The CIA’s special operations teams that specialize in renditions are drawn from the agency’s paramilitary unit, largely composed of former Special Forces personnel, plus career CIA intelligence officers and specialists in surveillance, communications and even behavioral sciences.
From Italian and Spanish police reports and court documents, the Tribune was able to identify the names, and in some cases the post office box addresses, used by 67 suspected CIA rendition specialists who registered at hotels in Milan and on the island of Mallorca.
Those post office boxes, in turn, led to scores of other names that share the same addresses, most of which are in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
Some of the bogus identities appear to be inside jokes, with surnames such as “Grayman” and “Bland,” or those of former CIA directors. One of the bogus identities is an apparent homage to Douglas Neidermeyer, the authoritarian ROTC commander in the movie “Animal House” who later is killed by his own troops in Vietnam.
A search of commercially available databases reveals no evidence that any of the named individuals ever has had a spouse, a residence, a telephone, a previous address, a mortgage, a credit history or a family.
Even though their listed birth dates place them in their 30s, 40s and 50s, none appears to have had a Social Security number before 1998.
The CIA requested that the Tribune not publish the names because some are in use abroad.
A senior U.S. official acknowledged that while the cover system had served the agency well for many years, it had not been designed to withstand the scrutiny made possible by the Internet.
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After learning of the extent to which the Tribune had cracked the CIA’s cover network, CIA Director Porter Goss ordered sweeping changes in the way the agency’s covers are created, according to government sources who asked not to be named.