The New Spymasters Page 22
That was not the whole story, though. Little by little, the secret services were teaching themselves to operate in a new, more efficient way, as well as learning the vulnerabilities of the jihadi cells and how to penetrate them. If they could not get to the top or run an agent inside for extended periods, at least they could place the agent far enough inside to gather some useful information.
One chink in the jihadi armour was al-Qaeda’s constant requirement for recruits. Another was its willingness to use recent converts to the religion. In 2008, one British security source told a newspaper that there might be ‘up to 1,500 converts to the fundamentalist cause across Britain’. At one level this was a headache for the security services because, ‘obviously, these people blend in and do not raise any flags’. But at another, it demonstrated that complete outsiders, whether black or white, could quickly insert themselves into militant circles. Among examples of such operationalized converts (spyspeak for people who turned their newfound belief in jihad into action) was the so-called Shoe Bomber, Richard Reid, who in 2001 tried to blow up a transatlantic jet. In another case in 2006, a white, 20-year-old ex-grammar school boy from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, was arrested and, although later cleared by a jury of the charges, was accused by prosecutors of being prepared to take part in blowing up jets with liquid explosives. He had only been a Muslim for four months at the time of the arrest. There was something credible about new converts in militant circles. ‘New religious recruits always tend to be more zealous than those who have grown up with that specific religion,’ Robert Leiken, director of the Immigration and National Security Programme, told the Scotsman.
According to Lord Alex Carlile, a British lawyer who became the government’s independent reviewer of anti-terrorism legislation, Islamic radicals were targeting converts in prison: ex-criminals were to prove a plentiful source of recruits both to join the jihad and to work as agents.23
One of those who showed that jihadism could be penetrated was just such a jail-house convert. He was a larger-than-life Danish ex-convict and biker called Morten Storm who had turned to Islam in the late 1990s as a way from escaping from a life of constant fighting, drug taking and drunkenness. Though he found religion, Storm had not abandoned his love of action. He was drawn into more and more radical circles. Known as ‘Murad Storm’, he came to meet militants living in Great Britain, went to study Arabic and Islam in Yemen (he was there in September 2001) and yearned to fight with Islamic radicals who were taking over Somalia. When his son was born in 2001, he named him Osama, after bin Laden. But, for all his involvement in militant circles, there was something holding him back. Perhaps it was, as he says, ‘I was not fully submitted to the acceptance that you can kill unarmed civilians.’ When a projected trip to Yemen was cancelled, he became so frustrated that he began to question the tenets of the whole religion he had followed for nearly a decade. ‘All my dreams about jihad were ruined. I was like, “that can’t happen, why?” I was so hurt and really, really upset … It made me sit up all night.’ As he thought more about it, his faith in radical Islam evaporated and he became excited by a new prospect – the idea of spying against it.
At some time in 2006, Storm first contacted the Danish intelligence service (PET), but due to connections he had built in radical circles in Britain, he was also asked to assist with Britain’s MI5 and with SIS too. Storm’s account of his work as an agent cannot be verified independently, but he did collect a vast amount of evidence to document his espionage – including emails, videos and a tape-recorded meeting with the CIA, of which more later.
What Storm did demonstrate was how an agent among jihadis could be run for quite a lengthy period, as long as he did not involve himself too deeply with any one group. Clever handling also showed that his work could be used to spot potential troublemakers and plots-in-the-making without involving him in any prosecution cases.
In Denmark, Storm noticed that a radical named Hammad Khurshid had shaved off his beard, so he tipped off PET that this could be in preparation for an attack. The authorities used hidden cameras to photograph Khurshid and another extremist experimenting with explosives. They were arrested in September 2007 and sentenced to twelve and seven years respectively. Storm was kept away from the courtroom.
Likewise in Britain, in a Somali mosque in Birmingham, Storm got to know a man called Omar, a Syrian whose real name was Hassan Tabbakh, who told Storm he was planning to make bombs. Police raided his home in December 2007 and found bomb-making chemicals and instructions. It was enough to send Tabbakh to jail for seven years, again without the need for Storm to give evidence.24
The crucial difference between Storm and Asim was that it had been necessary to put Asim in the witness box. The full story of what happened in Barcelona has yet to be publicly revealed, and key questions also remain about how Asim was recruited and indeed of his credibility. Subsequent research by Spanish journalists has revealed more about his background, including his earlier life, like Storm, on the edges of criminality. The journalists discovered that Asim was still wanted in Pakistan as an alleged ‘people smuggler’: he was accused of having for years run a racket selling false identity papers to help people get into European countries and also of defrauding people by taking money in return for false promises to make arrangements for them to be smuggled into Europe. Former associates speculated that he became a spy for French intelligence as a way of escaping the criminal charges back home.
None of these details were mentioned when Asim told his story in the Barcelona court, but they did not necessarily undermine it. In protecting spies, details were often withheld from open court. And the threat of legal compromise was a classic recruitment ploy used by some intelligence services, even if not everyone approved. ‘These kinds of methods of blackmail can backfire terribly,’ said one former SIS officer. But according to a well-informed Spanish source, Asim had been a walk-in to French intelligence, not someone actively targeted. ‘He had come to them about two years before.’ The source did not know his motives.
* * *
When the Guardia Civil stormed the Barcelona mosques Asim was arrested, but he was then transferred for special treatment. He would claim he never knew if his tip-off was the cause of the arrests. Giving evidence in court at the trial of the Barcelona plotters, he questioned if the Guardia Civil already had the gang under surveillance. The court was never told whether they had in fact been watching the gang.
Asim, who joined a Spanish witness protection programme, provided a few clues about how he came to be in touch with the French authorities. Much of his story was barely credible. He told the court he had met his French ‘civilian police’ friend in a local bar. ‘I met the friend two and a half years before because every time I was coming into the bar, he was there. We were sitting every day and came to know each other. We were like bar or coffee shop friends.’ Although the pair exchanged phone numbers, Asim denied knowing the French policeman was working for a secret service. He also said he hadn’t told the policeman about his terrorist links. When he went for training on the Afghanistan border, he gave the Frenchman different reasons. Once he said he was going to visit his sick mother. Another time it was to help in the aftermath of the earthquake. ‘I made many excuses to go back to Pakistan.’
Asim insisted his spying for the police began and ended with that one phone call. But he also admitted that he knew the policeman was not in the bar casually but was there to pick up information. ‘I came to know he was working for the police – [it was clear] they wanted to get information. I never said he was with the secret police.’
Evidence emerged in 2011, however, that Asim had lied to the court and that he had been a long-term secret agent, not just a last-minute informer. This came in a little-noticed cable from the US Embassy in Madrid, published on the Wikileaks website and marked ‘Secret’ and ‘NOFORN’ – meaning it wasn’t to be shown to any foreign country. It was headed: ‘SPAIN: PROSECUTOR DISAVOWS AL-QAIDA TIES TO BARCELONA SUBWAY PLOT’ and re
ad:
1. (S//NF) Contrary to self-incriminating court testimony by the government’s star witness in the recently concluded trial regarding the plot to attack the Barcelona metro system, National Court Prosecutor Vicente Gonzalez Mota on January 13 privately confirmed to POLOFF [a US Embassy political officer] that there were no Al-Qaida ties to the radical Islamist cell and that the witness was in fact a third-country undercover agent, as the defence had alleged.
The secret cable said Mota revealed this at a US–Spain working group on terrorism and organized crime. He had explained that Spanish law ‘allows for security services officials to remain undercover’, concealing – in other words, lying about – their true identity and affiliation ‘while testifying in court’. Previous embassy reports, said the cable, had pointed out F1’s ‘sworn testimony’ that he was a ‘former member of the cell who turned on his colleagues and notified authorities of the plot’ and ‘that he has been a member of Al-Qaida since 2005’, forming part of their finance network. In contradiction to what Asim said in open court, the cable stated that ‘the judges were aware that the witness was an undercover agent rather than an al-Qaida member’.25
If the cable was true and Asim had lied, then in their quest to protect the source, the authorities may have also denied the alleged plotters a reasonable defence. Without being informed of Asim’s background, it was hard for them to challenge the reliability of his account. And little convincing evidence was presented besides his testimony. ‘There are real doubts about his case,’ Antonio Baquero, the Spanish journalist, said. ‘I’m not sure anyone did the job well here.’ As the defence had pointed out in the trial, the police had found no explosives – just a few bits of wire and batteries and powder taken from fireworks. The most suspicious items were eight grams of nitrocellulose with particles of potassium perchlorate (also called ‘flash powder’) from the fireworks, the timers and 783 pellets from an air gun. (However murderous the potential intention, it hardly seemed a recipe for a serious attack.) The Spanish police believed that the real cache of explosives was never found, but they also distrusted Asim. Despite his emphatic testimony about plans for an imminent attack, prosecutors themselves admitted the bomb-makers must have been some way away from completing their work.
During the trial, Roshan Jamal Khan, an Indian businessman who was arrested and later convicted as a member of the cell, insisted that he had come to Spain to source supplies of olive oil to export to Bombay. While he was a member of Tablighi Jamaat and worshipped at the mosque, he said he hardly knew the others who were arrested and knew nothing of a bomb plot. Tablighi Jamaat was a peaceful group, he insisted. ‘It was very funny. We were going to spread love with people. Nobody expected suicide, making explosions of killing people.’26
Khan said that he had lived all his life in India and had never heard of the Pakistan Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. His family in Bombay later claimed, ‘It was only on the basis of a fantasy of a wannabe James Bond that it was surmised that a terror attack was imminent on the Barcelona metro. Thus, the police supposedly got into the act to foil it.’27
Two men had been arrested in the raids but were released without charge; they insisted on the innocence of the others. Rafqat Ali, a 27-year-old construction worker, ‘accused police of beating him and holding him in a darkened cell for hours’, according to a news agency. Sheikh Saeed Akhtar, aged fifty-two, who worked in a shop, said, ‘We are not terrorists. None of us are. We are just immigrants from Pakistan who work and go to the mosque.’ Akhtar said the police discovered electric cables and batteries at the mosque ‘because they are doing building work there. We have no interest in these Taliban.’28
In December 2009, all eleven alleged plotters were found guilty of membership of a terrorist group and two (Shahid Iqbal and Qadeer Malik) were found guilty of possession of explosives. Shahid and Qadeer were sentenced to fourteen and a half years in jail, Maroof Ahmed Mirza to ten and a half years and the rest to eight years and six months. No one was even charged with plotting a terror attack or attempted murder. On appeal to the Supreme Court, the explosives charges were quashed and the sentence reduced to eight years for Maroof and to six for the others, as, according to the court, the plot was ‘at such an embryonic stage’.29
* * *
Some details of Asim’s story, then, remain conflicting and mysterious. But whether a long-term or short-term agent, whether inside al-Qaeda or with a lower-level group of would-be jihadi militants, he was living proof that – however hard it was – spies could be placed inside a terror group and among people with access to the training camps of Pakistan and secret terror cells of Europe. Such agents were worth their weight in platinum and their intelligence needed to be used with great discretion. Blowing the cover of that spy for a plot allegedly based on a few scoops of firework dust had been a costly mistake. Wherever Asim had been recruited, whatever the merits of the prosecution case in Barcelona, he had the potential to go much deeper into militant circles. Putting him in the witness box was a highly unusual use of an agent, since, to preserve the integrity of intelligence methods, he could never tell an honest story. That was why, experienced operatives would argue, it was better to use a human source only as the starting point for evidence collection, someone who could suggest whose phones to tap or which rooms to bug. In this way, a case could be built without the agent needing to be compromised. It was also a means of verifying the agent’s account and assessing if his reports were exaggerated. But running the agent longer and building up a case could not be done on the authority of an intelligence agency or a prosecutor alone. It needed backing from political leadership with the courage to let the operation run despite the obvious risks that, if there were mistakes, a group of terrorists could slip out of surveillance. In Spain, just before an election, that courage was lacking.
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, 8:301
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.2
But the war was far from over.
* * *
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.’3 It was inspirational.