A Brief History of the Spy

by Paul Simpson

  The CIA’s DCI George Tenet refused to accept that the Agency had failed in its duty, blaming the FBI for the shortcomings that allowed the terrorists to enter the United States and get into position to hijack the aircraft. As far as he was concerned, the fact that he was able to present President Bush with a plan for retaliation within four days indicated that the CIA was on top of the situation, even if others were not.

  Even while the attacks were continuing, the CTC was beginning to track down information from all their sources, and within hours Tenet told the president that the attacks ‘looked, smelled and tasted like bin Laden’. Four days later, Tenet’s plan, which included ‘a full-scale covert attack on the financial underpinnings of the terrorist network, including clandestine computer surveillance and electronic eavesdropping to locate the assets of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups’ and his ‘Worldwide Attack Matrix’, a plan for covert action in eighty countries, was presented to the president and his advisers at Camp David. On 17 September, Bush signed a Presidential Finding authorizing the CIA to hunt down, and if necessary, kill the leaders of al-Qaeda: ‘I want justice,’ he told reporters that day. ‘And there’s an old poster out West, I recall, that said ‘‘Wanted, Dead or Alive’’.’ (The CIA had requested this authority in July, but had not yet received it.) He also authorised an extra $1 billion funding for the Agency.

  President Bush declared his War on Terror in a speech to Congress on 20 September, stating bluntly that ‘Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.’ Among the rhetoric, he announced the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, adding, ‘We will come together to give law enforcement the additional tools it needs to track down terror here at home. We will come together to strengthen our intelligence capabilities to know the plans of terrorists before they act and to find them before they strike.’ The phrase ‘war on terror’ was adopted around the world, although the British stopped using it, partly, as former MI5 head Elizabeth Manningham-Buller pointed out, because the 9/11 attacks were ‘a crime, not an act of war’.

  The Taliban refused to hand bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leaders over to the Americans, leading in October to Operation Enduring Freedom, the invasion of Afghanistan. During the preparation for the war, the CIA worked inside Afghanistan, trying to create rifts between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, even proposing to assist a coup from within the Taliban if it meant al-Qaeda were handed over. When these efforts failed, the invasion was launched and within a few weeks, bin Laden was forced to flee to Tora Bora, in the east of Afghanistan, from where (probably with the aid of Pakistani intelligence, even though they were ostensibly assisting the Americans), he was able to escape into Pakistan. For a long time, it was believed he was dead until a video recording was released in late 2002.

  * * *

  Interrogation of detainees has always been a useful source of intelligence for spies across the centuries, but it was taken to a new level in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center. The arguments for and against ‘enhanced’ interrogation — using such techniques as waterboarding (where water is poured onto a cloth over a suspect’s face, making him believe he is drowning) and sensory deprivation — have been rehearsed many times: can evidence produced that way be trusted, or has the suspect said what he thinks the interrogators want to hear in order to prevent the torture from recurring?

  The CIA was given wide latitude in its hunt for the terrorist suspects. José Rodriguez, who became head of the National Clandestine Service, in charge of the interrogations, defended their actions, pointing out, ‘We did the right thing for the right reason. And the right reason was to protect the homeland and to protect American lives.’ The CIA took over responsibility for the interrogations in early 2002 and began ‘rendition’ of the suspects — removing them secretly to ‘black sites’ in foreign countries, places where the Agency could have control over the interrogations without supervision from others in the US administration or the media. Abu Zubaida, believed at the time to be one of the senior members of al-Qaeda, was rendered to Thailand after his capture in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in March 2002, However, both George Tenet, in his book about his time as DCI, and Rodriguez maintain that they were careful to check the legality of their moves (what Rodriguez calls ‘get[ting] everybody in government to put their big boy pants on and provide the authorities that we needed’) before proceeding.

  A series of techniques was approved in what became described as the ‘Torture Memo’, an eighteen-page document dated 1 August 2002 sent by the Assistant Attorney General to the CIA’s General Counsel. This set out in considerable detail the methods by which the processes would be applied, and how the use of them could not be classified as torture within the definition of Section 2340A of title 18 of the United States Code. (It would be further clarified by three memoranda in 2005 totalling 106 pages.) Speaking in April 2012, Rodriguez claimed: ‘This program was about instilling a sense of hopelessness and despair on the terrorist, on the detainee, so that he would conclude on his own that he was better off cooperating with us.’

  The FBI carried out the initial interrogation of Zubaida, during which he identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) as the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, and revealed plans to attack American apartments with bombs, as well as an assault on the Brooklyn Bridge. According to Ali H. Soufan, the FBI officer in charge of the interrogation of Zubaida and other al-Qaeda members, Zubaida gave up nothing further of use during the enhanced interrogation — and indeed he and his Bureau colleagues refused to have anything to do with them.

  It is perhaps telling that Rodriguez authorized the destruction of the CIA tapes which chronicled the interrogation of Zubaida, although he claims that he did so after the revelation of the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib by Army personnel following the 2003 invasion. ‘I was concerned that the distinction between a legally authorized program as our enhanced interrogation program was, and illegal activity by a bunch of psychopaths would not be made,’ he told a CBS documentary in April 2012.

  The enhanced interrogation techniques were applied to KSM when he was captured; again, their efficacy is dubious. KSM was deprived of sleep for over seven days; he was waterboarded 183 times; his diet was manipulated. Yet he was still able to try to put his interrogators on the wrong track of the courier who was serving Osama bin Laden, and claimed more responsibility for some of al-Qaeda’s activities than he could have had in an effort to stop the interrogation.

  MI5 became embroiled in the rendition and torture controversy when they hit the headlines in 2010. The Guardian ran a story entitled ‘Devious, dishonest and complicit in torture — top judge on MI5’, based on a draft judgement in the case of Binyan Mohamed, who had been arrested in Pakistan, based on information supplied by Zubaida prior to his enhanced questioning, and interrogated by the CIA in Morocco as part of the War on Terror. Mohamed claimed that British officers were present during his interrogation and were passing questions to the interrogators, fully aware that he was actually being tortured. In 2006, MI5 said that Mohamed had only been questioned in Pakistan, where he was arrested, and the officer involved had seen no evidence of torture — although they had not sought assurances from the Americans regarding future treatment.

  A 2009 civil case became embroiled in a row over what sensitive materials could be revealed in public, but what the courts saw was sufficient for the Attorney General to recommend that the police investigate MI5. Eventually, Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, announced in January 2012 that there was not enough evidence to prove that the security services provided information about Mohamed when they knew he was at risk of torture, effectively clearing them.

  Another case of the British services assisting with rendition wasn’t so easy to dismiss. Abdelhakim Belhadj, who would later lead the Tripoli Military Council during the uprising against Gaddafi, was rendered to Libya by the CIA with Briti
sh help, then incarcerated and tortured in the notorious Abu Selim jail in southern Tripoli. The documents confirming this were discovered in an abandoned government building after the fall of Gaddafi’s regime, with MI6’s Sir Mark Allen writing to Gaddafi’s head of intelligence, Moussa Koussa, ‘I congratulate you on the safe arrival of Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq [the name used by Belhaj]. This was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over the years.’ Belhadj is suing the British government and Sir Mark Allen for damages, and the Metropolitan Police is investigating the allegations.

  * * *

  The hunt for Osama bin Laden and other key al-Qaeda members would stretch across the next decade, but that wasn’t the Bush administration’s highest priority. Whether there was a genuine belief that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a party to 9/11, or whether there were those in the American government — notably Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — who saw the terrorist attack as an opportunity to deal with more than one menace at a time, the focus quickly turned to Saddam. While they were busily engaged searching for al-Qaeda, the CIA was also tasked with investigating Iraq, and particularly whether Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.

  According to the report prepared by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, set up by President Bush following the invasion: ‘The Intelligence Community’s performance in assessing Iraq’s pre-war weapons of mass destruction programs was a major intelligence failure. The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policymakers.’ At the same time the Butler Report, set up in the UK for the same purpose, noted that the Joint Intelligence Committee’s judgement that Iraq was ‘conducting nuclear related research and development into the enrichment of uranium’ was based on two new agents’ reports, and ‘those reports were given more weight in the JIC assessment than they could reasonably bear’. It pointed out that the judgement ‘went to (although not beyond) the outer limits of the intelligence available’ but that there was ‘no evidence of deliberate distortion or of culpable negligence’.

  Whether the evidence was sufficient to justify the various administrations’ desire to create regime change in Iraq or not, there were allegations that the dossier of information had been ‘sexed up’ before it was revealed to the British parliament and media. Major General Michael Laurie told the Chilcott Inquiry into Iraq: ‘We knew at the time that the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care.’ Tony Blair’s communications chief Alastair Campbell has consistently denied the accusation, claiming that he only assisted with the presentational aspects of the dossier. He told Lord Chilcott:

  At no time did I ever ask [Joint Intelligence Committee head Sir John Scarlett] to beef up, to override, any of the judgements that he had. At no point did anybody from the prime minister down say to anybody within the intelligence services, ‘You have got to tailor it to fit this judgement or that judgement.’ It just never happened. The whole way through, it could not have been made clearer to everybody that nothing would override the intelligence judgements and that John Scarlett was the person who, if you like, had the single pen.

  There were two key elements to the accusations against Saddam: that he was gaining uranium from Niger which could be enriched to produce weapons of mass destruction — that could potentially be prepared for use within 45 minutes, according to the British dossier; and that he was also preparing biological WMDs. ‘We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels,’ Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council, as they debated a resolution over Iraq’s future. ‘The source was an eye witness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities. He actually was present during biological agent production runs. He was also at the site when an accident occurred in 1998. Twelve technicians died from exposure to biological agents.’

  The problem was that he wasn’t. The evidence for the latter relied on Iraqi informant Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, code-named Curveball, who was comprehensively proved to be a liar — and who eventually admitted to the Guardian he had manipulated his handlers within the Germany intelligence agency, the BND. ‘I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime,’ he said in 2011. ‘I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy.’

  Although by no means all the information regarding Curveball has yet been released into the public domain, the story that has emerged backs up the assertion made by Sir Richard Dearlove in a meeting at Downing Street on 23 July 2002. A leaked memo indicates he reported on his recent meetings in Washington that ‘Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’

  Al-Janabi entered Germany in late 1999 on a tourist visa, and then applied for asylum, claiming that he had embezzled Iraqi government funds and faced imprisonment or death if he returned. Once he was in the German refugee system, he began talking about his work as a chemical engineer, which immediately attracted the attention of the BND. (In his interview with the Guardian, Janabi later claimed that he didn’t mention his work until he was granted asylum in March 2000; the BND says that he actually ceased active cooperation after his asylum was granted in 2001.) He revealed that he had been part of a team that equipped trucks to brew bio-weapons, and named six sites that were already operational. Refusing to talk directly to American intelligence, the newly (and as it turned out, appropriately) code-named Curveball provided reams of material to the BND, enough to furnish ninety-five reports to Langley. There analysts evaluated the information, spy satellites checked out the sites named and drawings of the trucks were prepared. The problem, of course, was that without direct access to Curveball, no one could be absolutely sure that they were interpreting what he said correctly.

  Curveball’s information was nowhere near as concrete as its use to back up Powell’s speech would suggest. ‘His information to us was very vague,’ one of his supervisors at the BND told the Los Angeles Times in 2005. ‘He could not say if these things functioned, if they worked… He didn’t know… whether it was anthrax or not. He had nothing to do with actual production of [a biological] agent. He was in the equipment testing phase. And the equipment worked.’ He admitted that he had only personally visited one site, where he said that he understood that there had been an accident in 1998 — the source of the alleged ‘eye witness’ account referred to by Powell.

  Why was he taken seriously? Curveball’s information tallied with what the CIA analysts had anticipated, and, worse, seemed to be backed up by other information. When those sources were discredited, Curveball wasn’t immediately disregarded. Warnings were sent by MI6 and the BND to Washington regarding Curveball’s credibility. ‘Elements of his behaviour strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators,’ MI6 noted in April 2002. But by September 2002, DCI George Tenet was reporting that they had ‘a credible defector who worked in the programme’ for biochemical weapons. Despite the reservations of some within the CIA (which Tenet later vehemently denied being aware of), Curveball’s information and drawings were included in Powell’s speech — although, as was pointed out at the time by one congressional staffer, ‘a drawing isn’t evidence — it’s hearsay’. The BND assumed that the CIA had other sources to corroborate Curveball’s story, but it became clear that his testimony was the lynchpin around which the case was built.

  Despite massive searches by the UN Inspectors and the Iraqis themselves, no trace of the trucks that Curveball talked about could be found in the weeks between Powell’s speech and the invasion. Hans Bli
x, the chief inspector, told the Security Council on 7 March 2003 that they had found ‘no evidence’, but of course many simply thought that meant Saddam had hidden it, as he purportedly had with his other WMDs.

  The aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent discovery that Saddam did not have WMDs, continues to affect intelligence agencies and governments, with further official inquiries on-going. One aspect that became crystal clear, though, was that Curveball had lied. His family said that he had no problem with Americans; he had come near the bottom of his engineering class, not top as he had claimed. He was a trainee engineer, not the project manager that the CIA had made him out to be. Worst of all, he had been fired in 1995 — three years before the supposed accident, and just at the time when he claimed he started work on the WMD transports. A year after the invasion, the CIA was finally allowed access to Curveball directly, and took his story apart piece by piece.

  Despite this, al-Janabi tried to stick to his guns, until he finally admitted the truth to the Guardian in February 2011, although he maintained that he only had sketchy dealings with the BND. In response, George Tenet posted a statement to his website noting that ‘the latest reporting of the subject repeats and amplifies a great deal of misinformation about the case’. Amidst his further attempts at self-justification, he did make one key point: ‘The handling of this matter is certainly a textbook case of how not to deal with defector provided material.’ Few would disagree.