Accused pilots traced to Johnston

CLAYTON -- The forecast called for heavy snow on the route home, so the three pilots who had just flown a covert CIA-sponsored so-called "extraordinary rendition" flight were forced to stay an extra night at the Gran Melia Victoria, a luxury hotel overlooking the marina on the Spanish island of Majorca.

In Room 552, the pilot who called himself Capt. James Fairing picked up the phone at 2:28 in the afternoon and dialed his tree-shaded home in a subdivision carved out of rolling pine forests here in Clayton, south of Raleigh. He also called his employer, a Johnston County-based air charter service that has long worked for the CIA.

Fairing's co-pilot, who registered as Eric Matthew Fain, reached for the phone in his 10th-floor room and called a woman back home with whom he owns a 22-foot speedboat and who also flies missions for the CIA. The third pilot from the stranded flight carried a U.S. passport issued to Kirk James Bird. The passport photo shows a balding, middle-aged man with a broad smile.

The names they used were all aliases, but the Los Angeles Times confirmed their real identities from government databases and visited their homes this month after a German court ordered the arrest of the three so-called "ghost pilots" and 10 members of the CIA's special renditions unit on charges of kidnapping and causing serious bodily harm to Khaled Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, three years ago.

None of the pilots identified by the Times responded to repeated requests for comment left with family members and on their home telephones.

Relying on the operatives' passport numbers, hotel records, credit card bills and aviation records, German prosecutors are seeking to properly identify the 13 Americans in a high-profile case that has upset relations between the United States and Germany, and caused a political scandal in Germany over whether government officials sanctioned the CIA operation.

Elsewhere in Europe, legal and parliamentary investigations have focused a harsh spotlight on the CIA's program to abduct suspected terrorists and ferry them to secret sites for interrogation, operations known variously as "black renditions" or "extraordinary renditions."

On Friday, an Italian judge issued arrest warrants for 26 alleged CIA operatives for allegedly abducting a radical Muslim cleric outside his mosque in Milan in February 2003 and delivering him to Egypt, where his lawyer says he was tortured. The judge set a trial date for June 8 in Milan.

All the Americans charged, including the top two CIA officers in Italy at the time, have departed the country, but Italian law allows defendants to be tried in absentia.

None of the aliases used in Italy directly matches those in the German case, although one of the pilots might be the same in both incidents.

A CIA spokesman refused all comment on the rendition cases, and declined to discuss whether the prosecutions and investigations have hampered CIA travel or operations in Europe or elsewhere.

A key player

Flight records show that Aero Contractors Ltd., based in Smithfield, operated a plane that carried Masri from Macedonia to Afghanistan. The charter aircraft company has flown scores of sensitive missions for the CIA and has played a key support role in counterterror operations since the Sept. 11 attacks, according to former agency officials.

The three pilots in the Masri rendition case live within a 30-minute drive of the guarded Aero hangar and offices at the rural Johnston County Airport. Reached by telephone Saturday at the Aero office, Freddy Pearce, an Aero official, declined to discuss any aspects of the company's business.