This is cross-posted over at my blog,
Attytood. But I thought that Kossacks would "get" this more than most other folks:
Yesterday Dagospia, situated of gossip institutional that often is taken advantage of anonymous but characterized collaborations, has told the rest of the history:
Jerzy Kos "is not only a Polish manufacturer but 007 of Warsaw fortified of a subcutaneous microchip that has allowed to the Polish intelligence and American to since localize it the first hours of the rapimento".
-- Google's English translation of
an article published in Italy's la Repubblica, June 16, 2004.
You may have read this week that an arm of the European Union, led by a Swiss investigator named Dick Marty is trying to get to the bottom of the CIA's alleged secret network of "black prisons" for terror suspects in Europe.
If we were Marty, we'd be hustling right now to track down a Polish contractor by the name of Kos (!)...Jerzy Kos.
Who is Jerzy Kos? Despite the name, he's not a poor-spelling
ultra-liberal blogger from Hackensack. He is either a) an international man of mystery or b) the subject of a set of coincidences, the odds of which you would need a mathematician like Philly's
John Allen Paulos to calculate. He does have a knack for turning up in the darndest places.
In 2003, Kos -- who is apparently in his 50s -- was the manager of the obscure air field in northern Poland where it's now alleged that the CIA landed several flights with terror suspects, includinga leased Boeing 737 en route from Afghanistan to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
That alone is newsworthy -- and that happened before Kos ended up in Baghdad with a major construction contract, was taken hostage by terrorists and freed by U.S. commandos, and finally was accused by the leftist Italian newspaper of carrying out a secret mission to free the three Italian hostages held captive with him -- with the help of a microchip planted inside of his body.
Whew! And you thought you had an interesting last year or two!
Unflortunately, not much is known about Jerzy Kos before around 2003. It's clear that he could be a key witness to what was going on at the Szczytno-Szymany International Airport, the alleged landing site of secret CIA rendition flights.
"I was head of this airport at the time. The landing of the Boeing was a big event," Jerzy Kos told the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborczaus on November 4 of this year. According to the report picked up by BBC and not online: "Kos saw soldiers loading and unloading boxes, but he did not see any people on board. No records of the flight have remained." Here's another version of what Kos has said about Americans at the airport.
Now, would you find it odd if the manager of an obscure foreign airport used by the CIA turned up months later as a contractor in Iraq? Well, that's what happened. Kos apparently took a job with a small company called Jedynka Wroclawska that, against the odds, won a $50 million reconstruction project to build new housing projects in Basra, Babylon and Karbala in southern Iraq in April 2004.
Perhaps it's not surprising that Poland -- which was a key member of the Bush administration's "coalition of the willing, with about 2,400 troops in Iraq that year -- would reap some of the rewards of the lucrative re-building process in Iraq. But the small firm from Wroclaw was an unlikely choice, especially since it had partnered with a telecommications company called Telmaxnet that was under investigation for money laundering.
In late May, Kos showed up in Baghdad to work as an engineer on the project. Just four days after he arrived, on June 1, 2004, he said later in an Associated Prss article (that oddly does not seem to be online), seven or eight clean-shaven young men burst into the company's house while he was napping. They blindfolded him, tied him up, and threw him into a jeep and sped off. He spent eight days as a hostage, and eventually was joined with three Italian hostages in an abandoned schoolhouse. He claimed his captors wanted to use him as a bargaining chip to force the Polish troops to leave, although Polish officials said they were never contacted.
It's strange that Kos wasn't killed when his American rescuers arrived, and it's also strange how little he remembers about what happened. In that interview with the Associated Press, Kos "gave only a sketchy account of their June 8 rescue, saying he didn't see much because of a cloud of dust kicked up by a U.S. military helicopter and because he closed his eyes." He said he has no idea what happened to the kidnappers, although it was later reported in the Italian media that two men were arrested.
Within days, there were reports in the Italian media that the hostages were really freed because of a large ransom payment, possibly tried to the re-election efforts of Italy's then embattled Prime Minister (and close Bush ally) Silvio Berlusconi. Here's one report from the BBC:
Gino Strada, a founder of the medical charity Emergency, had been leading one of several attempts to negotiate their release.
He says that the three were close to being freed "with no conditions" - but eventually someone agreed to pay a $9m ransom on behalf of the Italian authorities.
"The hostages were in effect handed over to the Americans," he told the daily newspaper La Repubblica.
The paper itself accused the government of using the release as "election propaganda".
Or course, if the ransom story was true -- than that would seem to contradict the bizzare tale put out a few days later by la Repubblica, apparently by way of a publication called Dagospia, that Kos is really "the 007 of Warsaw," that his "kidnapping" was really a spy mission to track down the other hostages and get them all freed.
Tin-foil hat stuff? You bet. In fact, the microchip allegation doesn't seem to make a lick of sense. If Kos were on a spy mission such as that, how would they arrange for him to get kidnapped and ensure he would end up with the Italian hostages? Also, the ransom story has the greater ring of truth. In fact, Kos' employers at Jedynka reportedly also offered to pay cash to the kidnappers, although it's unclear if money changed hands.
And you could certainly make the case that it's just an amazing coincidence that the manager of the CIA's preferred European airport also turned up in Baghdad with a lucrative contract and ended up kidnapped. It does carry echoes of the strange kidnapping of Philadelphia suburbanite Nick Berg, except with the happy ending that Kos wasn't beheaded. His story epitomizes the freaky world we find ourselves plunged into in the 2000s -- a world of spies, torture, hostages and money of the fictional "Syriana," except that truth is always more bizarre.
Here's a weird footnote to Kos' story: On June 15, 2004, he told the Associated Press that his kidnappers thought he was a CIA agent. He said:
"They thought I am an American cooperating with the CIA and I tried to explain that I am a Pole, that I was there to build houses."
Heavens to Betsy! A CIA agent? What on earth would give them an idea like that?