Doc. 11302 Report whether the prime minister and his cabinet were briefed on the HVD programme, our source said: “Even the ABW [Internal Security Agency] and AW [Foreign Intelligence Agency] do not have access to all of our classified materials. Forget the prime minister; it operated directly under the president.” 177. Our investigations have revealed that the state office from which much of the strength of this Polish accountability structure derived was the National Security Bureau (Biuro Bezpieczenstwa Narodowego, or BBN), located in the Chancellery of President Kwasniewski. Our sources confirmed to us that the bilateral operational arrangements for the HVD programme in Poland were “negotiated on the part of the president’s office by the National Security Bureau [BBN]”. 178. Marek Dukaczewski, an outstanding military intelligence officer ultimately promoted to the rank of general, served the BBN in the chancellery of his close friend Aleksander Kwasniewski for the first five years of the latter’s presidency, from 1996 to 2001. Mr Dukaczewski worked directly alongside Marek Siwiec during this period, whilst Mr Siwiec was a Secretary of State in the Presidential Chancellery and then became Chief of the BBN. Jerzy Szmajdzinski was appointed Minister of National Defence for Mr Kwasniewski’s second term, in October 2001. Shortly afterwards, Mr Dukaczewski was nominated Head of the Military Information Services, the WSI, starting in December 2001. 179. Besides this accountability structure, which remained in place from the immediate aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks throughout Poland’s involvement in the CIA’s covert HVD programme, probably no other Polish official had knowledge of it. Indeed, the “highest level of classification” at national and intergovernmental levels, understood to match NATO’s “Cosmic Top Secret” category,153still attaches to the information pertaining to operations in Poland. Our unravelling of such secrecy to expose Polish participation in unlawful detention and transfer operations is perhaps the greatest testament to the “dynamics of truth” in motion. However, an alternative interpretation, which provided my inquiry with motivation in the face of systematic cover-up, came in one of our most memorable moments of testimony from a top-level Polish source. He stated simply: “Listen, there are no secrets in war. There is no intelligence in war. You cannot keep something secret in a time of conflict.” 4.3. The anatomy of CIA secret transfers and detentions in Poland 180. Notwithstanding the approach of the Polish authorities towards this inquiry,154our team was able to uncover new documentary evidence from two separate Polish sources showing actual landings in Poland by aircraft associated with the CIA. 181. These sources corroborate one another and provide the first verifiable records of a number of landings of “rendition planes” significant enough to prove that CIA detainees were being transferred into Poland. I can now confirm that at least 10 flights by at least four different aircraft serviced the CIA’s secret detention programme in Poland between 2002 and 2005. At least six of them arrived directly from Kabul, Afghanistan, during precisely the period in which our sources have told us that high-value detainees (HVDs) were being transferred to Poland. Each of these flights landed at the same airport I named in my 2006 report as a detainee drop-off point: Szymany. 182. The most significant of these flights, including the aircraft identifier number, the airport of departure (ADEP), as well as the time and date of arrival into Szymany, are the following: – N63MU from Dubai, arrived in Szymany at 2.56 p.m. on 5 December 2002; 153. See NATO, Security within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 17 June 2002, supra note 73; in Enclosure “B” – Basic Principles and Minimum Standards of Security, at p. 5, paragraph 18.a. In NATO terms, the category of security classification attached to the bilateral operations of the HVD programme is known as “COSMIC TOP SECRET (CTS)”, a category for which “unauthorised disclosure would result in exceptionally grave damage” to NATO and/or to participating member states. 154. The approach of the Polish authorities towards my inquiry is dealt with in further detail below. The official position of the Polish Government remains unchanged since it was announced on 10 December 2005: “The Polish Government strongly denies the speculation occasionally appearing in the media as to the existence of secret prisons on the territory of the Republic of Poland, supposedly used for the detention of foreigners suspected of terrorism. There are no such prisons in Poland and there are no prisoners detained in contravention of the laws and international conventions to which Poland is a party.” Most recently it was reproduced in submissions before the United Nations Committee Against Torture (CAT) in Geneva; see written replies by the Government of Poland to the list of issues (CAT/C/POL/Q/4/Rev.1) to be taken up in connection with the consideration of the fourth periodic report of Poland (CAT/C/67/Add.5), UN Document CAT/C/POL/Q/4/Rev.1/Add.1, 30 March 2007, available at http://www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cat/cats38.htm; response to Question 12, at p. 23, paragraph 72. 37