The New Spymasters (38 page)

A profile of Crooke in the
Financial Times
would later describe the point of SIS's talks with the IRA as trying to find moderates ‘whom they then hoped to “separate” from the extremists'.
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The same was later said of SIS and CIA efforts to talk to Taliban rebels during the war in Afghanistan after 2001. Britain said the object was to find the ‘reconcilables' and persuade them to either abandon their struggle or change sides completely.

But if one's aim was to suborn moderates, then contact with the enemy was both hostile and disingenuous. The approach was aimed not at seeking dialogue but rather at provoking discord. What Crooke did not say, but others emphasized, was that the use of such tactics by SIS and the CIA exposed the fault line between the intelligence officer's day job of making war on an enemy, by attempting to recruit a traitor among them or find other points of weakness, and his role as honest broker, maintaining a peaceable dialogue with that enemy.

Crooke said that in any case it was ‘complete nonsense' to think hunting reconcilables helped to end conflict. Why? Because, in his view, a violent organization's liberal or moderate wing was never likely to deliver peace: ‘Every attempt at finding the middle ground is pretty well doomed to failure.' For him, it was a fiction to think ‘that if you speak to “moderates like us” they will somehow be empowered to find a way to bring about a solution'.

Crooke parted company with liberals here. He was sceptical of all the amateur theatrics of peacemaking, all the well-meaning but misguided attempts (by churches or voluntary groups, for instance) to unite ‘people of goodwill'. In truth, peace came when you dealt with and convinced the tough guys – the ones with guns and bombs – that it was in their best interests. ‘The people who bring about a solution in nearly every case I have seen, in nearly all conflicts, have been the people who command the allegiance of the military [wing].' That was why in Northern Ireland the centrist Republicans of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) were eventually eviscerated. It was Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams – key figures in both the IRA military command and its political wing, Sinn Féin – who finally delivered the lasting ceasefire and the peace agreement.

Secret ‘peacemaking' in modern civil wars could achieve wonders only if the time was right. In the early days of a conflict, when embittered youngsters were typically filled with a killing rage, no amount of talking was going to assuage them. Crooke used to say that ‘fighters have to grow old' before they tire of killing. It was a lesson still unlearned by the US after 9/11, when their kill/capture campaign of assassination in Afghanistan and Pakistan served to constantly rejuvenate the Taliban leadership.

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After leaving Ireland in 1979, Crooke's next foray was to apartheid South Africa. Exactly what he did there remains a mystery, but it did involve dealing with SWAPO, the Soviet-backed liberation movement in what is now Namibia but was then known as South West Africa and under South African rule. One of his tasks was to press UN demands that SWAPO should disarm.

Crooke alleged there was a sharp politicization of both SIS and Britain's diplomatic service during these years: ‘This was part of the Mrs Thatcher revolution: the job of the ambassador [became] to sell British goods and pass out the message of British policy. Not to start sending contrary messages back.' He felt the rot had started – far beyond the events in southern Africa – with a trend towards neo-liberal political thinking that had taken root in Chicago in the 1970s and which influenced conservative thinkers across the West. According to this viewpoint, said Crooke, democracy could only survive if citizens were mobilized against tyranny, and that required portraying the world in monotone, populated with good guys and bad guys.

He noticed this in South Africa, where British diplomats clashed with Thatcher, whose strident support for the apartheid government required all its opponents to be demonized. ‘Ambassadors were warning about the consequences in Africa of this policy.' They would send back well-argued cables to London and ‘a telegram came back from the PUS [Permanent Under-Secretary] saying: stop doing this'. This was the policy and the diplomats were supposed to go out there and do as they had been told. ‘Here are the speaking points. Follow the speaking points.'

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Even if Crooke disliked Thatcher's rhetoric, he still served her cause, most notably in Afghanistan. Ever since the Soviet invasion of 1979, President Ronald Reagan, Thatcher's great friend, had been ramping up covert assistance to the Islamic groups that were fighting the Soviets and the communist Afghan government (it had actually begun before the invasion). In 1985, Crooke was dispatched under diplomatic cover to Islamabad, Pakistan, to help with the war effort as deputy chief of the SIS station. The war was largely being run with the Pakistani government and its military dictator, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. All money and weapons for the rebels had to go through the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI.

Milton Bearden, then the CIA station chief in Islamabad, remembered Crooke as ‘a natural on the frontier' and as ‘a British agent straight out of the Great Game'.
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In those days, Crooke's role involved not just talking with militants, but also supplying them with lethal hardware. While Bearden and other CIA officers were banned from crossing the border into Afghanistan, Crooke used to disappear across for days on end. He would then arrive back in Islamabad late at night and hurry over to Bearden's residence to show off his latest piece of captured hardware, Bearden remembered.

Some of the ‘comrades'
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with whom the British and Americans were fighting were hard-line Islamists, among them the Sunni Arab fighters of Osama bin Laden's group, which came to be called al-Qaeda. (Crooke would never say if bin Laden was among those he met. Contrary to rumour, as Bearden pointed out, no Western service gave any aid to bin Laden – as a rich Saudi, he hardly needed it – but he was an ally at the time.) As the war drew to an end, Crooke said he began to warn about the threat these militants would pose in future. But as one senator in Washington told him, ‘The very people you warned us against, they sure kick communist ass!' And that was the problem. ‘We looked aside,' said Crooke. But the cost of ignoring the Sunni Islamists became plain on 11 September.

Entirely the wrong lessons were also drawn from the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, he said. The impact of US-funded mujahideen was exaggerated, and while such propaganda helped justify the billions the CIA had spent, it also established the founding myth for al-Qaeda and the Taliban: namely, how a band of sandal-clad jihadists could defeat a superpower. By Crooke's account, it was the old story of discordant human intelligence brushed aside. Two years before the Berlin Wall fell, Crooke was already seeing the Soviet Union collapse before him. He was witnessing the implosion of its undefeated army in Afghanistan. But, he said, no one wanted to hear: ‘Both institutionally and most importantly psychologically [we were] totally unprepared for the collapse of the Soviet Union.' There was a strange fighting season when the Soviet Army refused to emerge from its barracks. ‘I remember very well because I was in Afghanistan and talking to people: Uzbeks coming down from Tashkent and other places. I knew there were all sorts of things happening in these Soviet republics, like assassinations of off-duty Russian soldiers. Whenever I would raise this, it was just dismissed out of hand. They would say: “Of course these things are not happening. We would know about those things.”'

It was this Soviet implosion that decisively altered the conflict from a point where the mujahideen were demoralized and almost defeated to one where the Russians were looking to withdraw, said Crooke. At the time and later, America ascribed this reversal to the CIA's covert actions and, in particular, the delivery of shoulder-launched Stinger missiles. The truth was, said Crooke, that after being transported by donkeys over mountain passes the Stingers were not effective. ‘They had a very low success rate. The figures given by the Americans were just fanciful.' Others involved disagreed strongly and insisted to me that the Stingers had had a noticeable effect on the behaviour of Soviet helicopter pilots. But a study of Politburo records by Alan Kuperman, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discovered that the Soviets were preparing to leave Afghanistan before the Stingers became effective. The weapon ‘was not utilized in Afghanistan until September 1986, a mere two months before the Politburo's decision to adopt a withdrawal deadline. At the key November 1986 Politburo meeting, no mention was made of the Stinger nor any other U.S. escalation'.
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Bearden called the claim ‘utterly specious'. Jack Devine, who headed the Afghan task force, said Kuperman's arguments ‘turned history upside down'.

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As the Soviet Union began to dissolve, everyone wanted to celebrate and reap the spoils of victory rather than hear about the next threat. Crooke said that he went to see the US ambassador in Islamabad after the Soviets had withdrawn from Afghanistan.

As Crooke recalled events, the ambassador slammed his fist down on his desk and shouted, ‘Got them!'

‘There's going to be a civil war!' Crooke replied.

‘No, no, it will be over in thirty minutes. Najibullah [the Soviet-backed Afghan president] won't survive thirty minutes.'

They had a bitter argument. But, said Crooke, then the debate was closed. And more widely, in Western intelligence agencies no one was permitted to collect information about Afghanistan. ‘If you had it you were not allowed to disseminate it. You had to tear it up and throw it in the waste bin.'

This was the madness of the post-Cold War 1990s, when the spy agencies were reinventing themselves. It was a time, he said, when they were determined to – using modern business-speak – ‘put the customer first'. They were ruled by ‘requirements', the formal list of intelligence priorities drawn up, in the UK and US, for example, in Whitehall and the US National Security Council, and signed off by politicians. It was not simply that warnings of future dangers were ignored, but that an uncommissioned warning – providing intelligence not covered by a specific requirement – was actually forbidden. The intelligence would be shredded. This was how bureaucratic the secret services had become, Crooke felt.

In later years, he alleged, the British secret service went further than the Foreign Office in becoming a means to ‘deliver outcomes for the politicians'. By the 1990s, ahead of both 9/11 and the Iraq intelligence debacle, it had ceased to be that iconoclastic bearer of bad news that had inspired him. Faced with either budget cuts or extinction, the service made itself useful as another way of delivering political objectives and ‘adding value to government policies' by underpinning an official ‘narrative' of the globe as it was seen by the politicians. In contrast to SIS, regular Foreign Office diplomats, whose position was more secure, came to be seen as almost rebellious. The diplomats were, if anything, ‘like good lawyers in the background, reminding us all of the problematic things that may come up'.

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One of the UK ‘requirements' in the 1990s was to assist the fight against trafficking of illegal drugs, as well as combating one of its by-products in South America: hostage taking. Crooke was sent to Brazil between 1991 and 1993, and from there to Colombia. He was cast again in the role of honest broker, talking to militants, though this time in their guise as kidnappers of Westerners. But there were lessons here for other conflicts too. Even when the gangs' demands were ‘ridiculous' and quite impossible to meet, it was still important to facilitate dialogue: ‘Because if you don't open up communications, you spend the next year negotiating about how to negotiate. And that's been the history.'

Opening talks did not mean negotiation. The priority was to increase understanding by making expectations on both sides a little more realistic. That was the lesson Crooke took to his next assignment: Palestine.

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The Nobel Peace Prize has a chequered history. Its award can be a sign of imminent war. But in Palestine it did at least signal a respite that went on for six years. In 1994, the prize was shared between the ageing Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, and Israeli statesmen Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. The Oslo Accords, signed a year earlier, had brought the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) out of exile. They returned from Tunisia to Gaza and the West Bank as the ruling faction of an interim Palestinian self-government. The Accords were a victory for secret peacemaking and public compromise. They were also a victory for the street fighters. The peace agreement marked the end of the First Intifada, which had been waged since 1987, largely by stone-throwing youngsters.

In 2000, however, large-scale violence returned. Anger had been bubbling up for some time, the result of a failure to solve some intractable issues. (These included the continued expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied areas and an insistence by both sides that an undivided Jerusalem should be their capital.) For Palestinians, what became the Second Intifada was provoked by the visit of Israeli politician Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, sacred to both Islam and Judaism. Sharon was already hated by Palestinians for ordering the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. He had been accused of allowing Israeli troops to be complicit in the massacres by Christian militia of the inhabitants of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. The purpose of going to the Temple Mount was, he said, to demonstrate it was in ‘our hands and will remain in our hands. It is the holiest site in Judaism and it is the right of every Jew to visit the Temple Mount.'
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