown, but a coincidence of dates disturbs some conspiracy-minded Spaniards. It was on March 11, 2004, that terrorists launched a horrific series of bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people.
After N313P was identified publicly late last year as part of “Air CIA,” it suddenly changed hands, from one little-known company to another, and got a new tail number: N4476S. Rodríguez remembers staking out the Palma airport last January. “I got off work about three. It was a nice afternoon, so I went to see if there were any planes.” And there it was. “There was no one around. There were no guards. It had as low a profile as possible; there was nothing to say, ‘There’s something here'.”
Since then, Rodríguez has traveled some considerable distance looking for planes involved with similar intrigues. He was in Tenerife last week, far out in the Atlantic, just about the time an alleged Croatian war criminal was due to be flown from there to The Hague for trial. But it’s unlikely any plane spotters will ever again fix their lenses on as many CIA flights as the ones on the Mediterranean resort of Majorca, and one might ask why? One theory is that it’s a convenient and relatively quiet stopping place on the way to North Africa, where the CIA now has good friends in Morocco, Libya and Algeria, as well as Egypt. Another is that the island’s luxury hotels offer ample rest and relaxation for the crews. Of course the passengers they pick up later are treated a little differently.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
How aviation hobbyists put vital evidence about secret CIA flights on the Web—and provided evidence for lawsuits about detainee abuse.
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Updated: 3:54 p.m. ET Dec. 14, 2005
Dec. 14, 2005 - When I finally got him on his cell phone, Javier Rodríguez had his Canon trained on Tenerife airport in the Canary Islands, and he was zooming in with a 500mm lens. Rodríguez normally works at a bank, but his passion is hunting aircraft, taking pictures, checking tail numbers, posting his findings on the Web. The hobby of plane spotting is sort of like jet-fueled bird-watching; you look for variety, color, rarity. You click off a few shots; you share them with friends. Apart from an occasional scare when a pilot confuses a long lens with a rocket launcher and radios the tower, this is a pretty innocuous obsession. Or so it was until the beginning of this year, when reports in NEWSWEEK and other publications caught up with “Air CIA.”
Ever since, plane spotters have played a key role keeping the issue of so-called “torture flights”—and images of the aircraft themselves—in front of the public eye. Last week, they and their pictures were more in demand than ever as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice toured Europe and found herself dogged at every stop by questions about the aircraft—Boeings and Gulfstreams—using European airports and transiting European airspace.
After countless refusals to talk about the planes and their destinations because, er, they were secret, and repeated denials that the United States practices torture, as narrowly defined by the Bush administration, Rice did quell some of the criticism from NATO allies. After all, many European governments seem to have known what was going on in their air space, or at least knew enough not to want to know. Yet this issue won’t go away. The plane spotters took it out of the hands of government, in fact. They put vital evidence on the Web, unwittingly at first, that human-rights organizations and parliamentarians have used to launch lawsuits and demand explanations.
The Bush administration, as we know, wants to put alleged evildoers beyond the reach of the U.S. Constitution, the Geneva Conventions and, in some cases, common decency. The lucky ones get sent to the legal limbo of Guantánamo. Others wind up being worked over in secret at foreign sites by un-American inquisitors that Rudyard Kipling might have called “lesser breeds without the law.” Of course, if terrible things are done in these places, Washington deplores them and denies responsibility.
“We rely on our law to govern our operations,” Rice said last week as she started on her European tour. The full text, available on The Shadowland Journal, cynically obscures questions of responsibility behind a cloud of noble intentions (to spread freedom and human rights) and pragmatic purpose (to squeeze vital information out of presumed terrorists at almost any cost).
According to Rice, “renditions” of one sort or another have been used “for decades” by “the United States and other countries” (a bit of condoweasel-wording that thus neatly fudges any discernible timeline). “Renditions take terrorists out of action, and save lives,” she claimed. Former CIA director George Tenet listed “the rendition of many dozens of terrorists prior to September 11, 2001” as “earlier counterterrorism successes,” Rice noted. Of course she ignored the most salient fact about those rendition “successes”: they did nothing to stop 9/11. She also failed to mention that two alleged Egyptian terrorists rendered from Albania to Cairo in 1998 were not just detained incommunicado and tortured, according to Human Rights Watch, they were put to death.
Since 2001, the Bush administration has made “extraordinary renditions,” well, pretty ordinary. When a radical Islamist preacher known as Abu Omar was snatched off the street in Milan in February 2003, the team that grabbed him treated the event so casually it left an extensive paper trail and incriminating phone records that tracked straight to the American airbase at Aviano. Italian judges have now issued arrest warrants for a total of 22 known and presumed CIA agents charged with kidnapping and related crimes.
Rodríguez and his buddies in the Majorca chapter of the "Iberian Spotters” club say they really had no idea they were plunging into the middle of this mess when they photographed some of the nondescript corporate planes that touched down at their local airport. “Business jets don’t attract a lot of attention,” Rodríguez shouted over his cell phone as an airliner roared above his head last weekend. “We’d take pictures of them when there really was not much else to do.”
Then, in January 2004, club member Josep Manchado snapped a white Boeing 737 with the tail number N313P. Soon after he posted the picture on a site called Airliners.net, Manchado started to get strange e-mails from what purported to be news organizations in Sweden, Germany and the United States. They seemed to be more interested in him than in actually buying the photographs. “They were crude,” Manchado told me over the phone this morning. “They were asking me for the number of my identity card, my address, my phone number.” Manchado, whose day job is urban planning, says he was puzzled by so much interest in this particular picture, and in him. Then—no more inquiries for almost nine months.
The next contact came at the beginning of this year when a German television network contacted Manchado while looking into the case of a naturalized German citizen who told a horrific tale of abduction and torture. On Dec. 31, 2003, Khaled el-Masri had taken a bus from the Germany city of Ulm to Macedonia, where he thought he was going to spend his holiday. Instead, he was detained at the Macedonian border and held incommunicado in a Skopje hotel for 23 days, under interrogation by local security forces. On Jan. 23, 2004, he says he was driven to an airport, handcuffed and blindfolded. There he was beaten by men using their fists and what felt like a stick.
According to a complaint filed last week in U.S. Federal Court by the American Civil Liberties Union on al-Masri’s behalf, “his clothes were sliced from his body with scissors or a knife, leaving him in his underwear. He was told to remove his underwear and he refused. He was beaten again, and his underwear was forcibly removed. He heard the sound of pictures being taken. He was thrown to the floor. His hands were pulled back and a boot was placed on his back. He then felt a firm object being forced into his anus.”
The complaint says el-Masri was dragged to a corner of the room and his blindfold removed. A flash went off in his face, but he was able to see seven or eight men dressed in black and wearing ski masks. “One of the men placed him in a diaper,” according to the ACLU filing. “He was then dressed in a dark blue short-sleeved track suit, and placed in a belt with chains that attached to his wrists and ankles. The men put earmuffs and eye pads on him, blindfolded him, and hooded him.” He was marched to a waiting plane where he was “thrown to the floor face down and his legs and arms were spread-eagled and secured to the sides of the plane. He felt an injection in his shoulder, and became lightheaded. He felt a second injection that rendered him nearly unconscious.”
That same day, Jan. 23, 2003, Manchado had taken his picture of N313P on the ground at Palma, Majorca. Aviation records show that it took off that afternoon and landed at Skopje at 8:51 p.m. “The jet left Skopje more than three hours later,” according to the ACLU complaint, “flying to Baghdad and then on to Kabul, the Afghan capital.” It appears that by coincidence, Manchado had taken a picture of that particular Boeing on its way to becoming el-Masri’s torture flight. No wonder he started getting mysterious e-mails.
For almost four months, el-Masri was held and grilled at a CIA facility known as the “Salt Pit” in an old brickworks outside Kabul. Eventually his captors concluded they had the wrong man. They put him on another secret flight, flew him to Albania, drove him out into the countryside, and abandoned him there. When el-Masri finally got home to Ulm and started to tell his tale, it seemed scarcely credible—until Manchado’s picture of N313P, along with Federal Aviation Administration records, provided vital corroboration.
Today you can see snapshots of the aging 737 when it was still in the fleet of Piedmont Airlines during the 1980s; or more recently, in its nondescript white guise, at Frankfurt; Geneva; Oporto, Portugal, and over Tulsa, Okla., in 2003 and 2004. But the story at Palma, Majorca, wasn’t quite over.
On March 10, 2004, Machado noticed N313P again when he was taking a flight to a nearby island. On March 12, it was still there, and another Iberian Spotter named Toni Marimon photographed it taking off. Why it stayed for so long is unknown, but a coincidence of dates disturbs some conspiracy-minded Spaniards. It was on March 11, 2004, that terrorists launched a horrific series of bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people.
After N313P was identified publicly late last year as part of “Air CIA,” it suddenly changed hands, from one little-known company to another, and got a new tail number: N4476S. Rodríguez remembers staking out the Palma airport last January. “I got off work about three. It was a nice afternoon, so I went to see if there were any planes.” And there it was. “There was no one around. There were no guards. It had as low a profile as possible; there was nothing to say, ‘There’s something here'.”
Since then, Rodríguez has traveled some considerable distance looking for planes involved with similar intrigues. He was in Tenerife last week, far out in the Atlantic, just about the time an alleged Croatian war criminal was due to be flown from there to The Hague for trial. But it’s unlikely any plane spotters will ever again fix their lenses on as many CIA flights as the ones on the Mediterranean resort of Majorca, and one might ask why? One theory is that it’s a convenient and relatively quiet stopping place on the way to North Africa, where the CIA now has good friends in Morocco, Libya and Algeria, as well as Egypt. Another is that the island’s luxury hotels offer ample rest and relaxation for the crews. Of course the passengers they pick up later are treated a little differently.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.