ROME -- The CIA ran secret prisons in Poland and Romania to hold terror suspects from 2003 to 2005, including some now-notorious Al Qaeda operatives, according to a critical report released Friday by the Council of Europe.

The investigation, undertaken by Sen. Dick Marty of the council's assembly, states that the one-time Eastern Bloc countries were willing participants in a U.S.-directed war on terror and "knowingly complicit" in the practice known as rendition, in which suspects were snatched and held in foreign countries for interrogation.


Officials in Poland and Romania and at the CIA called the report's conclusions baseless.

The report, for the first time, cites unnamed CIA sources as providing the names of key terror suspects sent to Poland: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a leader in the 2001 attacks in the United States; Abu Zubaydah, a suspected senior Al Qaeda operative; and Ramzi Binalshibh, another Al Qaeda suspect.

Rendition remains one of the most controversial aspects of the Bush administration's attempt to quell terrorist attacks. President Bush acknowledged the secret detention program only in September 2006, and the administration has been silent and unresponsive to questions about where the prisons were.

The report by the Council of Europe, an influential, intergovernmental body focused on democracy and human rights, is an attempt to fill in the gaps.

It identifies a remote Polish intelligence service base at Stare Kjekuty as an important CIA interrogation center. The base is a few miles from a former military airfield in Szymany in northeastern Poland. From 2002 to 2005, at least 10 flights apparently operated by CIA rendition teams were received at the airfield, and six of those came directly from Kabul, Afghanistan, the report said.

In most cases, the flights were disguised so they could not be tracked by transnational air control, the report said.

According to airport personnel who spoke to the Tribune last year, the flights apparently dropped off prisoners who were then transported in vans to Stare Kjekuty. Marty's report Friday said that "local authorities were not supposed to be aware of the exact number or the identities of the prisoners who passed through the facilities -- this was information that they did not 'need to know.' "

Marty issued a preliminary report in 2006 that relied heavily on press accounts and laid out possible scenarios of cooperation. The new report offers more details, explanations from unnamed intelligence figures about the alleged operations and some insight into what led Poland and Romania to cooperate.

"Highest state authorities" in those countries cooperated and knew of the alleged detention centers, the report said.

In Poland, Marty names then-President Aleksander Kwasniewski, among others, as a key collaborator with the U.S. In Romania, Marty names a "small circle of trust" that allegedly collaborated, including then-President Ion Iliescu, his minister of national defense and the head of military intelligence.

Both countries, democratic allies of the U.S. since the fall of communism, were eager to cooperate with the United States. Washington had been instrumental in supporting reforms, including those in the intelligence realm, the report said. Working with the U.S. on the secret program was seen as a matter of national interest, it said.

By Friday night, official denials were being broadcast in both countries. "This is all unfounded," Iliescu told Realitatea TV in Romania. The head of military intelligence, Sergiu Tudor Medar, told the same station that Marty's report was "pure speculation."