The New Spymasters Page 20

  * * *

  As it turned out, Curveball was not a spy who single-handedly took the world to war, but his story did illustrate how even honest men could construct lies. It also showed that good human intelligence needed to start with a healthy and professional relationship between an agent and his handler, and for the ultimate consumers of intelligence to verify that it was being gathered in a professional way.

  At a higher level, Curveball’s story also exposed the arrogance of a tick-box approach that qualified intelligence as sufficient to justify political action simply because several sources appeared to suggest the same thing. Brian Jones, a senior intelligence analyst on Britain’s Defence Intelligence Staff, was one of the few who had challenged the intelligence case before the war. But, when asked why SIS had set aside its own concern that Curveball was a ‘possible fabricator’, he said that most intelligence officers in Britain and the US had always been ‘uneasy’ about the story of mobile weapons laboratories. But that had changed when suddenly new sources appeared to corroborate the story, as well as new pressure to publish evidence.

  ‘There was always plenty of caution around about “Curveball” on both sides of the Atlantic until certain critical documents were required,’ Jones said, meaning that pressure to produce public documents had encouraged the intelligence chiefs to throw caution to the wind. ‘The bottom line on what went wrong is that forceful political leadership in both the UK and US left no doubt about what they believed the assessment on Iraq should say.’24 The intelligence agencies were in transition, ‘still adapting to an alien and nonsensical culture of satisfying the customer to stay in business’, and it was this effort that had killed their better judgement.

  * * *

  One of the sources that appeared to back up Curveball’s account was run by SIS and code-named Red River. According to the WMD Commission, this source ‘provided a single report that Iraq had mobile fermentation units mounted on trucks and railway cars’. He was mentioned when Colin Powell spoke of how a source ‘in a position to know’ had reported that Iraq had mobile production systems mounted on trucks and railway cars.25

  A secret annexe to the WMD Commission report accused SIS of misleading the CIA on Red River. Though supposedly ‘in a position to know’, the agencies had dealt with this source second-hand: it was someone whom SIS officers had not directly met or vetted. According to the Commission, classified material discussed the ‘CIA’s discovery (after the war) that the fourth source, whose reporting the Director of Central Intelligence [Tenet] stated corroborated Curveball’s reporting, was not the direct source of the reporting sourced to him on Biological Weapons’.26

  That criticism is disputed by some of those involved at SIS. At the time, said one officer, Dearlove and Tenet were constantly in touch. They had a special one-to-one ‘cipher phone’ to maintain a direct, personal channel. According to a senior SIS figure:

  Red River was indeed a sub-source, but it is out of the question that our reservations were not shared with the CIA … He was a valid sub-source who, because of the sensitive position he was in, fled Iraq in the build-up to the war and settled in another Arab country. His intelligence about biological weapons has not been discredited, nor the source’s whose sub-source he was.27

  As other highly experienced officers argued, the point was not that Red River was a useless source, it was just that, like other Iraq sources, his evidence had been overplayed. This was a lesson in how the word of secret agents, even in combination, could rarely be presented as proof. HUMINT by its nature, as the modern spy agency should have known from decades of experience, was rarely conclusive. ‘The best readers of human intelligence are artists not scientists. HUMINT is about texture. And so we did not expect our reports to lead to some great reversal of policy,’ said a senior British spymaster.

  * * *

  Little by little, the unravelling of the intelligence case for war in Iraq had shown how, despite all the technical means of intelligence collection at the West’s disposal, so much still depended on the fragile nature of human intelligence, and it had been found wanting. Those few good spies that Britain and America had in place in Iraq did not offer the clear indication of a threat from Saddam Hussein that the political leadership wanted.

  As some former American and British officers argued, the real problem proved not to be the shortage of agents inside Iraq but a shortage of professional intelligence officers who would dare, to use the old Quaker adage, to ‘speak truth unto power’.

  Dearlove, said one ex-colleague, had extraordinary self-confidence and was the ‘classic bullshitter extraordinaire’, but, according to another former SIS officer, his weakness was that he was a ‘failure on the sofa’ in Downing Street. ‘He was just too eager to please. He had no experience of really upsetting people.’ A retired SIS officer, speaking to the official Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War, described ‘wishful thinking’ from the service’s leaders that ‘promised the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow’.28 Elsewhere, a former senior SIS figure said the main point was that the agency’s then leadership had ‘tried too hard. They wanted to make a difference, to change policy, change the world. That is always a mistake.’

  Dearlove rejected the personal accusations. ‘I’m well aware of the criticisms of me, that I had too close a relationship with the Prime Minister and all this. This is complete rubbish,’ he told the Chilcot Inquiry. His subordinates could not be relied on to judge that relationship. ‘If you are looking up from underneath, you have no idea what the job of Chief is like, particularly when the world is in crisis.’ He then added:

  I challenge anyone to show me any single document that that was somehow improper. I mean, [Stewart] Menzies [the wartime chief of SIS] had a close relationship with [Winston] Churchill during World War 2. During any crisis, the head of intelligence, particularly when a crisis is so angular and difficult, is going to have to deal frequently with ministers. I wasn’t sipping Chardonnay in the evenings with Tony Blair, or nipping off to have breakfast with him in Chequers. I was going to meetings, as the head of SIS, to discuss SIS business in relation to the development of national security policy.29

  But there were dissidents in SIS who accused its senior leadership of not only overselling intelligence about the Iraq case externally, but of dragooning case officers and sources internally to follow a ‘party line’. One former British intelligence insider claimed that case officers were sent back again and again to revisit their agents and ask them once more to dig up information on WMD. ‘Eventually their sources might come up and say, “Well, if he had WMD, it might be kept here” [mentioning some location in Iraq], and then that was dressed up as real intelligence.’ The former officer added, ‘There were people sent home, dismissed outright, for refusing to play along.’

  Given how much secrecy surrounds SIS, it is hard to assess such claims. One former senior spymaster, no friend of Dearlove, said it was an exaggerated picture. But, he added, ‘there was real concern by some of those who actually dealt with the sources about the way their intelligence was being hawked about, being exaggerated’. An officer told Chilcot the problem was too much interference in cases by leadership. ‘You cut out expertise, and perhaps you also disable that element of challenge which is, I think, a very important part of operational life in the Service.’30

  In short, there had been insiders who thought that while Saddam might have had WMD there was not sufficient intelligence to make that case. These critics, few in number, were drowned out. But, as the Curveball case showed, the rot went deeper. Too many were thoroughly convinced of the argument and most of their actions can be explained by zeal. It was a case of self-deception. And it underlined how, despite their hubris, the modern spymasters, living cloistered like monks in the seclusion of their Top Secret world, could be desperately vulnerable to group-think.

  One veteran said, ‘SIS was painfully arrogant before Iraq. It’s a dangerous game because when you strut around like that, then no one was going to car
e when you go down. We had the sh*t ripped out of us.’

  * * *

  Few at SIS felt proud of this episode. The role played in their own building by Dearlove and his successor, John Scarlett, who had chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee in the pre-war period, was a source of painful division, even if Scarlett would later win back the trust of many with a self-effacing approach.

  In the US and Britain, Tenet, Dearlove and other professional intelligence chiefs would forever be forced to live with having signed off on an unprofessional intelligence assessment. Its biggest flaw was not to have been wrong, but rather to have lost sight of the caveats: to have portrayed judgements as clear-cut when the business is, in reality, always grey. But even now it would be just as naive to assume that the failure to find WMD proves that there never were any, as it was naive pre-war to be so certain that they were there. Before the war, there was a whisper of warning, a disquieting note that those in power decided to tune out. After the war, the pendulum of opinion has swung right over, to the point that loose ends, such as indications that Saddam might have actually had some WMD, were brushed aside. The official inquiries, as one former senior SIS officer said, ‘found no room for intelligence that remained unexplained’. What, he asked, about:

  • Signal intelligence about Iraqi military’s large-scale purchase of atropine (the antidote to nerve gas)?

  • A significant line of reporting on the trickle production (in laboratories not industrially) of VX (nerve agent) and its limited weaponization in field artillery rockets?

  • Intelligence from the Ukrainian Intelligence Service about the Russians helping to move compromising material out of Iraq into Syria before the inspections got under way?

  • Satellite ‘overhead’ images covering the passage of vehicles over the border (Iraq to Syria)?

  These questions could be seen as clutching at straws. But that misses the point. The spying game is never over. However difficult, gathering good intelligence needs people to listen to the tunes played in a minor key – and to never, ever stop challenging the received wisdom, whatever it is.

  * * *

  As we were having coffee, Curveball said that he had been offered plastic surgery by the BND and a new home and identity in Italy. But he had refused. ‘I want to stay Rafid Alwan. That’s who I am,’ he said. He also said the Americans asked, as recently as 2008, for help with information about Syria. He promised me there were many more explosive revelations to come from his story. He hoped to make some money. It is possible, of course, that he will do just that. But few will believe him.

  PART THREE

  The Flock of Birds (2008–13)

  Chapter 7

  Cover Blown

  ‘All over the world, people in terrorist groups are living like normal people’

  – French secret agent, code-named F1

  On Wednesday 16 January 2008, a Pakistani man with a well-trimmed black beard stepped off the train and on to one of the neon-lit underground platforms of the Estación de Francia, the second busiest mainline station in Barcelona.1 Asim had travelled all night from Paris. He was tired and sweaty – and he was nervous, for good reason. He was on a dangerous, secret mission. But after travelling for nearly twelve hours across Europe he had escaped attention. Spain and France were both inside the common borders of the European Union’s Schengen scheme. So no one had checked his passport or identity card at the frontier in the Pyrenees.

  He took the escalator up into the wide and crowded concourse. The people around were diverse – businessmen, manual workers, hawkers and tramps, brightly dressed, chattering tourists, and plenty too from India and Pakistan. He blended in. Glancing around the crowd, he looked for a fellow Muslim.

  ‘As-salaam aleikum. Peace be with you. Can you tell me the way to Tariq bin Ziyad mosque?’ he asked a passer-by.

  Asim noticed that there were policemen everywhere. In two months’ time, Spain was holding a general election and the atmosphere was febrile. ‘Everyone was expecting another attack,’ recalled Antonio Baquero, a security correspondent with the regional paper. Three days before the last elections, four years earlier, Islamists had planted bombs on commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people and injuring over 1,500. Some claimed that the handling of that attack had cost the ruling conservative party (Partido Popular) the election. (Initially the government wrongly blamed Basque separatists for planting the bombs.) This time round, security forces were taking no chances and were watching out for a repeat incident.

  After receiving directions, Asim walked down the street to the nearest metro. Looking around, he wondered if he stood out. His destination was the working-class Raval district, on the edge of the rabbit warren of medieval streets known as the Ramblas. This was one of Barcelona’s main tourist attractions, but the Raval was a little poorer, bleaker. He jumped on the metro, then changed once, taking the L3 line to Liceu station. Along the platform was a McDonald’s advertisement and pictures of half-naked girls promoting a travel company. At the far end there were electronic barriers and, beyond the stone steps, the Ramblas. Later in the day the wide boulevard would be filled with tourists and strolling families, all wandering down the famous central pavement shaded by tall plane trees, with its newspaper kiosks, café and stands of parked scooters. A sign in the window advertised a 30-euro massage.

  The way to the Raval was down a one-way side street, Carrer de l’Hospital, with a pavement that became gradually narrower. The five-storey apartment buildings on each side appeared to lean inwards, the balconies jutting out. The T-shirt shops and youth hostels gave way to drab-looking mobile phone stores and halal butchers. After passing the forbidding fortress-like walls of the medieval Catalonia Hospital, now a school and art gallery, he reached the unmarked back door to the mosque at number 91, just before a Pakistani bakery and a Sikh temple.

  This entrance was locked, so he was sent down a narrow echoing alleyway sliced between the apartment buildings, laundry flapping from the balconies above. Turning right into a new road, he felt the atmosphere suddenly become more edgy. He could see young men with mobile phones making whispered drug deals; fake blonde prostitutes were leaning against the walls. Then he saw the sign: the Mezquita Tariq bin Ziyad.

  It was the biggest mosque in Barcelona. Hidden behind the shabby entrance were six floors of prayer rooms. But even this was not enough space. Up to 1,000 people gathered here for midday prayers on a Friday, sometimes spilling into the streets. The mosque’s name had symbolic resonance. Bin Ziyad was an eighth-century governor of Tangiers who became a general, defeated the Visigoths and conquered Spain for Islam. (Gibraltar is named after him too: a corruption of Jabal Tariq, the mountain of Tariq.)

  Asim had arrived too early. The front entrance of the mosque was closed too. He found a nearby kebab restaurant and waited. But he returned at noon and joined the worshippers. Afterwards, he introduced himself to some of the religious leaders. He addressed them as ‘Maulana’, the honorific title given to Muslim clerics by South Asians. ‘At the time,’ he remembered, ‘I talked to them like a normal person. I didn’t know they were part of the organization.’2

  The people who ran the mosque and all those he met were ostensibly devotees of the Muslim proselytizing group called Tablighi Jamaat. This was the same conservative global movement that had welcomed Nasiri in Pakistan – and disgusted him with its moderate views. But among its millions of followers violent militants were not unknown. Tablighi Jamaat is proscribed in five countries even though the organization denies any links with violence.3 Later, a prosecuting judge in Barcelona, Ismael Moreno, would accuse it of promoting ‘indiscriminate’ violence for political ends.4 But this was an unusual viewpoint.

  As Asim would recall, the group he met in Barcelona was under the authority of al-Qaeda itself; its orders came directly from one of al-Qaeda’s sworn allies, the Pakistani Taliban (known as the TTP). Asim claimed that his instructions came from Baitullah Mehsud, the TTP commander.

  Asim would claim he
had been working secretly for the TTP around Europe for two years.5 Mehsud had personally given him the code name Ahmed. Ostensibly, Asim lived the normal life of an illegal immigrant in Paris, working ‘in the black’ – in other words, without being officially registered – for a French electricity company. But, he said later, ‘all over the world, people in terrorist groups are living like normal people’. During his holidays and at weekends he had travelled around France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy, delivering cash to militant cells. He also claimed to have taken several breaks from work to go on training missions in Waziristan, the most lawless part of the Pakistan frontier region, and on into Afghanistan itself. Sometimes he was away for months on end. ‘I was a member of al-Qaeda,’ he declared later in court.6

  He had come to Barcelona on fresh orders from his immediate commanders in Paris. ‘They told me maybe I would stay in Barcelona or maybe I would go to another country to take part in an explosion.’ He had not been briefed on his role in the attack. His Paris contacts said that all would be explained by the leader of the radical group based at the mosque, who used the code name Ashraf.

  As Asim waited after the noon prayers, Maulana Ahmed Maroof, a 38-year-old imam, came downstairs. Asim was obviously looking tense, so Maroof told him to relax and speak freely. He explained that he was the Ashraf that Asim was looking for and that the small group of eight now gathering in the corridor were to be trusted. Most of them were recent immigrants to Spain.

  The following account is based on later testimony given by Asim. His version of events is disputed by the others involved, but a Spanish court held that he was telling the truth.

  According to Asim, that afternoon Maroof outlined some details of an audacious plan to blow up Barcelona’s underground railway. He was speaking in a mixture of Punjabi and Urdu.

  ‘Why are we going to attack the metro?’ asked Asim.