The Volunteer

by Michael Ross

  During that trip, we lived under canvas with no electricity, gas, or refrigeration for three weeks—as Hemingway had during his own trip to Africa. (Forgive the lofty comparison, but the man is a personal hero.) My father would arise at dawn each morning and inquire as to whether I had been eaten by some predator in the night. When I’d reply that I was still in one piece, he’d sound disappointed. We affected British colonial administrator accents (easier for my father, who had resided in the U.K. for almost two decades). I called him “Carruthers” and he called me “Simpkins” for the duration of the safari (and for some time afterward). The Africans thought us mad.

  What I remembered most fondly were the indigenous people. We had Masai and Samburu tribesmen accompany us and guard our camp at night. They were magnificent fellows with their red robes, sandals, and spears. Their customs fascinated me, and I often daydreamed about joining their tribal ranks and leaving the worries of the Middle East to a past life.

  My father observed me with bemusement as I hung around their campfire, asking them how to say this or that—lion, cheetah, elephant, hello, goodbye—whatever I could soak up in their local dialect or Swahili. They probably thought me a pest, but they were kind enough to answer my questions. We went to one of their villages, and it was all mud huts, flies, and dusty cattle. I remember marvelling at how unchanged this way of life had remained for thousands of years. Before we left Africa, my father, who passed away in 2004, gave me a phrase booklet that explained Swahili grammar and diction. The Masai gave me a walking stick made from an African olive tree. I still treasure both.

  Terrorism is indefensible. But targeting such a poor country, where the only apparent crime was hosting a U.S. embassy, is especially senseless. The one image from the ISA video that haunted me most was the smoking, torn-up remains of an elderly man being pulled from the wreckage of a collapsed building. The poor man was dressed in what looked like his best (and probably only) brown suit. All I could think about were the many kind smiles that men like him had given me during my recent visit. I turned to Uri, Etti, and Etai, and said, “Ma ha’ish hazeh assa lehem” (What did that guy ever do to them?). No one answered me. I left the room. I’d seen enough.

  Over the next few weeks, more evidence came in. There was no longer any doubt about al-Qaeda’s involvement. The African embassy file brought me into prolonged contact with the both the CIA and FBI. As America’s federal law enforcement agency, the FBI operates primarily within the United States. But since breaches of U.S. laws often take place overseas, many of its agents are deployed abroad. The CIA regarded this situation with disdain. Even in my presence, Agency officers would casually deride the FBI as “the bastards across the river.”

  Since Legat was new in Tel Aviv and strapped for cash, they couldn’t implement a secure communication system with the Mossad. A simple solution would have been for the CIA station in Tel Aviv to let the FBI officers use their equipment. But of course they didn’t—the result being that I couldn’t communicate with the FBI unless it was through face-to-face meetings.

  As a result of this juvenile behavior, much American manpower was wasted on both sides. As part of the Oslo peace effort, for instance, the CIA and the FBI were both courting various Palestinian factions—each oblivious to the other’s efforts. In a meeting with the two groups, I commented that before the CIA and FBI created peace between Israelis and Palestinians, they should try it out on each other.

  On another occasion, at a joint conference on counterterrorism issues, I witnessed an exchange in which an FBI officer made a nasty crack about the CIA, only to hear a CIA officer respond, “At least we never had a transvestite for a director” (a reference to the secret habits of legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover). Such juvenile barbs couldn’t be serious, I thought. Yet no one on either side was laughing. In fact, some CIA officers even complained that the FBI was putting surveillance on them. Whether this was true or not, I couldn’t say. But the fact that the CIA would even suspect as much was astounding. Of course, the rift between the two agencies is no laughing matter. In fact, better interagency communication might well have led to the detection and thwarting of the 9/11 conspiracy.

  As is now well known, the CIA tracked two of the 9/11 hijackers—Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi—to a 2000 terrorist summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where they met 9/11 organizer Ramzi bin al-Shibh and other über-jihadists. After that meeting, the CIA learned, the pair went on to Los Angeles. But the Agency didn’t share this information with the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or the State Department.

  As a direct result, the names of the two men were never added to the terrorist watch list accessed by border agents. Even in June 2001, when the CIA finally came to the FBI for help in tracking down Almidhar and Alhazmi, the Agency pointedly refused to divulge critical information about the pair. According to a senior FBI official interviewed by a reporter for the PBS program Frontline, that meeting, held just three months before the World Trade Center attacks, ended in a shouting match.

  Even within the FBI itself, there were problems. For all its other flaws, the CIA has a streamlined reporting system similar to that of the Mossad, ensuring a steady flow of information back to Langley, Virginia. The FBI is different. From what I observed, the Bureau’s New York field office operates like a separate FBI, and goes its own way independent of what HQ dictates.

  I saw further evidence of CIA-FBI screw-ups first-hand. Once, I received a memo from the CIA requesting information about Sami al-Arian, Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Florida-based chief of U.S. operations. Six weeks down the line, I received the same request, using different wording, from the FBI. When I asked a member of the CIA’s Tel Aviv station, “Do you not share?” he replied with a terse “No.” Being neither a servant of the U.S. government nor a member of either organization, I couldn’t do anything about the situation. All I could do was feel embarrassment for both outfits for behaving so childishly in front of the Israeli intelligence community.

  To an Israeli’s eyes, it was an odd way to defend U.S. national security. From the moment I joined Mossad HQ, it was clear that Israel’s intelligence community functions as one, and freely shares intelligence on any number of issues, terrorism in particular. Disagreements occurred—I saw plenty in my time—but they never affect things at the operational level. In fact, many Mossad and ISA officers are great pals outside of their professional lives.

  If interagency co-operation within the United States was a joke, you can imagine how co-operation with other nations was conducted. As I learned the hard way, the stereotype of the CIA as an all-knowing, allcontrolling, cloak-and-dagger outfit is the furthest thing from reality. In truth, it more closely resembles a bloated corporate bureaucracy, weighed down by deadwood, scared of change, and suspicious of outsiders. During my tenure as liaison officer, the CIA did not consistently co-operate with Israel on the terrorism file, even when it was clear the two nations had the same interests at stake.

  One reason was that the U.S. intelligence community—which, in 1998, had a disclosed annual budget of $27 billion—had difficulty taking the Mossad seriously. Our entire North America department consisted of about six people, one of whom worked with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. That left five of us to deal with the CIA and FBI. To put that number in perspective, the CIA station operating out of the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv alone employs about thirty personnel. Meanwhile, the Mossad station in Washington consisted of two very overworked officers.

  But the more important reason the Americans didn’t share information with us, in my opinion, was that they were afraid of what we’d do with it—that if they gave us, say, the whereabouts of a senior Hezbollah commander, we’d go bump him off and they would be implicated. In pre-9/11 days, the CIA was constrained by Executive Order 12333, which prohibits any U.S. government from carrying out assassination operations both directly and through second or third parties. At the upper reaches, the CIA was in fact a very conservative organiz
ation due to the intense oversight of all its activities, and more than a little gun-shy since the heyday of their operations in Vietnam and Latin America. They adopted an organizational culture that preferred words to actions in all but the most extreme situations.

  In this sense, there was (and probably still is) a rift between the Agency’s leadership and its field agents, many of whom share the same proactive, gung-ho spirit as their Mossad counterparts. But often politics would thwart their best efforts. When George Tenet, the CIA’s director, became a key intermediary in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—as he did by order of the Clinton Administration shortly after the Oslo Accords were signed—it was obvious that the intelligence agency had lost its way. The CIA was never intended to be an arm of the State Department.

  Despite the lack of reciprocity, Tel Aviv continuously fed Washington information.16 I wasn’t bitter about the largely one-way nature of this information flow; I was simply looking to catch the bad guys through any means possible.

  The Israeli contribution to the African bombing investigation began with a single careless phone call—a conversation between an officer of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and a pair of Egyptian al-Jihad al-Islami leaders who were hanging about in Baku, Azerbaijan. The two parties were arranging a meeting. They didn’t know that the Mossad was listening in on their call.

  It was Thursday—six days after the embassy bombings—and the MOIS-al-Jihad meeting they discussed was scheduled for the coming week. We didn’t have much time to react. But I felt that, with more information, the Mossad might be able to act on this intelligence. I met with Etai and requested that we put intensive SIGINT coverage on their telephone communications. The move paid off. During subsequent phone calls, the targets revealed that they’d organized the African attacks. They also disclosed the exact time of their upcoming meeting, and the place as well: the lobby of the very Baku hotel where all of them were staying. Finally, they let on that one of the al-Jihad members in attendance would be none other than a very big fish named Ihab Saqr, a Zawahiri lieutenant who’d masterminded the 1995 bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad under the auspices of another bloodthirsty Egyptian terrorist group, al-Gama’at al-Islamiyya.17

  Furthermore, we learned that a certain Ahmed Salama Mabrouk was hiding out in Azerbaijan, and would join the meeting. Mabrouk was a ranking member of al-Qaeda who’d been sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. After serving just seven years, he’d returned to his terrorist roots, living on the run in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Albania, and finally, Azerbaijan.

  I began drafting a memo for the CIA, in the hope that they could act on our intelligence. But first I had to get clearance to share the information. Whatever the risks, I thought it was important that the Americans know about the meeting in Baku. And so I invested whatever professional capital I had in securing permission to give the Agency the memo. After some intra-Mossad horse-trading—including various promises to bring home expensive boxes of Belgian chocolates on my next trip overseas—I gained the needed permission.

  I typed the translation from Hebrew to English myself because the translator had left for the weekend—as I have said, the Mossad runs a shoestring operation—and then proceeded to call Andy, the Counterterrorism Center representative at the CIA’s Tel Aviv station. When I called Andy on the secure link, he responded in his semi-stoned way. “I have something that may be of interest to you,” I announced.

  “Cool,” he replied.

  After I sent the fax, I waited to hear some kind of excited reaction.

  “Thanks,” Andy said dully. “I’ll pass it on.”

  “Andy, do you know who these guys are?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, with a foggy honesty that I had to admire.

  I gave him thumbnail biographies of Saqr and Mabrouk. Then I suggested he not only pass the information on to the CTC at Langley, but also call the Agency’s station in Baku and try to get their officers to have the “locals” raid the meeting. I reminded Andy that we were on a tight timetable and that he might want to convey a sense of urgency.

  “I’ll call them right away and get back to you later,” he promised.

  Washington was seven hours behind, and it was getting late in the day. But I stuck around, hoping Andy would be able to get hold of someone in a position of authority.

  He did call me back and reported that the station in Baku consisted of two officers—one who was ill and one who was away on vacation, but on his way back to Baku. He gently suggested that the Agency regarded the landlocked former Soviet republic as something of a backwater (which I’d already guessed), and that the staffers there weren’t exactly A-list. Before hanging up, we set a meeting for the next day at our offices. Then I updated Etai and went home for the night.

  On Friday, Andy called me early in the morning. He told me the CIA really wanted to pick Saqr up. He also said the CTC boys were quite impressed by our ability to generate SIGINT in a hole as obscure as Azerbaijan, which gave Etai and me a nice ego boost.

  To the Agency’s credit, they were willing to divert resources to accomplish the operation without the usual six months of lobbying, bureaucracy, congressional hearings, and heavens knows what else that typically preceded CIA operations in the pre-9/11 world. This was good news.

  I called Uri, my department head, and he told me he’d already discussed the matter with Itzik, the division chief. “Itzik wants you to go to Azerbaijan and make sure we are kept in the loop,” Uri told me. “These are big fish and we want fishing rights. This is our operation as much as theirs,” he added. “Don’t ask them. Just tell them that you’ll be there.”

  I knew one of the reasons Itzik wanted me to go was that, being a native Canadian English speaker, I could pass myself off as one of the Americans and not let on that Israel was running the show from behind the scenes.18 Though I felt myself coming down with a bug of some kind, this order was coming from the top. I told Uri I’d go.

  When Andy arrived at the Mossad’s front gate on Friday afternoon, I escorted him to a meeting room in the main HQ building. When we got there, Etai was waiting, along with coffee and an assortment of pastries. (The Mossad is renowned for its hospitality to other services. The liaison division, in particular, has a small catering department that is famous for its cheesecake. The officers in the Mossad station in Washington complain that such hospitality is rarely reciprocated—especially at the FBI, where they are lucky to get a can of Coke from the vending machine.)

  During the meeting, I emphasized that it was important to make sure the Azerbaijan security services didn’t know who the targeted individuals were. “It’s nothing personal; we just have to protect our sources, and Azerbaijan is not yet out of its diapers intelligence-wise,” I told the others. I then dropped my little bomb on Andy: “I have been instructed to travel to Azerbaijan as part of the operation. You can handle the Azeris, but we want to make sure that everything goes down as planned.”

  The only proviso, I added, was that we would like to have access to all the intelligence extracted from Saqr and his friends. We especially wanted them to grill the MOIS officer. I’d never come face to face with an Iranian intelligence officer, and I was eager to hear what he’d cough up after being worked over by the locals.

  Andy clearly wasn’t happy about the prospect of Israeli supervision. But he remained polite and told me he’d let the people at Langley know about the change in plans.

  Etai then made an audiovisual presentation to brief Andy about the upcoming terror conclave in Baku. Andy told us he did not foresee any problems: the Agency station had good contacts with the Azeri locals, and they’d pretty much do as told.

  Andy called me later that day, and told me Langley would be sending a team from “somewhere in Europe” (which turned out to be Germany) to Baku the next day. I was already booked for my flight and would arrive on the Tuesday—notwithstanding my increasingly nasty flu.
<
br />   Some may wonder why al-Qaeda would have anything to do with an obscure locale like Azerbaijan. But terrorists intentionally seek out weak states where the lack of public order makes it easy to evade or co-opt local authorities. Afghanistan, Sudan, Lebanon, the tribal areas of Pakistan: they all follow this pattern. Azerbaijan presented al-Qaeda with another advantage as well: it provided a staging area for infiltration into nearby Chechnya, a jihad hotspot since the early 1990s.

  Baku was sunny when I arrived. The city is surprisingly picturesque, and the people are generally friendly to Westerners. If I had had more time, I would have spent a few days taking in the city’s famous architecture—a vivid mix of medieval forms and eclectic nineteenthcentury European influences. But instead, I had to rush to a meeting with Jason, the head of the import CIA team that was coordinating efforts with the Azerbaijan locals.

  This was not one of the local B-raters Andy had warned me about. Jason was a tall fellow in his fifties with greying temples and hazel eyes. He looked lean and somewhat patrician, a type that I understand to be in favor in the Ivy League ranks of the CIA. He had a nice smile, and projected an air of competence.

  My flu had gotten even worse during the flight, and Jason could tell I was woozy. When I reassured him that I’d be fine, we drank tea in a neutral hotel lobby. Quickly moving to the subject of cover, we agreed that I would be cast as part of the U.S. delegation as far as the Azeris were concerned. My name would be Bob—boring but stereotypically American, and easy to remember in my somnambulant state.

  Despite our agreement to co-operate, we still maintained a guarded posture with each other. Jason didn’t want me to be too familiar with the CIA’s methods, and I wasn’t about to elucidate our ways for him either. We both agreed on one thing, however: the arrest should be as low-key as possible. “The locals know the suspects are Islamic extremists but are thinking more in terms of Chechnya,” Jason said. “They’ll pick them up and hold them, and then we’ll have our crack at them, but it’s their jurisdiction.”