Covering Its Tracks

By DOUGLAS WALLER, Timothy J. Burger, Elaine Shannon, Mike Allen

While critics decry the CIA for using secret prisons overseas to interrogate and allegedly torture suspected terrorists, America's spooks are also contending with another issue--how such sensitive information became public in the first place. CIA Director Porter Goss, U.S. officials tell TIME, has ordered a top-level review of agency tradecraft procedures, including measures his National Clandestine Service takes to keep the movement of terrorist suspects it nabs out of the public eye. Amnesty International announced last week that it had identified, from flight records, six planes used by the CIA that had made some 800 trips through European airspace. (A CIA spokeswoman refused to comment. But a government official tells TIME that many of the exposed flights of CIA-linked planes have been for missions other than shuttling prisoners.)

Goss ordered the review amid concerns that sloppy procedures contributed to the recent disclosure that nearly three years ago, CIA operatives in Milan snatched Egyptian terrorist-suspect Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr and flew him to Cairo--where the Islamic cleric claims he was tortured; to throw the Italians off the scent, the CIA reportedly told them that Nasr had fled to the Balkans. The Italian government publicly denies the U.S. insistence that the CIA cleared the caper with Rome's intelligence service in advance, and this summer an Italian court issued arrest warrants for 22 CIA operatives allegedly involved. Milan prosecutors had no difficulty identifying the officers from cell-phone records and a trail of credit-card charges left at hotels and restaurants. "The spooks aren't very spooky these days," says a U.S. counterterrorism official.

No one has had to suffer publicly the consequences of the CIA's handiwork more than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose European trip last week was dubbed the "Secret Prisons Tour" by some U.S. diplomats. After months of relative silence from the Bush Administration on the topic of torture, Rice declared before taking off that the U.S. "does not permit, tolerate or condone torture under any circumstances." In Europe she insisted there was no loophole for CIA officers operating abroad or for harsh treatment that didn't technically qualify as torture.

In so doing, Rice appeared to accept a more restrictive standard than Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been trying--so far in vain--to get an exemption for CIA officers in the legislation that Arizona Senator John McCain has pushed to ban torture and other inhumane treatment. A senior State Department official denied any rift between Rice and Cheney and insisted Rice was merely "clarifying existing policy." But two senior Administration officials interpreted Rice's increasingly pointed statements as a clear sign to the bureaucracy back home as well as to allies in Europe that her more sweeping restrictions were to be operative U.S. policy.

At a press conference with Rice in Berlin, Germany's new Chancellor, Angela Merkel, said the Bush Administration has admitted that U.S. agents "erroneously" abducted Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent who they believed had terrorist ties. Rice would only say that when mistakes are made, Washington would "rectify them." El-Masri, who filed a suit in U.S. federal court last week against former CIA Director George Tenet and three private airline companies, claims that agents seized him on the Serbian-Macedonian border in 2003 and held him in Afghanistan for five months.

Congressional negotiators are likely to decide this week whether McCain's measure will stay in the defense bill. The amendment's passage may well be helped by new evidence that torture can produce bad intelligence. The Administration's claim before the Iraq war of a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, according to a report in the New York Times, was based primarily on the statements of an al-Qaeda prisoner the U.S. had handed over to Egypt in January 2002--who later said he had fabricated the claim to avoid torture. With more unwelcome attention to the CIA's interrogation record, covering his spies' tracks isn't Porter Goss's only p.r. problem.