Inside Guantánamo with Detainee 061

IT WAS LATE September 2002, and construction crews were just finishing work on the main prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, when three German intelligence agents arrived on the island aboard a U.S. military plane.

The reason for their visit was sensitive. The Pentagon was still arguing that those held at Guantánamo were "the worst of the worst" and "the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth," but behind closed doors CIA officials were coming to the conclusion that a number of detainees had no links to terrorism, and were working on a list of prisoners to be set free.

One of the detainees being considered for release was Murat Kurnaz, a German-born Turkish citizen who had been pulled off a bus in Pakistan the year before and turned over to U.S. forces. Since then, American security agencies hadn't turned up any evidence that he belonged to a terrorist group or posed a threat to the United States. But before clearing his release, the CIA wanted the Germans to interrogate him and offer their stamp of approval.

After they arrived, the agents were led out to a trailer near the dusty sprawl of cell blocks known as Camp Delta. Inside, the air conditioner was on full blast, and Kurnaz, a stocky young man with blunt features and a thick red beard, was seated on one side of a long table, his hands and feet shackled to a ring in the floor. The men took turns questioning him--about the nightclubs he frequented in his wilder years, about his reasons for embracing Islam, about his journey to Pakistan and the heavy boots he bought before leaving--while a hidden camera rolled in the background.

All told, they spent 12 hours with him over two days, concluding by the end that he simply found himself "in the wrong place at the wrong time" and "had nothing to do with terrorism and al-Qaida," according to German intelligence reports.

They discussed their findings with CIA and Pentagon officials, then boarded a plane back to Germany. During a stopover in Washington, D.C., one of the agents visited the local branch of Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, and reported back to headquarters via a secure phone line, saying: "USA considers Murat Kurnaz's innocence to be proven. He should be released in approximately six to eight weeks." A few days later, a Pentagon release form for the detainee was printed and awaiting signature.

"At that point, the picture was clear," says Lothar Jachmann, a retired spy who headed the intelligence-gathering operation on Kurnaz for Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, and was briefed on the Guantánamo visit by one of the agents. "We had nothing on him, and we had gotten feedback that the Americans had nothing on him either. The plan was to let him go."

But Kurnaz was not set free. Instead, he spent another four years languishing at Guantánamo, where he was repeatedly designated an "enemy combatant," despite evidence showing he had no known links to terrorist groups.

Lawyers for Guantánamo detainees often argue that their clients are being held based on thin intelligence, but Kurnaz's case is the first where the record clearly shows that evidence of innocence was ignored to justify his continued detention. His story, pieced together from intelligence reports, newly declassified Pentagon documents, and secret testimony before the German Parliament -- much of it never before reported in the United States -- offers a rare window into the workings of the secretive system used to hold and try terrorism suspects.

MURAT KUNRNAZ, the son of Turkish immigrants, was born and raised in Bremen, a rainy north German port city, where he lived with his family in a simple brick row house. His father, Metin, worked the assembly line at a Mercedes Benz plant, while his mother, Rabiye, stayed home with him and his two younger brothers. On Fridays he and his father attended the neighborhood Kuba Mosque, a storefront sanctuary with a barbershop, bookstore, and cavernous teahouse where old men in crocheted skullcaps huddle around plastic tables.