The New Spymasters Read online

  He became a spy because he was greedy, he said. One day he stole some money from the group. His comrades worked out that he was the thief and his brother let Nasiri know they would kill him if he did not return the money. It was a situation that would become a pattern: a young man at a crossroads of criminality and Islamic militancy who turns out to be an effective spy for a modern secret service.

  Short on options, Nasiri figured the knowledge he had of the GIA’s activities could be worth something. With that in mind, he sought out the DGSE by walking into the French Consulate in Brussels. He knew the DGSE was ruthless and he knew it was hunting down the GIA. As soon as he walked through the doors, he felt different. ‘It was a very difficult moment. I felt my body tremble. My heart was beating faster and faster, but my brain was saying you have no other choice. This is the way to do it and this is the only thing to do. I knew from that moment when I went in, my life would change forever.’14

  Put in touch with an intelligence officer whom he refers to as ‘Gilles’, Nasiri was told his knowledge of the group was of only limited worth; his real value would come from staying inside it and feeding live information to the French. Gilles told him, ‘I can protect your family … but I can’t give you everything you want. You haven’t given us enough yet. If you want all these things you’ll have to do more for us.’15

  According to Nasiri:

  [Gilles] had the temperament of a dictator: he always wanted to be in control. He wanted to tell me what to do, what to tell the members of the GIA cell … He was constantly pushing me to get into their ‘inner circle’ and telling me how to do it. But I had the power. I had the information he needed – and I didn’t like him ordering me around. I told him so, again and again, and I knew he was frustrated.16

  Without proper control over him, the French were in dangerous waters. Nasiri was involved in the trafficking of weapons and the French would have wanted to track his every step to prevent potential catastrophe. But he constantly resisted their authority. Nasiri said he was encouraged by the French to become more immersed in the group. This culminated in his drive from Belgium to Morocco – through France and Spain – in a car packed with explosives, weapons and money. The car kept overheating because it was so weighed down: ‘every piece of the structure of the car didn’t work … even the electric window did not work’.17 The Semtex explosives he was transporting were later taken on to Algeria, he was told. Based on the timing, it seemed impossible they were not used in the police station attack.

  * * *

  As the British had found in Northern Ireland, a secret agent inside a terror group faced a standard dilemma: how far to go. ‘Of course, that’s why handling agents is so difficult,’ said Caprioli. ‘When an agent is in the core of an organization and one day they are told to go kill someone, what do we do?’ He said in France the aim was to ‘withdraw the source as soon as you’ve identified all the members of the network. So one of our principles is to avoid letting the agent go too far, because if he goes too far he is part of the attack.’

  Hank Crumpton, a former head of operations of the CIA counterterrorism centre, wrote in his memoirs that the first problem encountered in recruiting agent-terrorists was the physical danger to a CIA case officer when approaching someone and asking them to spy. This is known in intelligence jargon as the ‘pitch’. ‘It was different from pitching a foreign diplomat, military officer, or trade official.’ It was much riskier. ‘A foreign diplomat could report the pitch, perhaps resulting in a diplomatic flap. A terrorist could respond in other ways, such as tossing a grenade at the case officer – which had recently happened. Our officer barely escaped down a stairwell as the grenade exploded behind him.’18

  Then there was, as Crumpton wrote, ‘the dilemma of employing those who may have murdered people or supported those who did’. There had to be some limits on whom they recruited. ‘We did not recruit, support, and encourage any asset to murder innocent people – even if such action advanced their access and influence within a terrorist group. That was flat wrong. But where did we draw the line?’19 The answer, he said, was to consult lawyers at the Department of Justice. He did not elaborate on what they advised.

  Few with knowledge of such counterterrorist operations would argue that an entirely clean and harm-free approach to running spies among terrorists could possibly work. There was always an inescapable judgement call: was it worth being complicit in a lesser crime for the sake of preventing a bigger one? Everyone involved agreed there was a line to draw – but they differed on where to draw it and who should draw it. And rules needed to be flexible, Caprioli suggested: ‘The situation itself dictates how you handle it. The reality on the ground is more than theory. You can have theories and principles, but when you’re dealing with reality that’s what dictates your behaviour.’ Nevertheless, principles were important. ‘You have to have principles to say, “OK, time to stop.”’

  * * *

  In March 1995, the French and Belgians decided it was time to arrest members of Nasiri’s cell in Brussels. He objected. He thought it was too early, and he feared that he would be double-crossed by the DGSE and arrested and prosecuted too. While he took its money, he never trusted the French agency; and his actions then showed why they were also right to not trust him. In his anger, Nasiri said, he confessed to fellow members of the cell that he had been spying for the French. ‘I did tip them off. I gave them twenty-four hours’ warning’ ahead of the arrests, he admitted – a fact he had never told the DGSE. The gang had a day to dispose of evidence, though it meant one of them was caught with a gun in his car on a Brussels street as he tried to move it.

  The DGSE did not know about – or at least did not mention – his betrayal. So after the arrests the relationship resumed. But with the Belgian cell dismantled and suspicion directed at him, Nasiri and the French concluded that his cover was blown as an agent in Europe. He could no longer work safely. Oddly, the confession Nasiri said he made to his GIA comrades (and there must be some doubt about his account here) had either not been believed or, for whatever reason, not been widely circulated. But in militant circles there were still questions about why he was the only cell member to avoid arrest. Meanwhile, the French were content to pay him off and ‘would have been happy if I just disappeared’. But Nasiri wanted more. ‘I hadn’t even started,’ he said. In the months that followed, he was to journey even deeper into the dark network of jihadism.

  Both Gilles and Nasiri knew of the whispers in militant circles about people who were disappearing. They were said to be going for training in special camps in Afghanistan. After the Soviet defeat, Afghanistan had passed into the control of different mujahideen fighters-turned-warlords. Some of the many Arabs who had joined the mujahideen (the so-called ‘Afghan Arabs’) had also stayed behind. They were regrouping and setting up camps in districts close to the Pakistan border where they had operated during the war. It was rumoured they were training fresh recruits to continue their jihad on new fronts – whether Bosnia, Kashmir, Algeria, Egypt or Chechnya. What was missing was first-hand information from the camps themselves. No outsider had penetrated the set-up.

  Nasiri and his French case officer discussed how it might be possible to get inside the Afghan camps. In his impetuous way, Nasiri suggested flying straight out to Pakistan, but the French thought that too brazen, he recalled. They felt he should head for Turkey and find a radical circle there that would direct him onwards with the right introductions. Nasiri tried that, but after weeks of fruitless travelling and a scare when he crashed his car the French finally accepted Nasiri’s plan.

  In the spring of 1995, he took a flight to Karachi with $15,000 in his pocket from the French.20 What followed was a combination of luck and guile. On the plane, he met an observant Muslim who gave him directions to the headquarters in Lahore of the conservative-minded Islamic evangelical movement Tablighi Jamaat. They welcomed young Muslims from across the world, including Nasiri. But he found they had a philosophy of peace, not of vi
olent jihad. Nasiri was disappointed. He wasn’t looking for peace-mongers.

  What he hadn’t realized was that Tablighi Jamaat was also infiltrated by radicals. When Nasiri decided to leave, disillusioned by their peaceful preaching, a spotter who had been present at Tablighi Jamaat stopped him and passed on the introductions he needed to go further into the militant network. He was heading for the border city of Peshawar, at the start of the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan. Nasiri said he met a man called Abu Zubaydah there, a militant whom the US government later named as one of the top leaders of al-Qaeda. Abu Zubaydah was the gatekeeper to the Arab mujahideen camps, the man to decide who would be accepted for jihad training. Some called Abu Zubaydah a sort of ‘travel agent’ for al-Qaeda. ‘He was a master counterfeiter. He made identity documents,’ said Nasiri, ‘and he was a master of knowing how to get people from A to B without getting caught.’21 After 9/11, he was interrogated and water-boarded in CIA secret prisons known as black sites. Thinking about his encounters with the man, Nasiri wondered if Abu Zubaydah was mildly autistic. (He was brilliant at many things, but never put in charge of any planning.) Abu Zubaydah sent Nasiri across the border to the movement’s most important camp, Khalden. Another person who would later be named by the US as an infamous terrorist leader, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, was in charge. He was a genial but commanding figure. ‘He was a tall man, very, very shy. When he gave you his hand to salute you, you wouldn’t feel his hand, it was so soft, so warm, so incredibly paternal, and when he spoke with you, you would see this smile spread over his face.’22 Captured in November 2001, al-Libi would be interrogated later by both the CIA and the Egyptian secret police. He was finally transferred by extraordinary rendition to Gaddafi’s Libya, where he died in prison. While Nasiri was at al-Libi’s camp, he heard that funds were coming from another mysterious ‘Sheikh’. This was Osama bin Laden, who was then still in Sudan.23

  It had all happened incredibly quickly. Less than a month after he had said goodbye to Gilles in Turkey, Nasiri was ensconced in what had become ‘jihad central’. Al-Libi’s Khalden camp was where recruits combined basic training in military skills with instruction in both religion and the ethics of jihad. And it was here that almost every famous al-Qaeda recruit had been or would go. In 1993, at the same camp, Ramzi Yousef and others had plotted the first bomb attack later that year on Manhattan’s World Trade Center. Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian leader of the 9/11 hijackers, was taught here too.24 Nasiri was present in the summer and autumn of 1995. The training was about 30 per cent with weapons and 70 per cent religious ideology. The weapons training felt like a gift: ‘For me it was like a present for a boy who had expected something for many years and then he got it.’25 It was also much more about classic guerrilla warfare than terrorist attacks.

  Despite their significant role for what became al-Qaeda, these camps catered for a much wider coalition of jihadi groups at war with their own governments, whether Chechens fighting the Russian army, Pakistan-backed Kashmiris fighting the Indian army or Algerians. Al-Libi was regularly asked, said Nasiri, about a particular group in some country. ‘He would stop and say, “No, we are not here to make the difference between this one and that one. Our enemy is the same: Saddam [Hussein of Iraq] or [Hafez al-] Assad [of Syria].” So Ibn Sheikh’s job was to train people to fight the first target of the [radical Islamists] which was their own government.’26

  Talking to prisoners in Bagram, Afghanistan, before his rendition onwards to Libya, al-Libi was asked, ‘Ibn Sheikh, are you al-Qaeda?’ He was said to have replied, ‘No, I’m not.’ But he said he was happy to be arrested as a member of the group. ‘I’m proud my enemy, the Americans, names me as part of al-Qaeda.’27

  * * *

  In the mountains of Afghanistan, Nasiri began to be absorbed by the appeal of the jihadis. ‘As the weeks passed,’ he wrote in his book, ‘it became harder for me to separate myself from my brothers. It took more and more effort each night to remember that I was not one of them. That I was a spy.’28 Nasiri rationalized his confusion in Afghanistan like this:

  My two missions, spy and mujahid were now one and the same. I had lost myself totally in my role. But that’s what any spy must do to succeed. No one can lead a double life for long and expect to get away with it. I had to immerse myself completely … Was I a good spy because I could lose myself so completely in my role as mujahid? Or was I a good mujahid who just happened to be a spy?29

  Nasiri’s account raised the question of whether his susceptibility to militant propaganda (some might say gullibility) had been an important safety net. His own true beliefs, it appeared, were in flux. But should his account of the camps and elsewhere be taken at face value? In general, much of what he said was credible, revealing deep knowledge of the nature of the camps and the people involved across militant circles. Security sources in different agencies have also confirmed aspects of his account, including his later work in Britain and France. Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, said that Nasiri’s tale ‘tracks very well with the information we had in classified holdings during the late 90s and since then’.30 But parts of his account, described in his book Inside the Global Jihad, did not ring true and seemed like the words of a ghostwriter chosen for an American audience.

  Based on my own meeting with him, it struck me that the French would have always taken care to maintain a distance between themselves and Nasiri. While they would have been eager to encourage his adventures and listen to their outcome, he might have had more of a semi-detached relationship with French intelligence than he made out. They subsidized his activities and extensively debriefed him, but they clearly had substantial doubts about his qualities as a secret agent and his loyalty. For instance, if the French had really wanted him to spy inside the Afghan camps, they would have given him some training first.

  I challenged Nasiri about whether in fact he really had been living the kind of dual spy-jihadi existence in Afghanistan that his book implied. Instead, I suggested, maybe he had become at ease with the philosophy of jihad and stopped even thinking of himself as a spy?

  ‘It’s true,’ he admitted, ‘I was genuine.’

  Nasiri said that the book had been a ‘negotiation’ with publishers in which he had had to ‘close my eyes’ to some of what was written. He struggled most to get the book to reflect his own radical perspective: namely, that while the GIA was wrong to attack civilians, the bomb attack on the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, for example, which took place while he was in the camps, was justifiable. Attacks on the Russians in Chechnya were praiseworthy. He admitted that his real goal in going to the camps – which the French had unwittingly assisted – was to be sent on a mission to Chechnya. ‘I really did want to go and kill Russians. Not civilians but the soldiers, the ones killing Muslims,’ he said. Only when Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi insisted that he go back to Europe did the other side of his mission, to spy for the French, kick back in. In other words, although he returned and delivered his report, if circumstances had been different he might never have gone back.

  * * *

  When I met Nasiri, it seemed obvious that, in an almost schizophrenic way, he thoroughly accepted both the dogma of jihad and having worked with some of its enemies. In the camps, he had gone a long way down the militant path. He even volunteered to defuse an improvised bomb that had failed to explode. His group was asked, ‘Who wants to become a shaheed [martyr]?’ Only Nasiri raised his hand and walked off to dismantle the device. That kind of devotion gave him the credibility a penetration agent needed to survive. But, he said, he did it ‘because I believe in Islam’. It meant he had little to hide. ‘I was genuine. I was not lying. I was not fabricating. And you know why? This is the best way to get anywhere you want in life because they can even cut off your hand or nose and you will still just say the truth.’

  There is a lesson here about spycraft. A successful spymaster is said to have an ability to get inside an enemy’s mind. But if you draw close to that dividing line between fr
iend and foe and begin to think like your opponent, you risk slipping over. This goes some way to explain why intelligence agencies themselves present such an ‘insider threat’. From Kim Philby to Edward Snowden, the biggest betrayals were from agencies established to prevent betrayal that made so much of their role in defence of the nation.

  As Nasiri put it, trying to recruit spies inside Islamist organizations required a wholehearted approach. Cheap tactics, such as offering them money, were bound to fail. ‘Because those people in the camps, those people in the groups, they always know who is really attracted to this life they lead.’ The only effective way to penetrate groups like al-Qaeda, he said, was to ‘build up a Muslim guy, really Muslim guy, 100 per cent Muslim guy and send him back to spy on the Muslims’. But, he claimed, there was a 99 per cent chance it would backfire and the agent would come back and kill. ‘When he will come back, if he comes back, he will blow you up.’ Nasiri laughed as he said it, although he insisted he was not joking.

  Although he may have become hardened over the years, it was obvious from meeting him that he must always have been incredibly headstrong. At Khalden he was one of the few who questioned the orders of the camp’s ‘sheikh’, al-Libi. Such poise may have protected him from exposure and suspicion. But, he admitted, he was equally uncompromising with his unfortunate handlers in Western intelligence. They tried in vain to control him and he regarded them as consistently dishonest.

  * * *

  In the winter of late 1995/early 1996 Nasiri moved on, via Peshawar again, to a second, more specialized camp. This was Darunta, on the road from the Khyber Pass to Kabul, near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. The camp was under the control of an Afghan mujahideen group, Hesbi-Islami, but a portion was reserved for training militants under the authority of al-Libi. This was more like a terrorist camp than Khalden had been. Rather than use supplied military hardware, trainees were taught how to make and then detonate explosives themselves. At this time, the camp leadership was deciding what to do with Nasiri. He was still hoping to go to Chechnya, but al-Libi told him his mission was to return to Europe and establish himself there.31 It was not important exactly where, but he was to set up his own cell and then identify targets that the ‘brothers’ could use for future assaults.