The New Spymasters (19 page)

Back in England, Nick Baker still took phone calls from Antoniades and was there to help his former agent, or at least to do what he could from retirement. He always remained a believer. But that was his professional obligation, just as it was Savery's. ‘It's like a marriage,' said Baker. ‘When you recruit someone like this you are with them all your life, good and bad.'

As for most of the secret services, they moved on from such work. The priority of fighting crime kept them occupied for a few years, but only until something else appeared. By the late 1990s it was already becoming clear to some that a more pressing problem than drug dealing was on the horizon: they would be called upon to combat a terrifying new threat, an ultra-brutal form of terrorist who considered ordinary Westerners as justifiable targets, and aimed to instigate attacks wherever hundreds of civilians would be killed. But even as secret services turned their attentions to this threat, the deployment of spies in the criminal world did not end, and nor did the recruitment of criminals or ex-criminals as spies.

Despite some mistakes in the way his case had been handled, Antoniades had proved that agents could be used for successful operations against major criminals and drug gangs. But for secret services engaged in more sensitive spying work such as combating Islamist terror, he had some character traits that were less than ideal – or even positively dangerous. Antoniades had always been a flamboyant, larger than life person, with a strong sense of his own importance as a known figure in his community. This meant he could never blend into the shadows or ignore a slight; he was never going to be a subtle spy. Moreover, he was both incredibly generous and addicted to gambling, which meant that every penny he earned would be either given or frittered away. He would never retire gracefully and, all in all, was a security risk.

On the other hand, Antoniades's versatility, resourcefulness and willingness to work against any enemy were incredibly valuable qualities. As we shall see, agents with his kind of raw courage, combined with a tough background, proved to be among those able to be a ‘man on the rock', an agent at the heart of a radical terror group.

Just as the Taliban, in their search for cash, had been willing to deal with Antoniades, almost any radical Islamist terror group – however pure and spiritual or political its motives – found people with criminal contacts immensely useful. Any serious campaign of violence required weapons and explosives, and help with illicit identity documents, cash and travel tickets. Frequently, the group also looked to a ready source of illicit income. All of these might draw the terrorists close to someone like Antoniades who knew this world, even if they had no motives in common. And, for the intelligence agency, Antoniades may have been chaotic but his principal motives – money, excitement and loyalty to his handlers – were much easier to deal with than those of a religious extremist. Ex-criminals might make risky spies and were hardly agents of choice, but they would prove their value as New Spies.

*   *   *

It is so often the fate of secret agents that, long after they have completed all useful work, they never accept retirement and never accept that they have been well compensated. Worst of all are the agents once protected by defunct agencies whose legacy has few defenders.

Antoniades, despite it all, remains proud. But he is angry too. ‘You believe one thing. I am eighty years of age. And I passed so many difficulties. The only people who beat me up are the British when they arrested me. No gangster punched me or gave me black eye. Strong people came to see me and left with broken noses or cut eyes. I had to fight every day in London but I wasn't touched.'

How much had he done for Britain and how much had Britain done for him?

‘I was with them thirty years. Now they throw me into the street. No pension. No money. I am just like a dog. I helped the Americans too in Afghanistan. Now like a dog. They chew the lemon and then spit it out.'

Chapter 5

Jihad

‘The reason we didn't prevent 9/11 is simple: neither the CIA nor its intelligence allies, Western or Muslim, had a spy or an informant inside al-Qaeda's command structure'

– Michael Scheuer, former head of the Osama bin Laden unit, CIA
1

It was close to the last time to do some shopping before the start of the holy month of Ramadan; the streets of Algiers were full of people stocking up on supplies. At around 3.20 p.m. on 30 January 1995 terror struck, transforming the busy thoroughfare into a scene of bloody twisted carnage. A car packed with more than 220 pounds of explosives, driven by what the security forces called a ‘volunteer of death', was detonated in front of a bank and close to police headquarters. Forty-two people were killed.

The horrific brutality of the attack caused consternation. It was blamed on a group known as the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the breakaway military wing of Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front, a movement that had been banned after almost winning a national election.

Algeria's ruler, President Liamine Zeroual, reiterated his intention to hold presidential elections that year despite the violence and opposition from all main political parties, including the now-outlawed fundamentalist movement. He vowed to ‘fight terrorism until it is eradicated'. In Washington, the White House issued a statement from President Clinton condemning the ‘senseless terror' that ‘cannot be excused or justified'.

Across the border in neighbouring Morocco, one man knew a secret that, if disclosed, could have made all that rhetoric seem hollow. While employed as an agent for the French secret service, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), he had, just days before, driven a carload of explosives and weapons from Belgium, through France and Spain, to North Africa. He was a member of a GIA cell in Brussels and the weapons were for the GIA in Algeria. He had not imagined the purpose of the shipment, but he seemed to have supplied the very explosives used in the Algiers bomb. ‘It was obvious for me it was mine,' he said later of the explosion. He had done the smuggling ‘to convince them that I am one of them, to spy more deeply on them. I am risking my life there.'
2

I will refer to this Moroccan as Omar Nasiri, a pseudonym he later chose. His employer, the DGSE, had once planted and detonated a bomb on the Greenpeace ship
Rainbow Warrior
in a harbour in New Zealand, killing a photographer. The agency had a ruthless reputation – which was why Nasiri chose to work for it.

Nasiri, whose job for the GIA was to buy and traffic arms from criminals, had contacted the French several months earlier. Like many potential agents, he had believed the fiction about spying and overestimated the importance of what he knew. He had hoped to pass on his secrets in return for a huge reward, for protection and a new identity. But the French valued his position above his knowledge. They asked him to stay in the group and find out more.

As he began to spy, he faced the classic dilemma of all spies active inside a gang of murderers. In both the old and new worlds of espionage, such issues were always present, but now they would become even more significant. The GIA was not a political group or government agency plotting only mild evil; these men were the authors of massacres. The danger for an agent was not so much how to get inside such a group but how to stay in it. Could or should innocent lives be lost to save other lives? Officially, among Western secret services, the answer was always a firm no. But was that really the way things worked? Did they evade the dilemma by keeping their agents at arm's length? This was the same question the British had faced in Northern Ireland, but, given the Islamists' callousness about taking innocent lives, the problem was more acute.

Intelligence agencies have come up with plenty of tactics for spying on people who plot to kill without having their agents commit murder. Spymasters try to recruit, say, a terrorist's girlfriend or driver, not a fellow gunslinger. But someone like Nasiri, close to the inner circle of a terror cell, was always a tantalizing prospect.

Nasiri's story is not typical. Intelligence services normally run a mile from someone as self-willed and unpredictable as he was. ‘If you have to deal with a difficult agent, it is with fear and trepidation and with a gun in your pocket,' as one former senior CIA officer said. Nasiri, I discovered, was a case study in conflicted loyalties. Given how far he ventured into the world of jihadism, and his candour about his own mentality, it did illustrate the special challenges of penetrating the modern Islamist terror group, of finding someone able to go deep inside and possibly disappear for months who you could also trust to come back and not kill you. Sometimes the ‘man on the rock' was the man you did not want.

*   *   *

Secret agents themselves can sometimes live in denial – a psychological concept meaning that they refuse to confront or even acknowledge something difficult or painful. Among agents, the difficulty is their conflicted role within the group they have penetrated: on the one hand, trying to support the group in order to avoid being exposed and stay alive, and on the other, trying secretly to defeat the group. Nasiri's way of dealing with this dilemma at the time of the Algiers bomb was to brush it aside. He had both a thick skin and other priorities. Recalling the event years later, he said, ‘I was mainly concerned with not getting caught – and getting hold of hash.'
3
Of the bombing, he said he felt no guilt. He had needed to establish his cover story. He had also said before, ‘I have no conception of damage. I have no conception of killing. I have no conception of responsibility.'
4
But this was a sensitive subject to recall. As the years passed, he would give different answers about that bomb, some of them contradictory.

On Christmas Eve 1994, while Nasiri was still in Belgium and a few weeks before the Algiers bomb blast, a plane was hijacked at Marseilles airport. Special forces stormed the plane in a gun battle. Again, Nasiri had wondered if the weapons involved had come from him. ‘I saw the bullet going off from the Kalashnikov and I thought this is my bullet, the one I buy,' he said.
5

This incident, he claimed, had affected him deeply. The Brussels gang had sat around and gloated as they listened to a tape of the fighting inside the plane. The hijackers had wanted to blow it up over Paris in a giant fireball – with materials that Nasiri feared he had supplied. As he wrote:

Everything on the tape was horrible. It was the first time I truly felt how close I was to all this horror. I know I could have thought about it earlier, but I'd chosen not to. I bought the guns for Yasin [a friend and member of the GIA cell] because it was exciting; because I needed the money … Everything was different now. The people on the plane were real to me … The GIA had tried to kill them all. It was horrifying to me, and when I heard the tape, I knew I was connected to it. I hadn't pulled the trigger, but maybe I had supplied the guns and the bullets. I was a killer, just like them.
6

But, he explained later, it was important to realize he was not against killing. He was not bothered in the least by attacks on the repressive Algerian government or Western forces like the French that interfered. But he did object to the GIA's tactics of killing other Muslims: ‘They were killing other Muslims inside Algeria and that's the biggest reason I went to the French Consulate. I was ready to die to stop them because I felt myself part of the killing.'
7

*   *   *

On a cold, grey day in May 2013, I was sitting on a bench outside Cologne's cathedral by the Rhine, waiting to meet Nasiri. It was a public holiday, the feast of the Blessed Sacrament, Corpus Christi. High above, deep-throated bells were tolling in the soot-stained Gothic spires – the second tallest in the world. A crowd thronged the cobbled square to watch a long procession of worshippers that paraded through the cathedral's thick wooden doors and sang hymns. It felt like a scene from a
Godfather
movie, before the massacre.

I saw him strolling up to me. It was nearly twenty years since he had become a spy and Nasiri was now about fifty years old, with a slightly squeaky voice. He had supposedly retired long ago from his intelligence work. As he said, ‘I am still without a job.' He did have some employment, but he obviously could not stop thinking about the world of radicalism that had been his life. He was keen to explain to me the mentality of the militants. He still followed it all; he was still absorbed by the Islamist mindset.

He talked about the ongoing civil war in Syria and Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist faction that was loyal to al-Qaeda and had just been designated a terrorist group. He presciently thought the Islamists would soon predominate among the rebels. ‘Does it shock you to know that I would go and fight with them tomorrow if I had the chance?' he asked.

I had wanted to meet Nasiri because he came closer than anyone that I have heard about to being that ‘man on the rock' the former senior CIA operative had spoken of – the spy who could have sat next to Osama bin Laden and known his thoughts and plans. He had written a book,
Inside the Global Jihad,
about his time spying inside the training camps that had come to be associated with al-Qaeda. He had met some of its key figures – even before the organization had begun to call itself al-Qaeda. Nasiri was another of the New Spies – the breed of agent hired post-Cold War to be pitted against the new enemies that had emerged in the 1990s, such as the modern Islamist terror group. Though it had been years since he had worked as a spy, he still had the habits of someone who had worked with intelligence agencies. He referred to them, as insiders did, as the ‘services'. He insisted on walking and talking, constantly moving from place to place as if still trying to dodge surveillance. He insisted that I did not publish the name that his handler from the DGSE had used, even though it was certainly a pseudonym. He had made the man a promise, even if he now disliked him. ‘If you make zigzags with your word, you have no chance to meet someone again.'