Three times in seven years he hung the ‘Closed for Vacation’ notice on his Pennington office and went out into the world to find a killer and claw him back into the range of ‘due process’. Three times he alerted the Federal Marshals Service and slipped back into obscurity.
But each time it landed on his mat he checked the small ads column of Vintage Airplane, the only way the tiny few who knew of his existence could make contact.
He did it again that sunny morning of 13 May 2001. The advert read: ‘AVENGER. Wanted. Serious offer. No price ceiling. Please call.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The File
Senator Peter Lucas was an old hand on Capitol Hill. He knew that if he were going to secure any official action as a result of the file on Ricky Colenso and the confession of Milan Rajak, he would have to take it high: right to the top.
Operating with section or department heads would not work. The entire mindset of civil servants at that level was to pass the buck to another department. It was always someone else’s job. Only a flat instruction from the top floor would achieve a result.
As a Republican senator and friend over many years of George Bush Senior, Peter Lucas could get to the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and the new Attorney General, John Ashcroft. That would cover State and Justice, the two departments likely to be able to do anything.
Even then, it was not that simple. Cabinet secretaries did not want to be brought problems and questions; they preferred problems and solutions.
Extradition was not his speciality. He needed to find out what the USA could do and ought to do in such a situation. That needed research, and he had a team of young graduates for precisely that purpose. He set them to work. His best ferret, a bright girl from Wisconsin, came back a week later.
‘This animal, Zilic, is arrestable and transferable to the USA under the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984,’ she said.
The passage she had discovered came from the Congressional Hearing on Intelligence and Security of 1997. Specifically the speaker had been Robert M. Bryant, Assistant Director of the FBI, addressing the House Committee on Crime.
‘I’ve highlighted the relevant passages, senator,’ she said. He thanked her and looked at the text she laid before him.
‘The FBI’s extraterritorial responsibilities date back to the mid-1980s when Congress first passed laws authorizing the FBI to exercise federal jurisdiction overseas when a US national is murdered,’ Mr Bryant had said four years earlier.
Behind the bland language was a staggering Act that the rest of the world had largely ignored, and most US citizens as well. Prior to the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, the global presumption was that if a murder was committed, whether in France or in Mongolia, only the French or Mongolian governments had jurisdiction to pursue, arrest and try the killer. That applied whether the victim was French, Mongolian or visiting American.
The USA had simply arrogated to itself the right to decide that if you kill an American citizen anywhere in the world, you might as well have killed him on Broadway. Meaning US jurisdiction covers the whole planet. No international conference conceded this; the USA simply said so. Then Mr Bryant went further.
‘ . . . and the Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Anti-terrorism Act of 1986 established a new extraterritorial statute pertaining to terrorist acts conducted abroad against US citizens.’
‘Not a problem,’ thought the senator. ‘Zilic was not a Yugoslav Army serviceman, nor a policeman. He was freelance and the title of terrorist will stick. He is extraditable to the US under both statutes.’
He read on, ‘Upon the approval of the host country, the FBI has the legal authority to deploy FBI personnel to conduct extraterritorial investigations in the host country where the criminal act was committed, enabling the United States to prosecute terrorists for crimes committed abroad against US citizens.’
The Senator’s brow furrowed. This did not make sense. It was incomplete. The key phrase was ‘Upon the approval of the host country’. But cooperation between police forces was nothing new. Of course the FBI could accept an invitation from a foreign police force to fly over and help them out. It had been going on for years. And why were two separate Acts needed, in 1984 and 1986?
The answer, which he did not have, was that the second Act went miles further than the first, and the phrase, ‘Upon the approval of the host country’, was just Mr Bryant being comforting to the committee. What he was hinting at but not daring to say (he was speaking during the Clinton era) was the word ‘rendition’.
In the 1986 Act the States awarded itself the right to ask politely for the murderer of an American to be extradited back to the States. If the answer was ‘No’, or seemingly endless delay amounting to a snub, that was the end of ‘Mr Nice Guy’. The USA had entitled itself to send in a covert team of agents, snatch the ‘perp’ and bring him back for trial.
As FBI terrorist-hunter John O’Neill put it when the act was passed, ‘From now on, host country approval has got jack shit to do with it.’ A joint CIA/FBI snatch of an alleged murderer of an American is called a ‘rendition’. There have been ten such very covert operations since the Act was passed under Ronald Reagan, and it all began because of an Italian cruise liner.
In October 1985 the Achille Lauro, out of Genoa, was cruising along the north coast of Egypt, with further stops on the Israeli coast in prospect, and carrying a mixed cargo of tourists, including some Americans.
She had been secretly boarded by four Palestinians from the Palestine Liberation Front, a terrorist group attached to Yasser Arafat’s PLO, then in exile in Tunisia.
The terrorists’ aim was not to capture the ship but to disembark at Ashdod, a stopping point in Israel, and take Israeli hostages there. But on 7 October, between Alexandria and Port Said, they were in one of their cabins, checking their weapons, when a steward walked in, saw the guns and started yelling. The four Palestinians panicked and hijacked the liner.
There followed four days of tense negotiations. In from Tunis flew Abu Abbas, claiming to be Arafat’s negotiator. Tel Aviv would have none of it, pointing out that Abu Abbas was the boss of the PLF, not a benign mediator. Eventually a deal was struck: the terrorists would get passage off the ship and an Egyptian airliner back to Tunis. The Italian captain confirmed at gunpoint no one had been hurt. He was forced to lie.
Once the ship was free it became clear that on Day Three the Palestinians had murdered an old American tourist, 79-year-old, wheelchair-bound New Yorker Leon Klinghoffer. They had shot him in the face and thrown him and his chair into the sea.
For Ronald Reagan that was it; all deals were off. But the killers were airborne, on their way home, in an airliner of a sovereign state, friendly to America and in international airspace; that is, untouchable. Or maybe not.
The flat-top USS Saratoga happened to be steaming south down the Adriatic, carrying F-16 Tomcats. As darkness fell the Egyptian airliner was found off Crete, heading west for Tunis. Out of the gloom four Tomcats suddenly flanked the airliner. The terrified Egyptian skipper asked for an emergency landing at Athens. Permission denied. The Tomcats signalled he should accompany them or face the consequences. The same EC2 Hawkeye, also off the Saratoga, that had found the Egyptian plane passed the messages between the fighters and the airliner.
The diversion ended when the airliner, with the killers and Abu Abbas, their leader, on board, landed under escort at the US base at Sigonella, Sicily. Then it became complicated.
Sigonella was a shared base: US navy and Italian air force. Technically it is Italian sovereign territory; the USA only pays rent. The government in Rome, in a pretty high state of excitement, claimed the right to try the terrorists. The Achille Lauro was theirs, the airbase theirs.
It took a personal call from President Reagan to the US Special Forces detachment at Sigonella to order them to back off and let the Italians have the Palestinians.
In due course, back in Genoa, home city of the liner, the small f
ry were sentenced. But their leader, Abu Abbas, flew out free as air on 12 October and is still at liberty.* The Italian Defence Minister resigned in disgust. The Premier at the time was Bettino Craxi. He later died in exile, also in Tunis, wanted for massive embezzlement while in office.
Reagan’s response to this perfidy was the Omnibus Act, nicknamed the ‘Never Again’ Act. It was not finally the bright kid from Wisconsin but the veteran FBI terrorist hunter Oliver ‘Buck’ Revell, in retirement, who took a good dinner off the old senator and told him about ‘renditions’.
Even then it was not thought that for Zilic a ‘rendition’ would ever be needed. Post-Milosevic, Yugoslavia was keen to return to the community of civilized nations. She needed large loans from the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere to rebuild her infrastructure after seventy-eight days of NATO bombing. Her new President Kostunica would surely regard it as a bagatelle to have Zilic arrested and extradited to the USA?
That certainly was the request Senator Lucas intended to proffer to Colin Powell and John Ashcroft. If worst came to worst, he would ask for a covert rendition to be authorized.
He had his writer-team prepare from the full 1995 report of the Tracker a one-page synopsis to explain everything from Ricky Colenso’s departure to Bosnia to try to help pitiful refugees to his presence in a lonely valley on 15 May 1995.
What happened in the valley that morning, as described by Milan Rajak, was compressed into two pages, the most distressing passages heavily highlighted. Fronted by a personal letter from himself, the file was edged and bound for easy reading.
That was something else Capitol Hill had taught him. The higher the office, the shorter the brief should be. In late April he got his face-to-face with both Cabinet secretaries.
Each listened with grave visage, pledged to read the brief and pass it to the appropriate department within their departments. And they did.
The USA has thirteen major intelligence (information) gathering agencies. Between them they probably garner 90 per cent of all the intelligence, licit and illicit, gathered on the entire planet in any twenty-four-hour period.
The sheer volume makes absorption, analysis, filtration, collation, storage and retrieval a problem of industrial proportions. Another problem is that they will not talk to each other.
American intelligence chiefs have been heard to mutter in a late-night bar that they would give their pensions for something like the British Joint Intelligence Committee.
The JIC meets weekly in London under the chairmanship of a veteran and trusted mandarin to bring together the smaller country’s four agencies: the Secret Intelligence Service (foreign); the Security Service (home); the Government Communications HQ (SIGINT, the listeners); and Scotland Yard’s Special Branch.
Sharing intel and progress can prevent duplication and waste, but its main aim is to see if fragments of information learned in different places by different people could form the jigsaw puzzle that makes up the picture everyone is looking for.
Senator Lucas’s report went to six of the agencies and each obediently scoured their archives to see what, if anything, they had learned and filed about a Yugoslav gangster called Zoran Zilic.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, known as ATF, had nothing. He had never operated in the USA and ATF rarely if ever goes abroad.
The other five were Defence Agency (DIA), who will have an interest in any arms dealer; National Security Agency (NSA), the biggest of them all, working out of their ‘Black Chamber’ in Annapolis Junction, Maryland, listening to trillions of words a day, spoken, emailed or faxed, with technology almost beyond science fiction; Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), who will have an interest in anyone who has ever trafficked narcotics anywhere in the world; the FBI (of course), and the CIA. Both the latter spearhead the permanent search for knowledge about terrorists, killers, warlords, hostile regimes, whatever.
It took a week or more and April slipped into May. But because the order came right from the top, the searches were thorough.
The people at Defence, Drugs and Annapolis Junction all came up with fat files. In various capacities they had known about Zoran Zilic for years. Most of their entries concerned his activities since he became a major player on the Belgrade scene: as enforcer to Milosevic, racketeer in drugs and arms, profiteer and general low-life.
That he had murdered an American boy during the Bosnian war they had not known, and they took it seriously. They would have helped if they could. But their files all had one thing in common: they ran out sixteen months before the senator’s enquiry.
He had vanished, vaporized, disappeared. Sorry.
At the CIA building, enveloped in summer foliage just off the Beltway, the Director passed the query to the Deputy Director Operations. He consulted downwards to five sub-divisions: Balkans, Terrorism, Special Ops and Arms dealings were four. He even asked, more as a formality than anything else, the small and obsessively secret office formed less than a year earlier after the massacre of the seventeen sailors on the USS Cole in Aden harbour, known as Peregrine.
But the answer was the same. Sure we have files, but nothing after sixteen months ago. We agree with all our colleagues. He is no longer in Yugoslavia, but where he is, we do not know. He has not come to our attention for two years, so there has been no reason to expend time and treasure.
The other major hope would have been the FBI. Surely, somewhere in the huge Hoover Building at Pennsylvania and 9th, there would be a recent file describing exactly where this cold-blooded killer could now be found, detained and brought to justice?
Director Robert Mueller, recently appointed successor to Louis Freeh, passed the file and request downwards with his ‘Action Without Delay’ tag, and it found the desk of Assistant Director Colin Fleming.
Fleming was a lifelong bureau man who could never remember the time, even as a boy, when he did not want to be a G-Man. He came from Scottish Presbyterian stock and his faith was as unflinching as his concept of law, order and justice.
On the work of the bureau he was a fundamentalist. Compromise, accommodation, concession – in the matter of crime these were mere excuses for appeasement. This he despised. What he may have lacked in subtlety he made up in tenacity and dedication.
He came from the granite hills of New Hampshire where the boast is that the rocks and the men vie for toughness. He was a staunch Republican and Peter Lucas was his senator. Indeed, he had campaigned locally for Lucas and had made his acquaintance.
After reading the skimpy report, he rang the senator’s office to ask if he might read the full report by the Tracker and the complete confession of Milan Rajak. A copy was messengered over to him that same afternoon.
He read the files with growing anger. He too had a son to be proud of, a navy flier, and the thought of what had happened to Ricky Colenso filled him with a righteous wrath. The Bureau had got to be the instrument of bringing Zilic to justice either via an extradition or a rendition. As the man heading the desk covering all terrorism from overseas sources, he would personally authorize the rendition team to go and get the killer.
But the Bureau could not. Because the Bureau was in the same position as the rest. Even though his gangsterdom, drugs and arms dealing had brought him to the attention of the Bureau as a man to watch, Zilic had never been caught in an act of anti-American terrorism or support thereof; so when he had vanished, he had vanished and the Bureau had not pursued. Its file ran out sixteen months before.
It was with the deepest personal regret that Fleming had to join the others in the intelligence community in admitting they did not know where Zoran Zilic was.
Without a location, there could be no application to a foreign government for extradition. Even if Zilic were now sheltering in a ‘failed’ state where the writ of normal governmental authority did not run, a snatch operation could only be mounted if the Bureau knew where he was. In his personal letter to the senator, Assistant Director Fleming apologized that it did not.
Fleming’s ten
acity came with the Highland genes. Two days later he sought out and lunched with Fraser Gibbs. The FBI has two retired senior officers of almost iconic status, who can pack the student lecture halls at the Bureau’s Quantico training facility when they go.
One is the towering ex-footballer, former Marine pilot Buck Revell; the other is Fraser Gibbs, who spent his early career penetrating organized crime as an undercover agent, about as dangerous work as you can get, and the second half crushing the Cosa Nostra down the eastern seaboard. When restored to Washington after a bullet in the leg left him with a limp, he was given the desk covering freelances, mercenaries, guns for hire. He considered Fleming’s query with a furrowed brow.
‘I did hear something once,’ he conceded. ‘A manhunter. Sort of bounty hunter. Had a code name.’
‘A killer himself? You know government rules absolutely forbid that sort of thing.’
‘No, that’s the point,’ said the old veteran. ‘The rumour was, he doesn’t kill. Kidnaps, snatches, brings them back. Now, what the hell was his name?’
‘It could be important,’ said Fleming.
‘He was terribly secretive. My predecessor tried to identify him. Sent in an undercover man as a pretend client. But he smelt a trick somehow, made an excuse, left the meeting and disappeared.’
‘Why didn’t he just fess up and come clean?’ asked Fleming. ‘If he wasn’t in the killing business . . .’
‘I guess he figured that as he operated abroad, and as the Bureau doesn’t like freelances operating on its own turf, we’d have sought top-level instruction and been ordered to close him down. And he’d probably have been right. So he stayed in the shadows and I never hunted him down.’
‘The agent would have filed a report.’
‘Oh, yes. Procedure. Probably under the man’s code name. Never got any other name. Ah, that’s it. Avenger. Punch in “Avenger”. See what comes up.’