The New Spymasters (4 page)

Was it really so hard to get inside al-Qaeda?
The Economist
magazine asked provocatively in 2002:

Al-Qaeda, America's spymasters tried to claim, was peculiarly difficult to infiltrate, since it was open only to kinsmen of members. That notion was blown apart by the appearance of John Walker Lindh, a Californian airhead, in Osama bin Laden's trenches. As one former CIA boss puts it, ‘Al-Qaeda was an evangelical organization: it wanted members. We never suggested any.'
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As one old-time CIA spymaster argued shortly after 9/11, the problem in the spy world was always one of focus. Recruiting spies required a sustained and directed effort of many years and, before 9/11, that effort could not be mustered. ‘If only,' he told me, ‘we'd had a man on the rock beside Osama bin Laden, learning of his thoughts, learning his plans.' The spy you really needed was someone in the inner circle who was close enough to gather real secrets. That did not mean he had to be a senior figure, but the spy had to be trusted, to be physically close to bin Laden. Without such a spy, the CIA had gathered widespread rumours of an imminent attack on American soil, but there had never been the kind of useful specifics that could have stopped the 9/11 attacks. ‘We never had anyone close enough,' he said.

This was the conversation that inspired me to write this book and try to answer the three questions I had posed. Given the difficulties involved, could such a ‘man on the rock' be the epitome of the twenty-first century spy? Would such a spy be as effective and useful as, say, the information from intercepts and surveillance? And was this the type of spy we really needed to protect us against the biggest threats to our security? With a new ‘war on terror' just launched, I set out in subsequent years to follow attempts to recruit such a man.

The spymaster had explained that on the seventh floor, the executive level of the old building at the CIA headquarters at Langley, they had held regular ‘hard target' meetings to discuss the main threats to the US. By the late 1990s, al-Qaeda was on the list. The problem was that, until it was too late, al-Qaeda was never top of the list. This meant that, unless a volunteer spy – a ‘walk-in' – came knocking, the CIA had almost no chance of getting an agent into the upper echelons of the organization. There was no serious targeting.

After the attacks, however, it was all supposed to be different. The intelligence game was back on, with a strict focus on finding and countering the terrorists. The third part of the book and the conclusion take us through from 2001 until near the present day, a period in which the direction of intelligence activity became, once again, clear. Al-Qaeda – and Osama bin Laden himself – became the Western powers' new ‘Main Enemy', replacing what had been the Soviet Union in the Cold War. It was a call to arms. In the weeks after 9/11, the CIA received 150,000 CVs from eager would-be recruits.
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Those few who were selected for duty were thrown into battle against Al-Qaeda. By 2011, it was estimated that 70 per cent of Western intelligence resources were being devoted to combating terrorism.
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Recruited into the CIA's first case officer class after 9/11, T. J. Waters recalled what his instructors told him: ‘If you learned nothing else on September 11, at least know this: Satellites, telephone intercepts, and hidden microphones are all well and good, but they're no substitute for knowing what someone is thinking, what they are planning in their heads. All the billions we've spent on advanced technology and nobody knew about September 11.'
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But for all the talk, traditional human spy work did not become the focus of attack against al-Qaeda. Instead, the secret services were frequently sidetracked from HUMINT by rival methods.

Officers who work for secret services may be involved not only in spying or recruiting spies but also in trying to exert influence by covert action – the instigation of an event by a sponsor who remains concealed and can therefore deny responsibility. (In spy-speak, ‘clandestine action' is slightly different: the action itself is a secret.) Covert action includes paramilitary work, such as organizing coups d'état or supporting guerrilla movements like the mujahideen in Afghanistan. It may mean disruptive measures, such as emptying an adversary's bank accounts. It may also come in the form of support work for other agencies, such as helping the police to conduct surveillance or planting bugs for the US signals intelligence agency, the NSA.

In the first years after 11 September, the focus of secret services was the struggle against terrorism, and within counterterrorism the main weapon was covert action, not recruiting spies. This covert action consisted in the first instance of liaison work with the intelligence services of other countries (places like Egypt, Jordan, Yemen and Pakistan, where al-Qaeda was present) and secondly of the handling of prisoners. In the war on terror, the CIA worked with the US military and foreign agencies to round up hundreds of Islamic militants and members of al-Qaeda's leadership. As described in my book on rendition,
Ghost Plane,
the CIA's business became the capture, transport and interrogation of terrorism suspects.
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All this activity was, in effect, not spying but global secret police work. Espionage had a far lower priority than this programme of transferring people from country to country and holding them in secret jails.

What the CIA defined as HUMINT now included the product of prisoner interrogations; soon the majority of HUMINT was to be from such ‘debriefings', as George Tenet, the CIA director, announced. Defending torture techniques like the near-drowning experience of waterboarding, he said, ‘I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us.'
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Former vice-president Dick Cheney further claimed that the interrogation of just one suspect, the alleged 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, surpassed all: ‘There was a period of time there, three or four years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al-Qaeda came from that one source. So, it's been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves.'
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Yet, as some veterans warned, these paramilitary and police methods all came at the expense of traditional spy work. This meant that opportunities for recruitment were missed. Tyler Drumheller, European division chief of the CIA in the period after 9/11, complained that the emphasis on prisoners had sapped resources, attention and brainpower away from the hard business of recruiting and running spies. ‘We are an intelligence service, an espionage service,' he said. ‘Not jailers, not policemen, not interrogators. We debrief people; we don't interrogate them.'
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According to other veteran spymasters, it was not only that the money, as well as the best and brightest talent, was shifted into counterterrorist direct action; it was that politicians lost their enthusiasm for the long game of the careful nurturing of sources. In their desperation to prevent the next bloody terrorist attack (and to avoid being held responsible for failing to take all possible measures to do so), these leaders had little of the patience or willingness to accept the risks that spy running required.

The lengthy wars fought by the US military and its allies, including Britain, in Afghanistan from 2001 and Iraq from 2003 were another diversion. As thousands of troops became embroiled in bloody civil wars, the CIA established enormous, heavily protected bases in both countries. Britain's SIS was deployed too in smaller numbers. The agencies were under great pressure to provide any kind of intelligence or take any action that could save lives. ‘Everything that the military didn't want to do or felt uncomfortable doing ended up in the lap of the CIA,' said Drumheller. With its troops in combat, the military wanted quick results; again, there was little patience. The rapid response to demands for more HUMINT was to interrogate more prisoners, or collect a report from a local partner. Liaison and prisoners were again the default. It was not a good environment for recruiting your own spies.

Later in the 2000s, at the close of the Bush presidency and continuing after the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the American covert action programme established a third pillar. Moving beyond liaison with other secret services and the handling of prisoners, the most important tactic became an assassination programme that involved killing Islamic militants with bombs and missiles from drone aircraft. Some in the business believed it was yet another distraction. Once again, intelligence officers were being recruited not to run spies but to assist with covert action, this time to help produce targets for assassination.

So, were the old methods destined for burial? Were spies just a sideshow, at best the handmaidens of an anti-terrorist killing machine: useful but expendable gofers who could be dispatched to run around, say, the badlands of Pakistan, to plant bugs or tracking devices, as some did, to give the drones better targets?

Not only were secret services distracted but, against new enemies, HUMINT was having an existential crisis. In the intelligence community, given the relative effectiveness of other methods, the value of spies against the modern state's most potent enemies was still in question. The West might continue to find traditional spy techniques effective against traditional enemies such as the Chinese Communist Party or Russia's Kremlin, it was argued, but would find them fruitless for penetrating what politicians considered the main threat, namely the modern Islamic terrorist group.

Sir Richard Dearlove, who served as chief of SIS from 1999 to 2004, made just such a case. Infiltrating the IRA had been hard enough, he argued in a public lecture in London in 2008, but terrorist groups like al-Qaeda were different. He challenged the optimistic view that it was possible to run a spy on the inside, to have a ‘man on the rock'. Al-Qaeda had now become disparate, ‘like a flock of birds', according to Dearlove. And even if you got an agent inside, the information they discovered might be valuable for only a few days, or even hours. With clear guidance already given publicly by al-Qaeda leaders about permitted targets and methods, there was often little need to share details of a planned attack within a network in advance. Al-Qaeda-style terrorists were not the only threat, and more traditional efforts at recruiting secret agents could be continued against these other threats, he maintained; but beating the terrorists required mass surveillance.

Sir David Omand, a former head of GCHQ, Britain's signals intelligence agency, and intelligence coordinator at No. 10 Downing Street, took a similar view. What mattered for dealing with current threats, he said, was less the kinds of secrets governments keep and more ‘access to the data flows'. He meant access to people's communications, to confidential information held by banks and to movements through examining airline databases. This type of intelligence, he argued, was more valuable now to counter an organization such as al-Qaeda, as it allowed terrorists to be tracked and their networks uncovered.
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So had the quest for a ‘man on the rock' been superseded? The attack in Khost – being duped by al-Balawi in the one operation to get so close to senior al-Qaeda leaders – seemed to suggest not. HUMINT had been squeezed, not squashed. When it had the chance, the CIA was as enthusiastic as ever to plant a spy inside. But, as Khost indicated, such opportunities were rare. And the operation's outcome demonstrated why no one was counting on the spies: HUMINT was no longer centre stage. The operation had been the CIA's best shot in the spying game and the White House had been watching. It failed in spectacular fashion.

The CIA went back to its high-tech methods and continued the fight. The main weapons were the killer drones, unmanned aircraft controlled from the US that fired missiles into Pakistan's north-western frontier. The CIA became more accurate in its aim. The drones were hitting fewer civilians and the CIA's surveillance network was showing its resilience. Two and a half years after the failed Khost mission, US intelligence got its most important target. The CIA directed Special Forces into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. In the streets of Washington, DC, a triumphant crowd shouted ‘CIA! CIA!' It was not something agency veterans ever expected to hear. The US and the CIA had prevailed.

As an official account of the killing emerged, there were no early indications that bin Laden had been betrayed by a spy. Instead, the manhunt illustrated very well the techniques of global covert policing. This was ‘new intelligence' at work: reams of intelligence analysis and spidery network diagrams, prisoner ‘debriefs' and endless all-seeing surveillance.

It was from this new high-tech world that, in June 2013, a whistle-blower emerged – a contractor from the NSA with administrator-level access to its computer systems, Edward Snowden. The thousands of highly classified documents he made available to journalists showed the power of the surveillance toolkit available to Britain and the United States. GCHQ, he revealed, wanted ‘to exploit any phone, anywhere, anytime'.
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No wonder the value and efforts of human spies sometimes appeared meagre. Yet the secret agent was not dead – far from it. For all his faults, attempts to write off the agent were misguided and misinformed. As will become clear, the nature of spies, and the value of human intelligence, had been misunderstood from the beginning.

First rule of intelligence: forget everything you know.

PART ONE

The Cult of Intelligence (1909–89)

Chapter 1

The Secret Agent

‘Spies in the British service commonly take up their dangerous duty out of sheer love of adventure'

– Captain George Hill, British secret service officer in Moscow
1