A Brief History of the Spy (30 page)

It is perhaps telling that Rodriguez authorized the destruction of the CIA tapes which chronicled the interrogation of Zubaida, although he claims that he did so after the revelation of the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib by Army personnel following the 2003 invasion. ‘I was concerned that the distinction between a legally authorized program as our enhanced interrogation program was, and illegal activity by a bunch of psychopaths would not be made,’ he told a CBS documentary in April 2012.

The enhanced interrogation techniques were applied to KSM when he was captured; again, their efficacy is dubious. KSM was deprived of sleep for over seven days; he was waterboarded 183 times; his diet was manipulated. Yet he was still able to try to put his interrogators on the wrong track of the courier who was serving Osama bin Laden, and claimed more responsibility for some of al-Qaeda’s activities than he could have had in an effort to stop the interrogation.

MI5 became embroiled in the rendition and torture controversy when they hit the headlines in 2010. The
Guardian
ran a story entitled ‘Devious, dishonest and complicit in torture – top judge on MI5’, based on a draft judgement in the case of Binyan Mohamed, who had been arrested in Pakistan, based on information supplied by Zubaida prior to his enhanced questioning, and interrogated by the CIA in Morocco as part of the War on Terror. Mohamed claimed that British officers were present during his interrogation and were passing questions to the interrogators, fully aware that he was actually being tortured. In 2006, MI5 said that Mohamed had only been questioned in Pakistan, where he was arrested, and the officer involved had seen no evidence of torture – although they had not sought assurances from the Americans regarding future treatment.

A 2009 civil case became embroiled in a row over what
sensitive materials could be revealed in public, but what the courts saw was sufficient for the Attorney General to recommend that the police investigate MI5. Eventually, Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, announced in January 2012 that there was not enough evidence to prove that the security services provided information about Mohamed when they knew he was at risk of torture, effectively clearing them.

Another case of the British services assisting with rendition wasn’t so easy to dismiss. Abdelhakim Belhadj, who would later lead the Tripoli Military Council during the uprising against Gaddafi, was rendered to Libya by the CIA with British help, then incarcerated and tortured in the notorious Abu Selim jail in southern Tripoli. The documents confirming this were discovered in an abandoned government building after the fall of Gaddafi’s regime, with MI6’s Sir Mark Allen writing to Gaddafi’s head of intelligence, Moussa Koussa, ‘I congratulate you on the safe arrival of Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq [the name used by Belhaj]. This was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over the years.’ Belhadj is suing the British government and Sir Mark Allen for damages, and the Metropolitan Police is investigating the allegations.

The hunt for Osama bin Laden and other key al-Qaeda members would stretch across the next decade, but that wasn’t the Bush administration’s highest priority. Whether there was a genuine belief that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a party to 9/11, or whether there were those in the American government – notably Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – who saw the terrorist attack as an opportunity to deal with more than one menace at a time, the focus quickly turned to Saddam. While they were busily engaged searching for al-Qaeda, the CIA was also tasked with investigating Iraq, and particularly whether Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.

According to the report prepared by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, set up by President Bush following the invasion: ‘The Intelligence Community’s performance in assessing Iraq’s pre-war weapons of mass destruction programs was a major intelligence failure. The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policymakers.’ At the same time the Butler Report, set up in the UK for the same purpose, noted that the Joint Intelligence Committee’s judgement that Iraq was ‘conducting nuclear related research and development into the enrichment of uranium’ was based on two new agents’ reports, and ‘those reports were given more weight in the JIC assessment than they could reasonably bear’. It pointed out that the judgement ‘went to (although not beyond) the outer limits of the intelligence available’ but that there was ‘no evidence of deliberate distortion or of culpable negligence’.

Whether the evidence was sufficient to justify the various administrations’ desire to create regime change in Iraq or not, there were allegations that the dossier of information had been ‘sexed up’ before it was revealed to the British parliament and media. Major General Michael Laurie told the Chilcott Inquiry into Iraq: ‘We knew at the time that the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care.’ Tony Blair’s communications chief Alastair Campbell has consistently denied the accusation, claiming that he only assisted with the presentational aspects of the dossier. He told Lord Chilcott:

At no time did I ever ask [Joint Intelligence Committee head Sir John Scarlett] to beef up, to override, any of the judgements
that he had. At no point did anybody from the prime minister down say to anybody within the intelligence services, ‘You have got to tailor it to fit this judgement or that judgement.’ It just never happened. The whole way through, it could not have been made clearer to everybody that nothing would override the intelligence judgements and that John Scarlett was the person who, if you like, had the single pen.

There were two key elements to the accusations against Saddam: that he was gaining uranium from Niger which could be enriched to produce weapons of mass destruction – that could potentially be prepared for use within 45 minutes, according to the British dossier; and that he was also preparing biological WMDs. ‘We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels,’ Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council, as they debated a resolution over Iraq’s future. ‘The source was an eye witness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities. He actually was present during biological agent production runs. He was also at the site when an accident occurred in 1998. Twelve technicians died from exposure to biological agents.’

The problem was that he wasn’t. The evidence for the latter relied on Iraqi informant Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, code-named Curveball, who was comprehensively proved to be a liar – and who eventually admitted to the
Guardian
he had manipulated his handlers within the Germany intelligence agency, the BND. ‘I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime,’ he said in 2011. ‘I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy.’

Although by no means all the information regarding Curveball has yet been released into the public domain, the story that has emerged backs up the assertion made by Sir Richard Dearlove in a meeting at Downing Street on 23 July
2002. A leaked memo indicates he reported on his recent meetings in Washington that ‘Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’

Al-Janabi entered Germany in late 1999 on a tourist visa, and then applied for asylum, claiming that he had embezzled Iraqi government funds and faced imprisonment or death if he returned. Once he was in the German refugee system, he began talking about his work as a chemical engineer, which immediately attracted the attention of the BND. (In his interview with the
Guardian
, Janabi later claimed that he didn’t mention his work until he was granted asylum in March 2000; the BND says that he actually ceased active cooperation after his asylum was granted in 2001.) He revealed that he had been part of a team that equipped trucks to brew bio-weapons, and named six sites that were already operational. Refusing to talk directly to American intelligence, the newly (and as it turned out, appropriately) code-named Curveball provided reams of material to the BND, enough to furnish ninety-five reports to Langley. There analysts evaluated the information, spy satellites checked out the sites named and drawings of the trucks were prepared. The problem, of course, was that without direct access to Curveball, no one could be absolutely sure that they were interpreting what he said correctly.

Curveball’s information was nowhere near as concrete as its use to back up Powell’s speech would suggest. ‘His information to us was very vague,’ one of his supervisors at the BND told the
Los Angeles Times
in 2005. ‘He could not say if these things functioned, if they worked . . . He didn’t know . . . whether it was anthrax or not. He had nothing to do with actual production of [a biological] agent. He was in the equipment testing phase. And the equipment worked.’ He admitted that he had only personally visited one site, where he said that he understood that there had been an accident in
1998 – the source of the alleged ‘eye witness’ account referred to by Powell.

Why was he taken seriously? Curveball’s information tallied with what the CIA analysts had anticipated, and, worse, seemed to be backed up by other information. When those sources were discredited, Curveball wasn’t immediately disregarded. Warnings were sent by MI6 and the BND to Washington regarding Curveball’s credibility. ‘Elements of his behaviour strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators,’ MI6 noted in April 2002. But by September 2002, DCI George Tenet was reporting that they had ‘a credible defector who worked in the programme’ for biochemical weapons. Despite the reservations of some within the CIA (which Tenet later vehemently denied being aware of), Curveball’s information and drawings were included in Powell’s speech – although, as was pointed out at the time by one congressional staffer, ‘a drawing isn’t evidence – it’s hearsay’. The BND assumed that the CIA had other sources to corroborate Curveball’s story, but it became clear that his testimony was the lynchpin around which the case was built.

Despite massive searches by the UN Inspectors and the Iraqis themselves, no trace of the trucks that Curveball talked about could be found in the weeks between Powell’s speech and the invasion. Hans Blix, the chief inspector, told the Security Council on 7 March 2003 that they had found ‘no evidence’, but of course many simply thought that meant Saddam had hidden it, as he purportedly had with his other WMDs.

The aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent discovery that Saddam did not have WMDs, continues to affect intelligence agencies and governments, with further official inquiries on-going. One aspect that became crystal clear, though, was that Curveball had lied. His family said that he had no problem with Americans; he had come near the
bottom of his engineering class, not top as he had claimed. He was a trainee engineer, not the project manager that the CIA had made him out to be. Worst of all, he had been fired in 1995 – three years before the supposed accident, and just at the time when he claimed he started work on the WMD transports. A year after the invasion, the CIA was finally allowed access to Curveball directly, and took his story apart piece by piece.

Despite this, al-Janabi tried to stick to his guns, until he finally admitted the truth to the
Guardian
in February 2011, although he maintained that he only had sketchy dealings with the BND. In response, George Tenet posted a statement to his website noting that ‘the latest reporting of the subject repeats and amplifies a great deal of misinformation about the case’. Amidst his further attempts at self-justification, he did make one key point: ‘The handling of this matter is certainly a textbook case of how not to deal with defector provided material.’ Few would disagree.

The perceived intelligence failures both prior to 9/11 and in the build-up to the war in Iraq led to one of the biggest shake-ups of the American intelligence community in half a century – or, at least, it should have done. The aim of the various reforms was to create an intelligence community fit for purpose in the twenty-first century. According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) website:

The United States Intelligence Community must constantly strive for and exhibit three characteristics essential to our effectiveness. The IC must be
integrated
: a team making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. We must also be
agile
: an enterprise with an adaptive, diverse, continually learning, and mission-driven intelligence workforce that embraces innovation and takes initiative. Moreover, the IC must
exemplify America’s values
: operating under the rule of law, consistent
with Americans’ expectations for protection of privacy and civil liberties, respectful of human rights, and in a manner that retains the trust of the American people.

DCI George Tenet resigned unexpectedly, stepping down from the CIA in July 2004, shortly before the release of the report by the 9/11 Commission. This recommended the establishment of a National Intelligence Director who would not only take responsibility for the safety of the United States, but also have effective powers to control the seventeen different intelligence agencies. This didn’t go down well with the government, or the various agencies that would be affected, and what many regarded as a typical Washington fudge and compromise ensued. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, in particular, didn’t want the Pentagon’s various intelligence agencies answerable to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI); the FBI wanted to keep their autonomy. At the time, historian and journalist Fred Kaplan described the final bill as ‘not reform in any meaningful sense. There will be a director of national intelligence. But the post will likely be a figurehead, at best someone like the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, at worst a thin new layer of bureaucracy, and in any case nothing like the locus of decision-making and responsibility that the 9/11 commission had in mind.’