The New Spymasters (42 page)

At first, according to Bowden, Abu Ahmed's phone could not be traced. ‘But in June of 2010, the United States was able to pinpoint the phone's location when it was in use, or even perhaps when not in use. This meant they could find the Kuwaiti, and watch him.'
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Now it got interesting.

The phone had appeared in Pakistan, already the presumed location for bin Laden's hideout. Advanced technology helped here. Satellites, stealthy drones and surveillance planes could all have been used to spot Abu Ahmed's car. Agents were deployed to watch roads. His car was found to be a white Suzuki Jimny with a distinctive spare wheel cover on the back. It was tracked from Peshawar to a house surrounded by high walls in the city of Abbottabad, close to a Pakistan Army military base.

The hunt became conventional again. When any police force finds the lair of a villain, the choice is to raid it or watch it. The CIA still had no evidence that bin Laden lived here. More surveillance technology was deployed. The CIA sent operatives to establish a safe house in a nearby villa in order to watch the compound and its inhabitants. But owing to the compound's high walls, it was only surveillance from the sky (satellite or drone) that revealed the presence of the man of the household – a man who paced around and cast a tall shadow, soon to be nicknamed ‘the pacer'.

The CIA now began to believe they had cornered their man. Analysts observed that he walked like the man their predecessors had seen in early 1999 through Predator cameras pacing around a desert compound in Afghanistan. He had later been positively identified as bin Laden, but, at the time, when the identity was still uncertain, President Clinton had refused to strike because of the real risk of killing innocent people.
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His new identification in Pakistan was still a hunch. Every analyst knew that all the evidence might seem to stack up perfectly but could still be wrong. Deciding to launch the attack into Pakistan was a heck of a call for President Obama to make.

It was at this point that Shakil Afridi came into the frame. Afridis have a reputation for being independent and rarely open to being recruited, but Dr Afridi had a series of problems that made him susceptible. While working in the tribal areas, he had been accused of medical malpractice. He was kidnapped by a local strongman and had to pay a ransom to be released. Later he visited the US, where he may have come under scrutiny from US intelligence. Research by
GQ
magazine concluded that Afridi attended a training session by a British charity that was organizing vaccinations in Pakistan. One of the charity's directors introduced him to the CIA in Peshawar, it claimed. The charity denied this.

Human intelligence had already played some role in following the courier thus far. A Pakistani ‘asset' had been the one who spotted his car in Peshawar and helped to follow him home to Abbottabad. Agents were involved in observing the compound and discovering that the courier and his family lied to other family and friends when telling them where they lived.
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But the deployment of Afridi was the most significant use of human intelligence that emerged from the sanitized account of the bin Laden operation. It was probably far from the whole story, but insiders insist that there was never an agent or well-placed ally who gathered anything so precise about bin Laden that they could have pointed to a map and said, ‘Osama bin Laden lives there!'

When asked to explain how bin Laden was caught, analysts involved speak of putting together a jigsaw puzzle of thousands of pieces. Cindy Storer, a former CIA analyst, was quoted as saying, ‘Pieces fall from the sky and add to the pile the analyst already has … There is no picture [to follow], no edge pieces. And not all of the pieces fit in the puzzle'. Nada Bakos, a former CIA targeting officer, wrote, ‘I can't stress enough that it is a team effort. It's much more complicated than one hero catching the bad guys. It is multi-faceted and not focused on one individual and no one in the CIA has a crystal ball.'
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Even the jigsaw metaphor did not convey the amount of ‘data points' involved in modern terrorism analysis, insiders claimed. So many people and factors were being pieced together at once that only a computer, backed by large teams of brainy humans, could make sense of the problem.

The plotting of links between people, places, telephones, bank accounts and so on was nothing terribly new. But what was new was the scale of information available and in need of processing with the aid of machines. A glut of data was transforming intelligence. And it rarely brought enlightenment. As the bin Laden operation showed, secret intelligence was going digital. It was adapting to the new technologies that society was using as well as adapting its own specific technologies. This digitization is still incomplete. It is a transformation that has taken, and will continue to take, many years and the outcome is still uncertain.

*   *   *

In the specialized world of secret agents, technology had always been both a help and a hindrance. The secret agent in the traditional James Bond films was armed before his mission by ‘Q', his quartermaster, with a series of wondrous high-tech toys, from exploding lighters to rocket-firing Aston Martins. In the real world, agents and handlers in dangerous situations try to carry as few gadgets as possible: they are too incriminating. ‘All those gadgets; that was just for Moscow hands,' said one senior former case officer in SIS. (Under constant KGB scrutiny, Western intelligence officers in the Soviet Union did have to use ingenious devices to communicate with their agents.)

In the twenty-first century, though, even the purists acknowledged that technology was beginning to play a much bigger role in spying, starting with the preparation process for a recruitment attempt. Technology could be used to map out potential targets, to identify sources and to research profiles of people who might be recruited. ‘HUMINT informs and enables technical operations and vice versa,' wrote Hank Crumpton, the former deputy head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, after 9/11.
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Human agents on the ground, for example, helped suggest targets for surveillance and for air strikes by Predator drones in Afghanistan. In turn, the data from Predators helped to verify the reports from spies.

Crumpton also described how bad human intelligence made technical operations fail. He once went to great lengths to place a bug in an intelligence target's apartment, only to have to remove it again after six months. The target had divulged nothing. It had been a bad choice. ‘Never underestimate the human factor; it's the most important part of clandestine operations, more important than technology.'
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As had been the case with catching bin Laden, insiders said that the most important use of technology in fighting terrorism was in tracking, tracking and more tracking. It sometimes made an intelligence officer's task feel more like police work than spy work. Paul Pillar, who retired in 2005 after twenty-eight years as a CIA analyst, latterly as a national intelligence officer for the Near East, said in an interview that the ‘basic process of taking information from human and technical sources and piecing it together' was very similar to what domestic law enforcement did. Trying to make sense of some criminal gang was ‘very much part of the intelligence business. It was before 9/11 and it has been since then.'
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But whether used to track gangsters or terrorists, the science of surveillance became far more precise: borrowing the classic techniques of spy-catching from counterintelligence, adding the latest gadgetry of geolocation and bugging, and then turning them against the modern fanatic. ‘The techniques of identifying suspects, covert surveillance and bugging were developed to counter the Soviet KGB and GRU,' said a former chief of GCHQ, Sir David Omand. These had been adapted, he said, and put to service against modern targets.
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Rather like JSOC had done in Iraq and Afghanistan, the civilian secret services began to adopt the technique of the ‘fusion cell', where representatives of all the different secret agencies and of human and technical intelligence collection came together. In the US, this happened in the CIA's ever-expanding Counterterrorism Center; in the UK, such teams were put together for different operations, both inside MI5's headquarters on Millbank and over the river at SIS in Vauxhall. Even the listening agency, GCHQ, which traditionally kept aloof in its base in the West Country, sent its people to be fully integrated. Against the Soviets, where the counterintelligence risk was severe, the ‘need to know principle' had been pre-eminent, but in this modern counterterror mission the (somewhat crass) slogan became ‘Dare to Share!' Old hands at SIS found the change remarkable.

Modern global travel and communications had made the trail international. And that was why the secret services could be most effective. Planet Earth had no police force of its own; national and regional police forces struggled to get permission to operate in other countries, or get help from colleagues in other police forces. Foreign countries were often more willing to help if that assistance was kept secret. And if those countries would not help, then spy services had the option of jumping the fence and helping themselves to information.

As the West made counterterrorism the priority, a seemingly endless manhunt was launched that went far beyond the pursuit of people like Osama bin Laden who had already instigated murderous crimes of violence. Taking a lead from the French in the 1990s, secret services attempted to go after the crime in preparation, the conspiracy – what the 2002 movie
Minority Report
called ‘pre-crime'. While network analysis might of itself have been nothing new, it was now to be used for a wider range of targets, and to try to anticipate future behaviour.

So while much modern counterterrorist work was, to my mind, essentially police activity, albeit frequently conducted in secret or across borders, the contribution of the intelligence officer to this increasingly joined-up fight, Omand argued, was his future-oriented mentality. ‘Because the whole training of intelligence officers is forward-looking. It is predictive.' The need to look forward was changing both intelligence work and police work, fusing their operations.

The view that intelligence work meant prediction was not shared by all. One former senior SIS officer rejected the whole idea. ‘It is a real fallacy, a widespread one, that we do prediction. Secret intelligence comes down to answering the question: “what's really happening?”' An agent or intercept could give an insight into what was happening off stage, what was being debated or planned, for example. But he could not say what would happen next. This distinction was important. In counterterrorism, while all agreed that good intelligence might identify an active terrorist plot-in-progress or specific plan of attack, there was real disagreement over the extent to which technology and more far-reaching surveillance could be used to peer even further into the future.

But whether or not intelligence was predictive, modern counterterrorism, as Omand rightly suggested, was definitely about looking towards the future. It required a logic of pre-emption. The pursuit and prosecution of criminals in the past would normally follow a crime being committed, he said. But in the era of the devastating suicide bomb, criminal punishment after the fact served as no deterrent to the martyr. So the requirement for the intelligence agencies and today's police, working together, he argued, was to identify the potential terrorists before they could organize and commit their criminal acts.

When deployed against Soviet spies or the IRA, surveillance techniques and the technology available were kept completely secret. But – even before the revelations of whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden in 2013 – the deployment of the intelligence services in the 1990s to assist in combating organized crime and then prosecuting terrorist plotters had allowed some of those secrets to slip out.

The techniques on display – as Dearlove had described – involved the broad surveillance of telephones, Internet and travel data, a focus on connections that appeared suspicious, the trawling of foreign communications (which could be conducted by the UK and US agencies without any special warrant) and then, when suspicions narrowed down, the application of more intrusive measures, like bugging cars and homes and listening to domestic phone calls.

What, then, was the role left for the human spy? At all levels, a human source might help focus inquiries or provide the basis for an interception warrant. But it was rare for agents to be central. That was partly because they were usually, for deliberate reasons, kept peripheral to any plot. As Omand said, ‘All intelligence work involves managing moral hazard. For example, it will be hard to find informants within a terrorist gang who are not guilty of criminal offences and do not have blood on their hands. Thus there is always a risk of being accused of colluding with wrong-doing. It is hard enough with a narcotics gang, worse with a serious terrorist organization. The chances of infiltrating such networks with undercover officers are slight and recruiting those already inside the network is hard and dangerous for all involved.'
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On the other hand, much valuable information had been volunteered to the authorities by the communities in which the terrorists sought to hide or from which they had sprung. Ordinary people often wanted the chance ‘to better themselves and not to be lumped in with the extremists in the eyes of the rest of society', according to Omand, who said they got ‘much more of that kind of volunteered HUMINT than [information] from deep penetration agents'. Also, with much looser networks of terrorists and the ‘increasing risk of lone wolves', there might ‘not be a lot to penetrate by traditional HUMINT methods' – in other words, even a very good spy might get nowhere near discovering an active plot. It had, however, sometimes been possible ‘to go up the food chain to the organizers and instigators of jihadist terrorism overseas, including by following their communications, contacts and movements'. That was the value of complementing human intelligence operations ‘by having bulk access to global communications'.