Swiss have the details of US rendition flights

The Swiss secret service, eavesdropping centre in Zimmerwald, south of Berne (pic) intercepted a Fax on November 19th 2005 using their national Onyx surveillance system (similiar but smaller than UKUSA ECHELON) . The officer marked their personal coded identifier, “wbm”, on the page and put the information down in a COMINT SAT report. The intercepted fax was given the reference number 160018 TER 00000115. This was published On 8 January 2006, in the Swiss newspaper Sonntagsblick (Sunday edition of the Blick newspaper).

The objective of the Onyx system is to monitor both civil and military communications, such as telephone, fax or Internet traffic, carried by satellite. In a way similar to ECHELON, Onyx uses lists of keywords to filter the intercepted content for information of interest, and the choice of keywords by the intelligence community must be approved by an independent commission.The system first saw life as SATOS-3 (the SATOS 1 and 2 systems were started in 1992, in particular to intercept faxes).

Dated 10th November 8.24 pm the Fax was from the Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, in Cairo, to his ambassador in London. It revealed that the US had detained at least 23 Iraqi and Afghani captives at a military base called Mihail Kogalniceanu in Romania, and added that similar secret prisons were also to be found in Poland, Ukraine, Kosovo, Macedonia and Bulgaria.

The report noted: “The [Egyptian] embassy got the information from its own sources that 23 Iraqi and American citizens have actually been interrogated at the military base Mihail Kogalniceanu close to the [Romanian] city of Constanza at the Black Sea. Similar interrogation centres exist in Ukraine, Kosovo, Macedonia and Bulgaria.”

The fax also referred to “prisoners being transported with American military planes from the base Salt Pit in Kabul to the Polish base Szymany and to the Romanian base on September 21 and 22, 2005.” It then went on to say: “In contradiction to all quoted facts, the Romanians deny the existence of the prisons that are used to interrogate members of al-Qaeda.”

At the time Jean-Blaise Defago, a spokesman for the Swiss defence ministry, declined to comment on the contents of the document, saying only that the authorities did not know how the newspaper had got hold of it.

He said Defence Minister Samuel Schmid had ordered an inquiry and confirmed that legal steps were being considered.

A Boeing 737, N313P, landed in Timisoara on January 25, 2004 just before midnight after flying from Kabul. It stayed on the runway for just over an hour and then flew on to Palma, Mallorca, where a CIA rendition team stayed in a hotel under fake identities.

Rendition jet N313P also travelled from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to Kabul on September 21, 2003. On September 22, it flew from Kabul to Szymany, a Polish defence ministry airfield. Close by is the Stare Kiejkuty base used by Polish intelligence. CIA jet N313P stayed only 64 minutes before flying to Romania.


Basically prisoners were transfered with diplomatic status, as the plane was effectively sovereign US territory.Each prisoner would be coded with a 900 series diplomatic passport.... and nobody would ask questions.

...and the Swiss enquiry ... disappeared .. like the fucking prisoners , without trace.