The New Spymasters (39 page)

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.'
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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.
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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.
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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.'

The hardening of Blair's views took place as he focused on making the case internationally for invading Iraq. Crooke was among a great many inside SIS and the Foreign Office who saw this ‘invasion diplomacy' as the culmination of a politicization of the British foreign service. Crooke also saw it as a decisive rejection of compromise. As he recalled later:

a senior British official had told me bluntly that my methods of building political solutions by building popular consent – holding ‘town hall' meetings with all factions, working with Hamas, shuttling between Palestinians on the ground and President Arafat to ensure broad participation and continued momentum – were passé. We were in a new era, and it required new thinking: ‘The road to Jerusalem now passes through Baghdad,' the official insisted.
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From the previous nuanced approach to the Arab–Israeli dispute, policy had hardened, subsumed into the language of counterterrorism. Hamas was now a ‘virus' and the Palestinian conflict was just another to be solved by ‘confronting extremists'.

The new thinking was underlined in an SIS paper, dated 1 March 2003 but only made public years later, which laid out a security strategy for the Palestinian Authority on how to repress groups like Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade that rejected the Oslo Accords.
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Crooke knew nothing of the document and later summarized it as a plan ‘to “degrade”' the capabilities of opponents to the Palestinian Authority, to disrupt their communications, intern their members, close their civil and charitable organizations, remove them from public bodies, and seize their assets'.
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No one in the EU was told of it either: ‘So Solana was working and continued to work with a policy of trying to include all of these groups at the same time as Mr Blair was undermining it.' It was a betrayal, Crooke felt in hindsight.

Other intelligence officers point out that, for basic security reasons, it would have made no sense at all to share any plans for attacking groups like Hamas with Crooke. As Crooke had himself argued, the peace channel needed to be sealed off from the military line for its own integrity.

The rift between Crooke and London was not about trust but about a disagreement on strategy. Since Britain was now in support of Israel's campaign to crush the militants by force, Crooke's chance of achieving a lasting cessation of violence was fading. When he had put together a ceasefire in August 2002, persuading both Hamas and Fatah to call off their attacks, it lasted only until Israeli jets dropped a one-tonne bomb and killed Sheikh Salah Shehadeh, the military head of Hamas, and also nine children and five other adults.
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The suicide bombings resumed and so did Israeli retaliation. In the following months, Crooke tried again, repeatedly, to bring about a de-escalation of violence. Sometimes it worked for a few days, and it did save lives, but there was no sign of abatement. Now at odds with British policy, Crooke was summoned back to London. As the
Guardian
reported on 24 September 2003:

Yesterday, a British embassy spokesman in Tel Aviv said Mr Crooke would leave Jerusalem within days for ‘personal security reasons … The deterioration in the security situation in the occupied territories made it impossible for him to do his job safely,' the spokesman said. The embassy acknowledged that Mr Crooke was leaving against his will but declined to discuss what his associates say were his growing differences with the Foreign Office …
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In the British tradition (as the
Guardian
put it), he was handed an honour from the Queen, a CMG (‘Call Me God'), and then sacked. That was accomplished with a summons to SIS headquarters in Vauxhall. He was seen by a junior clerk before being sent home for good. Crooke would never discuss the incident, just as he would never confirm his service for SIS.

SIS itself has never commented on Crooke's enforced retirement. But when interviewed several former officers argued that, whatever the merits of his opinions, his fault was to be actively promoting his own policy. One said, ‘He was highly intelligent but he had become an advocate.' That was no crime in itself, but he had pushed it too far and lobbied against British policy. Some also suspected that Crooke had gone along too readily with his outing as an SIS officer. ‘He was doing God's work, and has done so ever since,' said another former colleague, ‘but within a secret service you cannot do your own thing.' In evidence to Britain's Iraq war inquiry but speaking generally, Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of the service, said that ‘in SIS you cannot really afford dissenters. Dissent [redacted words] can cause phenomenal problems.'
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