European Report Details Flights by CIA Aircraft -
    Polish, Romanian Facilities Cited
    By Craig Whitlock
    The Washington Post

    Wednesday 29 November 2006

    Brussels - Most days, the skies are quiet over the Szymany airport, a mothballed runway in rural Poland. So the airport director took note when strangers showed up on at least six occasions in 2002 and 2003, offering to pay large sums of cash to land planes from faraway places such as Afghanistan.

    When the chartered civilian planes arrived, they followed the same secretive drill, Mariola Przewlocka, former director of the airport, told investigators from the European Parliament last week. To avoid prying eyes, she said, the aircraft would sit at the end of the runway and wait for unmarked minivans to arrive. In the dark, it was hard to tell whether people got on or off. But in at least one case, a flight took off with several passengers for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, records show.

    "More money was being paid for these landings than any other landings," Przewlocka told the investigators, adding that the people who brought the money spoke excellent Polish but that the invoices indicated the jet owners were from the United States. "The landings of these aircraft were part of the work of secret services, as we understood it," she recalled.

    Details of the flights and testimony from airport employees constitute "serious circumstantial evidence" that Szymany was the transfer point for a nearby secret prison run by the CIA, according to a report released Tuesday by a European Parliament committee that is investigating CIA counterterrorism operations in Europe.

    John B. Bellinger III, legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, called the European Parliament report "hysterical in its hyperbole." He said the committee was leaping to conclusions about the missions of the CIA flights and improperly assuming that they all had a "nefarious" intent.

    "There are numerous, numerous reasons for CIA flights to Europe," he said in a telephone interview. "By and large, they are a symbol of cooperation between our countries and the sharing of information, not illegal activity."

    The committee said that it had found records of 1,245 CIA-operated flights landing at European airports or passing through European airspace, though it found evidence of only a handful of cases in which prisoners were transported.

    The investigative committee said it suspected that the prison held captured al-Qaeda leaders and that it was housed in a nearby Polish intelligence training center at Stare Kiejkuty, in northeastern Poland. Although the committee acknowledged that it lacked proof, it cited testimony of airport employees that they were kept away from the mysterious flights by Polish military officials and were prohibited from conducting passenger checks or customs inspections.

    The CIA declined to comment Tuesday on the parliamentary findings. The government of Poland has repeatedly denied allowing the CIA to operate a prison on its territory.

    "The committee's report, from what we know so far, is not based on any strong proof but only commonly repeated assumptions, suspicions and probabilities," Krzysztof Lapinski, spokesman for Poland's minister for special services, told the Associated Press in Warsaw.

    The European Parliament accused Poland of blocking the probe, saying that high-ranking Polish officials refused to meet with the panel. It also accused the Polish government of withholding or destroying flight logs pertaining to CIA flights at Szymany and other airports.

    Also Tuesday, the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza reported that international flight logs showed that a single Gulfstream jet used by the CIA landed five times in Warsaw, the capital, and once at Szymany between February and July 2003. Four of the flights originated in Afghanistan, the paper reported.

    In November 2005, The Washington Post first reported the presence of clandestine CIA prisons in Eastern Europe. The Post withheld the exact locations at the request of the White House, which argued that divulging such details could jeopardize active counterterrorism operations and subject the host countries to retaliation from al-Qaeda and its sympathizers.

    In September, President Bush acknowledged the existence of the CIA's overseas prison network for the first time. He said that 14 inmates had been transferred to the U.S. Navy prison at Guantanamo Bay and that the "black sites" had been emptied, although he did not rule out using them again.

    No European country has admitted allowing the CIA to run secret prisons on its territory. But the parliamentary committee said it had obtained records describing an "informal" Dec. 7, 2005, meeting of foreign ministers from the European Union and NATO "confirming that member states had knowledge" of the secret prisons. The meeting was attended by Rice and other U.S. officials, according to the report.

    "The decision has been to keep mum and shroud decisions in secrecy," said Giovanni Claudio Fava, an Italian member of the European Parliament who led the investigation. "Many of our governments have cooperated actively and passively."

    The committee report also cited evidence that the CIA may have operated a prison in Romania and said it "cannot exclude," based on testimony by Romanian officials, "the possibility that US secret services have operated in Romania on a clandestine basis."

    The panel said it "expresses serious concern" about 21 stopovers by CIA-operated aircraft landing in Romania, including a crash landing by a Gulfstream jet in Bucharest on Dec. 6, 2004.

    Although no one was reported injured, seven passengers on board the flight "disappeared" after the accident, and Romanian air transport investigators never learned their identities, according to the report. The plane had started its journey at Bagram air base, the site of a U.S. prison in Afghanistan.

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    Researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.