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CIA-backed team used brutal means to break up terrorist cell in Albania
<http://www.msnbc.com/news/660358.asp?cp1=1>
Officials call operation one of the agency's great successes
By Andrew Higgins and Christopher Cooper
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
TIRANA, Albania, Nov. 20 -- Ahmed Osman Saleh stepped off a minibus here in
the Albanian capital in July 1998 and caught what would be his last glimpse
of daylight for three days. As he paid the driver, Albanian security agents
slipped a white cloth bag over Saleh's head, bound his limbs with plastic
shackles and tossed him into the rear of a hatchback vehicle. Supervising
the operation from a nearby car were agents from the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency.
SALEH'S ALBANIAN captors sped over rutted roads to an abandoned air base 35
miles north of Tirana. There, recalled an Albanian security agent who
participated, guards dumped the bearded self-confessed terrorist on the
floor of a windowless bathroom.
After two days of interrogation by CIA agents and sporadic beatings by
Albanian guards, Saleh was put aboard a CIA-chartered plane and flown to
Cairo, according to the Albanian agent and a confession Egyptian police
elicited from Saleh in September 1998. "I remained blindfolded until I got
off the plane," Saleh said in the confession, a document written in Arabic
longhand that he signed at the bottom.
There were more beatings and torture at the hands of Egyptian authorities.
And 18 months after he was grabbed outside the Garden of Games, a Tirana
children's' park, Saleh was hanged in an Egyptian prison yard.
BY THE SCRIPT
His capture was one of five scripted and overseen by American agents as
part of a covert 1998 operation to deport members of the Egyptian Jihad
organization to Cairo from the Balkans. At the time, Egyptian Jihad was
merging with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. U.S. authorities
considered the Tirana cell among the most dangerous terror outfits in Europe.
The CIA has refused to acknowledge the 1998 operation. But privately, U.S.
officials have described it as one of the most successful counterterrorism
efforts in the annals of the intelligence agency.
Today, as the Bush administration loosens its interpretation of the rules
on foreign assassinations and other restraints imposed on the CIA in the
1970s, America's clandestine role in Albania illuminates some of the
tactical and moral questions that lie ahead in the global war on terrorism.
Taking this fight to the enemy will mean teaming up with foreign security
services that engage in political repression and pay little heed to human
rights. By authorizing special military trials for some terrorists caught
abroad, President Bush has signaled that the protections of American-style
justice won't apply to all.
Although executed swiftly, the CIA's operation in Albania was far from
clean. At least two men targeted by the Americans eluded capture. Another
was shot dead during a gunfight with Albanian security forces.
One Albanian participant in the violent arrests recalled that an apparently
innocent elderly man was grabbed at Tirana's airport and then bound and
blindfolded.
The old man was interrogated for several days by the CIA before being
dumped on a downtown street. In statements to their lawyer in Egypt, the
five men who were deported there said they suffered the sort of elaborate
torture that has been a hallmark of a decade-long Egyptian counterterrorist
campaign.
Bill Harlow, a spokesman for the CIA, said any suggestion that "the CIA
either participated in or condoned torture" in any of its operations is
"wrong." He declined to comment further.
Albania is nominally Muslim but largely secular and pro-American. It has
served as a laboratory for counterterrorism tactics shunned in Western
Europe, for example, where governments are wary of giving the CIA too much
leeway and balk at sending suspects to countries that employ the death penalty.
Fatos Klosi, head of Albania's intelligence service, acknowledged that some
of his agency's actions, undertaken at the CIA's behest, were "not so
justified legally." But he defended them as necessary. "They convinced us
not to be soft with terrorists," said Klosi, who oversaw the 1998 operation.
The Tirana group broken up by the CIA was years in the making. Its members,
who ultimately numbered more than 20, started drifting in and out of
Albania in the early 1990s. They eventually coalesced into what appears to
have been a classic "sleeper" cell: a self-sufficient group ensconced in
its surroundings, awaiting a call from its leadership to begin terrorist
activities.
In addition to Saleh, a self-described terrorist with a 1993 Cairo car
bombing to his credit, cell members included an accomplished forger and a
budding propagandist. Most had spent time in Afghanistan or Pakistan,
learning how to handle weapons and explosives. Egyptian Jihad's leader was
Ayman Zawahri, a Cairo surgeon-turned-mujahedeen warrior who became bin
Laden's right-hand man after the Jihad group merged with al-Qaida in 1998.
The interrogation of the five Tirana cell members by Egyptian authorities
in the summer and fall of 1998, and the military trial that followed in
Egypt the next year, produced some 20,000 pages of confession transcripts
and other documents. The confessions apparently were coerced, which could
cast doubt on the credibility of some self-incriminating statements. But
the defendants' descriptions of their activities generally are consistent
with those of other sources and provide a rare detailed account of the
activities of a Muslim terrorist cell.
FERTILE GROUND
Islamic militants and CIA agents began arriving in Albania at about the
same time when the country's doctrinaire Communist regime collapsed in
1992. Both groups of outsiders saw fertile ground for expansion.
Arriving early was Mohamed Zawahri, the younger brother of Ayman Zawahri.
The younger Zawahri worked as an engineer for the Islamic Relief
Organization, one of more than a dozen charities based in Saudi
Arabia and other Islamic states that opened offices in Tirana. Mohamed
Zawahri helped other Egyptian Jihad members land jobs with charities that
were building mosques, orphanages and clinics there.
The CIA, meanwhile, found shelter in the new U.S. Embassy, which opened
after the Communists' fall. CIA agents provided the Albanian intelligence
service, known by its initials, SHIK, with equipment to record telephone
calls, as well as lessons on surveillance techniques, according to current
and former SHIK operatives.
The CIA, which aimed to track Muslim extremists in the region, found an
eager partner in Sali Berisha, a cardiologist elected Albania's president
in 1992. "Total cooperation," is how Berisha described his relationship
with the American intelligence agency. "They worked in Albania as if they
were in New York or Washington," he added.
Gaining permission for wiretaps was a snap, requiring little of the legal
red tape common in the U.S. Berisha estimated that almost two-thirds of the
hundreds of telephone conversations recorded in Albania during his
five-year tenure as president were taped at the CIA's behest.
While the CIA organized, so did Egyptian Jihad. In January 1993, Mohamed
Zawahri recruited Mohamed Hassan Tita, an architect and Jihad member, to
work at the Islamic Relief Organization. Funded by Saudi Arabia, the group
had offices in a former Communist Party academy, alongside Western charity
groups.
Within hours of stepping off the plane from Egypt, Tita was told by Zawahri
that he would have a special duty: collecting dues from the charity's Jihad
employees at a rate of 20 percent of their salary. "I think that all Jihad
members employed at the organization were employed through Mohamed
Zawahri," Tita said in his 1998 confession.
By the mid-1990s, the Egyptian Jihad cell in Tirana had swelled to 16
people, according to the Tita confession. His collections were running
about $1,100 a month.
Meanwhile, the CIA monitored the mixture of Muslim charity and militancy in
the Albanian capital. SHIK agents who worked with the Americans said the
CIA scrutinized the travel, phone calls and contacts of various charity
workers with suspected links to extremist groups from Egypt, Algeria and
other countries.
Every few days, a CIA officer from the American Embassy collected audio
tapes of phone conversations that SHIK operatives recorded on
American-supplied equipment in a secret eavesdropping center next to
Tirana's central post office. Since nearly all the conversations were in
Arabic, the tapes went back to the U.S. for translation, SHIK agents said.
For much of the 1990s, the CIA and SHIK contented themselves with observing
the suspected terrorists. The strategy, said ex-President Berisha, was "not
to cleanse [Albania of] these people, but to study them."
U.S. diplomats and spies did worry that Jihad members or other Muslim
extremists might attack the American Embassy in Tirana, SHIK officials
said. On one occasion in 1993, the Americans were alarmed when a suspected
Islamic militant drove repeatedly around the embassy. In another incident,
phone intercepts picked up an apparent order from overseas instructing a
Muslim-charity worker to case the embassy. An attack never came.
In 1994, the CIA sent an agent to Tirana to oversee the training of a new
SHIK unit dedicated to surveillance of suspected terrorists, according to
Albanian security officials. The American was a Vietnam veteran and spoke
Arabic. Operating out of a former military academy in Tirana, the agent,
who has since died in an unrelated car accident, according to his former
Albanian pupils, taught recruits how to follow and monitor targets. The
SHIK contingent, said then-President Berisha, was "trained by the CIA,
chaired by the CIA and run by the CIA." Some Albanian agents to this day
save surveillance photographs they said they took under CIA tutelage.
As American intelligence activity increased in the mid-1990s, Egyptian
Jihad expanded its network in Albania. In February 1996, Tita, the dues
collector, offered a job to Saleh, the man later grabbed near Tirana's
Garden of Games. Wanted by Egyptian authorities in connection with a
botched 1993 attempt to assassinate former Egyptian Prime Minister Atef
Sedki, Saleh came to Albania for the nominal purpose of teaching the Quran
to school children and running a Muslim orphanage.
Tita's most important hire was Shawki Salama Attiya, a forger and
instructor at al-Qaida camps originally set up in the 1980s to train
anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan. The son of a Cairo carpenter, Attiya
arrived at the camps in 1990, too late to fight the Soviets, who had left
in 1989. But that didn't diminish his enthusiasm. "We used to train on
attacking [mock] tourist buses," he said later in his confession.
Instructors "always told us to imagine the people in these buses were
Israeli tourists."
LEARNING FORGERY
By 1994, Attiya had relocated his family to Sudan, then home to bin Laden
and al-Qaida. He apprenticed himself to a forgery expert, learning how to
doctor passports, a talent much in demand among Muslim militants. "I
specialized in removing stamps and visas from passports and putting new
ones on," he said in his 1998 confession. Most of what he said in the
confession was corroborated by his wife, Jihan Hassan Ahmed, who gave a
statement to Egyptian police in 1998 but wasn't tortured or charged.
After awarding himself a diploma of his own making from the prestigious
al-Azar University in Cairo, Attiya arrived in Albania in August 1995, with
a fake passport and a new name, Magad Mustafa, he said in his confession.
His job at the Islamic Heritage orphanage paid $700 a month.
The main force drawing Egyptian Jihad operatives to Albania at the time was
the availability of paying jobs with the Muslim charities. The subject of
Jihad finances surfaced during a meeting in Sana, Yemen, in December
1995. Ayman Zawahri, the Jihad leader, discussed a successful bombing that
year of the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan. Then, he delivered discouraging
news: Jihad was nearly broke. "These are bad times," he said, according to
the confession of Ahmed Ibrahim al-Naggar, a Jihad member who attended the
Yemen gathering.
A month after the conclave, Egyptian Jihad outfitted Naggar with a plane
ticket, laptop computer and $500. He followed Attiya, Saleh and Tita to
Tirana. A trained pharmacist from a Cairo slum, he got a job with
al-Haramein, a Saudi charity operating out of a three-story villa in the
center of Albania's dilapidated capital.
In April 1996, eight Jihad operatives gathered in a Tirana house for a
fast-breaking feast at the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. A
visiting Jihad leader appointed Attiya the chief of the Tirana cell and
"emphasized the need for Jihad leaders to stick together," Tita recalled in
his 1998 confession.
The threat to Americans posed by al-Qaida was becoming clearer at that
time. In June 1996, the Khobar Towers U.S. Marines barracks in Saudi Arabia
were bombed in an attack attributed to the bin Laden group.
In Albania, the CIA struggled to maintain its carefully nurtured
relationship with SHIK, as Berisha's regime wobbled. Elections in May 1996
were marred by violence and voting irregularities. Nonetheless, in October
1996, six SHIK agents traveled to Langley, Va., for a weeklong CIA course
in surveillance offered at a Marriott Hotel near the agency's headquarters,
according to Albanians familiar with the visit.
Conditions in Albania deteriorated into anarchy in early 1997, following
the collapse of a large investment-pyramid scheme. Protesters stormed a
government armory, emptied prisons and attacked SHIK offices.
Amid the turmoil, Attiya kept up a lively forgery business. And Naggar
began training as a propagandist, cultivating contacts with the media
center that Egyptian Jihad ran openly in London. In May 1997, Naggar saw
his first article published: a feature on the life of Muhammed in "Call of
Jihad" magazine.
NEW URGENCY
President Berisha called an election in June 1997, lost and resigned. The
new government quickly revived surveillance operations with the CIA, which
had waned during the unrest. There was new urgency on the American side.
U.S. military planners, alarmed by mounting strife in neighboring Kosovo
and considering American intervention, wanted Albania purged of any
extremists who could threaten U.S. forces.
In 1998, as SHIK expanded its eavesdropping with yet more American
equipment, Attiya and Naggar began making frequent calls to Ayman Zawahri,
the Egyptian Jihad leader, who by then had joined bin Laden in Afghanistan,
Attiya said in his confession. The Tirana cell received word of the merger
of the two organizations during a phone call from Jihad's media committee
in London, Naggar said in his confession. Jihad, which had primarily
targeted the secular Egyptian government, would now join a broader assault
on Americans, Naggar recalled.
"There is a direct benefit from the merging of the groups under bin Laden,
financial strength being the most important," Naggar said. "Joining with
bin Laden is the only solution to keeping the Jihad organization abroad alive."
With war in Kosovo looming and Jihad resurgent, the U.S. shifted from
monitoring the Tirana cell to crushing it. In the spring of 1998, the CIA
asked Albania to help round up a half-dozen extremists operating locally,
according to current and former SHIK operatives. Egypt also was recruited
to help with the project, Egyptian court records show.
The Albanians were skeptical that the Muslim charity workers posed a
serious threat. But SHIK's head, Klosi, recalled that he was convinced
after visiting CIA headquarters in Langley in the spring of 1998.
About a dozen U.S. agents arrived in Albania to plan the arrests, according
to their Albanian counterparts. CIA and SHIK operatives spent three months
devising the operation, often meeting in a conference room next to Klosi's
office.
On June 25, 1998, the Egyptian government issued a prearranged arrest
warrant for Attiya, the forger, and demanded his deportation. Most such
requests to Western countries had been ignored in the past, said Hisham
Saraya, Egypt's attorney general at the time. This one was not.
That day, while driving in his 1986 Audi in Tirana, Attiya found himself
being trailed by an Albanian police car and another vehicle, he later
recalled in his confession. He was stopped and arrested. The same day,
Albanian security officers raided his home and found more than 50 plates
and stamps used to produce fake visas and other bogus documents, according
to court records from his 1999 trial.
Several days later, he was taken, handcuffed and blindfolded, to the
abandoned air base, north of Tirana. "There, a private plane was waiting
for me," he said in his confession. Once in Cairo, he was blindfolded again
and driven to Egypt's state security offices on July 2, 1998. "Since then,
the interrogations have not stopped," he said.
Attiya later told his lawyer, Hafez Abu-Saada, that while being questioned,
he was subjected to electrical shocks to his genitals, suspended by his
limbs, dragged on his face, and made to stand for hours in a cell, with
filthy water up to his knees. Abu-Saada, who represented all five members
of the Tirana cell, subsequently recorded their complaints in a published
report.
Also deported from Tirana was Naggar. He was nabbed in July 1998 by SHIK on
a road outside of town. He, too, was blindfolded and spirited home on a
CIA plane. In complaints in his confession and to his defense lawyer,
Abu-Saada, Naggar said his Egyptian interrogators regularly applied
electrical shocks to his nipples and penis.
Naggar's brother, Mohamed, said in an interview that he and his relatives
also were and continue to be harassed and tortured by Egyptian police. He
said he had suffered broken ribs and fractured cheekbones. "They changed my
features," Mohamed Naggar said, touching his face.
About two weeks after Attiya and Naggar were deported to Egypt, Albanian
security agents took Tita, the dues-collector, from his Tirana apartment.
They covered his head and put him on a plane. "After I was arrested,
[Egyptian interrogators] hung me from my wrists and applied electricity to
parts of my feet and back," he said in his confession.
As the CIA operation drew to a close, an Arab newspaper in London published
a letter on August 5, 1998, signed by the International Islamic Front for
Jihad. The letter vowed revenge for the counterterrorism drive in Albania,
promising to retaliate against Americans in a "language they will understand."
Two days later, U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up, killing
224 people. U.S. investigators have attributed the embassy bombings to
al-Qaida and now believe the attacks were planned far in advance. At the
time, American officials were rattled enough about the possible connection
to the Tirana arrests that they closed the U.S. Embassy there, moving the
staff to a more-secure compound across town.
The embassy bombings didn't stop the CIA from going after Saleh in Tirana.
In August, Albanian security agents grabbed him outside the children's
park. During two months of detention in Egypt, he was suspended from the
ceiling of his cell and given electrical shocks, he told his lawyer,
Abu-Saada. Also rounded up was Essam Abdel-Tawwab, an Egyptian Jihad member
who had lived for a time in Tirana before moving to Sofia, Bulgaria. He,
too, later told Abu-Saada he was tortured. Egyptian prosecutors
acknowledged in court documents that they observed a "recovered wound" on
Tawwab's body.
MASS TRIAL
The Jihad members brought back from the Balkans were tried by the Egyptian
military in early 1999. The prosecution of cell members expanded into one
of the country's largest-ever mass trials of alleged Islamic terrorists. In
all, 107 people were tried in the so-called Returnees-from-Albania Case.
Many were rounded up locally and had no direct connection to Albania. There
are no appeals from such trials.
About 60 of the defendants were tried in absentia, including Ayman and
Mohamed Zawahri, who were sentenced to death. Like his al-Qaida comrade,
bin Laden, Ayman Zawahri is thought by U.S. officials to be on the run in
Afghanistan. Mohamed Zawahri is assumed to be there, as well.
Naggar and Saleh were hanged in February 2000 in connection with charges
from earlier terror cases. Attiya was sentenced to life imprisonment. Tita
and Tawwab each received 10-year prison terms.
Egyptian presidential spokesman Nabil Osman said of such mass prosecutions:
"Justice is swift there, and it provides a better deterrent. The
alternative is to have cases of terrorism in this country dangling between
heaven and earth for years."
Osman brushed off torture claims by members of the Tirana cell, without
commenting directly on their validity. Egypt permits alleged torture
victims to seek remedies in civil court, he said. Members of the Tirana
cell, however, have been held incommunicado with no way to file suit.
"Forget about human rights for a while," Osman said.
"You have to safeguard the security of the majority."
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