Intel Wars (32 page)

The weapon that suddenly ended his tenure in Islamabad was not a bullet, a missile, or a bomb. It was a lawsuit filed in the city of Peshawar on December 10, 2010, by a Pakistani journalist named Karim Khan, which alleged that Bank and his boss, CIA director Leon Panetta, were responsible for the deaths of Khan's brother and son, who were killed in a CIA drone strike at Mir Ali in North Waziristan a year earlier, in December 2009.

On December 16, 2010, CIA headquarters sent a flash “Eyes Only” message to Bank advising him that his cover had been blown and ordering him to leave the country immediately. Station security personnel hustled Bank to the airport in a convoy of black armored SUVs, where he was put on a plane bound for the United States along with a security escort.

Bank's hasty departure was big news in India and Pakistan, where newspapers splashed his name and Khan's allegations all over the front pages. Back in Washington, CIA officials were furious. Unidentified CIA officials told the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
that they “strongly suspected” that Bank's name had been leaked by ISI officials in retaliation for the filing of a lawsuit in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, in November 2010, which alleged that the current director of the ISI, General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, was partly responsible for the November 26, 2008, terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, by the Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba that killed 173 people. ISI officials vehemently denied this charge.

In the months that followed, the CIA-ISI intelligence relationship rapidly went from bad to worse. On January 27, 2011, Raymond A. Davis, a thirty-six-year-old CIA contract security officer stationed in the U.S. consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, was arrested by Pakistani police after he killed two Pakistanis he claimed had tried to rob him in broad daylight at a busy intersection. The case caused an immediate sensation in the Pakistani press and quickly became a diplomatic incident when the Pakistani government refused to honor Davis's diplomatic status, holding him in prison pending trial for murder.

Pakistani security officials further inflamed the situation by leaking details of the matter to the local press, including the fact that Davis, a former Special Forces soldier, was working for the CIA. Davis spent several weeks in prison, then was released and quietly flown out of Pakistan after the CIA made what was described a large “blood money” payment to the families of the two slain men.

When the Pakistani government initially would not release Davis, the CIA suspended all intelligence-sharing activities with the Pakistani government and the ISI. In retaliation, the Pakistanis halted all joint intelligence collection programs with the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, including a number of joint human intelligence collection projects in the FATA, and banned the CIA from using Pakistani airfields for unmanned drone flights over northern Pakistan. A number of CIA case officers and contractors were also ordered to leave the country immediately.

The killing of Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011, in Abbottabad only further inflamed the already deeply troubled relations between the CIA and the ISI. On Saturday, May 7, 2011, a private Pakistani television network and a right-wing newspaper published the name of the new CIA station chief in Islamabad a day after the chief of ISI and the CIA station chief had held an angry meeting in Islamabad over the killing of bin Laden. Although the name given in the broadcast and the newspaper article was incorrect (the name given in the Pakistani press was Mark Carlton), CIA officials immediately claimed that the name had been leaked to the press by the ISI in retaliation for the embarrassment caused by the killing of Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil. The Pakistanis then arrested five of the Pakistani military officers and police officials who had helped the CIA monitor bin Laden's home in Abbottabad, and ordered the immediate closure of three intelligence fusion centers that U.S. special forces were secretly running in Peshawar and Quetta.

At the time that this manuscript went to press in mid-2011, U.S.-Pakistani intelligence relations had reached their lowest levels since 9/11. Officials in Washington confirmed that intelligence cooperation between the two countries had come to almost a complete stop. When asked to comment about the state of his agency's relations with Pakistan, a senior CIA official put it bluntly: “They couldn't be much worse than they are right now.”

A typical New Year's Day in Washington, D.C., is a surreal experience. The streets are almost completely empty of cars, and the sidewalks empty of people. In a town of serial workaholics, January 1 is one of the very few days of the year when the city's population of politicians, government workers, and lobbyists are not at the office working a typical ten- to twelve-hour day. It may be one of the very few days of the year when you can actually be assured of reaching people at home because they are all parked in front of their television sets watching a never-ending series of college football games.

New Year's Day 2011 was no different. But breaking with tradition, I abandoned my television set and attended a party at a private home in the Washington suburbs because I was promised that a number of senior intelligence officials would be present. The talk among the multitude of diplomats and spies in attendance centered on a polite debate as to whether the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan were going as well as President Obama said they were. But in one knot of partygoers the conversation focused on a topic that at the time I did not think was particularly important—the Middle East.

Almost everyone participating in the conversation was of the opinion that the Middle East and North Africa had become a backwater on the global stage, upstaged by the more pressing events taking place in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There was a dissenting voice, though. One State Department official, apparently a veteran Middle East hand, was not so sure. “Things have been too quiet over there for too long. I think something's going to blow,” he intoned with great seriousness. Judging by the derisive comments his assessment received, he was clearly a minority of one.

It is easy to see why no one thought that the Middle East or North Africa warranted much serious concern at the time. The region had been remarkably quiet during President Obama's first two years in office. The Israeli and Syrian militaries had not fired a shot at one another in almost five years, and the number of terrorist attacks inside Israel since Obama became president could be counted on one hand. The rest of the region seemed, at least on the surface, relatively peaceful.

That changed rapidly in the days immediately after New Year's as waves of popular unrest exploded across the region. On January 14, 2011, massive nationwide protests forced Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, a longtime U.S. ally, to resign and flee the country. Less than a month later, on February 11, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down from his post after eighteen days of public demonstrations on the streets of Egypt's cities.

The U.S. intelligence community had been reporting for years that popular unrest with the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes was building, but according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, nobody at DNI headquarters at Liberty Crossing foresaw that mass street demonstrations would lead to the collapse of both the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes. The thinking among the intelligence analysts at the time was that the massive police and security services of both countries were more than capable of suppressing any public unrest. The analysts were wrong.

It is small comfort, but all of our foreign intelligence allies, many of whom have better connections in the region than the United States, also did not see the unrest coming. According to a senior CIA official, the Mossad incorrectly predicted that Hosni Mubarak would be able to ride out the mass demonstrations in downtown Cairo without any difficulty. And the French foreign intelligence service, which had agents operating at all levels of the Tunisian government, had no inkling that the Ben Ali regime was so structurally weak that it would collapse of its own volition.

The collapse of the Mubarak regime in Egypt will almost certainly have serious long-term consequences for the U.S. intelligence community's efforts in the Middle East, especially in the realm of counterterrorism. Leaked State Department cables show that for twenty years the U.S. intelligence community enjoyed excellent relations with all four of Egypt's intelligence and security services.
Particularly important was the CIA's intimate relationship with the Egyptian General Intelligence
and Security Service (Al-Mukhabarat al-'Ammah), headed by Major General Omar Suleiman, which worked closely with Langley combating terrorism in the countries around Egypt, spying on the terrorist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip, as well as acting as a middleman during the on-again, off-again Arab-Israeli peace negotiations.
The FBI worked closely with the Egyptian State Security Service
(Jihaz Amn al Daoula), headed by Hassan Abdul Rahman, which was the principal agency for combating terrorism and militant extremism inside Egypt, as well as crushing political dissent. On foreign intelligence matters, the CIA and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) depended on the Egyptian Military Intelligence Service (Mukhabarat el-Khabeya), which monitored all external threats to Egypt, including Israel, Sudan, and Libya.

In the weeks that followed the collapse of the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes, mass street demonstrations, some of them violent, erupted in Bahrain, Jordan, and Yemen, all American allies. This marked the beginning of what has since become known as the “Arab Spring.” The Obama administration was particularly concerned about the potential collapse of the government of Bahrain, which in addition to being a key ally in the war on terrorism is the headquarters of the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet and homeport for all American warships operating in the Persian Gulf. A small detachment of U.S. Navy SIGINT aircraft, which fly daily intelligence collection missions off the coast of Iran, operates from the airbase outside the Bahraini capital of Manama. The Bahraini military and police were ordered to break up the protests by force. In the ensuing street battles, hundreds of protesters were killed or wounded.

Another country engulfed in violence following the fall of the Tunisian and Egyptian governments was Libya, whose leader, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, has for more than forty years been America's principal antagonist in North Africa. In February 2011, street protests erupted throughout Libya, quickly leading to a full-scale armed revolt across the country. The fighting spread to the capital of Tripoli by February 20. Opponents of Qaddafi took control of the city of Benghazi and by early March had evicted pro-government forces from all of eastern Libya. By March 2011, Libya was embroiled in a full-scale civil war. Qaddafi's forces controlled most of western Libya, while the rebels, who controlled the eastern part of the country, were led by a group based in Benghazi styling itself as the Transitional National Council, headed by former Libyan minister of justice Mustafa Abdul Jalil.

By mid-March 2011, the U.S. intelligence community was fully involved in the fighting inside Libya. CIA paramilitary personnel were operating on the ground in eastern Libya. Administration officials claimed that they were there only to “assess the situation.” In fact, they were helping direct air strikes against Qaddafi's forces and helping British and French intelligence personnel funnel arms shipments to the Libyan rebels, as well as trying to determine if any of the Libyan rebels were allied with al Qaeda or other Muslim militant organizations.

As time went by, more American intelligence-gathering resources were deployed to Sigonella Air Base on the island of Sicily, from where U.S. and NATO operations against Libya were being run. The CIA reportedly established a headquarters on the base to direct all of the agency's operations inside Libya. U.S. Air Force RC-135 SIGINT aircraft based at Souda Bay on the Greek island of Crete were being used to monitor Libyan air force and air defense communications. On March 21, 2011, President Obama authorized the use of Predator unmanned drones to identify the locations of pro-Qaddafi forces so that they could be hit with air strikes by U.S. and NATO forces. The end, when it came, was anticlimactic. In mid-August 2011, Qaddafi's forces collapsed and the Libyan rebels rolled into Tripoli virtually unopposed on August 22, 2011, all without the help of the U.S. military or intelligence community.

There is one country in the Middle East where the CIA has been actively trying to foment civil unrest for years. The country is Syria, another longtime nemesis of the United States because of its opposition to a peaceful settle of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its support of foreign terrorist groups, both dating back decades.

After 9/11, intelligence sources confirm, the Bush administration authorized a series of covert action operations designed to promote internal and external opposition to the Syrian regime. The CIA and the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, began actively providing covert financial support to a number of London-based opposition groups seeking to overthrow the regime of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. Some of the leaders of these groups had fled to London after the Syrian military brutally crushed a popular uprising in the city of Hama in 1982.

Although not explicitly stated, the purpose of these covert operations was to unseat Assad, who has ruled Syria since his father, Hafez al-Assad, died in 2000. If the U.S. government had hoped that the younger Assad would moderate his father's hard-line anti-Israeli policies and support for terrorism, these hopes were quickly dashed.
Assad has continued to thumb his nose at the United States since Obama became president in 2009
. Assad has strengthened his country's long-standing alliance with Iran, and Syria remains firmly opposed to any attempt to peacefully resolve existing Arab-Israeli disputes, such as the Palestinian problem in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

According to U.S. intelligence officials, Syria remains one of the top state sponsors of terrorism in the world
. Together with Iran, Syria is a major backer of the militant Shiite group Hezbollah in Lebanon and of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, giving Damascus an extraordinary degree of influence over Lebanese politics and the Arab-Israeli peace process.