The New Spymasters (30 page)

Running a spy like Asim inside an active cell of militants required not only audacity but also wise judgement – the skill both to assess when the cell was in danger of becoming operational and to determine, as the CIA was soon forced to do, if an agent inside al-Qaeda could really be trusted.

Chapter 8

Allah Has Plans

‘They plan, and Allah plans. And Allah is the best of planners'

– Koran, 8:30
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On 20 January 2009, the newly elected Barack Obama stood before the Capitol to be sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States. Nearly two million people had gathered that freezing morning in Washington, DC, for one of the most widely viewed events in history. His campaign slogan had been ‘Yes we can'. After years of painful and divisive wars, and a recent domestic economic slump, Obama embodied an infectious, hopeful spirit that, just for a moment, transcended the familiar grudge-match wrestle of American political factions.

His speech was uplifting. Borrowing the phrase from President Abraham Lincoln's promise in his 1863 Gettysburg Address during the Civil War, Obama looked to a ‘new birth of freedom'. Earlier generations, said Obama, had faced down fascism and communism ‘not just with missiles and tanks'. They had persevered with their values: ‘They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use. Our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.'

Obama said the country was at war, but the war was coming to an end. ‘We'll begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan.' He had promised to reverse many policies of his predecessor, President Bush. He had promised to close the camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He had promised an end to the CIA's programme of rendition, torture and secret detention. Here, at the Capitol, he promised to bring the troops back home.
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But the war was far from over.

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Six thousand miles away, a 31-year-old man was a prisoner of the war. As Obama spoke, he was being questioned for a second day. Humam al-Balawi, a doctor employed in a Palestinian refugee camp, was in a secret police cell. He was in Jordan, a close ally and oil-less dependant of the United States. His prison was a hilltop fort that overlooked Wadi Assur, the Valley of Orchards, in Amman, the capital city. It served as headquarters of the General Intelligence Department (GID). The doctor was getting a dose of reality.

Since America had invaded Jordan's neighbour, Iraq, five years earlier, Humam had been waging battle against what he regarded as the devil's own forces, the US and Israel. True, his war had been conducted mostly from his comfortable bedroom in a leafy part of Amman. But his words, which lionized the jihadi fighters of Iraq and Afghanistan and urged every young Muslim to join the cause, provided inspiration to others and so had impact. Thanks to the speed with which information spreads on the Internet, his online nom-de-guerre had become known from Washington to Riyadh. He called himself Abu Dujanah al-Khorasani. ‘Abu Dujanah' was a heroic battlefield companion of the Prophet Muhammad and ‘Al-Khorasani' means someone from Khorasan, an ancient name for eastern Persia, including the area of modern Afghanistan. The legend of a ‘Greater Khorasan' and its prophecies formed part of al-Qaeda propaganda. Militants were looking to a moment predicted by the Prophet when a new Islamic army, carrying black banners, would assemble in Khorasan and be triumphant. Although the hadiths – accounts of the personal sayings of the Prophet, as distinct from the Koran – were not unchallenged by scholars, some recalled the Prophet saying: ‘If you see the black flags coming from Khorasan, join that army, even if you have to crawl over ice, for this is the army of the Caliph, the Mahdi and no one can stop that army until it reaches Jerusalem.'
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It was inspirational.

Humam's arrest was timed, perhaps not accidentally, at a significant moment in his life. He had come to feel that he had reached a crossroads and he must make some decisions. He might be full of clever words, but was he really man enough to do what he so vehemently preached? A few days before his arrest, he had published an article online that explained his mental anguish. It was headlined: ‘When Will My Words Drink from My Blood?'

I feel as though my words have become vain and expired, and are dying between the hands of their writer, I feel as though I have become old and aged; people pass by me and whisper: an old man whose offspring have died. For every day that I spend sitting back steals some of my age and health and determination, thus broadening the gap between what I dream of and what I am actually.

The time had come for action. ‘For my words will die if I do not save them with my blood. And my feelings will die if I do not ignite them with my death … for I fear that I die on my bed as the cattle die, and By Allah I don't bear that.'
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Humam had a loving Turkish wife, Defne, and two young children, Leyla, aged seven, and Lina, aged five. But he asked his article's readers how he would explain to martyrs on the Day of Judgement why he had shunned the path of sacrifice taken by others to remain at home ‘dining with my wife and children in a peaceful house'. The spark for his outrage and sense of disempowerment had been television pictures of Israeli women observing an air raid on Palestinian-ruled Gaza. He recalled later the impact of these events on him:

I can't forget the scene I saw on al-Jazeera channel, in which the daughters of Zion were watching Gaza as it was being bombed by F-16 fighter jets. They were using binoculars and watching the Muslims get killed, and it was as if they were just observing some natural phenomenon, or as if they were watching a theatrical film or something similar.
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Humam's online call-to-arms was posted on the same date, 27 December 2008, as the Israeli tanks rolled into Gaza. The article did not go unnoticed by the Jordanian authorities. And so, at 11.30 p.m., six hours after sunset on a hazy moonless night, at the end of the day before Obama's inaugural speech, GID vans pulled up outside the elegant house of Humam's father, where Humam lived with his wife. ‘There are police outside,' she told him. They arrested him with a warrant for ‘possession of prohibited materials' and seized his computers. There was no time to erase his computer disk drives. It was going to be hard for him to explain away his blogging hobby to the secret police.

It was reported later that Humam cracked quickly, that he began to see the error of his ways and soon started to give up the identity of some of the militants that he knew. And if he wanted excitement, the GID was offering it. He was given the chance to be an informer, a spy of sorts. ‘So this step began with this proposal,' he recounted later. ‘They proposed that I go to Waziristan and Afghanistan to spy on Muslims.'
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The GID had not, in truth, begun quite so boldly. In the first few days, in line with standard spy-recruitment methodology, the agency tried to start Humam on the path of compromise, getting him to divulge a few names and details – to cross the line into betrayal. They also made threats. If Humam did not help, then his family would be in trouble. He was no longer Abu Dujanah, the invisible soldier of Allah. He was now the very ordinary Humam al-Balawi of Urwa Bin Al-Ward Street, the son of Khalil and husband of Defne. He was a marked man. Whatever he did from now on would be scrutinized by the state.

So, after just three days inside a jail, Humam agreed to betray his brothers. His handcuffs were removed and he was driven away from the hilltop. The GID dropped him home in a pickup truck and he stepped out a new man: Agent Panzer.

Or was he just playing along? He would say later that it had all been a ruse, that the idea he could have changed his mind so quickly was laughable.

So they think that if a man is offered money, it is possible for him to abandon his creed. How amazing! [Proposing such things] to a man whose last article just a short while ago was called ‘When Will My Words Drink from My Blood?'; a man who burns with desire for martyrdom … How can you have the gall to say to him, ‘Go and spy on the Mujahedeen'?! You'll never find such idiocy except in Jordanian Intelligence.
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In reality, no one would know what decision he had reached at this point. Most likely, he had not made up his mind what to do yet. The Jordanians realized that he was still a work-in-progress.

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As Humam al-Balawi was aware, thousands of miles east from his home, in what he called the ‘land of Jihad', a new type of war was under way. The battle zone was in the wild mountains of the north-west frontier of Pakistan and the war was characterized by the near-constant threat of attack from the sky.

For years now, with the secret acquiescence of Pakistani security forces, the CIA had been flying unmanned drones over the territory. As a covert military operation, conducted without any declaration of war, this fell to the CIA to organize, rather than the US Air Force. Some of these propeller-driven Predators even took off from and landed inside Pakistan, at a remote Pakistani Air Force base. The Pakistanis had also created an air corridor, known as ‘the boulevard', for unrestricted transit of US warplanes across the country.
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The Predators stayed aloft for hours on end, maintaining watch on the mountains of the Afghan border. Then, from time to time, they unleashed a Hellfire missile, killing a militant and, quite often, killing bystanders too. An updated version of the Predator could drop bombs as well as missiles.

Since July 2008, this drone war has intensified. The CIA was getting more accurate and striking more often. President Bush had authorized the CIA to strike before warning Pakistan. The new approach breached Pakistani sovereignty but was justified by intelligence that showed some members of Pakistan's combined foreign and domestic spy agency, known as Inter Service Intelligence (ISI), were actively assisting the militants. These ISI officers were helping them cross the border to attack US troops in Afghanistan. There was also evidence that the Pakistan Taliban were plotting or encouraging attacks abroad, including in the United States. This gave the US legal grounds for widening the drone attacks, against not only al-Qaeda but also the Pakistani Taliban, now they were formally judged to be a threat to the US. If anyone was a genuine danger, then by US law a president could attack them pre-emptively without even declaring war. Bush ordered a cross-border raid by Special Forces against a training camp.

When Obama took office, there was a brief pause, but the new president quickly established that he was, if anything, keener on drone attacks than Bush had been. He might have opposed torture, waterboarding and renditions, but did not object to what was in effect an assassination programme. This was apparent from the statistics. From 2004 to 2007, there were only ten publicly observed drone strikes in Pakistan. According to estimates by the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, the attacks killed somewhere between ninety-five and 107 civilians and between forty-three and seventy-six militants. In 2008, there had been six strikes by July. Then, after Bush's decision to escalate, another thirty strikes by the end of the year. These killed an estimated 157 to 265 militants and twenty-three to twenty-eight civilians. In 2009, there were two strikes in early January, followed by a pause until Obama was inaugurated. Then, in February 2009, one of the top commanders of the Taliban in the north-west frontier, Baitullah Mehsud, announced the launch of the Shura Ittihad ul-Mujahideen, a united council of fighters with three common enemies: the Pakistani state, the United States and the Afghan government. Mehsud was the leader allegedly behind the Barcelona plot. He was also blamed for the assassination in December 2007 of the Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto. Mehsud's pact was intended to end squabbles among militants. It was also a gift to the US, because it provided a clear legal basis for attacking his network. By the end of the year there had been a total of fifty-two strikes into Pakistan. The death toll: 241 to 508 militants and sixty-six to eighty civilians.
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While Mehsud was busy making alliances, in Jordan officers from the GIA were discussing with their CIA liaison contacts a plan to send the new informant, Agent Panzer, to Pakistan. The idea was that Humam would continue his life as a secret jihadi operative while also reporting to the GID – in other words, become a double agent.

This was not going to be an easy task. Experienced spymasters knew that to successfully run a ‘double' in place was one of the hardest things an intelligence officer could do. Betrayal is a double-edged sword. As the KGB had found when running Kim Philby, it was hard to work out who was really playing whom. Once the fear of betrayal took hold – as it had when James Angleton ruled as CIA counterintelligence chief from 1954 to 1975 – operations could become paralysed and pointless. As the CIA advised its staff in 1963, ‘The double agent operation is one of the most demanding and complex counterintelligence activities in which an intelligence service can engage. Directing even one double agent is a time-consuming and tricky undertaking that should be attempted only by a service having both competence and sophistication.'
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To handle such operations, the CIA had in place a series of procedures, not least of which was the supervision of a double-agent case by the agency's counterintelligence staff. Such rules had been drawn up in 1963, when the CIA faced its most serious and professional adversary, the KGB. As they confronted al-Qaeda and all its affiliates, the CIA had dropped its guard. They failed to appreciate the counterintelligence threat that al-Qaeda posed.