Blackwater aircraft have made stopovers at Pinal Airpark in Arizona, which used to be home to the Air America fleet.
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After public scrutiny forced the CIA to dismantle its fleet and sell the airpark, a company called Evergreen International Aviation, whose board included the former head of the CIA’s air operations, subsequently purchased it.
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As of 2006, Evergreen still owned and operated the airpark primarily as a storage facility for unused aircraft, largely because the desert climate allowed planes to survive longer with less maintenance. Not surprisingly, the company boasted in April 2006 of “four years of consecutive growth.”
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Aside from their stops at Pinal Airpark, Blackwater-owned planes frequented many airports alleged to be implicated in the rendition program. Aero Contractors, which has received much attention recently for its connections to the CIA, was headquartered in Johnston County, North Carolina, which “was deliberately located near Pope Air Force Base, where the CIA pilots could pick up paramilitary operatives who were based at Fort Bragg [home of the Special Forces]. The proximity to such an important military base was convenient for other reasons, too. ‘That supported our principal cover,’ one former pilot [said], ‘which was, we were doing government contracts for the military, for the folks at Fort Bragg.’”
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Former chief Air America pilot Jim Rhyne founded Aero Contractors for the CIA, and according to one pilot, he “had chosen the rural airfield [Johnston County] because it was close to Fort Bragg and many Special Forces veterans. There was also no control tower that could be used to spy on the company’s operations.”
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Johnston County is just one of the airports frequented by CIA flights, according to experts. “Typically, the CIA planes will fly out of these rural airfields in North Carolina to Dulles,” according to the authors of
Torture Taxi
.
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A glimpse of the flight records of planes registered to Blackwater subsidiaries Aviation Worldwide Services and Presidential Airways revealed numerous flights that follow these patterns and frequent CIA-linked airports:
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• Since February 2006, N964BW, a CASA 212, has flown the route from Johnston County to Dulles; been to Pinal Airpark three times; been to Pope Air Force Base twice; been to the Phillips Air Force Base and Mackall Army Air Field; and has also twice landed at the Camp Peary Landing Strip, home to the nine-thousand-acre CIA training facility known as “the Farm.”
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• N962BW, a CASA 212, has made numerous trips between Johnston County and Dulles and has been to Camp Peary, Simmons Army Airfield at Fort Bragg, and Blackstone Army Airfield near Fort Pickett. Its last reported flight was in September 2006, when it was headed from Goose Bay, Newfoundland, a NATO and Canadian Air Force Base, to Narsarsuaq, Greenland.
• N955BW, a SA227-DC Metro, is registered with Aviation Worldwide but has no recent flights. Nor does N961BW or N963BW, both CASA 212s. All of these planes have serial numbers that have not been assigned different N-numbers.
• N956BW fell off the radar in January 2006 just after beginning a flight from Louisiana to North Carolina.
• N965BW, a CASA 212, has traveled regularly to Pinal Airpark, the Southern California Logistics Airport, which is used by the military, and has made stops in Turks & Caicos, the Dominican Republic, Bahamas, St. Croix, and Trinidad and Tobago.
• N966BW, a CASA 212, has been to Pinal Airpark, many of the same Carribean stops as N965BW, Pope Air Force Base, and has made several Dulles-Johnston trips.
• N967BW, a CASA 212, was last recorded heading from Goose Bay to Narsarsuaq two weeks after N962BW.
• N968BW, a CASA 212, which regularly stops at Johnston County, Dulles, Phillips Airfield, and Camp Peary, has been to Pope Air Force Base, Pinal Airpark, and Oceana Naval Air Station.
In addition, though Blackwater’s aircraft in Afghanistan flew normal circuits, the company was also charged with flying out of the country, including to Uzbekistan. Air Force Capt. Edwin R. Byrnes was quoted in the FAA report on the crash of Blackwater 61 as saying that one of the aircraft English and Hammer were trained to use, “[t]he Metro was going to be used like a private jet to fly to Uzbekistan.”
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Uzbekistan has been one of the “key destinations” for both U.S. military and CIA renditions. Prisoners are alleged to have been brought there both for interrogation and repatriation from Afghanistan.
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Also, as it happens, Blackwater’s planes in Afghanistan operate out of Bagram, a known U.S.-run detention and torture facility. According to Blackwater /Presidential’s Afghanistan contract, all personnel “are required to possess a Secret security clearance.”
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The contract also outlined “operations security” requirements: “Information such as flight schedules, hotels where crews are staying, return trips, and other facts about the international mission shall be kept close hold and only communicated to persons who have a need to know this information. Flight crews should be aware of persons who are seeking information about the contractor, flights, etc. They should seek to maintain a low profile while operating DoD missions.”
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In June 2007 Blackwater released a statement in response to an article in London’s
Daily Mail
, accusing the company of engaging in renditions.
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“Blackwater and its affiliates do not now and have never conducted so-called ‘rendition flights,’ as the transport of detainees or terror suspects to interrogation centers has become known,” the statement said. (The paper quickly retracted the allegations.)
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It would take a far-reaching investigation to determine what, if any, involvement Blackwater has had in the government’s secret rendition programs. Company president Gary Jackson has been bold in bragging of Blackwater’s “black” and “secret” contracts, which are not publicly available or traceable; he claimed these contracts were so secret he could not tell one federal agency about Blackwater’s work with another.
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Under the war on terror, Blackwater’s first security contract was a “black” contract with the CIA, an agency with which it has deep ties.
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And then there was this development: In early 2005, Blackwater hired the career CIA spy many believe was responsible for jump-starting the Bush administration’s post-9/11 rendition program: J. Cofer Black, the former chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center. In November 2001, when U.S. forces captured Ibn al-Shayk al-Libi, believed to have run the Al Qaeda training camp in Khalden, Afghanistan, Black allegedly requested and got permission, through CIA Director George Tenet, from the White House to render Libi, reportedly over the objections of FBI officials who said they wanted to see him dealt with more transparently. “They duct-taped his mouth, cinched him up and sent him to Cairo,” a former FBI official told
Newsweek
. “At the airport the CIA case officer goes up to him and says, ‘You’re going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I’m going to find your mother and I’m going to fuck her.’”
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
COFER BLACK: THE GLOVES COME OFF
SINCE 9/11,
few people have had the kind of access to President Bush and covert “war on terror” planning as Ambassador J. Cofer Black. A thirty-year CIA veteran, Black was a legendary figure in the shadowy world of international espionage, having been personally marked for death by Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. He rose to prominence in the spy world following the central role he played in Sudan in catching the famed international terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as “Carlos the Jackal.” Black had spent his career in Africa and the Middle East, and when the 9/11 attacks happened, he enthusiastically seized a key role in plotting out the immediate U.S. response.
On September 13, 2001—two days after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—Black was sitting in the White House Situation Room.
1
The career CIA veteran was there to brief the President on the kind of campaign he had prepared for since joining the agency in 1974 but had been barred from carrying out.
2
After clandestine operations training, Black had been sent to Africa, where he spent the bulk of his CIA career. He worked in Zambia during the Rhodesian War, then Somalia and South Africa during the apartheid regime’s brutal war against the black majority.
3
During his time in Zaire, Black worked on the Reagan administration’s covert weapons program to arm anticommunist forces in Angola.
4
After two decades in the CIA and a stint in London, Black arrived under diplomatic cover at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, where he served as CIA Station Chief from 1993 to 1995.
5
There, he watched as a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden built up his international network into what the CIA would describe at the end of Black’s tour as “the Ford Foundation of Sunni Islamic terrorism.”
6
During much of the 1990s, agents tracking bin Laden worked under an “Operating Directive” that restricted them to intelligence collection on bin Laden and his network; they did not yet have authorization from the Clinton administration to conduct covert actions.
7
In bin Laden, Black saw a man who was a threat and who needed to be taken out. The administration, however, refused to authorize the type of lethal action against bin Laden and his cronies favored by Black. Some of Black’s men were enthusiastic about killing the wealthy Saudi but were rebuffed. “Unfortunately, at that time permissions to kill—officially called Lethal Findings—were taboo in the outfit,” according to CIA operative Billy Waugh, who worked closely with Black in Sudan. “In the early 1990s we were forced to adhere to the sanctimonious legal counsel and the do-gooders.”
8
Among Waugh’s rejected ideas was an alleged plot to kill bin Laden in Khartoum and dump his body at the Iranian Embassy in an effort to pin the blame on Tehran, an idea Waugh said Cofer Black “loved.”
9
But while Black and the CIA watched bin Laden, they, too, were under surveillance. In 1994, bin Laden’s group in Khartoum had reportedly determined that Black, who maintained cover as a simple embassy diplomat, was indeed CIA.
10
In his definitive book on the secret history of the CIA and bin Laden,
Ghost Wars,
Steve Coll wrote that bin Laden’s men began to track Black’s routes to and from the U.S. Embassy. “Black and his case officers picked up this surveillance and started to watch those who were watching them,” Coll wrote. “The CIA officers saw that bin Laden’s men were setting up a ‘kill zone’ near the US embassy. They couldn’t tell whether the attack was going to be a kidnapping, a car bombing, or an ambush with assault rifles, but they were able to watch bin Laden’s group practice the operation on a Khartoum street. As the weeks passed, the surveillance and counter-surveillance grew more and more intense. On one occasion they found themselves in a high-speed chase. On another the CIA officers leveled loaded shotguns at the Arabs who were following them. Eventually, Black dispatched the US ambassador to complain to the Sudanese government. Exposed, the plotters retreated.”
11
When Black left Khartoum, bin Laden was more powerful than when the veteran spy had arrived; a fact that would help fuel what would become Black’s professional obsession for years to come.
Black’s greatest triumph in Sudan, therefore, resulted from the capture of an international fugitive whose notoriety long predated bin Laden’s. Billy Waugh described how, in Sudan, he was pulled off surveillance of someone who “wasn’t much of a big fish at the time”—Osama bin Laden—for “the biggest fish” in December 1993.
12
Waugh described a meeting at the Khartoum Embassy where Black announced their new target: “In this city of one million souls, we would be responsible for finding and fixing none other than Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the man known far and wide as Carlos the Jackal, the world’s most famous terrorist.”
13
After the meeting, Waugh recalled, “Cofer Black pulled me aside and said, ‘Billy, this is the man. You’ve got to get this guy.’ At that moment, given the gravity evident in his voice, I knew the agency was making this a top priority. . . . I wanted to be the guy who caught this asshole.”
14
Carlos was accused of a series of political killings and bombings throughout the 1970s and ’80s and, while Cofer Black was in Sudan, was perhaps the most famous wanted man in the world.
Black, Waugh, and the Jackal team caught a break when Carlos called a trusted bodyguard from overseas to keep him out of trouble, after Carlos’s guard had been thrown in a Khartoum jail for drunkenly waving a pistol at a local shopkeeper.
15
They were able to ID the new bodyguard and his vehicle when he arrived in Khartoum and eventually traced the Toyota Cressida to the Jackal’s home. After months of careful and detailed surveillance from a rented apartment with a view of his home, the move was made in August 1994.
16
Waugh wrote of entering the CIA station that day, unsure of Carlos’s fate: “Immediately, Cofer and the fine lady station manager handed me a glass of champagne. Cofer bellowed, ‘Toast, Billy, you sweet son of a bitch. Carlos is in prison in France.’”
17
The arrest of the Jackal secured Cofer Black’s legendary status in CIA circles and remains one of his top career bragging points. After Khartoum, Black was named in 1995 as CIA Task Force Chief in the Near East and South Asia Division, continuing his monitoring of bin Laden’s network, before a brief stint in 1998 as Deputy Chief of the Agency’s Latin America Division.
18
In 1999, Black was awarded a significant promotion, heading up the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC).
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