A Brief History of the Spy (28 page)

In 1986, Reagan stepped up the pressure on Gaddafi’s Libya with further exercises in the Gulf of Sidra. After the Navy destroyed a Libyan SAM battery and two guided missile patrol boats, Gaddafi ordered all Bureaus to target American servicemen. On 5 April a bomb went off in a disco in West Berlin, killing three and wounding 230, which the Libyans believed ‘would not be traceable to the Libyan diplomatic post in East Berlin’. Perhaps unwisely, Reagan revealed two days later that they had proof of Libyan involvement in the bombing; the Libyans immediately changed all their codes.
On 14 April a huge attack was launched against Tripoli and Benghazi – although most of the information about its success derived from CNN rather than from spies on the ground.

The FBI’s counter-terrorism program was assisted by the Omnibus Diplomatic Security And Antiterrorism Act of 1986, which allowed them to conduct investigations in a foreign country where crimes had been committed against American citizens, with that country’s permission. The first to feel the effect of this was Hezbollah terrorist Fawaz Yunis, responsible for the hijacking in 1985 of a Royal Jordanian aircraft that was carrying four Americans. In 1987 Operation Goldenrod went into effect, in which, according to the court record, ‘Undercover FBI agents lured Yunis onto a yacht in the eastern Mediterranean Sea with promises of a drug deal, and arrested him once the vessel entered international waters.’ Yunis was sentenced to thirty years, of which he served sixteen and was then deported.

The most horrific terrorist incident prior to 9/11 was the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988. Despite a massive investigation by all the various intelligence agencies affected, there remains considerable doubt over exactly who was involved with this – Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, an agent for Libyan intelligence, the Jamahariya Security Organization, was found guilty in 2000, but until his death in 2012 persistently maintained his innocence (he only dropped his appeal against his sentence in exchange for being returned to Libya in 2009 when allegedly he only had weeks to live). Libya accepted responsibility for the explosion in 2003, but this may have been a method of gaining readmission to the international community. About all that the court in the Netherlands could say for certain was that ‘the cause of the disaster was the explosion of an improvised explosive device, that that device was contained within a Toshiba radio cassette
player in a brown Samsonite suitcase along with various items of clothing, that that clothing had been purchased in Mary’s House, Sliema, Malta, and that the initiation of the explosion was triggered by the use of an MST-13 timer’. Even some of those findings have subsequently been thrown into doubt.

Initial investigations focused on the PFLP and Syrian involvement, particularly since the PFLP had warned in 1986 that ‘There will be no safety for any traveller on an Israeli or US airliner.’ One of their cells in Germany was working on similar – although not identical – bombs, and it is alternately possible that after the cell was arrested in October 1988, thanks to the efforts of a Jordanian spy who posed as their bomb maker, the PFLP bosses subcontracted the bombing to the Libyans in the same way that they used the Japanese Red Army at Lod. Former FBI Special Agent Richard A. Marquise, the Chief of Terrorist Research and Analytical Center at FBI headquarters in the eighties, noted in 2008: ‘Did Iran contract with the PFLP-GC? Probably! But it cannot be proven in court. Did Iran ask Libya and [Palestinian terrorist] Abu Nidal . . . Perhaps, but that too cannot be proven and never will be unless a reliable witness or two comes forward with documentary evidence.’

However, the major terrorist threat of the next twenty years, until the assassination of its leader in May 2011, was only just coalescing into existence when Pan Am 103 fell from the sky. Al-Qaeda was formed by the Saudi Arabian-born Osama bin Laden around 1988 from elements of the international Muslim brigades opposed to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. According to the 9/11 Commission, that investigated the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, bin Laden ‘built over the course of a decade a dynamic and lethal organization’ whose aims are simple: it wants to eliminate Western influence from Muslim countries, and dispose of what it regards as ‘corrupt’ regimes.

Bin Laden never made any secret of his aims: ‘The US
knows that I have attacked it, by the grace of God, for more than 10 years now . . . Hostility toward America is a religious duty, and we hope to be rewarded for it by God,’ he told
Time
Magazine in 1998. ‘To call us Enemy No. 1 or 2 does not hurt us. Osama bin Laden is confident that the Islamic nation will carry out its duty. I am confident that Muslims will be able to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America.’

In the early nineties, having been thrown out of Saudi Arabia, bin Laden moved to Sudan, where he set up training camps for warriors in a ‘jihad’. One of the first attacks linked to the group was that on the World Trade Center in 1993, when six people were killed and more than a thousand injured by a 500 kg bomb planted in the parking lot. Behind that attack was Ramzi Yousef, the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who in turn claimed to be the instigator of 9/11. (A British security expert based at the World Trade Center, Rick Rescorla, had reported that the parking lot was an obvious target for terrorists two years earlier; this was ignored, as was his subsequent report that the WTC would be attacked from the air. Rescorla lost his life escorting people out of the South Tower on 9/11.)

Al-Qaeda was linked to the downing of two Black Hawk helicopters in Somalia in 1993, as well as the June 1996 bomb at the Khobar Towers, an American military housing complex near Dhahran in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen Americans. Shortly before this, bin Laden moved from Sudan to Afghanistan and in September 1996, called on his followers to ‘launch a guerrilla war against American forces and expel the infidels from the Arabian Peninsula’. A further fatwa (an Islamic legal pronouncement) was issued on 22 February 1998, by bin Laden and four of his associates in the name of the ‘World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders’, calling for the killing of Americans, saying it is the ‘individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any
country in which it is possible to do it’. Six months later, 225 people were killed, and over four thousand wounded, when bombs were driven into American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which led to airstrikes by the US against al-Qaeda positions in Afghanistan and Sudan. Bin Laden was indicted in the US courts for these attacks. In October 2000, two suicide attackers rammed a boat carrying explosives into the USS
Cole
near the Yemeni port of Aden, killing seventeen sailors and wounding forty others.

Those weren’t the only attacks linked to al-Qaeda in the nineties by the world’s intelligence services. The 1992 bombing of the Gold Mihor Hotel in Aden and the Luxor Massacre of November 1997 were both al-Qaeda funded operations, while a triple strike planned for January 2000 was foiled by the arrest of the Jordanian cell responsible for one part; the destruction of a skiff planned to sink USS
The Sullivans
in Yemen; and the arrest of the bomber who was going to set off a device at Los Angeles International Airport.

All this came at a time when the role of the intelligence agencies worldwide was being questioned. The sudden and dramatic end of the Cold War had left many wondering if countries needed secret services such as the CIA or MI6. In Britain, it was decided that the existence of MI6 would be revealed publicly, which, as the then-head of service Sir Colin McColl pointed out, many believed would be the start of a ‘slippery slope . . . Our work is about trust; trust between government and people running the service; and the service and people all over the world working for it,’ he told a BBC Radio documentary celebrating a hundred years of MI6 in 2009. In the end, what the Intelligence Services Act in 1994 did was simply confirm the services’ existence, but didn’t go into any form of operational detail. A team of management consultants were brought into MI6, who slimmed the service down considerably.

Similar events were happening at MI5, with the first female
Director-General, Stella Rimington, taking a much more public role. Consideration was given in 1994 to amalgamating the two services, but this was not implemented. A disaffected MI5 officer, David Shayler, tried to emulate Peter Wright with revelations about the service’s activities (even appearing on light-entertainment programme
Have I Got News For You
) but like Wright, showed more about his own deficiencies and faults than those of MI5.

President Clinton’s incoming DCI R. James Woolsey, who succeeded Robert Gates, told his confirmation hearings in 1992 that he was considering alternate activities for the CIA, such as possibly sharing their business intelligence with private companies. As he pointed out, the West had ‘slain a large dragon’, but still lived ‘in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes’. There was more intelligence sharing with old enemies – particularly over such issues as the whereabouts of nuclear missiles and other materiel that might have fallen into terrorists’ hands after the breakup of the Soviet Union. ‘We are partners now,’ the chief spokesman of the FSB, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Yuri Kobaladze said in an interview, ‘although it will take some time to find the right way to deal with each other. We have universal problems like proliferation and international terrorism. These are our enemies. That’s why we have to cooperate with the US and the rest of the world.’

For spies, the ground rules had changed. During the Cold War, spies operating undercover in a foreign country could normally expect interrogation and imprisonment followed by the likelihood of exchange (although of course there was always the chance of execution). Former Deputy DCI Admiral Bobby Ray Inman explained in 1993 that terrorists and the drug-traffickers didn’t play by those ‘gentlemanly’ rules. ‘When you try to penetrate them and they suspect you, they don’t put you in jail. They shoot.’

* * *

CIA morale was hit by the cost-cutting insisted on by the administration – although the plans were only for it to revert to the size it had been during the Carter presidency – and even more by the revelation of Aldrich Ames’ treachery. Despite the KGB being wound up when the Soviet Union was dissolved, Ames’ loyalty had continued to be to his Russian paymasters, and he gladly provided material to the SVR.

The CIA had suspected there was a mole as early as 1986, and Jeanne Vertefeuille (often likened to John le Carré’s fictional obsessed researcher Connie Sachs from
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
) was placed in charge of the investigation, although it was given no priority. Ames was posted to Rome between 1986 and 1989, and did not have a very distinguished career. When he returned, he was assigned to the counterintelligence centre and was therefore able to pass Moscow all the details of the CIA’s actions against the KGB and then the SVR. Suspicions about his spending habits had been voiced and eventually a joint task force was set up with the FBI. The Bureau took over the case in May 1993 and arrested Ames in February 1994. (Ames’ handler Victor Cherkashin believes that Ames and later Robert Hanssen were actually betrayed by a CIA spy within the SVR.)

R. James Woolsey came in for a great deal of criticism over his attitude to the discovery – although verbal reprimands were issued to eleven key staff members (some of whom were retired), no one was fired over the Ames affair. However, the Senate Intelligence Committee called this response ‘seriously inadequate’ for a ‘disaster of unprecedented proportions’. Woolsey resigned in December 1994. He was replaced by Deputy Defence Secretary John Deutch, who continued Woolsey’s policy of declassifying documents relating to the Cold War, and trying to broaden the Agency’s personnel base with more women and minorities (a class action case had been brought against the Agency by various female employees during Woolsey’s time). For the first time since William
Casey’s tenure, the DCI was a member of the cabinet, giving him more access to the president. He also brought in new management, in an effort to spring-clean the Agency.

The CIA’s public image suffered further during the mid-nineties when it was revealed that they were continuing to supply aid to Guatemalan military intelligence, despite an instruction in 1992 to sever ties, and were possibly complicit in the deaths of two Americans; this was seen as a continuation of now-outdated Cold War policies and further evidence that the Agency wasn’t moving with the times – as one former agent told
Time
magazine: ‘If you were going to pick a place where the CIA still has a cowboy mentality, it’s there.’ An internal probe found that the Agency had indeed covered up the deaths.

Other internal investigations launched by Deutch criticized the way in which material supplied by known double agents was passed up the chain of command, often without the relevant warnings attached. This practice was something that would come to haunt intelligence agencies in 2003 when the erroneous information regarding Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was given far more credence than it would have been had it been flagged correctly. Earlier operations against Saddam gave the Agency another knock when their spies in Northern Iraq, who had been trying to bring Kurdish and Iraqi dissidents together against Saddam, had to make a hasty exit in August 1996, leaving behind many of those who had trusted them. ‘It may be that the CIA actually made tremendous efforts to protect its people,’ a leading Iraqi expert said at the time, ‘but the perception among Iraqis is that having anything to do with Americans is dangerous to your health.’

In November 1996, another Russian spy was found in the CIA ranks. Harold James Nicholson was carrying exposed film and a computer disc with confidential Agency documents when he was arrested by the FBI. For the previous two years
he had been working as a teacher at Camp Perry, known as ‘The Farm’, the Agency’s training centre for new agents; prior to that he had been posted to Kuala Lumpur, where he was turned by an FSB officer who Nicholson had claimed he was trying to persuade to work for the CIA – ironically around the time that Aldrich Ames was arrested. Nicholson’s motivation was financial – after he was seen trying to beat a standard polygraph test in 1995, the FBI began investigating his finances, and discovered large sums of money. He eventually pleaded guilty to receiving $180,000 from the Russians and to one specimen charge of espionage, although he had blown the cover of the agents passing through The Farm during his tenure there. Nicholson was a well-regarded agent and many at the Agency believed that he was on the way to becoming ‘a big spy’ for the Russians.