Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (24 page)

CHAPTER 5

PLAUSIBLY DENIABLE (AND OTHER WAYS INTO TROUBLE)

T
he darkest, most sensitive Special Forces operations are linked to official, or quasi-official, intelligence agencies while remaining plausibly deniable. The relationship between freelance soldier and government is akin to that of the ventriloquist and his dummy. It is also sometimes competitive, sometimes symbiotic. While the CIA has its own direct action team, the Special Activities Division/Special Operations Group, it also depends for many of its operations on the multi-service Special Operations Command. Neither of those sources might be armed with sufficient deniability to make them plausible comrades in arms on black operations. In any case, critics of the CIA such as the espionage historian David Wise argue: “The CIA would be much better serviced by getting out of the paramilitary business altogether and strengthening its clandestine intelligence gathering. It was, after all, created to avoid another Pearl Harbor. It should concern itself now with preventing another 9/11.”
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Even some former insiders argue that the Agency should stick to its main job of running agents and collecting intelligence, leaving it to SOCOM to carry out the derring-do.

The CIA’s problem, of course, is that SOCOM is under Pentagon control. So for the most controversial black operations, such as armed coups and assassinations, the Agency still has a tendency to sub-contract to the paramilitary private sector. In June 2009, Leon Panetta, newly appointed to run the CIA, exposed to Congress a program through which the controversial security company Blackwater—now rebranded as “Xe Services”—would help train CIA assassins to kill al Qaeda leaders. Though the secret program ran for seven years, it seems to have produced a zero body count. Blackwater would have “helped the Agency with planning, training and surveillance.”
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The millionaire boss of Blackwater, Erik Prince, felt betrayed. He told
Vanity Fair
: “When it became politically expedient…someone threw me under the bus.” It became apparent that Prince, a right-wing patriot, offered more than advice to the Agency. He claimed to have been a vetted CIA asset for five years, developing at his own expense covert means of penetrating hard-target countries and stalking potential targets, including al Qaeda operatives, for assassination. A source close to Prince disclosed: “This program died because of a lack of political will.” And, it might be added, fear of legal trouble in spite of President George W. Bush’s license to the CIA to use “all necessary means” against Islamist terrorists

News of this arrangement was broken by the
New York Times
almost two months after Panetta informed Congress. The paper conceded that it was unclear whether the CIA had planned to use the contractors to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives in practice or just to help with training and surveillance. Questions about accountability also hung in the air. Robert Baer, a veteran CIA case officer, mid-East expert, and skeptic of misplaced direct action, surmised: “I suspect that if the agreements are ever really looked into—rather than a formal contract, the CIA reportedly brokered individual deals with top company brass—we will find out that Blackwater’s assassination work was more about bilking the U.S. taxpayer than it was killing Osama bin Laden or other al Qaeda leaders. More than a few senior CIA officers retired from the CIA and went to work at Blackwater…. But Blackwater stood no better chance of placing operatives in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where the al Qaeda leadership was hiding in 2004, than the CIA or the U.S. military did.”
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This is not entirely accurate. The CIA-driven drone offensive in Pakistan fired more than fifty missiles at Islamist targets in the tribal belt of Pakistan during the year preceding Panetta’s disclosure, killing numerous enemy including the Taliban commander in Pakistan, Baitullah Mehsud. Part of the price of that strategy was the innocent blood of an unknown number of civilians caught in the crossfire of this war. At the same time, up to 100 CIA and Special Forces operators spent months staring at computer screens inside the caves of Waziristan, scanning hours of video footage of suspect houses, vehicles, and faces in the ongoing hunt for bin Laden and his associates. CIA veterans brought out of retirement, back to the front line, are known as “The Cadre.” Their freedom to roam was limited by their “hosts,” Pakistan’s own intelligence agency the ISI, elements of which have been been accused of secretly supporting the Taliban. Instead, The Cadre did their best using human surrogates, who were regularly assassinated. One agent on this beat was Art Keller, who told a British correspondent: “These old hands, despite their age, are willing to spend many months in conditions most people would say is akin to prison. The divorce rate is through the roof. Yet it’s part of the allure that keeps driving them back. A lot of the time you are just sitting reading stuff but you are also in the right area. It’s the big show. You are at retirement age, but are you really going to sign up for the bowling league?”
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If things go wrong for agents manning such outposts, the covert extraction plan is invoked. It is usually risky. Its political origins are hard to conceal combining, as it does, the joint efforts of an intelligence agency, Special Forces and, occasionally, freelances drawn from the private sector. Britain, for example, relies upon “The Increment,” an elite drawn from the SAS and SBS, to provide tactical support for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) as well as the Royal Air Force Special Duties Flight. Using specially equipped Puma helicopters, C-130 Hercules transports, and a variety of civilian aircraft, Increment groups can usually smuggle agents into alien territory at night and in all weathers and retrieve them from remote airstrips identified in advance. Nearby, there is a prearranged emergency rendezvous. A plastic beer keg, buried underground, contains emergency survival rations and other items enabling the compromised spy to hide out for several days until the rescue team arrives. The agents in their turn are trained to use standard NATO flashlights fitted with infrared filters. Arranged in a T, these help the Special Duty pilots to identify the covert airstrip. Members of the maritime SBS, as well as running miniature submarines, take civilian qualifications enabling them to command a variety of non-military craft including trawlers as part of the same organization.

A former SIS officer, Richard Tomlinson, described how, during a training exercise in darkness and heavy rain, “the Hercules screamed into view…. With its props on full reverse thrust and its tires screeching in protest, it halted in an astonishingly short space. The rear ramp dropped and a Range Rover burst out and tore off down the runway toward the control tower. As briefed…we ran to the aircraft and clambered into the spacious hold. The aircraft executed a sharp U-turn and accelerated back down the runway as we clung to the webbing seats inside, took off, flew a tight circuit, and landed again. The rear ramp was already half-open as the plane touched down, giving a view of the Range Rover hurtling down the runway after us. With the aircraft still rolling, the Range Rover hurtled up the ramp at alarming speed. The [Increment] crew strapped it down and only seconds after touching down we were airborne again. ‘That was an example of how we do hot exfiltrations,’ Barry [one of the Increment] shouted over the roaring engines.”
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The greater the risk of compromise, the greater is the need for plausible deniability. It is also the area where freelance soldiers, many of them ex-Special Forces veterans, continue their military lifestyle beyond the limits of accountability. Sometimes they are formally released from regular military service for the duration of a black operation through an informal re-identification process known as “sheep dipping.” Intelligence agencies will employ freelances only when there is no alternative. Blocks on the use of regular Special Forces may be legal and financial, as in the case of Nicaragua, when Congress turned off funding for the Contras. They may be geopolitical, in cases where the fingerprints of Washington, London, Paris, or Tel Aviv must not be traced to a black operation. The attempt to blow up Sheikh Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, on 8 March 1985 in Beirut was manipulated through various cutouts including, possibly, a British planner and Lebanese foot soldiers.

There are also, in the subtle world of intelligence warfare, degrees of deniability. A spy using diplomatic cover as, say, his embassy’s commercial secretary, is likely, when caught, to suffer nothing worse than a declaration that he is
persona non grata
and sent home, though the loss of face and diplomatic cover can be substantial. In 2005 four British SIS men were filmed at different times in a Moscow park while retrieving data from an electronic device concealed inside a dummy rock. This was described by the Russian counter-espionage service, the Federal Security Service, as “the 21st century version of the dead-letter drop.” Using a palmtop high-speed transmitter carried by a Russian intelligence “asset,” the secrets were downloaded to the rock as the agent strolled past. The device, 30 centimeters wide, hollowed out to accommodate a waterproof box containing the electronics to fit inside the “rock,” had a range of twenty meters.

The data was retrieved electronically by one of the agent’s British controllers. The British agents were filmed in action and the rock itself opened and displayed on Russian television. Nikolai Zakharov, a spokesman for Russia’s FSB intelligence, said that the U.K.’s Secret Intelligence Service had promised in 1994 that it would stop spying on Russia, “but still as a rule they send their most talented men.” Surprisingly, no formal complaint was made by Russia. For diplomatic reasons, the Russians concluded that television exposure and the arrest of the British “asset,” along with international ridicule, sufficed.

For other spies, using a natural cover as a doctor, journalist or businessman—cases where the cover is fact—the risk is the greater since diplomatic immunity from trial and punishment is not an option. British intelligence uses a tiny band of patriots known as “UKN.” These people have a variety of skills as civil pilots, sailors, veterinary surgeons, and medical specialists. When SIS blows the bugle, they volunteer to work at short notice in hostile situations. If they are caught, the British government denies all knowledge of them. Extracting them might be delegated to the private sector, to a company such as Control Risks. Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, a number of British citizens working in Iraq became hostages. Some were alerted by secret radio messages to arrive at a prearranged rendezvous at a given time. They were then smuggled out by way of Kurdish northern Iraq, into Iran and flown from Tehran back to Britain. Deals of that sort usually form part of the K&R—Kidnap and Ransom—industry.

At the extreme end of deniability is the use of assassination. As a political instrument, it is usually of little value except in those cases where the target commands unusually centralized political power. The killing of the Taliban chieftain Baitullah Mehsud was such a case. After his death, a power struggle began within the Pakistani Taliban, setting off a series of terrorist attacks in Pakistan by factions claiming leadership. If power is diffused, democratically, then it makes little sense to pick off one or two individuals. The IRA’s near-success in wiping out Prime Minister Thatcher and a number of her ministers with a bomb at their Brighton hotel in 1984 came close to achieving a decisive political success. The terrorists succeeded, obliquely, in 1990, by assassinating Thatcher’s former aide, Ian Gow, a Member of Parliament. His death led to a by-election in a safe Conservative constituency. The Conservatives lost. It was a shock result that finally provoked Thatcher’s own supporters to turn against her. She was forced to resign in 1990 during Operation Desert Shield, when Britain was on the brink of war.

In spite of the unwisdom of assassination as a tool of political change, it happens. “In unguarded moments” Major Andre Dennison, a former SAS officer, serving the white supremacist regime in Rhodesia, “hinted of dark deeds, like the elusive IRA leader holed up in his Londonderry ‘safe house,’ where the frustrated SAS could not ‘legally’ reach him for months on end. Then the mysterious, never-explained shotgun blast in the dark of night, snuffing out the IRA man on his own doorstep when he answered the coded knock known only to his mistress.”
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The former British spy Tomlinson, claimed he was shown three plans to assassinate the Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. These did not bear fruit but the third plan interested conspiracy theorists who studied the death of Princess Diana in a car accident in the Alma Tunnel, Paris in 1997. Milosevic Plan 3 envisaged an arranged car crash, in a tunnel, triggered by use of a flashing strobe gun wielded by a member of UKN, disguised as a papparazo, to blind the chauffeur. While some people were disposed to believe the theory that Diana was assassinated by agents working for SIS, the long, official inquiry into her death dismissed it.

American doctrine on political assassination has wobbled over the years. For some time, heads of state were held to be untouchable, though the notorious plots against Fidel Castro (at least eight, constructed by the CIA) suggest otherwise. The U.S. aerial bombing of Gaddafi’s Libyan tent in 1986 was carried out because Gaddafi qualified, in Washington’s eyes, as a certified terrorist. In the world of plausible deniability and cut-outs, there is no doctrine except pragmatism. It might be no more than the by-product of an agenda aimed at political change (and pursuit of profit) by ex-CIA and Special Forces mercenaries doubling as patriots. The anti-Castro movement, enthusiastically supported by Cuban exiles in Florida, became an integral part of the disastrous invasion attempt on Cuba known as the Bay of Pigs fiasco.