CIA rendition jet flew to Europe to abduct Snowden: Report

A secret US government jet previously employed in CIA rendition flights flew to Europe last year to abduct whistleblower Edward Snowden from Russia and transfer him back to America, according to a new report.

As Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, arrived in Moscow from Hong Kong on the evening of June 24, 2013, an unmarked Gulfstream V business jet flew from the US to Denmark in a bid to deliver him back to the US, reports The Register, a British technology news and opinion website.

The jet, with tail number N977GA, took off from Manassas Regional Airport in the US state of Virginia, a quiet commercial airport 30 miles from Washington DC, The Register reported. The airport discreetly offers its clients “the personal accommodations and amenities you can’t find at commercial airports.”

The next morning, on June 25, N977GA was detected heading east over Scotland at the unusually high altitude of 45,000 feet. It had not filed a flight plan, and was flying above the level at which air traffic control reporting is mandatory.

“The plane showed up on our system at 5:20 on 25 June,” according to a Register source who is a member of an Internet aircraft-tracking network in the UK. “We knew the reputation of this aircraft and what it had done in the past.”

N977GA was not reporting its progress to air-traffic controllers, and thus it would normally have been necessary to use a massive commercial or military radar installation to follow its path.

The N977GA has been mentioned in reports as a possible transport for the CIA program of extraordinary rendition and is also believed to have been used by the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation Systems (JPATS), managed by the US Marshals Service for moving prisoners and non-US citizen criminals around.

The US Justice Department has charged Snowden with two counts of violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property for leaking documents that have revealed the scope and nature of US surveillance programs.

Snowden’s release of NSA material was called the most significant leak in US history by Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. In August, Russia granted him asylum for one year.