Called on their errors CIA agents' use of cell phones

Called on their errors
CIA agents' use of cell phones during mission lets police in Italy identify them, spurring agency review
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.

Amateur time
So amateurish was the rendition that the Italian lawyer for Robert Seldon Lady, whom prosecutors identify as the former CIA chief in Milan, says Lady's primary defense will be that he was too good a spy to have been involved in anything so badly planned and carried out. Lady, 51, who retired from the CIA two years ago, is believed to be living in Florida. If he or any of the 21 other CIA operatives charged in Abu Omar's abduction set foot in the European Union they are subject to arrest and extradition to Italy for trial. Prosecutors say there is little doubt Lady was a key player in Abu Omar's kidnapping and his rendition to Egypt, where he claims to have been tortured. Evidence seized by police last summer from Lady's Italian villa includes a surveillance photograph of Abu Omar walking from his apartment to a nearby mosque, at the precise spot where he was later seized and thrown into a van.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-worend1227,0,4368175.story?coll=ny-top-headlines

They are as incompetent as Bush.

Request also make to interpol. This is going to be messy.

There was a thread here some time ago re: the GPS chips in cell phones which means you can be tracked anywhere--employers could theoretically gain access to your every whereabouts... Some here were commenting on trying to maintain an old analog cell phone for this reason. Seems all you have to do is take the battery out, if you don't want to be traced?

Jesus, how pathetically inept.

Collin Farrell remove his cell phone battery when he didn't want to be tracked in the movie "The Recruit" (2003) and enough to have him leave it in when he wanted his fellow CIA recruit to be found later in the film.

If Hollywood knew enough to write that into the script, shouldn't the guys actually doing the job that Farrell portrayed know enough to do that?

Perhaps they need to go to the movies more often, they might learn something about their job! :sarcasm:

orders, things like this can "happen" you know.

There are people in CIA who care about laws, believe it or not.