Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  Personally, I think Guantanamo Bay has been disastrous for the USA and the West in general. It may have given some people in the Pentagon and the Bush administration a warm feeling inside to sweep up several hundred Islamist suspects from Afghanistan and Pakistan and cart them all off to a remote colony out of reach of civil courts or human-rights campaigners. Some valuable intelligence about Al-Qaeda may well have been gleaned in the early weeks after the camp was set up, but the damage done to Muslim and Arab perceptions of Western justice has been exponential. For every suspect locked away in Guantanamo Bay without trial – and without even a prospect of a trial for years – untold numbers in their home countries have turned against the USA, disgusted that the country which claimed to champion democracy around the world should have such scant regard for human rights. Until the US-led invasion of Iraq, Guantanamo Bay probably did more to reverse the tide of global sympathy for the USA after 9/11 than anything else; it effectively played right into Al-Qaeda’s hands, allowing their recruiters to say, ‘Look, we told you so. America just wants to humiliate and punish Muslims, it doesn’t care about your rights. Believe us when we say the War on Terror is a war against Islam.’

  Attacks by Al-Qaeda and its affiliates did not stop with 9/11, but they changed direction, sometimes targeting holiday resorts where Westerners gather, like Bali and Sharm El-Sheikh, sometimes targeting Jews, as in Mombasa, Tunisia and Casablanca. In Britain there was much media speculation about whether the country was a target, and I was criticized in 2002 by a retired newspaper editor in his opinion column for saying that it was. Accusing me of scaremongering, he wittily described me as ‘the BBC’s Insecurity Correspondent’, but I had my reasons to be pessimistic and they had nothing to do with what the politicians or police chiefs in London were saying. A wide body of opinion in the Middle East still holds Britain responsible for the creation of the state of Israel, blaming this country in part for the misery of millions of Palestinians living either as refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere, or living under Israeli military occupation in their own land. As Washington’s closest ally, Britain is often seen as being complicit in US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians, whereas in reality the British government has worked hard to win a fair deal for both sides. A serving British ambassador in the Middle East told me he had personally seen Tony Blair lecture the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, about the need to give Palestinians more freedom. But Britain’s influence in the region is a pale shadow of what it used to be, and its ineffectual efforts are often mistaken for a lack of interest or even acquiescence to a deeply unsatisfactory situation on the ground. Then there is the question of Britain’s friendly relations with Middle Eastern regimes which Al-Qaeda sees as ‘corrupt and apostate’, notably Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt; Al-Qaeda’s ideologues have long called on the West to sever its ties with such governments, believing that once this happens they will collapse under a wave of popular resentment. More recently, Britain’s role in the military campaign against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan has put us firmly on their target list.

  So when, in February 2003, the government deployed the Army to Heathrow in response to a terror alert, I did not see this – as some did at the time – as a political gimmick to get the public to back the coming invasion of Iraq. The Heathrow alert had nothing to do with Iraq; instead, it came from a captured Al-Qaeda supporter whose information had proved to be right before. He had let slip that there was a plot to bring down an airliner at Heathrow using a surface-to-air missile. The information passed up the chain of Britain’s intelligence apparatus until it reached Sir David Omand, the National Intelligence and Security Coordinator; he now had the problem of what to do with it. Sir David told me later that year that he had gone straight round to Number Ten Downing Street, where Tony Blair was in his living room watching football on TV with their baby Leo. ‘We have three choices,’ Sir David told the prime minister. ‘We can close Heathrow altogether, which would obviously be disastrous for business and tourism; we can do nothing, which in the circumstances would not be an option; or we can trigger a full-scale security alert.’ The two men agreed to opt for the latter and the following day there was a meeting of the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, an emergency committee convened in times of national crisis. It was chaired by Tony Blair and attended by Sir David Veness, the head of Scotland Yard’s Special Operations at the time (he later went off to work for the UN in New York), as well as a senior military officer and Alastair Darling, the transport secretary. David Blunkett, the home secretary, was said to be in a foul mood because nobody had consulted him until then. It was agreed that a large security presence was needed to deter the would-be attackers by making Heathrow a ‘hard target’. Veness said he did not have the manpower to cover Heathrow sufficiently, including the land around its runways, at short notice. The Army said they could do it but they wanted their men armed and protected in their armoured vehicles. Hence the deployment to Heathrow of a cavalry unit in light reconnaissance vehicles (which the media wrongly called ‘tanks’), while, out of public sight, plain-clothes soldiers from the Special Air Service patrolled the ground beneath the flightpaths around and beyond the runways. Was it an over-reaction? Not according to most of the passengers the BBC interviewed at Heathrow, who said they found the military presence ‘reassuring’. However, the actual threat never materialized, and no surface-to-air missiles or their owners were discovered. That could mean the information was wrong or that the security alert did its job; we will never know.

  Nine months later, on 3 November 2003, the first direct Al-Qaeda-inspired attack on British interests took place in Istanbul. I was on board a long-haul flight to Heathrow from Islamabad, having just spent a few weeks on the road reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and as the plane taxied towards the terminal I was looking forward to a hot bath and an afternoon in the park with my family. It was not to be. The voice of the Emirates crew’s First Officer crackled over the PA system: ‘Could Mr Frank Gardner please make himself known to the ground staff immediately on arrival.’ Stepping into the air corridor, I was told there had been a massive explosion at the British Consulate in Istanbul and another at HSBC; I was needed to appear live on the one o’clock news. I looked at my watch: it was ten past twelve. I had less than an hour in which to find a taxi, get into London to Television Centre, phone Amanda to break the news that I would probably not be home now till nearly midnight, and, most critically, make the necessary calls to find out exactly what had happened, and who were the most likely suspects.

  My first call was to our news desk, where the BBC’s invaluable John Witney had taken the initiative to get me tannoyed on the plane. I jotted down the details as my taxi lurched through Hounslow, occasionally dropping my mobile when we swerved round a bend. Two blasts – one at the British Consulate, another at HSBC, many casualties, no immediate claim of responsibility: all indications that this could be the work of individuals inspired by Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda attacks usually have a number of identifying features: no warnings, multiple synchronized explosions often carried out by suicide bombers, often using truck bombs, Western or Jewish targets, and maximum possible loss of human life. That morning’s explosions in Istanbul ticked all the boxes. But I have never gone on air with just my opinions alone if I can avoid it, so my next two calls were to two Arab experts I know who independently follow Al-Qaeda’s activities and have proved accurate in their assessments in the past. They were both convinced this was the work of a group inspired and possibly directed by Al-Qaeda.

  I then phoned the intelligence agencies, knowing only too well that it was far too early for them to have formed a view but aware that any snippet they could give me – even if it proved in the end to be wrong – would throw some colour on this developing story. Had they, for example, been aware of any recent ‘chatter’ (internet and telephone gossip between Al-Qaeda supporters) that mentioned a target in Turkey? What had been the threat assessment for Istanbul prior to this attack? What groups d
id they know that might be responsible? What were their Turkish counterparts telling them? The media officers in MI5 and MI6 did not have all the answers – actually they didn’t have any, or if they did they were not going to share them with me. I could appreciate that it would hardly help their work if they revealed too much to the media of what they knew about their terrorist opponents, but on the other hand I often have the impression that in their shadowy struggle against Al-Qaeda the intelligence agencies are somewhat embarrassed to admit how little they do know in some situations, evidence of the extreme difficulties they face in getting human informers inside the top layers of Islamist terrorist cells.

  By one o’clock I was on the set of the lunchtime news, just. There was make-up over my stubble and I was still in the same white shirt I had worn to go birdwatching the previous evening in the Himalayan foothills outside Islamabad, but when Anna Ford asked me for my assessment I at least had some details to give her and the few million people watching. By the time I went live on the six and ten o’clock bulletins I had had a chance to phone more people, including the CIA’s Public Affairs Office, which rarely gives out anything beyond the obvious (‘We have reason to believe this was a terrorist attack’) but is always good for a quote (‘Don’t say “CIA”, say “US security officials”’). But it was in those first, frenetic fifty minutes that having good contacts paid off. When the proverbial hits the fan you do not have time to start cultivating new contacts and persuading people who do not know you to part with sensitive or even commercially valuable information. You have to call the people you know well, listen to their views, assess them and move on.

  Four months later, on 11 March 2004, Al-Qaeda struck Madrid’s suburban commuter trains with ten rucksack bombs, killing nearly two hundred passengers in the worst terrorist attack on mainland Europe to date. I took the call from the indefatigable one o’clock news just as I was dropping the children off at school. ‘There’ve been some explosions in Madrid, the Spanish think it might be ETA,’ said the producer. I did not have a great deal of expertise on ETA, but as the death toll mounted my suspicions increased that something more sinister than this Basque separatist movement might be to blame. Once again, I had less than an hour in which to get myself into the studios and make the vital phone calls before starting a round of appearances on News 24 and BBC World. JTAC, the government’s Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre that sits inside MI5 headquarters and assesses the threat to UK citizens globally on a daily basis, was keeping an open mind but tending to listen to the Spanish government, who thought it was ETA. The Spanish counter-terrorism people had an excellent reputation (unlike those in some other Western European countries), honed by decades of combating ETA, so JTAC’s inclination was to follow their lead. But in investigating the Madrid bombings the Spanish were fatally influenced by politics. While the politicians of Prime Minister José María Aznar’s government were busy telling Spanish journalists that ETA was obviously to blame and that ‘anyone who doubted this was being irresponsible’, the Madrid police were discovering an abandoned van containing tapes of Koranic recitations and a pile of detonators for explosives. They also traced the mobile phone in the one rucksack bomb that had failed to detonate back to a phone shop used by North African immigrants suspected of belonging to the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, an extremist group linked to Al-Qaeda. It took Britain’s intelligence community forty-eight hours to concur that their early inclinations towards ETA being the probable culprits had been wrong and that Al-Qaeda had, after all, been to blame. In Britain there was no harm done, but for Spain’s government the mistake – or, as many suspected, the deceit – was unforgivable. In the nationwide elections two days later a furious electorate punished Aznar’s right-wing, pro-Bush government by voting it out of office, ushering in a new prime minister, Señor Zapatero, who had pledged to bring Spanish troops home from Iraq. Al-Qaeda was delighted. For the first time they believed they had managed to change the course of politics in the West, using terrorism to influence an election that resulted in the withdrawal of a major NATO ally from a jihadi battleground, Iraq. In fact Al-Qaeda was so encouraged by this development, as they saw it, that soon afterwards Osama Bin Laden issued an audio statement offering Europe a hudna, a truce, if it withdrew its forces from Islamic lands, i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan. Bin Laden made the point that it was nonsense to claim, as some had in Washington, that Al-Qaeda hated the West for its lifestyle. ‘Do you see us bombing Sweden?’ he argued. ‘No, we do not attack Sweden because it has no troops in our lands.’ At the time, in the early summer of 2004, there was a brief flurry of debate in the British and European media about the rights and wrongs of doing a deal with Al-Qaeda, but it was hypothetical anyway. No one in Whitehall seriously considered making any kind of a treaty with Al-Qaeda, and ministers have since pointed out that Al-Qaeda was attacking Western targets – notably New York and Washington – long before Coalition forces entered Iraq or Afghanistan.

  Incredibly, even after the Madrid bombings, there were some who still thought the terrorist threat to Britain was the political invention of a cynical government. That delusion was to be shattered horribly on 7 July 2005, of which more in the final chapter. Yet who could blame them? The massive bungle over Iraq’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) had led the British public to distrust the authorities when they spoke of secret intelligence. It will be a very long time indeed before a government in power can expect to convince Parliament and the public with the words, ‘Trust us, if you had seen the intelligence we have.’

  8

  Iraq and Afghanistan: the New Jihad

  OSAMA BIN LADEN – and what was left of Al-Qaeda in early 2003 – sat out the Iraq war on the sidelines. They have made up for it since. Sitting in his hideout, probably in Pakistan or Afghanistan, Bin Laden issued a desperate, last-minute appeal to Iraqi and other Muslims that was broadcast by Al-Jazeera as an audio statement on 11 February 2003. Bin Laden told Muslims it was their sacred duty to go and defend Iraq from invasion and occupation by the ‘crusaders’ (Al-Qaeda’s term for any Western military presence in the Middle East).

  ‘We are following up with great interest and extreme concern the crusaders’ preparations for war to occupy a former capital of Islam [Baghdad],’ said the Al-Qaeda leader, ‘to loot Muslims’ wealth, and install an agent government, which would be a satellite for its masters in Washington and Tel Aviv, just like all the other treasonous and agent Arab governments. This would be in preparation for establishing the Greater Israel.’

  In his lengthy broadcast, Bin Laden advised Iraqis to use the ground to their advantage and dig plenty of trenches. He boasted that this was how three hundred of his mujahideen had survived massive aerial bombardment by the Americans in the mountains of Tora Bora in late 2001. US soldiers, he said, had no combat spirit, they were ‘completely convinced of the injustice and lying of their government. They also lack a fair cause to defend. They only fight for capitalists, usury takers, and the merchants of arms and oil, including the gang of crime at the White House.’

  At the time, Bin Laden was wasting his breath. Almost everyone in the Arab world had deep misgivings, to say the least, about a US-led invasion of Iraq, but few were prepared to act to stop it. Amr Moussa, the articulate head of the Arab League, spoke for many when he complained shortly before the invasion: ‘You cannot deliver democracy to the Middle East at the end of a tank barrel.’

  Bin Laden said, ‘Regardless of the removal or the survival of the socialist Ba’ath party or Saddam, Muslims in general and the Iraqis in particular must brace themselves for jihad against this unjust campaign and acquire ammunition and weapons.’ In other words, he did not care if Saddam’s regime lived on or died. All that mattered was preventing another Muslim country from being invaded and occupied by the US-led Coalition.

  Let us be very clear about Iraq and Al-Qaeda. In the run-up to war in early 2003 there was not one single major intelligence agency that believed there was any institutional link between the regi
me of President Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. God knows, the White House and the CIA did their level best to find one. But months of research, analysis, quizzing of informants and trawling through intercepted telephone conversations could find only occasional, exploratory contacts between Iraqi officials and Bin Laden’s followers, mostly from the time when he was living in Sudan in the early 1990s. By 2003 the consensus in the international intelligence community was that Saddam and Al-Qaeda were not on the same team.

  The nearest anyone could come to a connection between them was the Islamist group Ansar Al-Islam and its protégé, Abu Mus’ab Al-Zarqawi. But Ansar Al-Islam had set up base close to the Iranian border in a remote, mountainous corner of Iraqi Kurdistan that was outside the control of Saddam’s forces. In August 2002 Western intelligence agencies believed they had tracked Al-Zarqawi to Baghdad; they believed the Iraqi authorities knew of his presence but they did not detect any signs of cooperation. Yet while there was little sign of Al-Qaeda activity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, within a year of invasion that country was to become the primary cause célèbre for Al-Qaeda and the international jihadi movement. The US-led invasion and occupation was to transform what was once a brutal, repressive but essentially secular dictatorship into the biggest live laboratory for terrorism. Iraq effectively became a recruiting agent for violent jihadi Islamists from all over the Arab world and even Europe.

  I first entered Iraq by mistake. In the aftermath of the Gulf War that drove Saddam’s troops out of Kuwait in February 1991, the Iraq–Kuwait border was just a line on the map with little to demarcate it on the ground. I was running the Middle East office of the British merchant bank Flemings at the time and I had arrived in Kuwait to pick up the pieces of our Kuwaiti business after seven months of Iraqi occupation and six weeks of war. Over seven hundred Kuwaiti oil wells were blazing out of control, having been set on fire by retreating Iraqi troops as a last act of vandalism, and it had been a rocky final approach to the airport with the little Kuwait Airways Boeing jolting and shaking as we descended through the black smog.