Abu Omar rendition
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The Abu Omar rendition was the CIA's kidnapping of Abu Omar, a cleric in Milan, Italy, in some tellings described as Egyptian, who was sent to Egypt to undergo torture: an instance of extraordinary rendition. John Kiriakou's summary judgement on it is unambiguous: "this ought to be taught as a class at the CIA on how not to conduct a rendition operation."

The operation

Abu Omar was an Egyptian national in Milan, a firebrand cleric who gave hard anti-American sermons after Friday prayers at the mosque. The CIA decided he was a threat, probably al-Qaeda, probably a terrorist, and that he needed to be shut down. A team Kiriakou puts at about a dozen people was sent to Milan and surveilled him for several weeks, establishing that he kept to a schedule and left his apartment at the same time every day to walk to the mosque. They parked a van on that route, and as he walked past it one day they opened the side door, snatched him, bundled him onto a plane and flew him to Egypt.

He was tortured mercilessly there. In Kiriakou's account the Egyptians eventually came back to the Americans to say this was either the wrong man or simply an innocent one, and he had to be released; he now gives interviews and will show the marks.

The Italian prosecutions

The Italians were outraged, a criminal act carried out on Italian soil without anyone's permission, "like we own the place", and were compelled to prosecute the officers involved. Almost all had been operating under pseudonym; the exception was Robert Lady, the chief of base in Milan, who was charged with several serious crimes, fled, and retired to Panama. The Italians asked the Panamanians to extradite him; they briefly arrested him and then, under heavy American pressure, let him go, after which he moved to the United States for his own safety.

What made the rest of the team identifiable, Kiriakou says, was elementary tradecraft failure. If you are operating overseas under pseudonym, do not buy souvenirs with the credit card in your real name, "what's wrong with you, are you stupid?", and do not phone your wife at night from your hotel room; buy a phone card and call from an anonymous, randomly chosen phone box. The Italians identified every single officer and indicted them all.

One of them, a dual American-Portuguese citizen, was arrested while visiting her mother in Portugal at Italy's request and held for extradition. Her case reached the Portuguese Supreme Court, which ruled for the government, and she was extradited to Italy for trial on kidnapping charges carrying ten to twenty years. Kiriakou says Barack Obama then put "ridiculous pressure" on the Italians, who pardoned and released her. She was the only member of the team who came close to facing justice; everybody else, in his phrase, "got away with it scot-free."

How it reached Kiriakou

Kiriakou says a journalist writing a book on the case in the summer of 2008 asked him to introduce him to the officers involved; Kiriakou said he had not worked with the "kidnappers." But when the journalist named an officer mentioned in Kiriakou's own book, Kiriakou confirmed the man's last name, and "that's what they hung me on." The espionage charges came from his torture interviews, but the conviction rested on this confirmation.

The fuller version names the journalist as Matthew Cole and describes a sequence of emails: a first list of a dozen names, a second list of another dozen, and finally a question about a man referred to in Kiriakou's book, "I think his name is John." Kiriakou replied that he meant John Doe, that he did not know what had become of him and assumed he was retired in Virginia somewhere. In doing so he confirmed the surname.

Cole, in Kiriakou's account, was not writing a book about Abu Omar at all; he was secretly working for the Guantánamo defense attorneys. The confirmed name went to a Human Rights Watch investigator, from there to the defense team, and into a classified filing seeking to depose the officer. The judge recognized the name as classified and turned the filing over to the FBI, which traced it back through Human Rights Watch to Cole and from Cole to Kiriakou. Two dozen FBI agents then raided his house and arrested him on five felonies including three counts of espionage, charges that were dropped, leaving the plea to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for confirming a name that was never made public.

The case, as Kiriakou summarises it

Kiriakou describes Abu Omar as an Egyptian cleric living in Milan whom the CIA believed to be an al-Qaeda plant. The agency "just snatched him off the street while he was walking down the street in Milan one morning, rendered him to Egypt, tortured him", and "it turned out that he was a completely innocent, you know, just a run of the mill cleric. He had nothing to do with al-Qaeda."

His own connection to the case is indirect and consequential: a journalist writing a book about the rendition emailed him about six months after the ABC News interview asking for introductions, and it was in declining those requests that Kiriakou confirmed the surname that became the basis of the charge under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. He told the journalist plainly that he had no knowledge of the case beyond what he had read in the Washington Post, and that "kidnapping was not my thing when I was at the agency."

The pretext, and how the cover failed

Kiriakou's fullest account of the operation comes from explaining how Matthew Cole used it as a pretext to approach him. The sequence he gives is that the CIA asked the Italians to help kidnap Abu Omar, a Muslim cleric in Milan he describes as "kind of a firebrand", and the Italians refused: "What are you out of your minds? This guy hasn't committed any crime. Just cuz you don't like his sermons doesn't mean that he should be kidnapped." The agency proceeded alone and sent him to Egypt, where he is Egyptian, "specifically to be tortured."

The Egyptians tortured him for around nine months and then reported back that there was nothing to find: "Look, this guy doesn't know anything. He's just a preacher. He doesn't like the United States, but he's not like Al-Qaeda. He's not a terrorist. He's just a preacher." He was released, returned to Italy and told the story, and Italy issued arrest warrants for every CIA officer involved.

What made that possible was tradecraft rather than investigation. Every officer was under cover and "every single one of them made a mistake with their cover. You're under cover, some made up name, and then you use the hotel phone to call your wife in your true name. Or you're under cover and you go souvenir shopping and you use your actual credit card in your real name." Almost all of them escaped, some carrying multiple felony arrest warrants; Kiriakou calls the affair "an operation that caused immense embarrassment to the CIA."

See also

- Extraordinary Rendition
- Matthew Cole
- CIA Torture Program Whistleblowing
