The New Spymasters

by Stephen Grey

  Humam’s arrest was timed, perhaps not accidentally, at a significant moment in his life. He had come to feel that he had reached a crossroads and he must make some decisions. He might be full of clever words, but was he really man enough to do what he so vehemently preached? A few days before his arrest, he had published an article online that explained his mental anguish. It was headlined: ‘When Will My Words Drink from My Blood?’

  I feel as though my words have become vain and expired, and are dying between the hands of their writer, I feel as though I have become old and aged; people pass by me and whisper: an old man whose offspring have died. For every day that I spend sitting back steals some of my age and health and determination, thus broadening the gap between what I dream of and what I am actually.

  The time had come for action. ‘For my words will die if I do not save them with my blood. And my feelings will die if I do not ignite them with my death … for I fear that I die on my bed as the cattle die, and By Allah I don’t bear that.’4

  Humam had a loving Turkish wife, Defne, and two young children, Leyla, aged seven, and Lina, aged five. But he asked his article’s readers how he would explain to martyrs on the Day of Judgement why he had shunned the path of sacrifice taken by others to remain at home ‘dining with my wife and children in a peaceful house’. The spark for his outrage and sense of disempowerment had been television pictures of Israeli women observing an air raid on Palestinian-ruled Gaza. He recalled later the impact of these events on him:

  I can’t forget the scene I saw on al-Jazeera channel, in which the daughters of Zion were watching Gaza as it was being bombed by F-16 fighter jets. They were using binoculars and watching the Muslims get killed, and it was as if they were just observing some natural phenomenon, or as if they were watching a theatrical film or something similar.5

  Humam’s online call-to-arms was posted on the same date, 27 December 2008, as the Israeli tanks rolled into Gaza. The article did not go unnoticed by the Jordanian authorities. And so, at 11.30 p.m., six hours after sunset on a hazy moonless night, at the end of the day before Obama’s inaugural speech, GID vans pulled up outside the elegant house of Humam’s father, where Humam lived with his wife. ‘There are police outside,’ she told him. They arrested him with a warrant for ‘possession of prohibited materials’ and seized his computers. There was no time to erase his computer disk drives. It was going to be hard for him to explain away his blogging hobby to the secret police.

  It was reported later that Humam cracked quickly, that he began to see the error of his ways and soon started to give up the identity of some of the militants that he knew. And if he wanted excitement, the GID was offering it. He was given the chance to be an informer, a spy of sorts. ‘So this step began with this proposal,’ he recounted later. ‘They proposed that I go to Waziristan and Afghanistan to spy on Muslims.’6

  The GID had not, in truth, begun quite so boldly. In the first few days, in line with standard spy-recruitment methodology, the agency tried to start Humam on the path of compromise, getting him to divulge a few names and details – to cross the line into betrayal. They also made threats. If Humam did not help, then his family would be in trouble. He was no longer Abu Dujanah, the invisible soldier of Allah. He was now the very ordinary Humam al-Balawi of Urwa Bin Al-Ward Street, the son of Khalil and husband of Defne. He was a marked man. Whatever he did from now on would be scrutinized by the state.

  So, after just three days inside a jail, Humam agreed to betray his brothers. His handcuffs were removed and he was driven away from the hilltop. The GID dropped him home in a pickup truck and he stepped out a new man: Agent Panzer.

  Or was he just playing along? He would say later that it had all been a ruse, that the idea he could have changed his mind so quickly was laughable.

  So they think that if a man is offered money, it is possible for him to abandon his creed. How amazing! [Proposing such things] to a man whose last article just a short while ago was called ‘When Will My Words Drink from My Blood?’; a man who burns with desire for martyrdom … How can you have the gall to say to him, ‘Go and spy on the Mujahedeen’?! You’ll never find such idiocy except in Jordanian Intelligence.7

  In reality, no one would know what decision he had reached at this point. Most likely, he had not made up his mind what to do yet. The Jordanians realized that he was still a work-in-progress.

  * * *

  As Humam al-Balawi was aware, thousands of miles east from his home, in what he called the ‘land of Jihad’, a new type of war was under way. The battle zone was in the wild mountains of the north-west frontier of Pakistan and the war was characterized by the near-constant threat of attack from the sky.

  For years now, with the secret acquiescence of Pakistani security forces, the CIA had been flying unmanned drones over the territory. As a covert military operation, conducted without any declaration of war, this fell to the CIA to organize, rather than the US Air Force. Some of these propeller-driven Predators even took off from and landed inside Pakistan, at a remote Pakistani Air Force base. The Pakistanis had also created an air corridor, known as ‘the boulevard’, for unrestricted transit of US warplanes across the country.8 The Predators stayed aloft for hours on end, maintaining watch on the mountains of the Afghan border. Then, from time to time, they unleashed a Hellfire missile, killing a militant and, quite often, killing bystanders too. An updated version of the Predator could drop bombs as well as missiles.

  Since July 2008, this drone war has intensified. The CIA was getting more accurate and striking more often. President Bush had authorized the CIA to strike before warning Pakistan. The new approach breached Pakistani sovereignty but was justified by intelligence that showed some members of Pakistan’s combined foreign and domestic spy agency, known as Inter Service Intelligence (ISI), were actively assisting the militants. These ISI officers were helping them cross the border to attack US troops in Afghanistan. There was also evidence that the Pakistan Taliban were plotting or encouraging attacks abroad, including in the United States. This gave the US legal grounds for widening the drone attacks, against not only al-Qaeda but also the Pakistani Taliban, now they were formally judged to be a threat to the US. If anyone was a genuine danger, then by US law a president could attack them pre-emptively without even declaring war. Bush ordered a cross-border raid by Special Forces against a training camp.

  When Obama took office, there was a brief pause, but the new president quickly established that he was, if anything, keener on drone attacks than Bush had been. He might have opposed torture, waterboarding and renditions, but did not object to what was in effect an assassination programme. This was apparent from the statistics. From 2004 to 2007, there were only ten publicly observed drone strikes in Pakistan. According to estimates by the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, the attacks killed somewhere between ninety-five and 107 civilians and between forty-three and seventy-six militants. In 2008, there had been six strikes by July. Then, after Bush’s decision to escalate, another thirty strikes by the end of the year. These killed an estimated 157 to 265 militants and twenty-three to twenty-eight civilians. In 2009, there were two strikes in early January, followed by a pause until Obama was inaugurated. Then, in February 2009, one of the top commanders of the Taliban in the north-west frontier, Baitullah Mehsud, announced the launch of the Shura Ittihad ul-Mujahideen, a united council of fighters with three common enemies: the Pakistani state, the United States and the Afghan government. Mehsud was the leader allegedly behind the Barcelona plot. He was also blamed for the assassination in December 2007 of the Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto. Mehsud’s pact was intended to end squabbles among militants. It was also a gift to the US, because it provided a clear legal basis for attacking his network. By the end of the year there had been a total of fifty-two strikes into Pakistan. The death toll: 241 to 508 militants and sixty-six to eighty civilians.9

  * * *

  While Mehsud was busy making alliances, in Jordan officers from
the GIA were discussing with their CIA liaison contacts a plan to send the new informant, Agent Panzer, to Pakistan. The idea was that Humam would continue his life as a secret jihadi operative while also reporting to the GID – in other words, become a double agent.

  This was not going to be an easy task. Experienced spymasters knew that to successfully run a ‘double’ in place was one of the hardest things an intelligence officer could do. Betrayal is a double-edged sword. As the KGB had found when running Kim Philby, it was hard to work out who was really playing whom. Once the fear of betrayal took hold – as it had when James Angleton ruled as CIA counterintelligence chief from 1954 to 1975 – operations could become paralysed and pointless. As the CIA advised its staff in 1963, ‘The double agent operation is one of the most demanding and complex counterintelligence activities in which an intelligence service can engage. Directing even one double agent is a time-consuming and tricky undertaking that should be attempted only by a service having both competence and sophistication.’10

  To handle such operations, the CIA had in place a series of procedures, not least of which was the supervision of a double-agent case by the agency’s counterintelligence staff. Such rules had been drawn up in 1963, when the CIA faced its most serious and professional adversary, the KGB. As they confronted al-Qaeda and all its affiliates, the CIA had dropped its guard. They failed to appreciate the counterintelligence threat that al-Qaeda posed.

  The Sunni radical movement that morphed, among other incarnations, into al-Qaeda had, as a whole, a prolonged experience of contact with intelligence services. Among the junior ranks of militant Islam – the fresh recruits destined to wear the suicide vests, for example – though plenty were paranoid about spies in their midst, most were ignorant about spycraft. Many were ‘clean skins’, meaning there was no intelligence on file about them, and so had little first-hand knowledge of the intelligence services. The senior veterans were different; their lifetime’s struggle had been defined by their stand against different agencies of state security, with whom they had often come into direct contact. Much of what passes for jihadi philosophy had been conceived in the torture chambers and dungeons of the Middle East secret police. (One of the most influential thinkers of political Islam, Sayyid Qutb, wrote his 1964 jihadist manifesto, Ma’alim fi-l-Tariq (Milestones), while in the custody of Egyptian State Security and incarcerated in Al Aqrab, the feared Scorpion prison in Cairo.) The violent tactics of the Salafists, those like Qutb and, later, members of al-Qaeda who looked back to the early life of the Prophet Muhammad as inspiration for their politics, developed from these experiences. Secret terrorist cells developed as weapons of resistance to this secret state power in societies where open political opposition was prohibited. And the relationship with the spymaster was not just repressive. At different times, militant groups were actively supported by or at least tolerated by the state. Because of the violent nature of these groups, contact with the state needed to remain secret and was therefore invariably handled by intelligence operatives.

  The very top of al-Qaeda had extensive experience of such a relationship. Contrary to the conspiracy theory, Osama bin Laden, its leader, was never funded or supported by the CIA. But, as a financier of Arab fighters in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, bin Laden for a long time had dealings with the Saudi GIP. As Steve Coll, his family’s biographer, recorded, ‘Prince Turki [the former GIP chief] and other Saudi intelligence officials said years later that bin Laden was never a professional Saudi intelligence agent. Still, while the exact character and timeline of his dealings [with GIP] remain uncertain, it seems clear that bin Laden did have a substantial relationship with Saudi intelligence.’11 According to Coll, some in the CIA later concluded that ‘bin Laden operated as a semi-official liaison’ between the Saudi GIP, international Islamist religious networks and ‘the leading Saudi-backed Afghan commanders’.12

  In other words, although secret services might find it hard to penetrate Islamist networks, it was not because they had ever lacked contact or access to them. Before they headed for the mountains, these radical groups had emerged from a wider struggle that, from its inception, had been alternately monitored and encouraged, inspired and repressed, by the secret services. The story of the West versus al-Qaeda is one of an almost continuous confrontation with secret agencies. This did not occur only in the Middle East. A normal American or European citizen might never come across MI5 or the FBI. But a militant Islamist could come across them when he was stopped at the borders, or called into the embassy for a ‘few questions’, or received an early-morning knock on the door. Those who fought on the front line often got to meet their enemy.

  But if they had some experience of the spymasters, did the militants have much skill at running spies themselves? Few really knew for sure. Volunteers for al-Qaeda were certainly expected to behave a little like spies, at least when they operated in the West. When they took their bayat (oath) they were sworn into a secret society and the terrorist shared the secret agent’s need to be covert. While preparing for an attack, a jihadi needed to blend in with normal society, or at least manage well enough to avoid attention. As Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi had explained to Nasiri in Afghanistan, they might also have to collect information like spies:

  We must fight the Zionists efficiently … We need brothers who can live among them, who can watch them, surveil them. We need blueprints and photos of their clubs, their synagogues, their banks, their consulates … We can’t just send anyone to do this job … We need a brother who can resist all temptation, and remain pure in himself while he lives amongst the kafir. We need someone with unlimited resources of patience and determination.13

  Apart from the need for operational security, al-Qaeda demonstrated early on its awareness of the need for good counterintelligence. As far back as the late 1990s the widely circulated ‘Jihad Manual’ warned about the spies favoured by the US. One section read:

  Types of Agents Preferred by the American Intelligence Agency [CIA]:

  1. Foreign officials who are disenchanted with their country’s policies and are looking towards the U.S. for guidance and direction.

  2. The ideologist (who is in his country but against his government) is considered a valuable catch and a good candidate for American Intelligence Agency [CIA].

  3. Officials who have a lavish lifestyle and cannot keep up using their regular wages, or those who have weaknesses for women, other men, or alcoholic beverages. The agent who can be bought using the aforementioned means is an easy target, but the agent who considers what he does a noble cause is difficult to recruit by enemy intelligence.

  4. For that purpose, students and soldiers in Third World countries are considered valuable targets. Soldiers are the dominating and controlling elements of those countries.14

  Al-Qaeda’s targets for recruiting their own spies were listed in the same document as:

  1. smugglers;

  2. those seeking political asylum;

  3. adventurers;

  4. workers at coffee shops, restaurants, and hotels;

  5. people in need;

  6. employees at borders, airports, and seaports.

  But it warned: ‘Recruiting agents is the most dangerous task that an enlisted brother can perform. Because of this dangerous task, the brother may be killed or imprisoned. Thus, the recruitment task must be performed by special types of members.’15

  * * *

  A more authoritative al-Qaeda study on intelligence techniques was written in October 2006 by someone described by counterterrorism researchers at the US Military Academy, West Point, as al-Qaeda’s spymaster.16 In his 152-page pamphlet, ‘The Myth of Delusion’, Muhammad Khalil al-Hakaymah demonstrated avid reading of publicly available material about weaknesses in US human intelligence. He explained why both the FBI and the CIA had trouble finding reliable agents: the agencies’ shortages of Arabic translators and operatives, how older intelligence professionals had been driven out by younger, more ideological officers,
and how overdependence on the polygraph (a lie-detecting machine) as well as excessive security measures had hindered recruitment.

  Al-Hakaymah failed to predict the coming drone war. He warned that the greatest intelligence threat to al-Qaeda was penetration by spies rather than by technology. He wanted al-Qaeda to ready its defences. According to him, in the old days Western spies came disguised as ‘businessmen, journalists or clergy’ but the New Spies, after all the lessons learned from 9/11, would ‘closely and literally imitate the operating system of the Islamic Jihadist groups’. It was a new Great Game (my words), with ‘young officers seeking adventure and risk to their lives, wearing Islamic costumes and practicing the rite of the Muslims if necessary to protect their cover by melting into Arab and Islamic societies’.17

  Three years after al-Hakaymah wrote his article, there was no sign that any such penetration by Western agents had really materialized. The CIA was not getting even close. Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri eluded capture and a sanctuary remained for Islamists in the mountains of Pakistan, in most of Somalia and parts of Yemen. Nevertheless, al-Qaeda was starting to lose momentum. Not only had key operational leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohamed (the suspected architect of 9/11) been captured and imprisoned, the organization was showing its political ineptness. It haemorrhaged popular support due to what many fellow radical Muslims saw as its relentless focus on ‘martyrdom operations’ (suicide attacks), in which other Muslims, particularly in Iraq and Pakistan, were the usual victims.

  Al-Hakaymah recognized what was occurring and that al-Qaeda’s greatest danger was itself. In another article, ‘Towards a New Strategy in Resisting the Occupier’, he encouraged listening to public opinion and criticized mass casualty attacks that killed Muslim civilians.

  However, not all jihadi thinkers were dismayed by the bloodshed. Activists like Humam revelled in it. One of his idols was fellow Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the human butcher who led al-Qaeda in Iraq on a murderous wave of hostage-taking, videoed beheadings and indiscriminate car bombs. In 2005, al-Zarqawi’s supporters had mounted a triple suicide attack on luxury hotels in Amman that left sixty dead. A year later he too was dead, killed in a targeted strike by US forces.