He told us that he was forty-one years old and of Lebanese descent. He was married with four young sons, and he had worked as a used car salesman. In late December 2003, after an argument with his wife, he’d boarded a tourist bus to the Macedonian capital, Skopje, where he planned to take a weeklong vacation. When the bus reached the Serbia-Macedonia border, guards confiscated his passport and prevented him from reboarding the bus. He said he was taken to a small, dark room and accused of being a terrorist.
“They asked a lot of questions—if I have relations with Al Qaeda, al-Haramain, the Islamic Brotherhood,” el-Masri told us, pausing between sentences. “I kept saying no, but they did not believe me.” Al-Haramain was an Islamic charity suspected of funneling money to terrorist causes, and it was said to be affiliated with Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban.
After twenty-three days, the Macedonian authorities turned him over to officials he believed were from the United States. His captors hauled him onto a plane bound for Kabul, Afghanistan, he said. Once there, he was chained and subjected to a series of beatings. He was stripped and photographed naked, then plied with drugs as his interrogators repeated a barrage of questions about his alleged ties to Al Qaeda. After a month-long hunger strike, he was blindfolded and flown to northern Albania, where he was allowed to walk across the border into Macedonia, reclaim his passport and possessions, and fly back to Germany. Altogether, he said he had spent five months in captivity. He had not been charged with any crime.
It was a stunning tale, and el-Masri trembled as he told it. I’d seen people in Iraq who were in shock after they’d witnessed bombings or been released from prison. El-Masri’s demeanor reminded me of theirs. I wasn’t sure if his story was true, but I was convinced that something bad had happened to him. However, my American colleague, another Times reporter, didn’t buy it.
El-Masri called me later that evening. “I think your colleague didn’t believe me,” he said.
I told him that we were just doing our jobs. These accusations were very stark, and we would need evidence. I said I needed time to find more leads, and I asked about his plans. He would contact a lawyer, he said. “I want the people who did this to me to be brought to justice. I want them to acknowledge what they have done to me and others.”
I still had doubts. What interest would the CIA have in kidnapping el-Masri? He mentioned that he had prayed at the Multikulturhaus, an Islamic center in Neu-Ulm that was frequented by radicals and closely monitored by the German security services. He also was friendly with Reda Seyam, the creator of the video of mujahideen beheading Serbs that I’d watched as a teenager at my cousin’s house in Morocco.
El-Masri’s connection with the Multikulturhaus and Seyam were my first clues as to why the CIA might have taken him. Seyam, a German of Egyptian descent, had been radicalized while living in Neu-Ulm as a young man. Later, he had spent time in Indonesia, and the U.S. intelligence services believed he was linked to the terrorist bombings in Bali in 2002. He is now believed to have become a high-ranking figure in the Islamic State.
I knew it sounded crazy, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt that el-Masri was telling the truth. There was something about the way he told the story, and how traumatized he seemed, that stuck with me. I called Matt Purdy again and convinced him to let me dig into the story in my spare time. “Okay, keep me posted,” he said. “But remember these are very tough accusations. You’ll need a lot of proof.”
I understood that a story in the New York Times would be seen as a direct attack against the CIA and its practices in the so-called War on Terror, but it wasn’t the first story we’d heard about the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, which secretly extradited terror suspects from one foreign country to another “outside of the legal process.” Since September 11, this clandestine practice had become widespread, with “snatches” of more than one hundred alleged terrorists, who were transported for interrogation to prisons in other countries and to U.S.-run secret facilities in Afghanistan, Poland, Thailand, Guantánamo Bay, Romania, and Lithuania. Among the kidnap victims was Maher Arar, a Canadian born in Syria who was suspected of being an Al Qaeda operative. Arar said that after he was detained in New York in 2002, the United States had sent him to Syria, where he was held for ten months and tortured. Another detainee, an Australian national named Mamdouh Habib, claimed in a federal lawsuit that he was shipped to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after enduring six months of torture in an Egyptian prison. Human rights organizations estimated that dozens of “high value” detainees were being held in secret locations, known as black sites, all over the world.
I went over my notes from the interview again. The next day, I began calling sources in the German security services. Officially, people said they had never heard anything like el-Masri’s story. “Have you started believing in fairy tales?” one official asked me. I wondered how many days I should give myself to find out whether el-Masri was telling the truth.
My next best hope were the sources I called the “pay-phone” people, because I called them only from old-fashioned phone booths to make sure no one was listening. Later, I would use old Nokia phones I bought in a shop near a German train station for the same purpose. The shopkeeper there knew how to get unregistered SIM cards, which I used to call sources who I suspected were being monitored. Most of these sources were officials I’d gotten to know during and after my time in Iraq, from Germany, the United States, and various countries in the Middle East and North Africa, people who had access to sensitive information.
I went to a pay phone in my neighborhood and reached out to a senior German security official. He had given me an “emergency number” that wasn’t his regular cell.
“Is this a good time?” I asked.
“I can’t talk very long, but I was expecting your call.”
I told him that I needed his guidance and described el-Masri’s case, without giving his name or many details. “I need to know, could this story be true, or am I wasting my time? I appreciate any help you can give me. Also, why did you say you had been expecting my call?”
“No, I don’t think you are wasting your time,” he answered calmly. “You are on the right track. This is a big thing.”
I pushed the receiver closer to my ear, so as not to miss a word.
“The answer to your second question: the German authorities were officially informed around the same day this man made his call to you.”
“What authorities? And how did they know he called me?”
“It means either one or both of you were watched. You might want to check with the minister of the interior, but there were others informed as well. I have to go.”
I hung up. My head was spinning. I was still looking for a motive, but now at least I knew I was on to something. My next call was to the spokesperson at the Ministry of the Interior. “No comment” was all he would tell me.