The New Spymasters Read online

  Nasiri returned to Europe in May 1996, just as Osama bin Laden took a chartered jet from Sudan to Afghanistan to lead the jihadi movement.

  * * *

  By the time of the 9/11 attacks, agents like Nasiri who had infiltrated al-Qaeda were still a rarity. The lack of effort by Western intelligence agencies was due not only to the dangers and difficulties but also to the cuts made in intelligence budgets since the end of the Cold War, as well as what became known as the ‘wash’ of disreputable sources (for example, those with records of human rights abuses). Former officers of both the CIA and SIS rightly said that human intelligence efforts were then at a low point. The British had cut their budget for human intelligence operations nearly as much as the Americans had done, as several former SIS officers confirmed.

  But the main reason why there was so little effort to get spies among the extreme Sunni Islamists was the failure of most in the West to grasp the scale of the threat posed. Until agencies realized the true measure of the danger, hard-to-control agents like Nasiri were rarely going to be seen as worth the trouble. The French, whose citizens had been murdered in numerous terrorist attacks in Paris during the 1990s, had a better grasp of the risk. And they were highly critical of the British, for instance, for being almost wilfully blind to the operational role of extremists living in their midst and actively plotting terrorism. Officials at MI5 would later acknowledge that failure.

  * * *

  When he returned from Afghanistan, Nasiri made contact with the French again. He felt vindicated. ‘I was on top of the world. No one had believed in me; no one thought I had anything to offer. The DGSE had been ready to throw me in jail and wash their hands of me. Then they tried to pay me off to disappear. But now here I was, just back from the Afghan training camps with vast stores of information. They wouldn’t try and get rid of me this time. Now they needed me.’32

  The DGSE responded, he recalled, with a mixture of joy that he was alive, disbelief about what he had done and, most of all, uncertainty about what to do with him next. They did debrief him extensively, in a hotel in Istanbul, but they hardly seemed interested in the level of detail he could provide about the location and layout of the camps, the training programmes and the personalities who were coming and going. While much of his account cannot be independently verified, his description of the camps did accord with what other intelligence operatives and visitors there would later indicate.

  Nasiri ended up in London, where the GIA had regrouped and where the French decided he should be run jointly with the British. But he did not get on with his MI5 handler, ‘Daniel’, whom he disliked in almost all respects. ‘I disliked the way he threw his briefcase, I disliked the way he spoke, I disliked the way he told me he’d be “handling” me as if I were a circus animal.’33

  Like him or not, Nasiri presented MI5 with another dilemma. Al-Libi had sent Nasiri back in part to fund-raise, meaning he was expected to wire money to the camp. At first the French and British baulked at giving him cash that would essentially fund terror training, but on three occasions, he said, they agreed.

  Nasiri began hearing about a preacher based at a mosque at the Four Feathers Youth Centre near Baker Street in London. He was known as Abu Qatada, a Palestinian-Jordanian whose real name was Omar Mahmoud Othman and who was later labelled, with justification, bin Laden’s ambassador in Europe. He was one of the key clerics who gave vital scholarly endorsement to bin Laden’s actions. Nasiri identified him as the most compelling threat in the city. He also says he passed on messages between Abu Qatada in London and Abu Zubaydah and al-Libi in Pakistan.

  At the time, though, British intelligence had little ability to identify real operational extremists like Abu Qatada, according to Nasiri. They were more interested in far less credible preachers like the Finsbury Park mosque’s Abu Hamza (an Egyptian whose real name was Mustafa Kamel Mustafa). Despite his previous training in Afghanistan, Abu Hamza was then little more than a rabble-rousing fraud. He had little or no active connection to the hard-core jihadi network. Nasiri knew someone who had trained with him and had learned that – contrary to what Abu Hamza claimed in his speeches – he had lost his arm not in combat but in an accident while making explosives. In the years that followed Abu Hamza’s influence grew in London among young radicals. He was extradited in 2012 to the United States on terrorism charges and was found guilty in 2014.

  Nasiri never discovered why MI5 told him to drop his focus on Abu Qatada. (At the time of writing, and after a legal battle stretching over many years, Abu Qatada had just been deported from the UK back to Jordan, where he was acquitted on the initial charges, but indicted on new ones.) Meanwhile, Nasiri’s French contacts, whom he also saw in London, were still focused on finding the camps where Algerians trained and had little interest in the wider threat from Islamists. There was a basic lack of trust based on the belief that Nasiri was still uncertain as to where his loyalties lay. ‘I think they were afraid of me and what I would do. They were following me everywhere.’ A divorce seemed inevitable.

  After his relationship with MI5 broke down, it was made clear to Nasiri that he should leave the country, particularly after he proved uncooperative following al-Qaeda’s 1998 embassy attacks. That day, fed up with surveillance, he took the battery out of his mobile phone and left it in his flat. ‘I let them go and they don’t know where I was any more. They was crazy, they had to call my future wife to tell her, “Please, please where is he?” They called her and said, “Where is he?” and I was just in London.’

  After a spell back in North Africa, Nasiri agreed to move on to assist German intelligence in combating Islamists on their soil. But he lost patience with the Germans too. He never got the new identity and the protection he had hoped for. ‘I feel I risked my life for nothing. For absolutely nothing,’ he said.34

  * * *

  In the years after Nasiri’s spying missions, the ‘Afghan Arabs’ became more prominent and the name they had adopted, al-Qaeda, became known to the world. Al-Qaeda-linked groups attacked US interests in Yemen, Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania. There were further attacks, and attempted attacks, in the US and Jordan at the time of the millennium celebrations.

  Only a small group of people, inside or outside the secret services, fully understood the threat that al-Qaeda posed. And the CIA, working with anti-Taliban factions, did make some attempts to kick-start a programme to infiltrate the jihadists. Still, when the strike came on 11 September 2001, the US and Britain had not a single spy inside al-Qaeda. It was a critical weakness.

  As the official US inquiry into 9/11 confirmed, there had been a ‘lack of reliable and knowledgeable human sources’ inside al-Qaeda. ‘Prior to September 11, 2001, the Intelligence Community did not effectively develop and use human sources to penetrate the al-Qa’ida inner circle.’35 Michael Scheuer – one of those at the CIA who had rung alarm bells – asserted, ‘The reason we didn’t prevent 9/11 is simple: neither CIA nor its intelligence allies, Western or Muslim, had a spy or an informant inside al-Qaeda’s command structure.’

  Watching coverage of the attacks at home in Germany, Nasiri felt physically sick. He wondered whether, if people had listened to him and the authorities had kept a closer eye on those who had gone for training in the Afghan camps, they might have been prevented. ‘I tried to get them to understand the reason that all those boys go to Afghanistan and train and be ready to die for a cause – not for their mother or son but because of the humiliation of Islam and Muslims.’36

  Nasiri had his weaknesses as an agent and seemed at times perilously uncertain of his own loyalties. As he warned, someone able to think like a radical and live among them for months might easily be drawn into their ranks. But these questions of loyalty are always present in the spy business, particularly with long-term infiltrations. What emerges from his story is not that finding a way into such groups was too difficult but rather that there was little serious attempt to try. This came from a failure to listen, a basic lack of interest or conce
rn at that time by the secret services (and by the policymakers who directed them) about a movement that was forming far beyond their borders. Even if, no doubt, another more compliant and level-headed person would have made a better agent, Nasiri showed that the Afghan camps could be infiltrated.

  There would be great challenges ahead and new tradecraft and new specialists would be required if the Western agencies were to succeed. ‘We’re still kind of stuck in the Cold War approach to this,’ said Scheuer in a newspaper interview a dozen years after Nasiri’s venture. ‘This is a much more difficult target than the Soviets were. These people are true believers. They’re living according to their beliefs, not in the lap of luxury.’37 In other words, bribery would not motivate them to spy. But none of these differences were insurmountable; they were instead a reason to adapt.

  But while the Belgians, French and British worried about attacks at home, they took little interest in the international movement that was coalescing. As Nasiri explained, the Soviet war had inspired the ‘myth of the mujahideen’ and this, combined with the seething anger of the Arab street and new extremist ideas, brought together a coalition of radicals that would pose a terrible threat. Within Western security agencies, almost no one cared about what had become of far-off Afghanistan; few people were worried about the alienation of youngsters in the Middle East or were even troubling to learn Arabic any longer; and fewer still bothered to study the potent religious ideas that were swirling around. Small wonder that the intelligence services had little to show when disaster struck.38 Nasiri may not have had all the mental qualities or the loyalty necessary to make a good spy and to convince the West to take the Sunni radicals seriously, but his story illustrated both that you needed spies in remote places and that it was possible to get them there. It was a chicken and egg problem: unless you had someone in the camp to appreciate what was happening and the threats posed, you were unlikely to be able to persuade somebody to send a spy there. This is why good spying works in tandem with good analysis, because someone needs the wisdom to decide where to look.

  Successful spying, then, is driven by tradecraft, resources and the quality of recruits, and also by the direction set. It requires such a concentration of effort that unless something is made a real priority results are unlikely. That was the case with al-Qaeda before the attacks of 9/11.

  But there is also the reverse problem. When a subject gets too great a priority and governments want to see success too quickly, the consequences can be equally disastrous. Without great care and professionalism, there is an incentive to exaggerate, even to fabricate, and the spy game can fall into disrepute. This is what happened in the run-up to the Iraq War of 2003, which showed the very personal, human way that spying can turn into lying.

  Chapter 6

  Caveat Emptor

  ‘They tried too hard. They wanted to make a difference, to change policy, change the world. That is always a mistake’

  – retired senior officer, SIS

  An intelligence expert was reading from a book about a secret agent with the code name Curveball. The agent had become famous for telling the world that Iraq’s late dictator, Saddam Hussein, had mobile laboratories to make biological weapons (or germ weapons as they are popularly known). The book was labelled non-fiction. It had won many awards. But it began with a statement by the author that he was using a false name for Curveball and that, despite writing 280 pages about him, they had never met.

  As the expert – someone who had intimately scrutinized the agent’s case – leafed through the pages he started to scribble furious notes in the margin. He was getting angry. The opening pages were a fantasy, he said. They were about Curveball’s 1999 arrival in Germany and how he was recruited by the country’s secret intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND).

  He selected a passage from the book: ‘Staring out the window, Ahmed Hassan Mohamed could see little of his new home. In the spring or summer arriving passengers at Munich’s Franz Josef Strauss International Airport normally glimpse…’

  This made the expert angry. ‘He never went there! He arrived overland from France.’

  ‘Ahmed’s plane flew from North Africa…’

  ‘It was France!’

  The expert listened as I read aloud a long description that continued for three pages: ‘[his] bags betrayed new riches … the man brought back stuffed dates and preserved lemons, kif candy and almond cookies … Airport workers in neon yellow slickers scurried near the plane … Utility vehicles painted cautionary orange … The long line moved slowly but the traveller [Curveball] was patient…’

  ‘The first two and a half pages completely made up! I suppose they need to do this to sell books.’

  ‘The border officer pressed a button on his desk, and another man … escorted the traveller across the hall to a small office with a desk.’

  ‘No.’

  He talked to the passport officers. ‘I am from Baghdad, northeast Baghdad. I live with my mother and father.’

  ‘His father was dead.’

  ‘I attended the University of Baghdad…’

  ‘No. It was the Technical University.’

  ‘Yes, I am married.’

  ‘Divorced.’

  ‘Clutching the slips of paper and his bag, he walked purposefully through the huge airport to reach the bus stand outside.’

  ‘No. He never went to the airport.’

  The account I was reading was from the best-selling book by an American journalist, Bob Drogin. It was the story of a monstrous lie, told by the agent known as Curveball, that was so large he was blamed for helping start the 2003 Iraq War, which led to the deaths of thousands of people. Drogin’s 2007 book, Curveball, was subtitled Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War. A quote on the cover was provided by thriller-writer Frederick Forsyth, who referred to events as ‘the biggest fiasco in the history of secret intelligence’. Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister at the time of the war, took a similar view: ‘It was Curveball. That’s it. The war was based on lies.’1 Of all the evidence compiled about Saddam Hussein, the accusations about germ weapons had been the most compelling and most fleshed out. Curveball had provided that evidence. An official inquiry into the US intelligence failure on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (known as the WMD Commission) had called him the ‘pivotal’ source on bio-weapons. The inquiry concluded, ‘Virtually all of the Intelligence Community’s information on Iraq’s alleged mobile biological weapons facilities was supplied by a source, codenamed “Curveball,” who was a fabricator.’2

  But how did those fabrications come into being and get endorsed by the world’s leading intelligence agencies? And what did this process reveal about the profession of spying and the worth of spymasters and HUMINT in the modern age? When conservative-minded US president George W. Bush and liberal-spirited UK prime minister Tony Blair joined forces to launch the Iraq invasion, despite many protests, they were acting in the spirit of the age, giving form to a public desire to intervene ahead of trouble, to prevent massacres and human rights abuses and surprise attacks such as those of 11 September 2001. However, such an approach to foreign intervention required highly accurate, reliable intelligence. A close look at the Curveball case shows that, even when the lives of thousands depend upon it, spying can turn to lying without much of a conscious effort, or even any malice. It also offers clues about how to avoid such disasters in the future.

  * * *

  Drogin had written the book about Curveball before he knew much about the true identity and personal circumstances of this agent. In the way of many journalists, he filled in blanks. ‘Like any author,’ he wrote, ‘I flesh out the written record and the memories of participants to bring life to the page.’3 But in doing so Drogin had inadvertently mirrored the life of the worst kind of secret agent – someone who filled in the gaps in what he knew with second-hand accounts to ‘bring life’ to his reports.

  As the expert read on, he identified more than forty errors before
he got bored. Many were trivial, but some touched on the heart of this story: how the lie had been conceived, born, shaped and matured. Drogin’s erroneous information, he said, included details of the key man who debriefed Curveball:

  The case officer stood straight-backed and tall … already in his late 50s he had spied for Germany across Africa in the 1980s … He was most fluent in the pitiless vernacular of spying: he used dishonest means – theft, lies, blackmail, and worse – to get at the truth. Even at the BND, most people knew Ahmed’s [Curveball’s] chief case officer only by his cover-name, Schumann … Schumann’s special skill was persuading informants to talk.

  All false, he said. Schumann did not exist. There was no such case officer. Everyone had known who handled Curveball and it was no one like that.

  ‘Schumann was lost. What did it all mean? He was neither an engineer nor a microbiologist.’

  ‘In fact his debriefer, “Dr Peter” [not his real name], was a trained scientist, [with] a PhD.’

  ‘… broken English…’

  ‘No, Curveball spoke English. His university courses were in English.’

  ‘… they ran concealed tape recorders and video cameras…’

  ‘The BND had no secret recordings and no transcripts.’