Art of Betrayal (58 page)

At CIA headquarters, a sense of unreality had haunted the empty corridors on 11 September as all but a small core of staff were evacuated into the car park amid fears of an incoming plane. Mike Scheuer, who had previously run the CIA's unit tracking bin Laden, had turned on his TV just as the second plane hit. ‘We had a chance to stop this and we didn't,' was his reaction. Many who had worked on the Al Qaeda issue reflected that the day's carnage was the direct result of having been constrained for so long from going after bin Laden with all the aggression he showed in targeting the United States. The insiders were aware in a way that others were not just how much had been known about bin Laden and his plans. They were determined not to repeat past mistakes. These individuals took the attack hard, feeling a sense of personal responsibility. Aggression would be the watchword in their response. ‘The analogy would be the junkyard dog that had been chained to the ground was now going to be let go and I just couldn't wait,' recalled the take-no-prisoners head of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center, Cofer Black, who had personally had a run-in with bin Laden in Sudan. Later he would say, ‘There was a before 9/11 and an after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves came off.'
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Five days after the attack, Black and CIA colleagues went to the bland, modern British Embassy in Washington late in the afternoon to brief senior MI6 officers still anxious about the American response. The British officials had requested the meeting and they expressed caution about taking actions which might destabilise the Middle East. ‘Our only concern is killing terrorists,' Black said in his characteristically blunt style during a bleak three-hour meeting. ‘When we're through with them, they will have flies walking across their eyeballs,' he would tell President Bush, who relished the tough talk and the promise of swift retribution. ‘All rather bloodcurdling, isn't it,' one person present said to another CIA officer as the meeting at
the British Embassy ended. Cofer Black told the same CIA officer they would probably all get indicted for the things they were about to do. ‘If you're going to be an officer of the CIA you're just going to have to appreciate that if you go on long enough and do a good enough job, at the end of your career, it should involve probably hiring a lawyer,' he later explained.
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The colourful language and martial metaphors of Black and his cohorts jarred with the style of London's more old-school spies. Back in Whitehall, every morning the spy chiefs would traipse in, ‘all in dark suits and carrying their battered briefcases,' noted Alastair Campbell.
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For Blair himself, disaster also spelt opportunity. Members of his own cabinet told him he was seen around the world as the only person who could restrain Bush. A headline in an American paper described one of his speeches as ‘a pitch for world leadership'. For the spy chiefs as well, the thrust into the centre of the action was enough to give them whiplash. Before 11 September 2001, the Prime Minister hardly saw his spy-masters and the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Richard Wilson, recalled doing his best to get them a slot in Blair's diary in order to build a relationship. But now the position of the intelligence chiefs was transformed. Every day, the Prime Minister would turn to them first in the meetings. The chief of MI6 drew close. ‘The Prime Minister was in the air a great deal of the time going round the world. At least that's what it felt like sitting at home,' recalled the Cabinet Secretary later. ‘He had Sir Richard Dearlove with him. Richard Dearlove, who had previously, as it were, not had contact really with Number 10, seized his chance, quite understandably, and got to know the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister got to know him.'
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Dearlove would become one of his closest advisers in the months to come, a reflection of the extent to which national security decisions surrounding terrorism and proliferation were informed by intelligence rather than the diplomacy of the Foreign Office, an institution that was seen as lacking the heft and agility required. Intelligence was now determining government policy day to day. The argument seemed resolved in favour of the modernisers with their call for intelligence to be ‘useful' and as close as possible to the decision-making The events of 11 September 2001 answered the insecurities felt so deeply since the end of the Cold War. For Britain's spies it was a chance to influence a prime minister directly and to be at the centre of power once more.
For that Prime Minister, it was a chance to influence an American president and walk the world stage. No one in London had any conception of where the American President would lead them or at what cost.

In Afghanistan, MI6's shadow warriors were returning to the fray but without their old partner. Massoud had been killed by the suicide bombers posing as TV crew two days before 9/11, the removal of their most troublesome adversary a gift from bin Laden to his Taliban allies. It was clear that the Taliban had not so much fought their way to power as bribed, bartered and intimidated their way. The coalition strategy would be to mirror that.

On 28 September, the Foreign Secretary approved the deployment of MI6 officers to the region.
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The UK still had people who had been involved with the mujahedeen in the 1980s and who had the language skills and regional expertise. Insiders say the response showed an MI6 strength but also a weakness. When it moved, MI6 could move very quickly, but it moved with all it had and this was not that much. A handful of officers with a budget of $7 million landed in the northeast of Afghanistan at the end of the month. Passing the rusting Russian vehicles blown up during the last jihad, they met General Mohammed Fahim of the Northern Alliance and began working with other contacts in the north and the south to build alliances, to secure support and to bribe as many Taliban commanders as they could to change sides or leave the fight.
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Plucked overnight from retirement in the Cotswolds to be despatched to the wilds of the Panjshir, one of the Britons sent into Afghanistan after 9/11 to negotiate with the Northern Alliance was an old MI6 hand straight out of a John Buchan novel. Paul Bergne, then in his mid-sixties, was an expert archaeologist who spoke at least a dozen languages. He was a tall, gentle, veteran spy who had immersed himself in the culture of every country he visited. In the Foreign Office he was often referred to as ‘Greenmantle' in reference to one of John Buchan's novels in which the gentleman-adventurer Richard Hannay investigates an uprising in the Muslim world. Bergne was the type of polymath who inhabits the nooks and crannies of the service often largely forgotten until the next crisis hits their region of expertise. With a detached, quizzical air and an independent streak he had joined MI6 in 1959, first serving overseas in Vienna before
becoming the in-house expert on Islam and Central Asia. After he retired in 1992 he was appointed Britain's first ambassador to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan where he initially ran the Embassy from a messy, cheap hotel room. His second retirement, largely spent in academia, ended as he was asked to go to Afghanistan to persuade the Tajiks of the Northern Alliance to do more than use Western intervention to regain the upper hand in their old feuds, not least with the Pashtun. When the Northern Alliance took Bagram airbase, he had to intervene personally to stop them firing on British troops as they landed because no one had expected them. The Northern Alliance, he said, ‘came within an ace' of opening fire on the Britons. ‘I asked the foreign minister not to take any hasty action, because he was extremely angry,' Bergne later said. ‘They had been sorely tempted to open fire.'
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At the CIA, Cofer Black's instructions to the team leader he was sending to Afghanistan were simple and grisly when it came to Al Qaeda's leadership. ‘I want to see photos of their heads on pikes,' Black told Gary Schroen. ‘I want bin Laden's head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden's head to the President. I promised I would do that.' It was the first time Schroen had heard a direct order to kill. ‘We can certainly kill bin Laden, but I don't know where we're going to find dry ice in Afghanistan,' he replied. The strictures put in place after Larry Devlin's testimony before Congress in the 1970s were gone, lifted by a president who demanded action and supported by an agency which did not want to let the American public down. ‘The authorities had changed,' Black would explain. This was war. The pendulum was swinging once again for the CIA, this time violently.
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Schroen had been pulled out of a retirement programme because he had served in South Asia on and off since the late 1970s and had been the link man to Massoud in the late 1990s. He got hold of an ageing Russian helicopter and $3 million in hundred-dollar bills and headed towards Northern Afghanistan, one of the worries being the danger of being shot down by a shoulder-fired missile of the type that the CIA had supplied years earlier. He was joined by a team of CIA paramilitary officers. ‘If they didn't do paramilitary actions for a living, they'd probably be robbing banks,' one CIA officer said of their ilk.
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After they landed they hooked up with the Northern
Alliance, still shell-shocked from the brutal murder of their leader. There was no master plan to co-ordinate the work of the CIA and MI6 teams. Everything was moving too fast. Everyone just needed to do what they could and make sure they did not run into each other. Conversations were simply about who had assets where. Most British contacts were with the Northern Alliance but with a sprinkling in the south, where the Americans were also struggling to find viable allies. The failure to find a partner in the south was slowing plans and causing problems. Soon the US and British teams were providing intelligence reports on Taliban front-line positions and mapping their defences for a bombing campaign. ‘Are you going to stay this time?' the Afghan allies repeatedly asked the CIA's overall Afghan commander when he arrived. ‘Yes. We are staying this time,' he promised.
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At a meeting at a military bunker, the concerns of the Pakistani leadership were evident. The Taliban had been their proxy. The wily President Pervez Musharraf, who had seized power in a coup, told his assembled senior commanders that they had to make a choice. Abandon their old allies, the Taliban, or else they would be steamrollered by the US. To make the choice easier he moved key generals, including his ISI chief Mahmood Ahmed, the man who had looked so worried at the Four Seasons. Ahmed had been particularly close to Mullah Omar, the Taliban's one-eyed leader, and wanted to preserve the group's influence. ‘In terms of the policy, it really did turn 180 degrees,' recalls Bob Grenier, then the CIA chief in Islamabad.
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But, with the decision made, the Pakistanis explained to Grenier that they were deeply worried that the Northern Alliance would rout the Taliban and take Kabul. They warned the Americans that this would cause bloodshed and risk excluding the Pashtun population of the south. Disputes raged in Washington and especially in the CIA over whether or not to listen to this advice and restrain the Northern Alliance. Post-Massoud, the collection of leaders at the top of the Alliance did not look appealing. Most looked like thuggish warlords because that was what they were. Washington agreed to hold back from bombing the Taliban front-line positions until a more coherent Pashtun resistance could be organised in the south to complement the largely Tajik Northern Alliance.

This was a chance for the ageing Afghan jihadists of the 1980s to
choose sides – the Taliban or the Americans and the Northern Alliance. Old faces re-emerged from the woodwork seeking one more shot at glory. The one-legged Abdul ‘Hollywood' Haq, once fêted in Downing Street, managed to garner some support from Afghan-American businessmen and rode into battle once more heading from Peshawar to Jalalabad with a group of twenty supporters. An unarmed US Predator drone watched as he was surrounded by Taliban forces and executed. Hamid Karzai, another Pashtun whose father had fought the Taliban, was nearly killed by a misdirected bomb. He would be one of the only Pashtun leaders to sign up with the Americans. That would stand him in good stead. Some of the other commanders the US had once backed now sided with their enemies, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar among them. Another was Jalaluddin Haqqani, who had been Congressman Charlie Wilson's favourite and yet became one of the most deadly adversaries of the new Afghan government and the closest local leader to Al Qaeda (while remaining so close to the ISI that it considered him one of its assets).

For a tense few days in October it looked as if air strikes were not having any impact and the bombers started to run out of targets. There was talk in the press about the ‘Afghan Winter' approaching. But once fire was finally focused on the Taliban positions in the north they crumbled, allowing the Northern Alliance to sweep into Kabul. In all, only around 100 CIA and 300 US special forces were sent to Afghanistan, but within two and a half months of deploying on 27 September and by working with air power and local forces they were able to topple the Taliban. But where was the man whose head was supposed to be delivered on dry ice?

Britain's SBS alongside MI6 was sent into the wild, mountainous Tora Bora region to hunt for bin Laden alongside US teams. Several members of a SBS team listened to bin Laden speak to his fighters on shortwave radios that had been captured. Two of them at one point spotted a tall figure in a camouflage jacket move south-east with a fifty-man protective detail and enter a cave through a hidden entrance. The Americans and British, accompanied by Afghans of dubious loyalty, were few in number and their request to the Pentagon for back-up was turned down.
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By failing to commit large numbers of ground troops to secure the border, the US allowed bin Laden to slip
away into Pakistan. ‘Massoud liberated Afghanistan from the Soviets,' declared his former aide Abdullah Anas. ‘Osama bin Laden gave it to the Americans in two weeks and then fled.'
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Bin Laden was able to regroup his organisation over the border in Pakistan.