by Stephen Grey
Milton Bearden, then the CIA station chief in Islamabad, remembered Crooke as ‘a natural on the frontier’ and as ‘a British agent straight out of the Great Game’.9 In those days, Crooke’s role involved not just talking with militants, but also supplying them with lethal hardware. While Bearden and other CIA officers were banned from crossing the border into Afghanistan, Crooke used to disappear across for days on end. He would then arrive back in Islamabad late at night and hurry over to Bearden’s residence to show off his latest piece of captured hardware, Bearden remembered.
Some of the ‘comrades’10 with whom the British and Americans were fighting were hard-line Islamists, among them the Sunni Arab fighters of Osama bin Laden’s group, which came to be called al-Qaeda. (Crooke would never say if bin Laden was among those he met. Contrary to rumour, as Bearden pointed out, no Western service gave any aid to bin Laden – as a rich Saudi, he hardly needed it – but he was an ally at the time.) As the war drew to an end, Crooke said he began to warn about the threat these militants would pose in future. But as one senator in Washington told him, ‘The very people you warned us against, they sure kick communist ass!’ And that was the problem. ‘We looked aside,’ said Crooke. But the cost of ignoring the Sunni Islamists became plain on 11 September.
Entirely the wrong lessons were also drawn from the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, he said. The impact of US-funded mujahideen was exaggerated, and while such propaganda helped justify the billions the CIA had spent, it also established the founding myth for al-Qaeda and the Taliban: namely, how a band of sandal-clad jihadists could defeat a superpower. By Crooke’s account, it was the old story of discordant human intelligence brushed aside. Two years before the Berlin Wall fell, Crooke was already seeing the Soviet Union collapse before him. He was witnessing the implosion of its undefeated army in Afghanistan. But, he said, no one wanted to hear: ‘Both institutionally and most importantly psychologically [we were] totally unprepared for the collapse of the Soviet Union.’ There was a strange fighting season when the Soviet Army refused to emerge from its barracks. ‘I remember very well because I was in Afghanistan and talking to people: Uzbeks coming down from Tashkent and other places. I knew there were all sorts of things happening in these Soviet republics, like assassinations of off-duty Russian soldiers. Whenever I would raise this, it was just dismissed out of hand. They would say: “Of course these things are not happening. We would know about those things.”’
It was this Soviet implosion that decisively altered the conflict from a point where the mujahideen were demoralized and almost defeated to one where the Russians were looking to withdraw, said Crooke. At the time and later, America ascribed this reversal to the CIA’s covert actions and, in particular, the delivery of shoulder-launched Stinger missiles. The truth was, said Crooke, that after being transported by donkeys over mountain passes the Stingers were not effective. ‘They had a very low success rate. The figures given by the Americans were just fanciful.’ Others involved disagreed strongly and insisted to me that the Stingers had had a noticeable effect on the behaviour of Soviet helicopter pilots. But a study of Politburo records by Alan Kuperman, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discovered that the Soviets were preparing to leave Afghanistan before the Stingers became effective. The weapon ‘was not utilized in Afghanistan until September 1986, a mere two months before the Politburo’s decision to adopt a withdrawal deadline. At the key November 1986 Politburo meeting, no mention was made of the Stinger nor any other U.S. escalation’.11 Bearden called the claim ‘utterly specious’. Jack Devine, who headed the Afghan task force, said Kuperman’s arguments ‘turned history upside down’.
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As the Soviet Union began to dissolve, everyone wanted to celebrate and reap the spoils of victory rather than hear about the next threat. Crooke said that he went to see the US ambassador in Islamabad after the Soviets had withdrawn from Afghanistan.
As Crooke recalled events, the ambassador slammed his fist down on his desk and shouted, ‘Got them!’
‘There’s going to be a civil war!’ Crooke replied.
‘No, no, it will be over in thirty minutes. Najibullah [the Soviet-backed Afghan president] won’t survive thirty minutes.’
They had a bitter argument. But, said Crooke, then the debate was closed. And more widely, in Western intelligence agencies no one was permitted to collect information about Afghanistan. ‘If you had it you were not allowed to disseminate it. You had to tear it up and throw it in the waste bin.’
This was the madness of the post-Cold War 1990s, when the spy agencies were reinventing themselves. It was a time, he said, when they were determined to – using modern business-speak – ‘put the customer first’. They were ruled by ‘requirements’, the formal list of intelligence priorities drawn up, in the UK and US, for example, in Whitehall and the US National Security Council, and signed off by politicians. It was not simply that warnings of future dangers were ignored, but that an uncommissioned warning – providing intelligence not covered by a specific requirement – was actually forbidden. The intelligence would be shredded. This was how bureaucratic the secret services had become, Crooke felt.
In later years, he alleged, the British secret service went further than the Foreign Office in becoming a means to ‘deliver outcomes for the politicians’. By the 1990s, ahead of both 9/11 and the Iraq intelligence debacle, it had ceased to be that iconoclastic bearer of bad news that had inspired him. Faced with either budget cuts or extinction, the service made itself useful as another way of delivering political objectives and ‘adding value to government policies’ by underpinning an official ‘narrative’ of the globe as it was seen by the politicians. In contrast to SIS, regular Foreign Office diplomats, whose position was more secure, came to be seen as almost rebellious. The diplomats were, if anything, ‘like good lawyers in the background, reminding us all of the problematic things that may come up’.
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One of the UK ‘requirements’ in the 1990s was to assist the fight against trafficking of illegal drugs, as well as combating one of its by-products in South America: hostage taking. Crooke was sent to Brazil between 1991 and 1993, and from there to Colombia. He was cast again in the role of honest broker, talking to militants, though this time in their guise as kidnappers of Westerners. But there were lessons here for other conflicts too. Even when the gangs’ demands were ‘ridiculous’ and quite impossible to meet, it was still important to facilitate dialogue: ‘Because if you don’t open up communications, you spend the next year negotiating about how to negotiate. And that’s been the history.’
Opening talks did not mean negotiation. The priority was to increase understanding by making expectations on both sides a little more realistic. That was the lesson Crooke took to his next assignment: Palestine.
* * *
The Nobel Peace Prize has a chequered history. Its award can be a sign of imminent war. But in Palestine it did at least signal a respite that went on for six years. In 1994, the prize was shared between the ageing Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, and Israeli statesmen Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. The Oslo Accords, signed a year earlier, had brought the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) out of exile. They returned from Tunisia to Gaza and the West Bank as the ruling faction of an interim Palestinian self-government. The Accords were a victory for secret peacemaking and public compromise. They were also a victory for the street fighters. The peace agreement marked the end of the First Intifada, which had been waged since 1987, largely by stone-throwing youngsters.
In 2000, however, large-scale violence returned. Anger had been bubbling up for some time, the result of a failure to solve some intractable issues. (These included the continued expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied areas and an insistence by both sides that an undivided Jerusalem should be their capital.) For Palestinians, what became the Second Intifada was provoked by the visit of Israeli politician Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount in
Jerusalem, sacred to both Islam and Judaism. Sharon was already hated by Palestinians for ordering the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. He had been accused of allowing Israeli troops to be complicit in the massacres by Christian militia of the inhabitants of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. The purpose of going to the Temple Mount was, he said, to demonstrate it was in ‘our hands and will remain in our hands. It is the holiest site in Judaism and it is the right of every Jew to visit the Temple Mount.’12
Both sides had been preparing for violence. And it was a far bloodier intifada than the first. Once again young Palestinians threw stones at Israeli troops and were suppressed with lethal force. But their attacks on Israel were now becoming far more deadly as the Palestinians began to send across suicide bombers. These were trained and deployed not only by Arafat’s Fatah movement – from its armed wing, Fatah Tanzim, and its offshoot the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade – but also by Hamas, a resurgent Palestinian movement that had rejected the Oslo Accords and now appeared to be competing to produce the bloodiest attacks.
Into the fray stepped Alastair Crooke, delegated by SIS to join the staff of Javier Solana, the Spanish former secretary general of NATO who, in October 1999, was appointed the EU’s first security chief. Crooke’s task was to assist Solana on a fact-finding commission headed by former US Senate leader George Mitchell into the causes of the First Intifada. Mitchell reported in April 2001, but Crooke’s mission had only just begun. Europe wanted to play a more assertive role in promoting Middle East peace and Crooke was asked to engage with all parties. Tony Blair was, at first, broadly supportive of his efforts. After the attacks of 9/11, Blair committed Bush to supporting a renewed Palestine–Israel dialogue as a quid pro quo for joining his ‘War on Terror’ coalition.
Against a background of terrible bloodshed, 2002 was not an auspicious year for peace. The violence came to a head with a Hamas attack on 27 March that killed thirty Jews celebrating Passover at the Park Hotel in Netanya, north of Tel Aviv. On 29 March, Israel responded with Operation Defensive Shield, launching troops into heavily populated towns that the Oslo Accords had ceded to Palestinian control and encircling and imprisoning Arafat in his headquarters. On 2 April, the Israelis laid siege to Jenin. When they eventually crushed opposition there – with the help of bulldozer tanks – many journalists alleged that there had been a massacre. The EU sent Crooke to investigate. He crossed over alone through Israeli lines. He saw how the town had been bulldozed by the Israeli soldiers. But he found no massacre. He was playing the role of the classic dispassionate eyewitness.
Also on 2 April, attention shifted to Bethlehem and the fourth-century Church of the Nativity in Manger Square, the legendary birthplace of Jesus. Some 200 Palestinians, both militant fighters and ordinary residents of the town, took sanctuary in the church at the start of what became a thirty-nine-day siege by Israeli forces.
The Israelis were after thirteen men in the church who were on their wanted list for their alleged role in organizing suicide attacks. According to one account, the men ‘included nine from the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, some of them members of Bethlehem’s Abbayat clan, blamed by the Israelis for a series of terrorist attacks over the last 20 months. Included too were three members of Hamas. The thirteenth was Abdullah Daoud, the Palestinian intelligence chief in Bethlehem.’13
In the protracted stand-off, while British and American diplomats talked to the Israeli leadership, Crooke dealt with the trapped Palestinians by slipping across the lines. The situation was understandably tense. Monks inside the church said food had run out. Gunmen in the church and Israeli troops outside exchanged shots. A Palestinian was shot dead in the church courtyard. ‘At various times the Israelis would again stop firing and then I’d walk across that square to the Church of the Nativity – occasionally to take bodies out of it, and also to receive the list of who was in there.’ To avoid being misidentified as a fighter by Israeli snipers, he would walk ten yards, stop, stand still, then walk on again. The process continued ‘until I’d reached the appropriately termed Door of Humility, to pass through that’.
Crooke went back and forth until the siege was lifted with a deal. On 10 May the CIA took the thirteen wanted Palestinians away in a convoy of armoured cars. They fingerprinted them and then delivered them to an aircraft hangar from where Britain’s Royal Air Force flew them to Cyprus and ultimately into exile.14
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Over the summer, as the suicide attacks and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian towns continued, Crooke was trying to promote a ceasefire by talking to the two main groups fighting, Hamas and Fatah Tanzim. Since the Israelis were trying to assassinate a list of militants, Crooke needed to demonstrate to those he met that he was not collecting information on them but only offering dialogue. So, while the CIA might move about with bodyguards in armoured cars, he was the barefoot intelligence officer.
‘I had no protection at all,’ he said. Travelling to the refugee camps of Nablus and nearby Balata, he would go alone in Palestinian taxis. He would take no phone and even ‘check my shoes to make sure the Israelis hadn’t put anything in them’. A little boy would pick him up at the edge of a camp and guide him through the alleyways. He was ‘completely vulnerable’ and entirely under his host’s power. He was relying on the old Middle Eastern tradition of hospitality: however duplicitous your host might be, he could not harm his guests.
One of the tricks was to show no fear. When passing through troubled neighbourhoods Crooke would wind down the window, smile and, if necessary, get out to greet people ‘so they could see me completely’. Even though he spoke little Arabic, he took no interpreter: ‘I never took anyone with me to meetings.’ Unlike journalists, who often took guides and interpreters, he was convinced the militant groups ‘would never trust those people’. He had been issued with a bulletproof vest but that stayed in the hotel cupboard.
Although it is said that he was a career spymaster, the most important factor was that he made it clear that he was not spying. He was talking to both sides, which meant things were complicated. He had to frame his questions carefully. ‘I didn’t ask people for their names, identities or any questions of a military nature.’ What he was after was their thoughts and ideas. ‘There was no intelligence aspect to it,’ he insisted, although on this point he was misleading. What he meant was that he was not collecting secret intelligence. But what he was learning through this contact with the militants – about their character and intentions – was very useful and it was passed back to European governments.
He was trained in countersurveillance and did his best to avoid being followed. But he told the Palestinians to take their own precautions: ‘You do what you have to do and I will conform with it. But I am not giving you any guarantees. I am happy to change my clothes and even take anything off.’ Years later, two of the meetings he held were described in minutes supposedly kept by Fatah and seized by the Israelis when they invaded the Gaza Strip. They referred to encounters in June 2002 with Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the religious leader of Hamas, in Gaza.15
According to the transcripts, Crooke had begun his meeting with Hamas by asserting, ‘We are all currently entering a difficult time, not just in Palestine but in the entire region. The main problem is the Israeli occupation.’ Such a statement called into question Crooke’s good faith as a neutral interlocutor. But Crooke said the transcript was fantasy. The transcript quoted Yassin as saying that he was a man of peace. What nonsense, said Crooke. ‘Yassin would actually boast to me: “I am a man of war.”’
Crooke said Yassin had been impressive. ‘He had a real twinkle in his eye. He was paraplegic. He had an earpiece because he couldn’t hear. His hearing aid would give off high-pitched screams as you were talking to him and you couldn’t know what he was hearing. But he was vitally alive as a person and tough as nails. He dominated. He just radiated this presence. He was a very powerful figure.’ Yassin was killed in an Israeli bomb attack at a mosque in March 2004. The strike
was not the result of an intelligence coup, said Crooke. Everyone in Gaza knew where he lived. ‘He had never hid. He lived at home. He was paraplegic. If he went anywhere he had to use a special vehicle and be lifted into it.’
The true bit of the transcript was the debate over whether the talks should be made public. Hamas thought they should be: otherwise the details could be leaked in a distorted way by their opponents, as proved to be the case. But, at the time, Crooke had insisted the existence of their dialogue should be kept secret. Like it or not, talking to the enemy, to those willing to kill civilians, remained a taboo in much of the Western world – particularly after 9/11.
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It was inevitable that someone, at some stage, should discover Crooke’s secret service background. He was now a regular on the scene in Jerusalem. He tried to keep a low profile, eschewing the boutique American Colony Hotel beloved of journalists. But, by dealing with the numerous factions, his role was becoming public. It’s not clear who leaked what, but in August 2002, in a profile in the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, for the first time in his career Crooke was outed as an operative of SIS, a rare event for a serving or even retired officer.
The result was a flurry of publicity, not all bad. Israeli newspapers poked some fun. Someone called him ‘brave to the point of madness’. Another quoted an Israeli intelligence officer who said of him, ‘Don’t be fooled by his appearance. You don’t want to meet him in a dark alley in the middle of the night. Ask the mujahideen in Afghanistan or the drug barons of Colombia.’
Initially, people stood by him, including – most importantly – Javier Solana and David Manning, Tony Blair’s foreign policy and security adviser. But more problematic than his public outing was a policy shift under way in Britain. Blair had grown wary of talking to militants and now wanted a more aggressive approach, described as a ‘counterinsurgency surge’, said Crooke. ‘Blair had secretly agreed with the Americans, and perhaps others, a change of policy which was to destroy Hamas, undermine its leadership.’
