WASHINGTON -- On Aug. 12, 2003, a Gulfstream IV aircraft managed by a Capital Region charter company and carrying six passengers took off from Dulles International Airport and flew to Bangkok with fueling stops in Cold Bay, Alaska, and Osaka, Japan.

Before it returned four days later, the plane also touched down in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates and Ireland. As these unusual flights happened, U.S. officials took custody of an Indonesian terrorist, Riduan Isamuddin, who had been captured in Thailand and would spend the next three years being shuttled among secret prisons operated by the CIA.

The Gulfstream IV's itinerary, as well as the $339,228.05 price tag for the journey, are among the details about shadowy CIA flights that have emerged in a Columbia County courthouse in a billing dispute between contractors. The court documents offer a rare glimpse of the costs and operations of a controversial program -- which President Barack Obama shut down shortly after taking office -- that contracted private jet flights from Richmor Aviation, a Hudson-based company that offers chartered luxury jet services from its Route 9H headquarters.

For all the secrecy that once surrounded the CIA's rendition program, a significant part of its operation was entrusted to very small aviation companies like Richmor whose previous experience involved flying sports teams across the country.

The August 2003 flights -- and dozens of others to locations such as Bucharest, Baku, Cairo, Djibouti, Islamabad and Tripoli -- were organized by Sportsflight, a one-man aircraft brokerage business on Long Island. It then secured a plane from Richmor Aviation, based near the Columbia County Airport, which eventually sued Sportsflight for breach of contract. In the process, the cost and itineraries of numerous CIA flights became part of the court record.

In other cases, the government has invoked the "state secrets" privilege to shut down litigation about the CIA program, but the case in Columbia County proceeded uninterrupted in an almost empty courtroom. There were only two witnesses at the bench trial, Richmor President Mahlon Richards and the owner of Sportsflight, Donald Moss.

In a 2009 judgment, largely upheld on appeal earlier this year, Columbia County Judge Paul Czajka, who is running for district attorney, awarded Richmor more than $1 million.

"I kept waiting for (the government) to contact me. I kept thinking, isn't someone going to come up here and talk to me?" said William Ryan, the attorney for Richmor, which manages and books charter flights for aircraft owned by others and operates from four small airports in New York and Connecticut. "No one ever did."

Moss's attorney, Jeffrey Heller, also said he was never contacted by any government official.

The more than 1,500 pages of material from the trial and appeals courts files appear to include some sensitive material, such as logs of air-to-ground phone calls made from the plane. These show multiple calls to CIA headquarters, to the cell and home phones of a senior CIA official involved in the rendition program, and to a government contractor, DynCorp, based in suburban Falls Church, Va., that worked for the CIA.

Attorneys for the London-based legal charity Reprieve, which has been investigating the CIA program, discovered the Columbia County case and brought the court records to the attention of The Washington Post, the Associated Press and a British newspaper, the Guardian.

"This new evidence tells a chilling story, from the CIA's efforts to disguise its illegal activities to the price it paid to ferry prisoners to torture chambers across the world," said Cori Crider, Reprieve's legal director. "If we are to avoid repeating our mistakes, we must have a full accounting of how this system was allowed to flourish under our very noses."

The CIA declined to discuss the case.

"The CIA does not, as a rule, comment on litigation, especially that to which we are not a party," said Marie Harf, a spokeswoman for the agency.

It's not the first time that Richmor has garnered attention for its connections to international intrigue. In an unrelated story the Times Union reported in 2002 that a flight school run by Richmor Aviation out of Schenectady County Airport was one of four U.S. flight-training schools where a convicted terrorist, Abdul Hakim Murad, polished his flying skills, according to Philippine investigators. Murad, who attended the Glenville flight school in 1992, was linked to an Islamic extremist group later credited with helping design the Sept. 11 attacks. Murad is in federal prison.

Nine years ago, a manager for Richmor Aviation said the FBI was alerted to the flight school after a Richmor business card was discovered in the Manila apartment Murad shared with Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was convicted of orchestrating the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center.

In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the CIA's Rendition Group, a division of the agency's CounterTerrorism Center, was tasked with finding terrorism suspects, orchestrating their capture and transferring them for interrogation to covert prison sites in allied countries.

The program was exposed by journalists, human rights activists and aviation enthusiasts who examined public flight records, identified the tail numbers of private planes suspected to be involved in rendition operations and then continued to spot those planes.

The Richmor plane -- tail number N85VM -- was identified publicly in 2005 after it was used in the rendition of Abu Omar, a Muslim cleric who was snatched off the streets of Milan and flown to Egypt. The company was managing the plane for its owner, Philip Morse, vice chairman of Fenway Sports Group, parent company of the Boston Red Sox.

Richmor changed the tail number of the Gulfstream and complained in a letter to Sportsflight that it became the subject of "negative publicity, hate mail and the loss of a management customer as a consequence of the association of the N85VM with rendition flights." The letter also stated that Richmor crews were not comfortable leaving the country, and that the owners "are afraid to fly in their own aircraft."

The CIA captured and rendered at least 100 terrorism suspects to other countries, including all of the high-value detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Among them is Isamuddin, who is better known as Hambali. He and the al-Qaida-affiliated group he led are accused the 2002 night club bombing in Bali.

The CIA used a network of at least 26 private planes that were leased through front companies and legitimate contractors. By 2007, the Council of Europe was able to identify 1,245 flights operated by the CIA that had passed through Europe; invoices in the Columbia County courthouse record numerous stops in Britain and Ireland.

The contracts for these and other flights had remained classified. Over the course of 36 months, between 2002 and 2005, the Richmor plane flew at least 1,258 hours for the agency, including routine flights to transfer personnel to Guantanamo and other destinations, according to the court records.

The records include a contract stipulating that all flight crew must be American-born citizens.

Richmor billed at a rate of $4,900 an hour for the use of the plane and earned at least $6 million over three years, according to the invoices and other court records. Richmor accounted for only a small percentage of the CIA's business, according to publicly available records. That suggests the agency paid tens of millions of dollars to use private planes in the aftermath the Sept. 11 attacks to transport detainees and its own personnel.

Senior writer Brendan J. Lyons contributed to this report