For those who would criticize my Intelligence affiliations, consider this:
I acquired all of my success without wiretaps, water boarding or warrantless searches. I never engaged in rendition, kidnapping men off the streets of one country and transporting them to secret prisons for brutal interrogations. I never seduced young jihadis to plot bombings, so that I could arrest them and build a reputation for myself.
Quite the opposite, I applied myself to old-fashioned dialogue and diplomacy. Long before anti-terrorism was fashionable in Washington, I opened a back-channel with Middle Eastern countries that could contribute something important to counter terrorism policy. I worked to support values of non-violence that were clearly stated upfront to all parties, and fully understood. I got difficult problems unstuck. I never solicited media attention for my successes. My satisfaction came from working to achieve my values, not from a need for personal celebrity.
For all those reasons, it is a ghastly twist of fate that my Asset work achieved notoriety—but not public respect. Because in fact I accomplished a great part of what America’s leaders and the American people hail as your highest priorities. The global community’s greatest good was served. My efforts protected U.S. and Middle Eastern security, and laid a foundation for a wider scale of cooperation in multiple sectors.
I never betrayed my original values. On the contrary, through this work, I found a practical way of expressing my beliefs and working to achieve them.
Dialogue didn’t mean the U.S. had gone soft on Iraq, either. For sure Dr. Fuisz and Hoven did not give a damn about the immorality of sanctions or U.S. militarism. They were warriors, not sentimentalists. They wanted to leverage access from my activism to these embassies, because they understood that Iraq and Libya had the best intelligence on terrorist activity in the Middle East. And the U.S. needed to capture that intelligence.
It was simple logic. They could not afford to blind their sight because of hostilities with Baghdad or Tripoli. They needed the Lockerbie Trial and the weapons inspections. I was the one who lobbied for lifting sanctions to reward cooperation. But it was really a Catch 22. If Iraq or Libya refused to cooperate, it would have created another justification for holding sanctions in place. So in a real sense, my back channel created a pressure valve that was vital to the endgame.
Strikingly, however, my handlers and I discovered that we shared a common value system in support of non-violence. And as an Asset, I was far more desirable than arms traders or international drug lords, who are the most common types of Assets. As one would expect, weapons traders play all sides of a conflict, and typically only reveal intelligence that would harm the financial interests of their competitors. Likewise, drug lords provide quotas of high value intelligence for drug busts, sacrificing weak traffickers, in order to shield the most profitable operations of their cartels.
Those sorts of Assets are shady and duplicitous, frequently engaging in the very same illicit activities which Intelligence strives to expose. They limit Intelligence to whatever fits their group agenda.. They fudge it. They play with it. They redact what isn’t helpful to their cause.
I was infinitely more reliable. Some of the spooks might have strongly disagreed with my politics. But they understood from my platform that I would never incite violence. And I would discourage others from doing so.
I wasn’t half bad, after all.
I recall my visits to the Iraqi Embassy with tragic clarity.
The United Nations Mission of Iraq resided in a gorgeous old brownstone on the Upper East-side of Manhattan, half a block from Central Park and a brief walk to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue.
Five video surveillance cameras marked the entry door and inner foyer. During crises with the United States, an American security guard would be posted in front of the building. I would get waved inside.
Many times during flare ups in hostilities, my private life would be thrown aside, while I rushed to visit the Iraqi Embassy. I aspired to be a source of calm, a counterweight to belligerent threats that would ratchet up the stakes inside Iraq. I did not always succeed, but at least I earned my reputation as a peace activist honestly. I saw for myself that even one small voice urging restraint can make a difference. Kindness and dignity matter.
Ah, but isn’t it “grandiose” to want to contribute to peace efforts?
Perhaps. But nothing can change the fact that I did so. I worked very hard for this. I dedicated almost a decade of my life to it.
Walking into the Iraqi Embassy, I was struck by a sense of worn elegance, tattered on the edges, but proud and timeless nonetheless. Beautiful plaster crown molding tipped the ceilings over elegant honey wood floors, slightly scuffed. A marble fireplace on the main floor and, for awhile, a large chandelier drenched with crystal prisms remarked on better days, when the Embassy was alive with high profile guests seeking audience with the Ambassador to discuss corporate investments and cultural missions to Baghdad.
Most afternoons, the embassy was quiet. When I would arrive, the diplomat on guard would bring me cups of sweet Iraqi tea, while my diplomatic contact got summoned to the embassy. In those rooms, conversing with diplomats, I saw endurance and fortitude such that nobody who actually spoke with those men would question their integrity. These were honorable and good people. Even those who called Iraq an enemy would have to respect them. They were not war-mongers. They were devoted to easing the suffering of Iraqi children under sanctions. I admired them greatly, because they preserved that integrity in the face of the most grueling ostracism and pariah status inflicted by their host country, the United States.
Admittedly, I have a broader perspective of Saddam Hussein than other Americans. I saw Saddam as a political creature of the Middle East, just like Hafez al Assad, Syria’s former President for Life, and Hosni Mubarak, President for Life of Egypt, or any of the Emirs and Princes ruling over Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. The United Nations is loaded with dictatorships in Africa and Asia. It’s the people who must be protected. For its part, Iraq was more progressive and secular than most Arab countries. Their people shared western values, making conversation easy.
Just three Assets covered the Iraqi Embassy in New York before the War. I never met the other two until all of us got indicted as “unregistered Iraqi Agents,” and accused of “conspiracy with the Iraqi Intelligence Service.”87
The United States did not need us anymore. We had served our purpose and could be discarded. Worst yet, we were up to our eyeballs in direct contact with “inconvenient truths” that contradicted official U.S. policy. Our voices would have been a major embarrassment to the false story Congress was selling to the public. So they took us out, though they had been lucky to enjoy our service at all. Don’t forget: under Saddam Hussein’s government, the CIA could “count the number of agents in Iraq on one hand.”88 Saddam killed them all as traitors as fast as he found them. And he tortured the hell out of them first.
It helps explain the saying that “Assets have no future. Only a bullet.”
Foolishly, I never thought that axiom applied to me. Never would I have anticipated the insulting rhetoric by Republicans or Democrats on Capitol Hill, not after all I had done. I am fiercely proud to this day of the work that we accomplished.
I considered it a tremendous privilege and challenge.
Above all, Asset work provides a unique opportunity to roll up your sleeves and dig into hard problems in the international community. An Asset participates directly and immediately in changing the dynamics of the conflict. “Think tanks” abound in Washington. They only talk about issues and problems. Asset work gets you into the room where the problems are hammered into solutions.
If you really believe in a cause, it’s a chance to make some crucial difference— or to beat your head against the wall trying. It’s creative and proactive—the enemy of passivity and inertia. It’s “doing,” not wringing your hands in grief.
You don’t like the situation. Change it.
When you’re an Asset, you can.
Where then do misperceptions about “Double Agents” come from?
Those misperceptions are surprisingly common: Very simply, when one Agency captures an Asset—almost nobody in other Agencies knows who they are. Or what they’re doing. Or that their work is being closely watched. They don’t know about the Operation. They can’t identify who’s running it. And the Asset doesn’t know all the facts either. So if confronted, the Asset might give unexpected answers, which makes other Agencies—or factions inside the same agency—very nervous.
Other foreign Intelligence agencies likewise don’t know what it’s for. They only know that some individual has initiated contacts with some awfully extraordinary groups of people. That’s all they see. And they are paying attention.
In my situation dealing with Iraq and Libya, you’d better believe those other Intelligence factions steadily reported the fact of my meetings higher up the chain—including foreign intelligence services. They would have been negligent not to. Sometimes they might have been told to look the other way. Or they might have received heated instructions to “get me.” These groups are so disparate and unconnected to one another that one faction could flag a series of contacts as potentially threatening, while another team or faction was aggressively pushing to maintain those same projects.
Because they fight over control of Assets and budgets, one agency— or faction within the agency—might refuse to disclose an operation. Another faction might then attack the Asset. It happens all the time. It’s the peril of Asset work.
When it came to the Lockerbie negotiations, certain factors aggravated the hardships, because there was outright hostility to the Trial in some quarters. Factions played against each other fiercely. Defense Intelligence championed the Lockerbie Trial. Parts of the CIA feared it. As the Asset who started the talks, I got caught in the cross-fire. Even though the U.S. government declared the Lockerbie Trial a formal policy goal, I was bitterly harassed.
I was also heavily protected. Paul Hoven stayed over night at my house with a gun a few times during the Lockerbie talks, when unfriendly folk would come to Washington. Except I don’t think he slept. By contrast, there were no threats when our team started back channel talks with Iraq on resuming the weapons inspections—just heavy tracking, especially after 9/11. Ironically, as long as they showed up, I felt safe. I was reporting my actions, and they were responding.
I cannot stress enough that it would be anathema to the whole system of intelligence gathering to discourage Assets from maintaining contacts within their target circle. If one agency in the Intelligence Community gets into the habit of burning Assets used by other factions, the entire process of intelligence gathering would be defeated. It would break down irreparably. It would guarantee the destruction of U.S. Intelligence.
There were other drawbacks that I would come to recognize later on. By then, I had become so engrossed in this life that it would have been impossible to change my destiny.
Truthfully though, I would never have wanted to.
Iraq’s Collision With Fate: Why 9/11 Had to Happen
I get asked all the time why Washington allowed the 9/11 strike to happen. Because that’s what they did. They allowed it to happen. 9/11 was the outcome of a shadow policy of “deliberate avoidance.” Senior officials got warned over and over what was coming by numerous, highly knowledgeable sources. The government very deftly resisted appeals to coordinate a preemptive response between agencies, which would have made it possible to acquire more “actionable” intelligence to block the attack. (That’s “nuts and bolts” intelligence.)
In the aftermath, it’s obvious that 9/11 provided the vehicle for War with Iraq. Everyone can see that.
But very little has been offered to explain why.
What obstacles faced Washington prior to 9/11 that compelled the Pro-War Camp to take such drastic measures to topple global opposition to War with Iraq?
Put another way, why did the Bush Administration consider a “Pearl Harbor Day” necessary to achieve its secret objectives in Baghdad?
“Why” has been a black hole in the debate. And it’s much more than a rhetorical question. There’s substantial history of parallel events involving Baghdad in the twelve months leading up to 9/11, which has never been discussed in this context at all.
In my opinion, understanding that parallel history is critical to understanding what happened to the United States that tragic morning.
My Asset work made me much more attuned to those undercurrents, which came very close to swamping the White House agenda altogether.
It was all right there below radar. Americans proceeding blissfully in their lives had no idea what was coming:
It was peace.
Flagging International Support for U.N. Sanctions
When President-Elect George W. Bush swore his oath of office on January 20, 2001 his new Administration faced a serious problem: Peace was breaking out all over the world—much of it focused on Iraq. Emissaries from around the globe traveled to Baghdad, openly expressing sympathy for Iraq’s plight under sanctions and encouraging Baghdad to return to the fold. Trade emissaries looked forward to restoring economic ties. They began to negotiate reconstruction contracts in all economic sectors, which would be implemented as soon as sanctions got lifted. Europe, Russia, China, the Arab League, and the Non-Aligned Movement all agitated for a major policy shift. Baghdad moved closer to ending the hated sanctions every day.
By this time, Iraq had suffered 11 years under brutal U.N. sanctions that blocked free-flow imports of food, medicine and equipment for factory production in every sector.
The international community could stand it no longer. Internationally, support for sanctions was collapsing rapidly and irrevocably.
Iraq’s misery was dire. Health and medical services deteriorated the most severely. Most of the international community has forgotten that Iraq performed the second heart transplant in the world, before sanctions, and boasted some of the finest hospitals and medical staffs rivaling the United States and Europe.
Under sanctions, Iraq could not purchase chemotherapy drugs, insulin or digitalis for heart conditions. Health officials could not purchase x-ray machines or oxygen canisters for hospitals. A visiting U.S. Congressional delegation reported in 2000 that hospitals lacked incubators for new born babies, or air conditioning for seriously ill patients in the desert climate.89
On my trip to Baghdad in March 2002, three hospitals threw back their supply doors in random floor inspections to prove that doctors had almost no prescription drugs of any kind on site—no pain killers for hospitalized patients—not even aspirin. Oxygen canisters were in such short supply that patients in adjoining hospital rooms handed them back and forth five to ten minutes at a time. When the canisters would run out of oxygen, hospital patients would receive no breathing assistance at all.
Not surprisingly, many hospital patients died for lack of life support.
This policy of cutting off Iraq from all outside trade was implemented by the U.N. at the demand of the United States and Britain. The “oil for food” program allowed Baghdad to sell $5.26 billion worth of crude oil every 6 months with which to buy food, medicine and all other supplies necessary to run a country of 22 million people.
On a per capita basis, the “oil for food” program averaged $252 in humanitarian assistance for each Iraqi citizen.90 However, Iraq relied on that allowance to bankroll every other part of its economy, too, including heavy equipment for oil facilities, clean water treatment and sewage systems, electrical production, housing and food storage.
On the high end, Iraq was restricted to $600 million worth of oil parts and equipment every six months to staunch the rapid deterioration of its oil industry after 11 years of neglect. Inevitably those monies cut into the allocation available for food and medical supplies. The advanced destruction of its pipeline and pump stations made it impossible for Iraq to increase its oil output, nonetheless.
Independent of that U.N “oil for food” program, the Iraqi people had no access to their own national wealth and natural resources, most notably oil. The U.N. bureaucracy controlled it all.
Once some of the best educated peoples in the Middle East, under sanctions, Iraqis could not purchase pencils or desks or books for school children. Every Iraqi school child was allocated just 6 pencils, 2 erasers, 1 pencil sharpener and 6 exercise books that had to last the entire school year.92 Humanitarian aid workers opined that sanctions wiped out literacy in a single generation. Except for an elite minority, the “sanctions generation” would enter adulthood with only the minimum educational requirements necessary to participate in rebuilding their country.
In context, by 2003, 18 year old males in Iraq had been living under sanctions deprivation since they were 5 years old. With dangerously few personal resources to recommend the future, or provide a way for them to participate in it, it’s not surprising that so many young Iraqi men gave their muscle and backbone to the insurgency movement to oust the Occupation. They had nothing else to look forward to.
It’s unfathomable for consumer-driven Americans and Europeans to comprehend the society created by the United Nations: Iraq was prohibited from importing any sort of consumer good at all—Translated to daily life, Iraqis could not buy cars to drive. Or computers. Or dishwashers. Or washing machines. Or dishes and silverware. Sanctions prohibited the imports of chairs, couches, tables and light fixtures; television sets and stereos; stoves, refrigerators and microwave ovens, and every other conceivable item for daily use. The United Nations seized all of Iraq’s oil wealth, paying six figure salaries to bureaucrats in New York and Geneva, who managed “humanitarian” programs and weapons inspections to verify Iraq’s disarmament. Central economic planning by the United Nations created the sort of deprivation expected in the poorest third world countries, a shocking outcome in a nation sitting on the world’s second richest oil reserve.
EXTREME PREJUDICE: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq Page 11
