The New Spymasters (2 page)

Timeline of Major Events

1909:
The British Secret Service bureau is founded. Two years later, it is divided into what became the domestic Security Service (MI5) and the foreign Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

1914–18:
First World War.

1917:
The Bolshevik party, a communist faction, seizes power in Moscow and St Petersburg and founds the Soviet Union. Its intelligence service, created by Felix Dzerzhinsky, is known first as the Cheka and later, among other names, as the NKVD and KGB. From 1920 its headquarters are in Lubyanka Square, Moscow.

1939–45:
Second World War. The UK founds the Special Operations Executive (SOE) for secret operations behind enemy lines in 1940 and in 1942 the US founds the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

1947:
The CIA is founded, replacing the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), established a year before.

1955:
The Soviet army withdraws from Austria.

1961:
The construction of the Berlin Wall.

1962:
The Cuban Missile Crisis.

1979:
The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan.

1982:
Israel invades Lebanon.

1987:
First Intifada (uprising) of Palestinians against Israeli occupation starts.

1988:
Soviet troops begin withdrawing from Afghanistan.

1989:
The Berlin Wall is breached. The ‘Iron Curtain' collapses. Massacre in Tiananmen Square, Beijing.

1990:
Iraq invades Kuwait, beginning the first Gulf War. Nelson Mandela is released from prison in South Africa.

1991:
The Soviet Union is dissolved. Iraq is defeated in Gulf War by US and allied troops. Somali government is toppled, leading to a bloody civil war and decades of lawlessness.

1992:
Bosnian War (until 1995). US troops enter Somalia (remaining until 1994). A military coup in Algeria prevents Islamist movement gaining power; beginning of Algerian Civil War (until 2002).

1993:
Oslo Accords end the First Intifada and establish Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza territories.

1994:
Rwanda genocide. First Chechen War (to 1996). CIA officer Aldrich Ames is exposed as a KGB spy. Britain's SIS ‘comes out' and is affirmed in a new law. Ceasefire by Northern Ireland's Irish Republican Army (IRA).

1995:
Algerian militants launch bomb attacks on the metro in Paris, France.

1996:
IRA violence resumes in Northern Ireland.

1998:
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization declares war on the US and organizes bomb attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Good Friday Agreement ends war in Northern Ireland. Kosovo War (to 1999).

1999:
Second Chechen War (to 2009).

2000:
Second Intifada begins (to 2005).

2001:
11 September (9/11) attacks in US. Afghan War begins (ongoing).

2003:
Second Gulf War: invasion of Iraq, followed by civil war from 2004 (ongoing).

2004:
Madrid train bombings. Orange revolution in Ukraine.

2005:
7 July (7/7) attacks on the London Underground and bus network.

2006:
London Plot to use ‘liquid bombs' on transatlantic planes.

2008:
Israeli troops enter Gaza (remaining until 2009). Russia–Georgia War.

2009:
Jordanian secret agent kills seven CIA employees in Afghanistan.

2010:
Arab Spring begins with political protests in Tunisia; spreads to Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria (ongoing).

2011:
Osama bin Laden killed.

2013:
Edward Snowden, a private contractor, releases classified documents on the National Security Agency.

2014:
Russia annexes the Crimea region of Ukraine. A new ‘Islamic State' seizes swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq.

Author's Note

The following account is based, in part, on numerous interviews conducted not only over five years researching this book but also over two decades of covering security as a journalist. Quotations from people are based on those conversations or correspondence with myself or my researcher. Since many of these interviewees are or were active in the secret intelligence world, for reasons of discretion they are frequently quoted anonymously and no further information is provided about the interview. If the quotation is from another source, this is indicated in the text or by a note, with details of that source provided at the end of the book. If any attribution is missing or incorrect, or you have any other comments, please contact me via my website (
www.stephengrey.com
) so I can make any necessary changes in future editions of the book.

Please also note that I sometimes refer to individuals by their first given names; this should not imply any partiality but is done simply for clarity. Also, for ease of read, I refer throughout to a spy as ‘he', but of course spies are men and women.

Introduction: The Exploding Spy

‘When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object'

– Milan Kundera,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
1

On 31 December 2009, a Jordanian doctor opened the door of a pick-up truck and prepared to greet officers of the Central Intelligence Agency for the first time. There were eight people waiting. They had even made a birthday cake for him. The CIA and the White House had high hopes for this day. The doctor was a spy, a man who had driven to this US base in Khost, Afghanistan, from the wild tribal zone of neighbouring Pakistan. They hoped he could lead them to the al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden.

Wrong. The doctor was working for the other side, for al-Qaeda. He reached into a pocket, pressed a detonator switch and blew himself up. Seven people from the CIA were killed: the base chief, Jessica Matthews, four other officers and two security guards. The eighth victim was a Jordanian intelligence officer; the ninth an Afghan driver. Matthews had made the birthday cake. She had been searching for bin Laden for years. Perhaps that made her desperate to believe in the doctor. But she had misread the signs. She had been one of the world's leading experts on al-Qaeda. One commentator suggested her death was the intelligence ‘equivalent of sinking an aircraft carrier in a naval war'.
2

The doctor had been a double agent, maybe a triple agent. Here was the first real hope of getting a spy next to bin Laden, a genuine lead. He had seemed to be the perfect New Spy: a mole inside America's biggest adversary since Soviet Russia. And then it all was blown away.

His name was Humam al-Balawi. He was a Jordanian national but by descent he was a Palestinian, the people who were in conflict with America's close ally, Israel. Having worked at refugee camps, he had seen the victims of what he saw as Israel's aggression and he had every reason to be furious with a United States that financed Israel. And he had proved his hatred, writing a blog on the Internet that advocated war on the Americans. He was an obvious man to attack the CIA. He was also a perfect man to spy for the CIA.

It was a brilliant cover story. If al-Balawi really was working for the CIA, then he would have been one of their greatest ever spies. He was such an unlikely spy – and therefore so right for the job.

It was not to be. If only they had checked. They had never met him before. Yet when he came to the base, he wasn't even searched. Jessica had not wanted to offend him. She had wanted to accord him ‘respect'. But as a last testament that al-Balawi recorded on video made clear, he had been playing the American and Jordanian spy services for weeks.

On a marble wall back at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, they carved seven more stars. Seven more of their comrades killed in the field of action. Since the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, twenty-five stars had been added.
3

Welcome to the deadly world of spycraft.

*   *   *

‘To work in intelligence is to live with perpetual failure,' said a former leading figure in the British secret service.
4

By any measure, the al-Balawi mission in Khost was a tragic, wretched and careless venture. But the operation was also an audacious act: a dance into the unknown and a proof-of-life signal that, despite the careless blunders of those days, the spy game was not over.

This book is an inquiry into the modern secret agent and his employer, the spymaster. Our subject is what the novelist and sometime intelligence officer Graham Greene called ‘the human factor', the business in which a real walking, talking person like al-Balawi sets about gathering ‘intelligence', by which I mean some secret or protected information.

In the trade, the use of a human being, a spy, to gather intelligence is known as
human intelligence
(HUMINT) collection. There is obviously a dark side to our subject. Spying is the art of betrayal. Almost inevitably, to gather secrets a spy must betray his country, or at least betray the trust placed in him by those who have given him access to the secrets.

While it showed that the spy game continued, did the debacle of Khost show that the spymasters were now incompetent? The CIA's potential secret agent had been ‘grotesquely mishandled', said a military historian, Edward Luttwack, among other critics.
5
Or was it that using human spies against al-Qaeda leaders was just too difficult?

In these pages, I address the state of human intelligence and do so by seeking to answer three questions. First, how has spying changed in the twenty-first century? Second, when can spying still be effective? And third – the essential question posed by Khost – what kind of spying is needed and will help deal with the specific threats of today and the future?

*   *   *

Given the incredible things that can be divined in the twenty-first century by stealing a copy of someone's electronic mail or listening to their phone, for instance, the idea of taking the word of an old-fashioned human source may seem rather questionable. Spying has been called the world's second-oldest profession, but it can also seem to be an anachronism.

As the Khost mission showed, spying carries tremendous risks. Spies must betray the secrets of the country or group they target. But betrayal can be addictive. Spies can, in turn, also betray those who recruit them. Since spies must survive by telling lies, it can be hard to know when they are telling the truth.

The discovery of a spy operation can trigger diplomatic rows, sow discord and, at worst, be a pretext for war. By contrast, the use of spy satellites or the bugging of conversations – technical methods of getting intelligence – can seem a far safer way to gather information. A former CIA operative described being told by an analyst colleague, ‘Please give us a great agent. Satellite photos don't tell us where the missile is aimed or who can fire it.' But Admiral Stansfield Turner, a CIA director under President Jimmy Carter, declared that technical spying ‘all but eclipses traditional, human methods of collecting intelligence'.
6
After the 1990 Gulf War he again summed up what became a dominant, if often unspoken, view that the US should not depend on old-style spies:

The litany is familiar: We should throw more and more human agents against such problems, because the only way to get inside the minds of adversaries and discern intentions is with human agents. As a general proposition that simply is not true … Not only do agents have biases and human fallibilities, there is always a risk that an agent is, after all, working for someone else.
7

But despite the risks that Turner described, hardly a month goes by without a new spy being unmasked. At the time of writing, the United States was being accused by Germany of recruiting a spy inside its defence department and another in its secret services. In response, the CIA's Berlin chief of station was expelled, with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, declaring that the Americans had ‘fundamentally different conceptions of the work of the intelligence services'.
8
And yet for governments whose secret services or law enforcement agencies employ spies like these, the potential benefit of having a ‘spy in the enemy camp' is frequently too seductive, even if the ‘enemy' is actually a close ally.

Spies, then, are a persistent feature of modern states. But do they make much difference, in particular against the biggest threats that nations face today?

Good specific human intelligence is still critical. It might arguably have permitted action to thwart the attacks of 11 September 2001, in which 2,753 people died,
9
or the tribal massacres in Rwanda, East Africa, in which 800,000 people died in just 100 days in 1994. But bad intelligence suggesting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction also helped lead to an invasion of that country which cost the lives of up to 500,000 people.

*   *   *

Espionage is an old and elemental human art, susceptible to endless permutations, which is why it is always hard to generalize about spying, though the motivations for betrayal – ideology, religion, money, blackmail etc. – tend to remain unchanged. As I once heard a former chief of British intelligence say, ‘There have been no new motives since the Mesopotamians.'

This book is not a comprehensive survey. It reflects the experiences of those I have met while working primarily in the western hemisphere and dealing mainly with the security services of the United States and Britain, with some additional contacts in Germany and France and across the Middle East and South Asia. It omits huge developments in eastern Asia, South America and Africa.

Just as the Cold War finished, I began a career as a journalist and writer. In the years that followed, working mainly abroad, and particularly reporting on national security, I have been privileged to meet spies, and the spymasters who recruit and run them, everywhere from cigar rooms in Washington, tea rooms in London, beer gardens in Germany and coffee shops in Cairo and Beirut, to military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan and walled compounds in Pakistan. Some of them worked for secret services and some for other agencies in the military and law enforcement that also practise espionage.