The New Spymasters

by Stephen Grey

  Inside a bright yellow taxi one summer’s day in 2002, a 53-year-old man, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, gazed out of the window from the back seat as his driver weaved his way through the narrow streets of a town in Palestine. The route was circuitous.

  The driver put on the radio. There was plenty in the news. Every day, young men from these parts were crossing to Israel strapped with explosives and blowing themselves up. The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) was striking back – entering Palestinian villages and towns, arresting suspected militants and bulldozing their homes. Yasser Arafat, the veteran leader of the Palestinians, was trapped inside his compound in Ramallah, surrounded by Israeli troops.

  The passenger was a spy of sorts: one of Her Majesty’s intelligence officers. But he did not behave as you might expect such a man to do. Despite the danger, he did not carry a gun or even a phone. He was not wearing body armour. He was not gifted in any local language. His mission was neither to steal secrets nor to stage-manage a betrayal.

  The taxi pulled up at the bustling gates of a refugee camp and the man got out. The place was called Balata, just outside Nablus. He looked around and spotted a small boy who walked up and asked, ‘Meester Aleestair?’ The man nodded and the boy set off, beckoning him to follow.

  Heading through a maze of buildings, they walked down a street, through a building and out the back entrance into an alley, then across to another building. It would be hard to remember later. And that was the point.

  Finally, they arrived in a squat and half-lit apartment. The man was ushered forward into a small room and the boy disappeared. Inside were waiting a small knot of men, mostly in their forties, dressed in jeans and neat shirts. Each of them was a representative of a different faction engaged in armed struggle.

  ‘So,’ said one of the militants, ‘where do we start?’

  For the SIS officer sitting opposite, Alastair Warren Crooke, the story could be said to have begun long ago. His life in the secret service had been spent talking to men of violence. It had taken him to his birthplace, Ireland, as well as South Africa, Namibia, Colombia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Finally, in 2000, he had come to Israel and Palestine. He had undertaken a one-person programme of talks with Palestinian militants, at a time when such contacts were officially denied.

  Crooke would later be sacked by SIS. When he carried on talking to militants unofficially, he was described by some as having ‘gone native’, the old colonial jibe used against someone who had developed too close an affinity for the indigenous people. He would become persona non grata with Britain’s Foreign Office. Right-wing establishment commentators would portray him as ‘odious’ and worse. One described him as a ‘Beirut-based public relations firm for the Islamic Republic’ with ‘sympathies with the rocketeers and human shield-warriors of Gaza’.2 Even some of his friends considered that he had begun to get too close to, and defend too often, the men of violence with whom he was liaising.

  For all the noise and the manner of his departure, Crooke’s career remained a window into an enduring but rarely talked about tradition of intelligence work: the secret channel for peace. His personal story, one of spying without betrayal, should not be aggrandized. Others had also done such work, notably in 2003 when an SIS team headed by Sir Mark Allen, a devoted falconer and student of Bedouin ways, led successful negotiations, also involving Stephen Kappes of the CIA, that helped bring reconciliation with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and ended Libya’s attempt to acquire nuclear technology. Further back, in the 1970s, the CIA engaged in extensive dialogue with Palestinian terror groups. But because much of Crooke’s career has been made public it is easier to tell without restriction. As we explore what modern spying looks and should look like, his story sheds light on the fine line between espionage and discreet diplomacy, and whether getting secret intelligence on a threatening group is as important as simply understanding them. In most cases of such secret contact, the details and identities of the officers involved have never been made known. And even in Crooke’s case, there were strict limits on what he could reveal about his past activities. But, thanks to his very public ‘outing’ as a spy in the Israeli press, the veil could be lifted a little.3

  * * *

  If ever a Briton had been born for a life of adventure in foreign lands, it was Alastair Crooke. ‘I had never really lived in England,’ he said. ‘I had mostly lived overseas in many places and was brought up in a very mixed atmosphere.’ That was his rather mild and grossly understated way of putting it.

  The Crookes’ roots were diverse. Alastair was a descendant of one Sir Thomas Crooke, who came from England to the town of Baltimore, County Cork, in 1606 and established a base to trade with pirates. Despite the town’s subsequent sacking by such pirates in 1631, the family lived nearby for another eight generations. It was in Ireland, in 1949, that Alastair was born.

  His family was also Australian. His great-grandfather William Crooke, a doctor, had sailed from Ireland in 1841, aged twenty-six, as a free settler to the penal colony of Tasmania (then Van Diemen’s Land) with his brother, a teacher. Both later moved to Melbourne. Alastair’s father, Frederick Montague Warren Crooke, was born in 1896 in Sydney. He left a city public school, Newington College, to volunteer for the Australian Expeditionary Force during the First World War. He fought with them in the bloody Gallipoli beachhead in Turkey and in the trenches of the western front.4

  But he was also an Englishman. His father, who used his middle name ‘Warren’, recorded his nationality as ‘English’ on his travel documents. That was even before he had left the Australian forces and enlisted with the Gurkha regiment in India. Though dispirited by the agonies of the trenches, the young Warren saw hope of an old-style, more decent type of conflict in the Empire’s service. He explained his transfer as a ‘career choice’ to become a professional soldier. ‘Should like it also, as it is rather an interesting kind of warefare [sic] out there, mere play compared to the slaughter in France.’5 As a career officer in the Indian Army, Frederick participated in the last of Britain’s three Afghan Wars. In the Second World War, as an acting lieutenant-colonel, he commanded a British brigade.

  The family then put down African roots. After Crooke’s father retired, he bought a tobacco farm in the former colony Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe). Crooke spent his childhood there, before being dispatched to the experimental Aiglon College in Switzerland, run by a teacher named John C. Corlette.

  Aiglon was a school for adventurers. It valued self-reliance above all else in a regime particularly aimed at the troublesome sons of the pampered rich; many were from broken homes. The boys matured through physical challenges, like a hard climb, said Crooke: ‘When they have a little ledge, a couple of inches, to walk along and it is icy and the weather is raining and they have to walk along it without ropes and they know they may slip and there is a 1,000-foot fall and Mummy and Daddy can do absolutely nothing to help them, it has a profound effect in suddenly maturing people.’

  Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer turned Russian president, recalled being told once by his former service, ‘We don’t take people who come to us on their own initiative.’6 In the 1970s, the British secret service was like that too. No job advertisements were posted. Recruitment was by invitation.

  Crooke will never quite confirm he was a member of SIS, even though it is public knowledge and even if he is prepared to comment, as an interested observer, on the nature of intelligence work and on his deployments abroad. He is still minded that the Official Secrets Act applies. But, based on several interviews with people who knew and worked with him, it is possible to piece together his career.

  SIS first approached Crooke while he was at St Andrews, Scotland’s oldest university. He studied politics and economics there from 1968 to 1972. Initially, he turned them down. He had become interested in economic theory, but, after graduating, a brief spell as a junior banker in the City of London convinced him of the moneyman’s narrow perspective. He changed direction and, approached again by
SIS, this time he said yes.

  The intelligence profession appealed not only for the adventure but also for the nonconformity. This was never supposed to be a sought-after or esteemed job, he felt, looking back. Its mission was to deliver uncomfortable messages to government even if ‘you get no thanks and rewards for coming along with the bad news’. But there was something noble about the job. Crooke believed there should be a constant interplay between intelligence analysis and recruiting sources. It was a form of detective work. ‘Intelligence is when you read the papers or hear something and suddenly the hairs on the back of your neck prick up and you say, “That doesn’t fit.”’ The profession was ‘iconoclastic’. Its aim was to pick up on an anomaly and use ‘dogged determination’ to solve the mystery that lay beneath ‘and see if it brings down the whole structure of thinking’.

  SIS basic training, whatever it was (he would not disclose the information), clearly did not last too long. To Crooke’s mind, the art of intelligence was in any case something you either had or didn’t have. ‘It was always evident from the recruitment that good intelligence work is something like art, it is about nuance.’

  By 1975, Crooke had been posted back to the country of his birth, Ireland. Officially, the 26-year-old British officer was a junior diplomat handling relations with the press. These were heady days. In February that year, a ceasefire was called by the IRA in Ulster. But peace did not last and the violence spread south into the Irish Republic. In July 1976, the new British ambassador to Ireland, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, was blown up by a landmine. The IRA claimed that he had been sent to Dublin ‘to coordinate British intelligence activities’.7

  Even as the IRA resumed its violence, SIS was exploring ways to speak to its leaders. SIS usually dealt only with conflicts outside British territory. This included Ireland, but not the province of Northern Ireland, which was the terrain of the rival domestic Security Service (MI5). But when the Troubles had begun in 1968, MI5 was judged too inexperienced to run agents inside terrorist groups, so SIS initially took the leading role in both the south and north.

  In 1973, an independent-minded SIS officer named Michael Oatley, newly arrived in Northern Ireland, opened an indirect channel to the terrorists. Following the events of Bloody Sunday a year before, the British government had banned any contact by its representatives with the IRA. But against orders and initially without anyone’s knowledge, Oatley (and others who have not been named publicly) pushed at the door that would eventually lead to peace in Northern Ireland. The IRA knew him by the code name Mountain Climber.

  The novice secret servant Crooke was also busy, using his Irish blood to good effect. He made contact with the more left-wing and less sectarian Official IRA: ‘For strange reasons I was taken up and became very close to one of the main leaders.’ The Officials had split from the more violent Provisional wing of the IRA (PIRA) back in 1969. Gradually the Officials – or ‘stickies’ – were persuaded down the path of constitutional politics, even if many fighters defected to PIRA. But in the mid-1970s, the transition was not complete.

  ‘I used to go to Galway to their dinner parties and used to sit at the dinner table, and this wasn’t some sort of nice, civil society middle of the road.’ He also went to Drogheda, on the east coast between Dublin and Belfast, which was dangerous territory in those years for British Embassy staff. ‘The last few people staying there had been kneecapped and thrown out.’ The official IRA was based around trade unions. He would go to their meetings and afterwards they would ‘take great pleasure in saying Sean here has just done this or that. He is the Active Service Unit [commander] in Belfast and he is just out of the Maze [prison]. And you would spend hours discussing Irish history with them. Thank God I had done my background.’

  All the while, the two sides were simultaneously shooting at and discreetly talking with each other. This twin track was replicated in Crooke’s own family. His brother Ian, seven years older, was in the British Army, fighting in Northern Ireland with the elite 22 SAS. He later commanded the regiment’s reserve unit, 23 SAS, and was famed for his role as operations officer in the 1980 assault on the Iranian Embassy in London.

  In public, the British government insisted it would treat the IRA as criminals, never as a rebel army. IRA prisoners were accused and tried as felons, never designated prisoners of war. The government claimed that it would not be moved by threats; they would engage in dialogue only if the terrorists first laid down their arms. But that approach was always ‘fantasy’, said Crooke. The idea that ‘you don’t start the process [of talking] until there is an agreement to give up weapons or stop violence’ was seriously flawed and no one really believed it. After all, the Americans had sat down with their Vietnamese enemy in Paris even as the killing continued on the battlefield.

  But, to use Winston Churchill’s vocabulary, keeping ‘war-war’ and ‘jaw-jaw’ going in parallel was never easy. One track was bound ‘to explode into the other track at some time’, according to Crooke. If an enemy realized that a secret intelligence officer had made contact simply as a means of gathering information to kill him, then trust would evaporate and things could become dangerous. ‘The main thing is how you build a track that can isolate itself and can, if you like, cover over the wounds inflicted on the military side.’

  A profile of Crooke in the Financial Times would later describe the point of SIS’s talks with the IRA as trying to find moderates ‘whom they then hoped to “separate” from the extremists’.8 The same was later said of SIS and CIA efforts to talk to Taliban rebels during the war in Afghanistan after 2001. Britain said the object was to find the ‘reconcilables’ and persuade them to either abandon their struggle or change sides completely.

  But if one’s aim was to suborn moderates, then contact with the enemy was both hostile and disingenuous. The approach was aimed not at seeking dialogue but rather at provoking discord. What Crooke did not say, but others emphasized, was that the use of such tactics by SIS and the CIA exposed the fault line between the intelligence officer’s day job of making war on an enemy, by attempting to recruit a traitor among them or find other points of weakness, and his role as honest broker, maintaining a peaceable dialogue with that enemy.

  Crooke said that in any case it was ‘complete nonsense’ to think hunting reconcilables helped to end conflict. Why? Because, in his view, a violent organization’s liberal or moderate wing was never likely to deliver peace: ‘Every attempt at finding the middle ground is pretty well doomed to failure.’ For him, it was a fiction to think ‘that if you speak to “moderates like us” they will somehow be empowered to find a way to bring about a solution’.

  Crooke parted company with liberals here. He was sceptical of all the amateur theatrics of peacemaking, all the well-meaning but misguided attempts (by churches or voluntary groups, for instance) to unite ‘people of goodwill’. In truth, peace came when you dealt with and convinced the tough guys – the ones with guns and bombs – that it was in their best interests. ‘The people who bring about a solution in nearly every case I have seen, in nearly all conflicts, have been the people who command the allegiance of the military [wing].’ That was why in Northern Ireland the centrist Republicans of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) were eventually eviscerated. It was Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams – key figures in both the IRA military command and its political wing, Sinn Féin – who finally delivered the lasting ceasefire and the peace agreement.

  Secret ‘peacemaking’ in modern civil wars could achieve wonders only if the time was right. In the early days of a conflict, when embittered youngsters were typically filled with a killing rage, no amount of talking was going to assuage them. Crooke used to say that ‘fighters have to grow old’ before they tire of killing. It was a lesson still unlearned by the US after 9/11, when their kill/capture campaign of assassination in Afghanistan and Pakistan served to constantly rejuvenate the Taliban leadership.

  * * *

  After leaving Ireland in 1979, Crooke’s n
ext foray was to apartheid South Africa. Exactly what he did there remains a mystery, but it did involve dealing with SWAPO, the Soviet-backed liberation movement in what is now Namibia but was then known as South West Africa and under South African rule. One of his tasks was to press UN demands that SWAPO should disarm.

  Crooke alleged there was a sharp politicization of both SIS and Britain’s diplomatic service during these years: ‘This was part of the Mrs Thatcher revolution: the job of the ambassador [became] to sell British goods and pass out the message of British policy. Not to start sending contrary messages back.’ He felt the rot had started – far beyond the events in southern Africa – with a trend towards neo-liberal political thinking that had taken root in Chicago in the 1970s and which influenced conservative thinkers across the West. According to this viewpoint, said Crooke, democracy could only survive if citizens were mobilized against tyranny, and that required portraying the world in monotone, populated with good guys and bad guys.

  He noticed this in South Africa, where British diplomats clashed with Thatcher, whose strident support for the apartheid government required all its opponents to be demonized. ‘Ambassadors were warning about the consequences in Africa of this policy.’ They would send back well-argued cables to London and ‘a telegram came back from the PUS [Permanent Under-Secretary] saying: stop doing this’. This was the policy and the diplomats were supposed to go out there and do as they had been told. ‘Here are the speaking points. Follow the speaking points.’

  * * *

  Even if Crooke disliked Thatcher’s rhetoric, he still served her cause, most notably in Afghanistan. Ever since the Soviet invasion of 1979, President Ronald Reagan, Thatcher’s great friend, had been ramping up covert assistance to the Islamic groups that were fighting the Soviets and the communist Afghan government (it had actually begun before the invasion). In 1985, Crooke was dispatched under diplomatic cover to Islamabad, Pakistan, to help with the war effort as deputy chief of the SIS station. The war was largely being run with the Pakistani government and its military dictator, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. All money and weapons for the rebels had to go through the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI.