CIA agents' use of cell phones during mission lets police in Italy identify them, spurring agency review.
Milan - The trick is known to just about every small-time crook in the cellular age: If you don't want police to know where you are, take the battery out of your cell phone when you're not using it.
Had that trick been taught at the CIA's rural Virginia training school for covert operatives, the Bush administration might have avoided much of the crisis in Europe over the practice the CIA calls "rendition."
When CIA operatives assembled here nearly three years ago to abduct an Egyptian-born Muslim preacher named Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, and "render" him to Cairo, they left their cell phone batteries in.
Even when not in use, a cell phone sends a periodic signal, enabling the worldwide cellular network to know where to look for it in case of an incoming call.
Those signals allowed Italian police investigating Abu Omar's disappearance to construct an almost minute-by-minute record of his abduction in February 2003, and to identify nearly two dozen people as his abductors.
CIA director Porter Goss, "horrified" at the sloppiness of the Milan rendition, has ordered a "top-down" review of the agency's "tradecraft," the nuts and bolts of the spy business.
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
take the battery out
CIA agents' use of cell phones during mission lets police in Italy identify them, spurring agency review.
Milan - The trick is known to just about every small-time crook in the cellular age: If you don't want police to know where you are, take the battery out of your cell phone when you're not using it.
Had that trick been taught at the CIA's rural Virginia training school for covert operatives, the Bush administration might have avoided much of the crisis in Europe over the practice the CIA calls "rendition."
When CIA operatives assembled here nearly three years ago to abduct an Egyptian-born Muslim preacher named Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, and "render" him to Cairo, they left their cell phone batteries in.
Even when not in use, a cell phone sends a periodic signal, enabling the worldwide cellular network to know where to look for it in case of an incoming call.
Those signals allowed Italian police investigating Abu Omar's disappearance to construct an almost minute-by-minute record of his abduction in February 2003, and to identify nearly two dozen people as his abductors.
CIA director Porter Goss, "horrified" at the sloppiness of the Milan rendition, has ordered a "top-down" review of the agency's "tradecraft," the nuts and bolts of the spy business.
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