A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial by Hendricks Steve

Author:Hendricks, Steve [Hendricks, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Flight

AVIANO AIR BASE has a history of renditions, although before the kidnapping of Abu Omar they seem to have been only of a leporine kind. On the lands around Aviano, rabbits have bred like, well, rabbits and have become aeronautical hazards, chiefly by turning the air-intake valves of jets into rabbit-intake valves. The rabbits are also terrestrial hazards. Pilots of F-16s have returned to Aviano from dropping five-hundred-pound bombs on an al-Qaeda safehouse or a Baghdad hospital, gotten in their cars, and headed home, whereupon bunnies have hopped in front of them. Warriors have been known to swerve off the road to save the innocents. Consequently, the air base instituted an annual rabbit round-up in which hundreds of volunteers form a line on a runway and march as a wall on the adjoining fields, driving the rabbits before them into a long net. The detainees are then transferred to vehicles and rendered to the forests and mountains beyond U.S. jurisdiction, where they are set free—a testimony to American mercy. An Italian would have turned the captives into coniglio fritto dorato, which is rabbit that has been chopped, marinated in olive oil and lemon, slathered with egg and flour, and dropped in a pan of boiling oil, the result of which is a convincing argument against animal rights.

After Magistrate Spataro and DIGOS followed the trail of Abu Omar to the hermetic American enclave at Aviano, there were fewer ways to trace him. The trail did not vanish entirely, however. All planes that take off in Italy must follow either a civilian or a military protocol. Under the civilian protocol, a pilot files a flight plan with her originating air-traffic control tower, the tower in turn guides the flight through takeoff, then, once the plane reaches a certain altitude, a regional control center takes responsibility for guiding and monitoring it. If the plane leaves one region of Italy for another, the responsibility passes to another control center, and if it leaves Italy altogether, the responsibility passes to the new country. At the same time that the regional centers are tracking the flight, an international aviation authority in Brussels called Eurocontrol does the same. All civilian flights and some military flights fly under civilian protocol. Other military flights may be declared “on mission” and exempted from the civilian protocol. In those cases, the pilot files no flight plan with Italian authorities, and military rather than civilian air-control centers guide the plane. The flight still shows up on civilian radar, but civil authorities essentially ignore it.

Spataro asked all of the civilian and military monitoring agencies for records of flights that left Aviano between 5:00 P.M. on February 17, 2003, and midnight on February 18. He hoped the agencies would have flight plans and radar traces, maybe even recordings of conversations with the pilots, but he learned that such data were purged every few months unless there was a reason, like a crash, to keep them. There had been no reason to keep the data on flights from Aviano on February 17 and 18.

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