Trading Secrets

Spies and Intelligence in an Age of Terror

Mark Huband

• Editorial: I.B. Tauris
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857733481
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Intelligence & Espionage

Today's intelligence community faces challenges that would have been inconceivable only a dozen years ago. Just as al-Qaeda's destruction of the Twin Towers heralded a revolution in global diplomacy, the events of 9/11 also threw two centuries of spy-craft into turmoil - because this new enemy could not be bought. Gone were the sleepers and moles whose trade in secrets had sustained intelligence agencies in both peacetime and war. A new method of intelligence had been born. The award-winning former Financial Times security correspondent Mark Huband here takes us deep inside this new unseen world of spies and intelligence. With privileged access to intelligence officers from Rome to Kabul and from Khartoum to Guantanamo Bay, he reveals how spies created secret channels to the IRA, deceived Iran's terrorist allies, frequently attempted to infiltrate al-Qaeda, and forced Libya to abandon its nuclear weapons.
Using accounts from ex-KGB officers, Huband vividly describes the devastation caused by the West's misreading of Soviet intentions in Africa, and explains how ill-prepared western intelligence agencies were when the Cold War was replaced by the perception of a new terrorist threat. Benefiting from privileged access to intelligence sources across the world, Trading Secrets provides a unique and controversial assessment of the catastrophic failure of spies to grasp the realities of the Taliban's grip on Afghanistan, and draws upon exclusive interviews with serving officers in assessing the ability of the major intelligence agencies to combat the threat of twenty-first century terrorism.

1

‘THE CRAFT OF CHEAT AND IMPOSTER’

Peter Clarke and I were sitting on the polished leather armchairs which nestle in strategically placed clusters and thus allow visitors to the coffee room of the Rubens Hotel to remain out of earshot of whoever may be sitting nearby. Convenient for Whitehall and the various counterterrorist agencies today dotted around Victoria and along the banks of the Thames, the Rubens’ rather over-decorous rooms and hallways, replete with private corners, soft lighting and a busy street outside from which it is easy to step in or out, make it the perfect spot for a quiet chat about secret intelligence.

Ever the police officer, whose professional life had begun in 1977 as a ‘bobby on the beat’ and culminated in his appointment in 2002 as head of the UK’s counter-terrorist police, Clarke chose his words with care. On the one hand he was keen to explain, on the other studious to avoid divulging operational secrets. We had met many times. As we sipped our cappuccinos he was at the early stage of a new, post-Met career in the private sector. Denied access to secret intelligence, his observations may have gone the way of many who have left government service and sought greater financial rewards as ‘advisors’ and ‘experts’ with the burgeoning number of security companies and private intelligence outfits which today operate with varying degrees of success behind the grand front doors of Mayfair. But he was not one of those former state servants who these days seek to enhance their value by combining guesswork with obfuscation while hinting at remaining privy to intelligence long after their official passes have been handed back. Instead, his observations remained as frank and well-considered as they had been between 2002 and 2008 when he had led what became known as the Counter-Terrorism Command (CTC), whose operations had thwarted major terrorist attacks across Britain.

The threats are no secret. It is the operational details that are. But dominating the intelligence-gathering strategy is a challenge of a kind that some say dates back to the efforts of Queen Elizabeth I’s spymaster Thomas Walsingham to unearth ‘Catholic’ conspiracies to unseat the Virgin Queen. The challenge remains the same: how to find people who know what is about to happen, and to stop it before it does.

Just as Walsingham’s efforts had depended on spies, so do the successes and failures of modern intelligence gathering. The complex individuals whose readiness to betray trust, take risks and often earn little or nothing for their efforts, are today as central to the world of espionage as they were five hundred years ago. Even though telephone intercepts and electronic data mining now lead the way in intelligence gathering, people – and their intentions – are still at the centre of spying, whether it be in seeking to unearth terrorist plots, understanding the intentions of ‘rogue’ regimes, or discerning social trends which may lead to revolutions.

But after five hundred years or more of learning each other’s ways, the spies are still being thwarted by the spied-upon – the latter remain adept at preventing their organisations from being infiltrated, their plans from being thwarted and their networks being uncovered.

For the intelligence officers whose stock-in-trade is to recruit those who can step inside the plots, learn the plotters’ secrets and take steps to halt plots before they happen, the role they now play is, increasingly, to explain to the linguists and others who are listening-in to bugged telephone calls what it is they are really hearing. While the brilliant minds of the headset-wearing staff of the UK Government’s listening station GCHQ are taking notes as they eavesdrop conversations, it is the SIS or MI5 officer standing nearby – who has been following the evolution of a terrorist cell or a clandestine weapons-trafficking operation – who is often best placed to put the pieces together. The combination of operational bravado, strategic cunning and collective memory brought together in the intelligence agencies can perhaps then turn a mystery into a target, by – as one long-serving officer once told me – providing that ‘crucial five per cent’ of the overall picture that is often all to which the secret-intelligence content of an investigation may amount.

In the wake of 9/11, much that it was thought had been learned over many years appeared redundant. But in the weeks and months which followed that day, as both MI5 and SIS found they were grappling with the implications for themselves and their American counterparts of President Bush’s global rampage, I heard Britain’s spies often voice the view: we understand terrorism because of our experience of Northern Ireland. I wondered how much real substance there was to this claim, and wondered whether the uniqueness of historical events meant that there were no such things as ‘lessons’ – only ‘techniques’. Having spent the decade prior to 9/11 living in and writing about the Muslim world, I found it challenging immediately to make the comparison between the specific political goals of the Provisional IRA and the global intentions of al-Qaeda. Was the claim by those within the UK intelligence services a rather spurious one, intended as much to get the Americans off their backs as to make them listen? Moreover, what experience of Ireland was really being referred to?

I had never worked as a reporter in Ireland, neither in Northern Ireland nor in the Republic. How the experience of operating in one place could inform action in another was a major question facing MI5 as it sought to tailor its experience of Northern Ireland to the new threat from home-grown Islamist extremism. And at least one of the answers seemed implied in what Peter Clarke said on that bright February morning in 2009. Reflecting on the challenge from radical Islamic groups which faced the colleagues he had left behind at the Met, he told me,

What has been missing is anything coming up from the communities, in terms of intelligence. I can’t think of any major case that has resulted from intelligence coming up from the ground. In the Irish days [of the 1970s and 1980s] it was fairly easy to say to people: look out for suspicious activity. But this has changed. These days what you’re asking people to do is to look out for changes in behaviour – like people becoming more observant in their religious life.¹

The implication of his comment was significant: the old methods of intelligence gathering had become redundant.

But just as identifying the motives of the enemy is crucial to understanding how to contend with the threat, so understanding the community from which the enemy comes is crucial to gauging how to recruit people from within it who are prepared to spy on it. Until 2004, MI5 had been unable to infiltrate effectively any of the two hundred or so Islamic groups – most of them small, numbering fewer than ten people – who were surveillance targets as part of Britain’s domestic counter-terrorist effort. It was only with the ‘airlines plot’ revealed in August 2006 – which involved plans simultaneously to blow up aircraft as they flew across the Atlantic – that really significant intelligence was derived from MI5 infiltration of the group of plotters.

Meanwhile, a common feature of the UK agencies’ assessment of how well – or badly – they were coping with the long-gestating challenge which culminated in the attacks on 9/11, was comparison with the past.

Like all such institutions, the agencies of which the intelligence machinery is comprised house generations of staff who share a single experience. Just as in the armed forces there are the Falklands and ‘Gulf War One’ generations, in SIS there are those who will forever be associated with life behind the Iron Curtain, while others rather like being referred to as the ‘Camel Corps’ of Arabic and Persian speakers. Within MI5 there is an entire generation of intelligence officers who lived and breathed Northern Ireland for two decades or more, but who are today working with a new intake of recruits who may never set foot in the province.

In light of the generational changes, and the obvious need the agencies have to ‘move on’ in response to events, and to seek to grapple with what is happening today, it is not surprising that history is sometimes consigned to the bottom drawer. Despite the references to the experience of MI5 in Northern Ireland throughout much of the Troubles as having informed the counter-terrorism effort post-9/11, the real ability to learn from past experience remains tentative, as Britain’s leading academic scholar of intelligence, Christopher Andrew, writes in The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5:

Had the intelligence community and the security forces been aware at the beginning of the Troubles of the problems caused half a century earlier [during the Irish War of Independence, 1919–21] by the lack of co-ordination between the military, the police and the metropolitan intelligence agencies, similar kinds of confusion would have been less likely to recur.²

Within the generation of intelligence officers who cut their teeth in Belfast and South Armagh during the 1970s and 1980s, there is a keenness to place today’s experience of terrorism within the wider context of intelligence gathering as a profession that has been crafted and fine-tuned over many years, and which has evolved its practices in response to events – a profession which has an established and tested tradecraft. But as he eyed the traffic that passed beneath the open window of his office in the heart of Victoria, a senior security official with long experience of counter-terrorism in the UK seemed to express – with a frankness that is always disarming when coming from an old hand in a profession renowned for its skills in the art of deception – how challenging it was to apply old lessons to new realities. Referring to radical Muslim groups in Britain, he told me,

There has been a change in the dynamic of all this. Our understanding has been increasing throughout. There was a lack of that with 9/11. Up until 2005 it felt like a period of great turmoil. It felt as though we were throwing every desk officer we had into it. It was very difficult to get a strategic grip. Late 2005 was our worst period. It was getting alarming.

It really did feel like a desperate scramble during that period.³

And what was it that he was able to look back on pre-9/11 that placed his current post-9/11 role in context? His response was clear:

The early days in Northern Ireland were a desperate scramble. It takes a little bit of time to catch your breath. It’s quite a different feel. But it’s fairly normal. We are in a better position now. The PIRA (that is, the Provisional IRA) were a hierarchical terrorist outfit with clear command and control and a good leadership. But the overall terrorist problem in the UK [in the twenty-first century] is much wider and more networked, so you don’t see the group. Terrorist groups have an environment that they adapt to. The Islamist groups are much more varied than the IRA. Nationality does have an impact on some of this.

As the hum of Central London filtered up from the street below, the room fell quiet for a moment. A phrase – ‘alert not alarm’ – which had been a governmental mantra in the aftermath of 9/11, and which was intended to stir the population out of any complacency while simultaneously discouraging panic, passed through my mind; I wondered whether the man sitting before me in white shirt and dark, plain tie, leaning slightly forward in his chair as he made his points, was in fact the last line of defence. If he could understand how false the apparent calm outside his office window was, and if he had the insight, accumulated knowledge and capacity to hand which would ultimately thwart the bombers, then the calm might become believable after all. Understanding is the key – along with the capacity to place isolated events into broader contexts, and take steps that will then neutralise the threat; only then can it be known whether the knowledge base – the intelligence – is sound. He broke the silence:

The experience of being in Northern Ireland gave us a realisation of the signals that you get by being on the ground. We recognised that we needed people up front (that is, based in localities across the province) to make communication shorter. It could not be done by sending messages from London.

I asked him which period he was specifically referring to. ‘All of it,’ he replied. ‘Throughout the conflict – from the 1970s, until today.’

But the experience had actually started many years earlier.

Understanding the security and intelligence implications of the radicalism that has evolved into twenty-first-century terrorism and the ‘home-grown’ threat rooted within Islam’s ‘jihadist-salafist’ trend, is little different from the task the British faced when they first encountered the challenge to the comfortable lives of the English landowners who had ruled Ireland since 1556. That challenge burst onto the Irish political landscape with the emergence of the secretive Society of United Irishmen, and the adoption of its revolutionary constitution on 10 May 1795.⁴ The ensuing rebellion, which challenged the British domination of Irish political life, erupted in 1798 under the military command of the fifth son of the Duke of Leinster, Lord Edward Fitzgerald.

Central to the success of the British in thwarting the challenge to its administrators in Dublin Castle were the informers put in place within the ranks of the United Irishmen by Edward Cooke, Under-Secretary for Civil Affairs in the British administration, who was the ‘man on the ground’ sent by the British Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger.

In his classic study of Irish nationalism, the historian Richard English argues that the rebellion of 1798 failed because ‘from the start, the United Irishmen had been riddled with government informers (a theme which was to recur in later Irish republican conspiracies).’⁵ But while secret intelligence determined the outcome of the rebellion – Britain’s spies providing the key intelligence which led to the arrest and execution of the rebel leadership – the task of deciding how best to use their intelligence advantage was often the larger challenge for the British. Knowing the enemy better than he knows you, while seeking to ensure that he doesn’t know how much you know about him, lies at the heart of spy-craft. But what real advantage does that offer if the intelligence target has emerged from within a domestic movement whose aims have a deep social root, and whose support base may be deepened and broadened if it can portray itself as ‘victimised’ and spied upon? Within the United Kingdom, today’s major focus on gathering intelligence in order to thwart terrorist plots – which, it must be said, is far from being the only focus – is entangled within this conundrum; by using the overwhelming power of the state – including its intelligence-gathering capacity – to confront the threat from violent extremism, does the state run the risk that its success will drive more people to violence, as anger rises among those sympathetic to the cause?

Pitt’s use of secret intelligence throughout his two terms as premier (1783–1801 and 1804–6) was – despite having some precedents – groundbreaking in terms of its scale, sophistication and the financial resources devoted to it. Just as would be the case during the Troubles of the 1970s and 1980s, traitors, opportunists and occasionally men and women sincerely seeking non-violent means to address the political crises, were ready and willing to engage in the trade in secrets that is the lifeblood of the intelligence machinery.

One of the first of these ‘touts’ – as informers are known in Ireland – was Thomas Reynolds, a Dublin silk mercer in dire straits, who was paid a lump sum of £5000 and given an annual pension of £1000 for life in return for his betrayal of the independence cause to Cooke and the British authorities, as the 1798 rebellion took hold. Reynolds would later became British consul, first in Iceland then in Copenhagen, before settling in Paris, where he died in 1836, having earned a total of £54,740 from the British Government in return for the information he had provided nearly thirty years earlier.⁶

But Reynolds’s role as a tout is relatively minor when considered beside that of the spy who came next – a philandering, lying, vain chancer and newspaper proprietor called Francis Higgins. It was Higgins’s intelligence gathering on behalf of Cooke which ultimately led to the failure of the Irish rebellion, his character having gone down in the history of spying as illustrative of the ‘perfect spy’ upon whom intelligence agencies have forever been dependent.

In an account of Higgins’s activities published in London and Dublin in 1866, based on contemporary records, the writer William Fitzpatrick – a fierce critic of Higgins – cites newspaper accounts from the time when he writes, ‘Notwithstanding the repeated assurances of the said Higgins, and the said several pretences to his being a person of fortune or business, he now appears to be a person of low and indigent circumstances, of infamous life and character, and that he supported himself by the craft of cheat and imposter.’⁷

His role as a spy on behalf of Dublin Castle is best revealed by Higgins himself.

Rarely in the history of espionage has the evidence of a spy’s attitudes, purpose and character been so abundantly revealed as in the 158 letters he sent to Cooke and his predecessor Sackville Hamilton between 1795 and 1801, and which appear to have been his primary means of communicating with the Castle. From the moment of the United Irishmen’s decision to go ‘underground’, Higgins wrote detailed accounts of where meetings of the clandestine organisation were taking place, who was present and what was discussed. Seemingly as regular as the information flow, however, were his requests for payment; a letter to Hamilton dated 10 April 1795 providing details of the activities of the ‘Roman Catholick Committee of Correspondence’, and stating,

However, Dear Sir...

Índice

• Cover
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 ‘The craft of cheat and imposter’
• 2 The first intelligence war
• 3 Talking to terrorists
• 4 Making spies
• 5 Games without frontiers
• 6 The Osama method
• 7 The road to 9/11
• 8 Guantanamo days
• 9 Prisoners
• 10 Know your enemy
• 11 ‘Hail the chief’
• 12 Shadow wars
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography