The BBC's search for a CIA "black site" in Poland

Szymany airport, Poland

very interesting...

I stood at the end of the frozen runway, peering through the mist, trying to make out the terminal building in the distance.

It was exactly at this spot, and under the cover of darkness, that the CIA planes did their business.

"They always followed the same procedure," says Mariola Przewlocka, the manager at the remote Szymany airport in north-east Poland when the strange flights arrived during 2003.

"We were always told to keep away. The planes would stay at the end of the runway, often with their engines running. A couple of military vans from the nearby intelligence base would go up to them, stay a while and then drive off, out of the airport.

"I saw several of these flights but never saw inside the vans because they had tinted windows and they never stopped at the terminal building.

"Payment was always made in cash. The invoices were made out to American companies but they were probably fake," says Mrs Przewlocka.

[...]

After a week of meetings in smoky Warsaw restaurants and coffee bars with Polish intelligence sources, airport workers and journalists, I obtained what I had been looking for, and something that nobody in authority wanted to reveal, the flight log of planes landing at Szymany airport.

They confirmed my eyewitness's account - that a well-known CIA Gulfstream plane, the N379P, had made several landings at the airport in 2003.

The plane has been strongly linked to the transportation of Al-Qaeda terrorists.

Another plane, a Boeing 737, had flown direct from Kabul to this remote Polish airport.

"There is no particular reason for a Gulfstream to stop there. So there has to be a reason why the plane is stopping there and the fact that everyone is trying to conceal this reason makes it all the more interesting to try to find out what it is," says Anne Fitzgerald from Amnesty International.

I followed the route of the military vans from the airport to the nearby secret Polish intelligence base at the village of Stare Kiejkuty.

Surrounded by double-lined fences, security cameras and thick pine forest, visitors are not welcome.

Within five minutes of stopping the car I was approached by a man in a military uniform who made it clear he wanted me to leave.

Was this where a CIA secret prison had been located?

A committee of European parliamentarians who investigated the CIA secret prison programme subsequently concluded in a report:

"In the light of... serious circumstantial evidence, a temporary secret detention facility may have been located at the intelligence training centre at Stare Kiejkuty."

The search for Poland's secret CIA prison is broadcast in Global Account for the first time at 23.06 GMT on Thursday 28 December on BBC World Service.

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