A Brief History of the Spy

by Simpson, Paul

  Despite massive searches by the UN Inspectors and the Iraqis themselves, no trace of the trucks that Curveball talked about could be found in the weeks between Powell’s speech and the invasion. Hans Blix, the chief inspector, told the Security Council on 7 March 2003 that they had found ‘no evidence’, but of course many simply thought that meant Saddam had hidden it, as he purportedly had with his other WMDs.

  The aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent discovery that Saddam did not have WMDs, continues to affect intelligence agencies and governments, with further official inquiries on-going. One aspect that became crystal clear, though, was that Curveball had lied. His family said that he had no problem with Americans; he had come near the bottom of his engineering class, not top as he had claimed. He was a trainee engineer, not the project manager that the CIA had made him out to be. Worst of all, he had been fired in 1995 – three years before the supposed accident, and just at the time when he claimed he started work on the WMD transports. A year after the invasion, the CIA was finally allowed access to Curveball directly, and took his story apart piece by piece.

  Despite this, al-Janabi tried to stick to his guns, until he finally admitted the truth to the Guardian in February 2011, although he maintained that he only had sketchy dealings with the BND. In response, George Tenet posted a statement to his website noting that ‘the latest reporting of the subject repeats and amplifies a great deal of misinformation about the case’. Amidst his further attempts at self-justification, he did make one key point: ‘The handling of this matter is certainly a textbook case of how not to deal with defector provided material.’ Few would disagree.

  The perceived intelligence failures both prior to 9/11 and in the build-up to the war in Iraq led to one of the biggest shake-ups of the American intelligence community in half a century – or, at least, it should have done. The aim of the various reforms was to create an intelligence community fit for purpose in the twenty-first century. According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) website:

  The United States Intelligence Community must constantly strive for and exhibit three characteristics essential to our effectiveness. The IC must be integrated: a team making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. We must also be agile: an enterprise with an adaptive, diverse, continually learning, and mission-driven intelligence workforce that embraces innovation and takes initiative. Moreover, the IC must exemplify America’s values: operating under the rule of law, consistent with Americans’ expectations for protection of privacy and civil liberties, respectful of human rights, and in a manner that retains the trust of the American people.

  DCI George Tenet resigned unexpectedly, stepping down from the CIA in July 2004, shortly before the release of the report by the 9/11 Commission. This recommended the establishment of a National Intelligence Director who would not only take responsibility for the safety of the United States, but also have effective powers to control the seventeen different intelligence agencies. This didn’t go down well with the government, or the various agencies that would be affected, and what many regarded as a typical Washington fudge and compromise ensued. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, in particular, didn’t want the Pentagon’s various intelligence agencies answerable to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI); the FBI wanted to keep their autonomy. At the time, historian and journalist Fred Kaplan described the final bill as ‘not reform in any meaningful sense. There will be a director of national intelligence. But the post will likely be a figurehead, at best someone like the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, at worst a thin new layer of bureaucracy, and in any case nothing like the locus of decision-making and responsibility that the 9/11 commission had in mind.’

  Tenet’s successor at the CIA was Porter Goss, who would be the last CIA chief to act as head of the intelligence community; one of the many clauses of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act prevented a DNI from serving as head of the CIA or any other agency at the same time. The first DNI, appointed in 2005, was former US Ambassador to the UN and Iraq, John D. Negroponte; his successor in 2007 Admiral Michael McConnell also served for two years. Neither really was in a position to force through the changes that were needed within the intelligence community. By the end of November 2008, even the DNI’s own Inspector General noted that the office was not providing effective leadership, which was ‘undermining ODNI’s credibility and fuelling assertions that the ODNI is just another layer of bureaucracy’.

  Goss probably didn’t expect to become DCI. A few months before Tenet’s surprise resignation, in his capacity as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Goss wrote to the Agency saying:

  After years of trying to convince, suggest, urge, entice, cajole, and pressure [the] CIA to make wide-reaching changes to the way it conducts its HUMINT mission [the] CIA continues down a road leading over a proverbial cliff. The damage to the HUMINT mission through its misallocation and redirection of resources, poor prioritization of objectives, micromanagement of field operations, and a continued political aversion to operational risk is, in the Committee’s judgment, significant and could likely be long-lasting.

  This damaged his relationship with senior staff at the Agency, many of whom would resign during his tenure.

  Goss was succeeded by former NSA head, and Deputy DNI, Michael Hayden, who served from 2006 to 2009. During that time, the Agency was actively involved in (still-classified) missions in Pakistan, assisting with the removal of al-Qaeda’s leadership. ‘We gave President Bush a list of people we were most mad at, in the tribal region of Pakistan, in July 2008,’ he said in 2010. ‘By the time I left office, more than a dozen of those people were dead . . . What the Agency did to dismantle the al-Qai’da leadership . . . I’m most proud of that.’ The CIA also helped with the identification of a nuclear reactor that was being built in Syria with North Korean assistance. Hayden was an advocate of confirming the intelligence publicly after the event – not earlier, since the Syrians ‘might do something stupid if they were publicly embarrassed’ – in order to ensure that people were aware of the Korean involvement during the discussions over nuclear proliferation.

  British intelligence agencies were also actively involved with counter-terrorism operations after 9/11. As the bombings in London on 7 July 2005 (known as 7/7) which killed fifty-two people proved, they weren’t always as successful as they might have liked, but as the public portions of the trials of terrorist suspects who have been arrested show, MI5 and MI6 have been responsible for preventing further atrocities. Errors have of course occurred – such as the shooting of innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes on 22 July 2005, in the aftermath of an attempted second wave of bombings the previous day.

  The attempt by Richard Reid to blow up a transatlantic jet just before Christmas 2001 was an indication to the British agencies that this form of terrorism could be home-grown. Over the next decade, MI5’s budget and personnel were increased, and they were able to monitor a larger number of suspects. Operation Crevice led to the arrest of a terrorist cell in 2003 shortly before they began a campaign against nightclubs, shops and pubs using ammonium nitrate bombs – although unfortunately two men with whom they briefly had contact were not monitored. They went on to cause carnage in London on 7/7. Operation Rhyme, which took place in 2004, prevented Dhiren Barot from carrying out his planned attacks in London underground car parks. Operation Hat stopped the failed bombers of 21 July 2005 from trying again. Kazi Rahman was arrested trying to buy weapons in November 2005 after a police and MI5 sting operation – his name had been passed to MI5 by the FBI after they were able to turn al-Qaeda operative Mohamed Babar the previous year.

  Operation Overt was aimed against Abdullah Ahmed Ali, who planned to rival the scale of the 9/11 attacks using suicide bombers inside multiple aircraft departing from Heathrow. He and his co-conspirators were arrested in August 2006, shortly before they became operational; the way they intended to explode the devices i
s the reason why security measures regarding liquids being taken on board aircraft were tightened up immensely that summer. The nine members of a plot to create havoc at Christmas 2010, with targets including the Stock Exchange, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the Palace of Westminster and the London Eye, were arrested four days before they planned to set off their first device. On 1 July 2012, a plot by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to explode a bomb during the London Olympics was foiled; a few days later, a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist was arrested after visiting the Olympics site in East London five times in one day, in contravention of the control order he was under.

  As Eliza Manningham-Buller pointed out in a TV documentary about the war on terror, there never is just one plot being investigated. At any one time, dozens are under investigation.

  Probably the highest-profile intelligence operation of the past few years has been the hunt for, and eventual assassination of al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden. While Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) may have been in charge of the details of the 9/11 plot, it was bin Laden who was its instigator and mastermind, making him the ultimate target of all the American intelligence activities in the decade following the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York.

  US Navy Seal Team Six entered the compound at Abbottabad, Pakistan, and carried out the mission that eliminated bin Laden in May 2011, but they weren’t alone – members of the US Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) and the CIA were there beside them. Surprising as it may seem, even on the day that President Barack Obama gave the authorization for the mission to proceed, no one had ever captured a photograph of bin Laden at the compound or been able to get a recording of the mysterious male figure who occupied the building’s top two floors.

  Billions of dollars were expended by the US during the first decade of the twenty-first century on electronic surveillance. But it was through information gained through old-fashioned means – interrogating prisoners – that bin Laden was finally tracked down. The key to finding him turned out to be his trusted courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, aka Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed. Numerous leads had been followed up since bin Laden disappeared from Tora Bora in 2002, following the American invasion. All had turned out to be dead ends. Many of the al-Qaeda hierarchy had been tracked down and eliminated, as the CIA struck with Predator and Reaper drones, but not bin Laden himself. Every aspect of the tapes that he issued was analysed, whether it was the shape of the rocks in the background or the birdsong briefly audible. Large rewards were offered for information, but bin Laden’s almost messianic position as the perceived saviour of true Islam meant that there were no takers.

  Al-Kuwaiti’s name was one of those mentioned by Mohammed al-Qahtani, an al-Qaeda operative who was originally groomed as a twentieth hijacker for the 9/11 attacks. Captured by the Pakistanis in December 2001, he was interrogated at the American base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where he admitted, after weeks of abuse, that KSM had introduced him to al-Kuwaiti, who had given him instructions in secret communications. When KSM himself was captured, he told his Pakistani interrogators that al-Kuwaiti had helped bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora, although he later told his American questioners that al-Kuwaiti was retired. This information was divulged after his extreme interrogations, and seems to have been a deliberate attempt to put the Americans off al-Kuwaiti’s scent; his act of defiance is often quoted by those opposed to the extreme methods as proof that such means do not always work.

  However, another al-Qaeda courier, Hassan Ghul, said otherwise. Al-Kuwaiti was a trusted part of bin Laden’s inner circle, and was working with Abu Faraj al-Libi, KSM’s successor. When al-Libi was captured in May 2005, he also tried to divert attention away from al-Kuwaiti, making up the name of a courier whom he said was the key player. Attention was focused on the courier network, but leads were in short supply.

  When he took power in January 2009, President Obama made the capture of bin Laden one of the CIA’s priorities, and on 2 June 2009 he ordered his new D/CIA Leon Panetta to ‘provide me within 30 days a detailed operation plan for locating and bringing [bin Laden] to justice’. Hopes were pinned on an apparent defector from al-Qaeda, Jordanian doctor Humam al-Balawi, but hope turned to tragedy when al-Balawi blew himself and seven CIA operatives up on 30 December 2009. Al-Qaeda continued operations, even as the CIA turned up the heat against them further – an attempt to down a commercial jet was foiled, and Faisal Shahzad, an American of Pakistani descent trained by the Taliban, tried to blow up his SUV in Times Square on 1 May 2010.

  Surveillance on al-Qaeda operatives around the world paid dividends in the summer of 2010 when one of them contacted al-Kuwaiti, who revealed that he was ‘back with the people I was with before’. This was taken to mean that he was back in bin Laden’s inner circle. Human intelligence came to the fore now, as a Pakistani agent, working for the CIA, tracked al-Kuwaiti to Peshawar in Pakistan, then followed him back to the town of Abbottabad, two hours to the east. Al-Kuwaiti was living in a compound that struck the CIA as odd, since it had neither phone nor internet services.

  When Panetta heard of this ‘fortress’ he ordered the Agency to investigate every avenue for getting inside the compound. It was clear that there was a chance that this was bin Laden’s location, but after the Curveball fiasco over WMDs seven years earlier, they were determined to ensure that any intelligence used to launch a mission was absolutely certain. The number of families in the compound seemed odd, as did the Pakistani intelligence service’s complete lack of knowledge about it. As deputy director Michael Morell pointed out at one stage, ‘The circumstantial case of Iraq having WMD was actually stronger than the circumstantial case that bin Laden is living in the Abbottabad compound.’

  The CIA set up a safe house in Abbottabad, and deduced from the various movements to and from the compound, as well as observation of the amount of laundry left to dry, that there were three families within the compound rather than the two which there would appear to be at first glance. The composition of the third seemed to match bin Laden’s immediate family. It did seem as if the hunt might be over.

  The relationship between the Americans and the Pakistanis took a knock early in 2011 when a CIA contractor, Raymond Davis, killed two Pakistani citizens in Lahore. There was already little trust between the two countries and their respective intelligence agencies: the Times Square bomber wasn’t the only anti-American terrorist who had come from Pakistan, and there was a feeling that the Pakistan intelligence agency might not be playing it straight with the CIA. Consequently, the Pakistanis were not informed of the CIA suspicions over the Abbottabad compound.

  As plans were drawn up, the information the CIA had painstakingly gained was subjected to a ‘Red Team’ inquiry once more, this time by experts outside the Agency. This meant that every piece of evidence was checked to see if there was an alternate explanation that provided as likely an explanation as the one ascribed by the CIA. The week before the raid went ahead, the Red Team concluded that none of the alternate hypotheses was as likely as the theory that bin Laden was there.

  Obama’s DNI, James Clapper, was one of those who felt that it was ‘the most compelling case we’ve had in ten years’ of hunting for bin Laden. Leon Panetta felt that they were ‘probably at the point where we have got the best intelligence we can get’. Both Vice-President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defence (and former CIA DCI) Robert Gates were against a raid; Foreign Secretary Hillary Clinton was in favour. So, after considering everything, was the president.

  The raid went ahead on 1 May and at 11.35 p.m. President Obama informed the American people that ‘the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.’

  Leon Panetta remembered one of the most unusual events of that night. As he drove from the White House, he heard chants from Lafayette Park. ‘CIA! CIA! CIA!’ Maybe some of the failures of the past were now forgiven.

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  A NEW COLD WAR?

  The conflict in Syria during 2012 brought the idea of a ‘new Cold War’ back into focus. With the CIA assisting the rebels and the Russians helping to maintain the existing regime, at the time of writing it seemed as if ‘proxy wars’ like those waged in the fifties and sixties are being fought once more, as the ideologies of East and West clashed. But beneath all the rhetoric about a change in Russian attitudes following the collapse of the Soviet Union, did anything really change? Wouldn’t it, perhaps, be more accurate to say that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism marked a new phase in the Cold War, which has been fought constantly since then?

  It is open to debate as to how much difference there is between the KGB and the agencies that were formed from its members and apparatus. The KGB’s First Directorate – responsible for overseas operations – became the Foreign Intelligence Service, initially headed by Yevgeni Primakov. As its spokesman Yuri Kobaladze pointed out in 1994, their main purpose was information-gathering from overt and covert sources: ‘That does not mean we will stop gathering information on you, and you on us, right? There are friendly states but no friendly intelligence services.’ The Second Directorate eventually became the FSB after Boris Yeltsin disbanded the Ministry of Security following questions about its loyalties during his struggles with the Russian parliament in 1993. Disingenuously, it claimed that it too could close down if the CIA activities in Russia were discontinued.