Art of Betrayal (59 page)

Once again, the view in Washington was ‘job done in Afghanistan'. Soon the US began withdrawing special forces teams and preparing them for their next war. Nothing much had followed behind the military, no great aid or development or attempt at institution building. Some in Washington, ignoring the key role played by Afghan allies, drew the over-confident conclusion that small teams combined with air power could win wars without a large body of ground troops.

The rout of the Taliban meant that prisoners were swept up into makeshift and ageing jails, including many foreign fighters who had trained in the camps and fought against the coalition. In mid-December the MI6 officers who had been deployed to the region began to interview prisoners held by the Northern Alliance. In January they turned to interviewing those held by the Americans. In neither case was the decision to interview referred up to ministers in London. On 12 December it had been agreed in London that MI5 officers should also be sent out to interview prisoners who might possess intelligence on attacks against the UK. The first MI5 staff arrived at Bagram on 9 January 2002. The following day an MI6 officer conducted his first interview of a detainee held by the US. He reported back to London that there were aspects of the way the detainee had been handled by the US military before the interview that did not appear consistent with the Geneva Conventions. Two days after the interview he was sent instructions, copied to all MI5 and MI6 staff in Afghanistan, about how to deal with concerns over mistreatment. ‘Given that they are not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene to prevent this,' it explained, referring to signs of abuse. It went on to say that the Americans had to understand that the UK did not condone such mistreatment and that a complaint should be made to a senior US official if there was any coercion by the US in conjunction with an MI6 interview. The instructions ended with a no doubt happily received lawyerly warning that ‘
acts carried out overseas in the course of your official duties [are] subject to UK criminal law. In other words, your actions incur criminal liability in the same way as if you were carrying out
those acts in the UK
'.
⁵⁰
The instructions, it was later found, were inadequate, in that they failed to require officers to report their concerns immediately to senior US officials and to London. In the next three weeks before he came home the MI6 officer saw no other signs of mistreatment. But it had not been an isolated incident.

The gloves had come off. On 7 February President Bush made clear that the US did not consider the Geneva Conventions applied to detainees arrested in Afghanistan and they were to be sent to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. There were more signs of abuse. In April an MI6 officer was present at an interview conducted by the US military and raised concerns with a US officer. In July an MI5 officer said he heard a US official talking about ‘getting a detainee ready', which appeared to involve sleep deprivation, hooding and stress positions. When he reported it to his senior management they did nothing. It would not be surprising if officers in the field felt they were getting little support from back home.

Britain's closest ally was, as its vice-president Dick Cheney put it, working ‘the dark side'. The top Al Qaeda prisoners who were picked up in the War on Terror were taken on a journey to ‘black' sites, secret locations in Eastern Europe and Asia where pliant governments had allowed the CIA to harbour secret facilities. There the agency could engage in acts everyone but the administration itself would describe as torture. The CIA was becoming, in effect, a military command as well as an intelligence agency which would be engaged in everything from interrogation of detainees to firing guided missiles to killing Al Qaeda leaders, creating an awkward situation for an ally who worked closely with it.

How much did British intelligence know about their cousins' walk on the dark side? Very little, they claim, which in itself points to an intelligence failure. ‘It took us longer than it should have done to find out,' accepts one former official. There were warning signs early on, however. ‘I was worried by the reaction that one heard – which was a very emotional reaction – in the weeks after 9/11 from a number of American officials,' Dearlove said later. ‘We tried even at that stage to point out we had lived with a serious, different type of terrorist threat. We had gone down a track which had caused great problems. I'm thinking of internment in Northern Ireland. And we had learnt many hard lessons … our position was if you forfeit the moral high
ground in confronting these types of problems you make it maybe much more difficult. You maybe gain a short-term advantage, you certainly lose long-term advantage.'
⁵¹

Britain and America share most but not all secrets. The secret rendition programme in which high-value Al Qaeda suspects were tortured was highly classified, but it was still clear that
something was happening
to these prisoners in the years after 9/11 because they had disappeared. What's more, the UK was happily receiving intelligence reports based on their interrogation. A ream of very interesting reports began to reach Britain in 2003. The material was gold dust but the Americans were saying very little about its source. Was it a newly minted agent inside Al Qaeda's leadership? some in British intelligence wondered. Soon it became clear that material was coming from the self-confessed ‘mastermind' of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was spewing out details of plans and plots and plotters. ‘I said to my staff, “Why is he talking?” because our experience of Irish prisoners and terrorists was that they never said anything,' Eliza Manningham-Buller recalled.
⁵²

Another intelligence chief wondered if Mohammed had been turned to work with the West. What had really happened was that he had been waterboarded, a technique which makes the body think it is drowning, a total of 183 times. ‘The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing,' Manningham-Buller said. ‘One of the sad things is Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush all watched
24,'
she added, referring to the TV drama in which an American spy uses extreme techniques to extract information and stop attacks.
⁵³

As they processed the leads supplied from Washington, MI5 was relieved to find that it already knew about half the people Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had identified in the UK. But the remaining half were new leads which were hurriedly pursued. An urgent hunt began for one of those he helped identify named Dhiren Barot, a key Al Qaeda figure in the UK, who proved well trained enough to lose his surveillance team temporarily. Eventually he was picked up, but the FBI was furious he was not handed over to it.

When MI5 officers interviewing detainees in Guantánamo Bay became concerned over mistreatment in 2004, protests travelled through intelligence channels and also through Downing Street and
the Foreign Office.
⁵⁴
But the spies also say that the leads that emerged out of torture in the black sites were important for national security (although not quite to the extent President Bush later claimed when he wrote that they directly prevented attacks on Canary Wharf and Big Ben). Ask them quietly and a few of those who have worked at the heart of the secret state will whisper that the idea that torture is never useful and always produces flawed intelligence is too easy a truth to cling to. They will say that Algeria, whose methods were brutal, was an important partner after 9/11, providing vital intelligence. They will say that you never really know how intelligence you are handed was produced. And, they ask, can you imagine the witch-hunt and the blame game if there was to be an attack on Britain tomorrow and it was found that intelligence on it from, say, Saudi Arabia had been declined because of concerns over its provenance? But while passive receipt of intelligence is one thing, the moral terrain becomes even more treacherous when you are watching interrogations on video monitors from neighbouring rooms (as Pakistani officials say occurred with some detainees) or sending questions over to the Americans to be put to someone you know has been spirited away somewhere secret, as happened with British resident Binyam Mohammed, held in Pakistan and then in a secret prison in Morocco. In his case there was sufficient concern over wrongdoing to justify opening a criminal investigation into complicity with torture. ‘No torture and there is no complicity with torture,' John Scarlett said, defending MI6's actions. ‘I have every confidence and always have had every confidence in the standards, the values, the integrity of our officers.' The relationship with the Americans had nonetheless experienced tensions, he acknowledged. ‘Our American allies know that we are our own service, that we are here to work for the British interests and the United Kingdom,' Scarlett later said of the relationship. ‘We're not here to work for anybody else and we're an independent service working to our own laws – nobody else's – and to our own values.'
⁵⁵
Trust between the two countries' intelligence services began to erode as British inquiries unearthed and made public details of American techniques, breaching the ‘control' principle in which a country which originates an intelligence report maintains control over where and how it is passed on or released. Some Americans fumed at the way in which European governments
distanced themselves from American policy on detainees while at the same time using the intelligence produced. Speaking before Congress, Mike Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, lashed out at ‘effete sanctimonious Europeans who take every bit of American protection offered them while publicly damning and seeking jail time for those who risk their lives to provide the protection'.
⁵⁶

The British and Americans have long had a classified no-spy agreement which says they do not collect secret intelligence on each other and do not recruit each other's citizens as agents. This is partly about sovereignty and partly about the problems of parallel intelligence operations pranging into each other as they go after the same agents. The British can, however, occasionally run unilateral operations inside the US against other nationals with US approval (approval which is extremely rare, although some US officials suspect that Britain may have run unilateral operations without approval against the IRA at various points). The US does not have the ability to run approved unilateral operations in the UK, much to the annoyance of some CIA officers (very occasionally they have been caught evading this). After 9/11, some senior American intelligence officials pushed hard to run their own operations inside the UK to collect intelligence. London resisted strongly, fearing not least that the Americans might end up carrying out rendition operations as they did in other European countries like Italy in which suspects were snatched off the street. One former CIA official recalls a meeting at which the head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, never one to be shy of expressing her opinion, resisted US unilateral operations particularly strongly. ‘Try it and we'll arrest you,' the CIA man recalls her saying. Another CIA official at the same meeting came out irritated by what he saw as a patronising lecture about how Britain was a country of rules where the Magna Carta had been written and fumed to his colleague about being told what he could or could not do by a ‘medium-sized power'.
⁵⁷

When a man in Birmingham is communicating with a terrorist planner in Karachi the distinction between foreign and domestic information quickly blurs. Streams of information from different sources need to be integrated and trails of data mined and manipulated to establish how someone might be linked to a network. Staff
from MI5 and MI6 were thrown together in joint teams alongside colleagues from GCHQ who pluck terrorist communications out of the ether. MI5 found itself co-ordinating closely with the police with whom it used to have an often difficult relationship. The days of bitter rivalry between MI5 and MI6 had passed, although the odd clash still occurred. Most of the difficult entanglements, particularly the case of Binyam Mohammed, centred on the Security Service, MI5, rather than on MI6. After 9/11 senior MI5 officials had been keen to take the lead on all intelligence which related to threats to the UK. Even if detainees were held abroad, they wanted to carry out the interviews. In the past, MI6 officers used to joke that their counterparts should never be allowed beyond the Straits of Dover because their understanding of the ways of foreign intelligence services was so limited. There used to be a running joke about the telegrams MI6 officers in a faraway country received from MI5 in London which was looking for help from the local intelligence service in some investigation. ‘Please instruct your liaison …' the telegrams would begin before going into the details of the request. ‘You weasel, you cajole, but you don't instruct liaison partners,' explained one old hand from MI6. But there was no
Schadenfreude
at the mounting allegations faced by its sister service, not least because it coloured the reputation of all of British intelligence. Paradoxically, public perception and reputation is remarkably important for those who work in the secret world. It is precisely because they cannot talk much about their work that they worry more about the ways in which it is perceived by the public.

MI5 also had to deal with its fictional portrayal in the BBC drama
Spooks
, which began broadcasting a few months after 9/11. ‘I don't think the public think it's like
Spooks
. I think they realise
Spooks
is fiction in the same way as they know that James Bond isn't like MI6,' says Manningham-Buller, who claims not to have watched the programme since the first series and the unfortunate demise of a female officer in a vat of boiling chip fat (the programme was thought to have led to a drop in female applicants because of its violence). ‘There are two regrets I have. One is that it portrays intelligence as simplistic, as a simple thing to be understood if you only do things in the right order – that things can be solved in forty minutes by six people. The second thing I regret about it is it portrays the service as
having utter disregard for the law. Whereas we are very careful that everything we do has a proper legal basis.'
⁵⁸
The hits to the MI5 website, and particularly its recruitment pages, surge after every episode of the drama, but insiders are less sure that the Bondish image of gun-toting, rule-breaking secret agents is as helpful to a domestic security service trying to investigate its own citizens as it is to a foreign intelligence service, like MI6, out trying to do bad things to foreigners. If
Spooks
was like real life, one MI5 officer explained, the camera would cut to the officer at 3 a.m. still filling in his warrant form and all the associated paperwork before being allowed out the door.