Art of Betrayal (61 page)

At a lonely secret CIA base near the Afghan border with Pakistan, the real dangers of agent running became clear in December 2009 along with the ability of Al Qaeda to learn the old games of double agents. Al Qaeda is always on the look-out for plants from Western intelligence and demands references from known radicals. Recruits can be quickly exposed to extreme violence, perhaps witnessing the beheading of someone carrying a mobile phone, to send a message. Parts of Al Qaeda, especially those like the older generation of Egyptians who had grown up battling a state security service trained by the KGB, were well versed in counter-intelligence and the organisation has tried to send some people into MI5 as penetration agents (a greater concern might be someone who joins in good faith but is then pressured due to family or personal ties). By late 2009, Al Qaeda was able to replicate old-style Cold War techniques and run a double agent against the CIA. Jordanian intelligence approached a well-known radical asking him to go to Pakistan to contact Al Qaeda's senior leadership. He was run jointly with the CIA, which had high hopes he might be able to locate Al Qaeda's number two. But when he came across the border from Pakistan to a meeting at the CIA's base in Khost, Afghanistan, he blew himself up. Among those killed was the commander of the CIA base, a brave, dedicated and experienced woman with a long track record of tackling Al Qaeda.

On 2 May 2011, the CIA would at least have its vengeance for her death and the three thousand others killed nearly ten years earlier. Osama bin Laden was tracked, through one of his couriers, to a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, using a combination of human and technical intelligence. A team of US Navy Seals landed by night and killed the Al Qaeda leader; his body was disposed of in the sea a few hours later. A man who had eluded western intelligence for so long and who had been assumed to be hiding in the wilds of Waziristan had been watching satellite TV in a comfortable house close to a military garrison. Pakistan was not informed in advance for fear of jeopardising the operation. The first MI6 knew of the mission was when its Chief was called by his American counterpart to explain what had just happened.

MI6 had reorganised after 9/11 and reshuffled its staff, opening
new stations overseas, with Islamabad becoming its largest base. MI6's uptick in funding was not as large as that for MI5, but it still struggled to recruit fast enough. Old hands were rehired to help out. It took a while for it to be clear how it could help most effectively in countering terrorist threats to the UK. Eventually it focused on chasing leads overseas and upstream to relieve the pressure domestically. This included maintaining the intelligence coverage of suspects as they moved from the UK overseas, particularly to Pakistan. It was no good following someone every day in Britain if you lost them the minute they set foot in Karachi. But knowing what they were doing required the help of a sometimes already stretched liaison partner who had to be carefully massaged. This was always particularly difficult with Pakistan's mercurial ISI. Sometimes help could be enlisted overtly, sometimes through a secret relationship, having a local official on your payroll to check the records. One problem is reciprocity. A Pakistani general might offer his help in catching a British Al Qaeda suspect in his backyard – but only if a Baluchi nationalist in London is sent the other way in return. Working with the ISI was always complex, not least because it cared little for foreigners' concerns over human rights. ‘We're not worried about that,' one Pakistani official explained when asked about the allegations of torture in the Western media. ‘We're not afraid of the third degree.'
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The task of facing terrorism was daunting in terms both of scale and of the moral chicanes to be navigated. It required close working with allies, some of whom played by different rules. There were mistakes made and lessons learnt. It did though provide a new raison d'etre for the spies and seemed to answer the question of what they were for in the new world. But for British intelligence the years after 9/11 witnessed another crisis, one that shook them to the core and that exposed the deep and bitter tensions over their new role.

10

IN THE BUNKER

I
t was late on 24 September 2002 and the MI6 officer was wearily heading home. He took the lift down to the ground floor of the service's ziggurat headquarters at Vauxhall Cross and stepped through one of the airlock tubes at the main entrance. He was an old hand with a couple of decades of service behind him in the hot-spots of the world, but he had never quite got used to the new building. With a nod to the armed security guards, he stepped out into the spaghetti-like chaos of the Vauxhall interchange. As he navigated the buses and cars to make his way to the railway station, a placard heralding the headline for that day's
Evening Standard
newspaper caught his eye. ‘45 MINUTES FROM ATTACK', it warned in big, bold black letters. He stopped in his tracks. The government's dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been launched that morning and he knew, in a way the public did not, precisely what the headline was referring to. Two thoughts hurtled through his mind in quick succession. ‘That's not quite what the original intelligence report said,' was his first. His second thought, which quickly swamped the first, was: ‘If this goes wrong, we're all screwed.'
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Two and a half thousand miles away in Baghdad, President Saddam Hussein was also perturbed. He had summoned his Revolutionary Command Council which, nominally, helped him run the country. Given that his management style consisted largely of fear interspersed with occasional violence, its members knew their lives depended on his favour, and Saddam realised this meant that they often lied to him. As he looked around the table and demanded answers he appeared ‘stiff' and ‘under pressure'. He had just read this new dossier published with much fanfare by the British government. It contained detailed information about his own military capabilities. There was even a claim that weapons of mass destruction could be fired in forty-five
minutes. This puzzled him. He knew nothing of the capacity they described. Was there anyone in the room who was aware of any capabilities that the President himself did not know about? By turn, each member of the Revolutionary Command Council hurriedly said no, they did not. That would be impossible, they said, knowing a wrong answer could be costly. Anything they knew, he would know. Saddam Hussein remain puzzled. If his underlings really were telling the truth, what explained the confidence of those devils at British intelligence?
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If Saddam had known what had gone through the MI6 officer's mind outside Vauxhall Cross perhaps he might have had some inkling of the trouble that was heading his way. If the MI6 officer had known of Saddam's bemusement he too might have shared in that reaction. The service was about to go through a crisis which, according to one colleague with a historical bent, was to be its darkest hour since Philby's betrayal.

The direction that Britain's closest ally was heading in was always apparent. The night after the 11 September attack when British officials dined at CIA headquarters in Langley, the Downing Street Foreign Affairs Adviser David Manning had cautioned against striking Iraq, sensing that Washington's hawks already had Saddam within their sights. The following month CIA officers were over in London for the memorial service for the former MI6 Chief David Spedding. ‘We should focus on Afghanistan,' an MI6 officer told a CIA counterpart. ‘If you go into Iraq, it's really going to complicate things.'
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‘Afghanistan first' was the message from London but by the first week of December, the chief of MI6 was in the White House with David Manning for talks with President Bush's top advisers. The British officials were delivering a paper entitled ‘the second phase of the war against terrorism'.
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A few days earlier, at four o'clock in the afternoon on 30 November, a senior MI6 director, an Arabic speaker deeply versed in the Middle East, took a telephone call from Manning. The Iraq issue was building up apace, Manning explained. Could the officer do a quick paper on how to approach the subject by six that afternoon? ‘If the US heads for direct action, have we ideas which could divert them to an alternative course?' the paper began. It warned of the dangers of planning to remove Saddam. ‘This is not going to be simple or straightforward,
and it doesn't have to pan out well,' was the message from the leading member of the service's ‘camel corps'.
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After the weekend more papers were sent over by the officer. Another paper took a completely different approach, outlining a set of broad motivations for action beyond just WMD. ‘At our meeting on 30 November, we discussed how we could combine an objective of regime change in Baghdad with the need to protect important regional interests which would be at grave risk if a bombing campaign against Iraq were launched in the short term.' Where did the talk of regime change come from? ‘It came out of the ground like a mist following the change of temperature on 9/11,' the officer later reflected. ‘It became clear to all of us that nothing short of decisive intervention in Iraq was going to satisfy the Americans.' At this stage a bombing campaign in support of Iraqis trying to topple Saddam was perceived as a more likely strategy than an all-out invasion. These were technically private papers rather than ‘policy papers' but the words regime change were all over them at a time when the Foreign Secretary was trying to head off such talk as a bad idea and illegal.
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Downing Street had turned to MI6 and its experts – rather than the Foreign Office – and the service was offering a route map for the way forward, touching even on the need to provide a legal basis for any intervention.

Washington's hawks held back for a while. But by the spring of 2002 victory in Afghanistan seemed to have been achieved and London watched Washington's gaze turn resolutely back to Iraq. George W. Bush and members of his team had differing motives – unfinished business for some like Cheney who regretted not driving on to Baghdad in 1991, with an added personal twist for the new President whose father had led that first Gulf War. In neo-conservative eyes this was the once-in-a-lifetime chance to reshape the Middle East state by state, beginning with Iraq. America's intention was clear, although the means by which it would achieve its goal was not.

This provided an opening for Blair. He told President Bush he would stand by him in dealing with Saddam; the only issue was how the Iraqi leader would be dealt with. ‘TB [Tony Blair] wanted to be in a position to give GWB [George W. Bush] a strategy and influence it,' wrote Alastair Campbell in his diary.
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The Prime Minister had known what his mission was within three days of the attack. ‘My job is to try and steer them in a sensible path,' Tony Blair had told his
Foreign Secretary.
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For Blair, this was his moment on the world stage, the chance to harness the writhing anger of the United States and guide it on to a surer footing. He enjoyed being, in his words, ‘a big player'.
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In London, there was that reflexive instinct among spies, soldiers and wannabe statesmen to stay close to the Americans. Maintaining that relationship – and with it the flow of American intelligence and the self-perception of walking on the world stage (even if on someone else's coat-tails) – had become gospel. Staying close supported the often illusory notion of influence.

Blair also shared the view of a titanic struggle that could be fought by ‘modernising' the Middle East through a dramatic act. ‘Our enemy has an ideology. It does threaten us. The ultimate answer is in the spread of democracy and freedom.' ‘In the choice between a policy of management and a policy of revolution, I had become a revolutionary.'
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Crucially, the British Prime Minister also harboured the same nightmares as those in power in Washington, a dark vision of a world in which, without decisive action, terrorists and weapons of mass destruction were destined to join together with catastrophic consequences. That dread had become all-consuming in the upper reaches of the US government. Fearful of missing another attack, the spies were chasing shadows everywhere. An overheard conversation in a Las Vegas casino about a nuclear weapon obtained from Russia's stockpile heading for New York made it on to the CIA's Daily Threat Matrix which some days listed a hundred specific threats.
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Then anthrax turned up in the post, killing five people, and the nightmare seemed to have become real. As Kabul fell, new intelligence emerged revealing that bin Laden himself had met with two former members of Pakistan's nuclear programme just weeks before 9/11. CIA Director George Tenet personally jumped on his plane to Pakistan to try to discover the truth. All this time, Bush and Blair were also receiving secret intelligence briefings about the Pakistani nuclear salesman A. Q. Khan offering countries, including Libya, instructions and parts to make a nuclear bomb. Saddam's weapons, such as they were, were no more of a threat after 9/11 than they had been before. What had changed was the tolerance in London and Washington.
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There was a commingling of calculation and belief in Tony Blair to the point where pulling them apart was impossible. In his view, a line needed to be drawn somewhere when it came to states developing
weapons of mass destruction, and that somewhere was Iraq.
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Blair was sure that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction because his spies believed it always had been. After the first Gulf War of 1991, MI6, the CIA and UN weapons inspectors had combed over the wreckage of Iraq and had been shocked to find Saddam had been much closer to building a nuclear bomb behind their backs. They vowed never to be caught out again, overlooking the fact that they had also over-estimated Saddam's stockpile of chemical agents.
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As with Soviet military and economic power, it was safer to err on the side of caution because normally the costs of being wrong that way were lower. In 1995, a fleet of limos pulled up outside a hotel in the Jordanian capital, Amman. Inside were two of Saddam's daughters and their husbands. One of the men, Hussein Kamel, revealed that there had also been a larger biological programme than anyone had suspected before 1991 but said it was destroyed. The Iraqis then owned up and provided extensive documentation. Western intelligence had been deceived again. Saddam was clever and cunning, they decided, a master of deception. Through the 1990s, there had not been much need for independent intelligence gathering. The UN weapons inspectors became the eyes and ears of the CIA and MI6. In some cases this was done covertly, the US placing its own spies inside the inspection teams who collected military targeting information on sites.
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MI6 also passed intelligence to and debriefed inspectors, twice in 1998 discussing with them how to publicise the finding of traces of VX on missile warheads (although Operation Mass Appeal, as it was called, was abandoned when the story leaked out independently).
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Later that year, the inspectors were expelled by Saddam. With their dominant source of new information eradicated, intelligence analysts were left with history. Worst-case assumptions had become just assumptions, which were left unchallenged.