Authors: Matthew M. Aid
In Indonesia, the CIA and the Australian foreign intelligence service, ASIS, have provided the Indonesian security services and national police with intelligence and technical support that has resulted in the decimation of the al Qaeda affiliate in that country, Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). JI is best known for being behind a series of bloody terrorist attacks in Indonesia, the most notorious of which was the bombing of a nightclub area on the island of Bali that killed 202 people, most of them Australian tourists. According to Indonesian diplomatic officials, since 2002 their country's security services have captured or killed more than six hundred JI operatives and sympathizers, but they admit that JI is still very much alive and kicking in the Muslim slums of Djakarta and other Indonesian cities.
In the Philippines over the past decade, a small force of U.S. Army Green Berets from the 1st Special Forces Group and their supporting intelligence operators, using classic counterinsurgency tactics, have secretly helped the Philippine military capture or kill many of the leaders of Abu Sayyaf, a Muslim terrorist group linked to al Qaeda, who had been terrorizing the populace of the island of Mindanao and the nearby Sulu archipelago since the early 1990s.
But Abu Sayyaf is still very much a going concern. A resilient group of about four hundred fighters is still operating on Basilan and Jolo islands off the coast of Mindanao, occasionally emerging from the jungle to ambush a Philippine army unit or police station. On September 29, 2009, Abu Sayyaf guerrillas killed two American Green Berets and a Philippine marine on the island of Jolo. A great amount of frustration has been voiced by intelligence analysts over the fact that just when American Special Forces advisers thought they had Abu Sayyaf cornered and ready for the kill, senior Philippine military commanders could not be coaxed or cajoled into finishing the job. Instead, as one American Green Beret officer put it, “They [the Philippine military] took a siesta and gave them time to rebuild.”
In February 2011, three months before U.S. Navy SEAL commandos killed Osama bin Laden in his hideout in northern Pakistan, senior U.S. intelligence officials told the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees that the U.S. intelligence community still held al Qaeda to be the number one threat to U.S. national security. In fact, well before bin Laden's death in his compound in Abbottabad, al Qaeda had become, in relative terms, a bit player in global terrorism. Al Qaeda's decline has been years in the making. In 2008, former CIA intelligence officer Marc Sageman, now a terrorism analyst with the RAND Corporation, correctly predicted in his book
Leaderless Jihad
that al Qaeda was rapidly declining as a terrorist threat.
The facts back up this contention.
According to the latest annual report from the National Counterterrorism Center
, al Qaeda accounted for less than 1 percent of the eleven thousand documented terrorist attacks in 2009, indicating the global terrorist threat has evolved dramatically over the past decade to the point where a host of new groups now pose a major threat to U.S. national security and perhaps a greater challenge to the U.S. intelligence community than that formerly posed by al Qaeda. The vast majority of terrorist attacks in 2009 were committed by 240 other terrorist groups around the world, many of whom have lengthier track records of violence and mayhem than al Qaeda. For instance, the worst terrorist incident in all 2009 was not committed by al Qaeda or any other Muslim extremist organization. It occurred on January 17, 2009, near the village of Tora in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, when guerrillas belonging to a group calling itself the Lord's Resistance Army, led by a messianic individual named Joseph Kony who believes that he is the “spokesperson of God,” massacred four hundred Congolese villagers in an orgy of violence.
There is even a growing terrorist threat on America's borders to the north and south.
In Canada, over a dozen foreign terrorist groups
, like the Palestinian group Hamas, Hezbollah from Lebanon, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the Armed Islamic Group from Algeria, the Kurdish Workers' Party from Turkey, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam from Sri Lanka, and the Basque separatist group ETA, operate openly, raising funds, holding rallies, operating Web sites, and publishing newsletters on behalf of their parent organizations. Although none of these groups has shown any sign of trying to mount a terrorist attack inside Canada or the United States, leaked State Department cables reveal that Canadian security forces have on occasion “
vigorously harassed
” Hezbollah members living in the Toronto area based on what was described as “non-specific intelligence on possible terrorist operations.”
Just across the Rio Grande from the United States, an increasingly violent war has been raging for more than a decade between Mexico's government and that country's powerful drug cartels, which has claimed the lives of over 34,000 people in just the last four years. According to a leaked State Department cable, by 2008 the security situation in Mexico had become “
a stew of widespread criminality, drug trafficking, [and] corruption
.”
Although the U.S. government has not designated the Mexican drug cartels as terrorists, the Mexican government has.
The cartels have assassinated government officials and policemen
, thrown hand grenades into street parties, detonated IEDs outside government buildings, and executed en masse hundreds of innocent civilians.
By the time the Obama administration entered office in 2009, the escalating violence in Mexico was beginning to spill over into the United States. Gun battles between rival Mexican gangs took place in the towns along the U.S.-Mexican border. The Mexican military had requested from Washington intelligence on the drug cartels the previous year, but the Bush White House had delayed granting the request because of concern that the information could end up in the hands of the cartels, who had the Mexican government, military, and police thoroughly penetrated. The sharp escalation in violence across the Rio Grande in early 2009 forced DNI Denny Blair to divert precious intelligence resources, including SIGINT intercept personnel and unmanned drones, to try to help the Mexican military and police combat the cartel gunmen, many of whom were former Mexican military special forces officers trained and equipped for counterinsurgency.
In recent months, the tempo of U.S. intelligence collection activity inside Mexico has been dramatically stepped up. The CIA and DEA stations in Mexico City were augmented in 2010 so as to increase the volume of human intelligence reporting on the Mexican drug cartels, and the army began deploying small SIGINT collection units known as Toric Ice Teams to the Rio Grande. Since February 2011, the U.S. Army has been flying unmanned drones over northern Mexico from Biggs Army Airfield on the grounds of Fort Bliss, located just outside El Paso, Texas. Also on Fort Bliss is the El Paso Intelligence Center, where the Drug Enforcement Administration is currently constructing a sophisticated SIGINT facility to intercept the cell phone calls of drug cartel officials across the border in Mexico.
When asked in 2011 why the U.S. intelligence community was investing so much time and effort in combating the Mexican drug cartels, a senior U.S. government official stated, “We had to. To do nothing would have invited disaster. If the drug violence spread into the United States it would have been a catastrophe.”
For the past five years, terrorism has been slowly but inexorably spreading into those parts of the Middle East and North Africa that were peaceful prior to 9/11. A big part of the reason why new terrorist groups, many claiming to be offshoots of al Qaeda, have sprouted up so rapidly across the Muslim world is that thousands of angry young men from virtually every country in the Middle East and North Africa (the colloquial term for these individuals is
jihadis
) went off to Iraq to fight the U.S. military after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003. After getting their fill of action, they returned home, bringing with them lethal new skills in terrorist organization, finance, and bomb-making.
The Israeli foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, detected the first wave of these jihadis returning to their home countries in the Middle East and North Africa from Iraq in late 2004 and warned the U.S. intelligence community that this homecoming meant that trouble was on the way. According to a leaked State Department cable, the head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, told a visiting U.S. congressional delegation in 2005 that “
Israel has evidence that foreign fighters
originating from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Syria and Yemen have arrived back in their home countries, and he [Dagan] assumes that some had returned to Saudi Arabia as well. Dagan predicted that, as with men who fought in Afghanistan during the 80's and 90's, these returning militants would stay in touch with each other, forming a network based on their common experiences in Iraq ⦠He worried however, that these militants' countries of originâin particular Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and Sudanâare ill-equipped to control the returning jihadis, who might then pose a threat to stability in the region and, ultimately, to Israel.”
Dagan's prediction quickly came to pass. Two years after the Mossad chief spoke to the visiting congressional delegation, the still-classified version of a June 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism issued by the DNI in Washington revealed that in the four years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, al Qaeda had morphed into something broader based and more insidious as a host of new offshoots suddenly began appearing outside of Pakistan.
In recent years, Africa has quietly become a major hot spot for Muslim terrorist groups.
For example, in the last three years a brand-new al Qaeda offshoot
calling itself al Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has appeared in North Africa. Founded in Algeria in 2007 with the expressed purpose of overthrowing the secular Algerian government, AQIM has waged a nasty albeit little publicized terror campaign against the Algerian government, killing hundreds of soldiers, policemen, and civilians with the same kinds of suicide car bombs and IEDs al Qaeda used against U.S. forces in Iraq. In recent years, AQIM has expanded its operations to neighboring Morocco.
To counter AQIM, the CIA and the French foreign intelligence service, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), have covertly provided intelligence support to the Algerian and Moroccan governments to try to help them beat back the scourge. The CIA and DGSE have helped the Algerian military's security service, the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS), capture a number of senior AQIM leaders and kill a number of others. But cooperation with the Algerian intelligence service has not been easy; a leaked State Department cable describes the Algerian counterterrorism officials the CIA has to work with as a “
prickly, paranoid group
.”
Next door in Morocco
, the CIA and the DGSE have provided similar intelligence information to the Moroccan foreign intelligence service, the General Directorate of Studies and Documentation (Direction Générale des Ãtudes et de la Documentation, or DGED) and lavish technical support, including cellular telephone intercept equipment, to the Moroccan internal security service, the Défense et Surveillance du Territoire (DST), helping it capture a number of violent Muslim extremists opposed to the Moroccan regime.
AQIM has rapidly adapted since 2007 and morphed into something potentially more dangerous. It has gained strength and slowly spread its tentacles to the neighboring countries of Niger, Mali, and Mauritania, where in recent years the group has been setting up base camps with impunity because local security forces are so weak and poorly trained that they are incapable of resisting AQIM's encroachment on their territories.
This has forced the U.S. intelligence community to expand its efforts to these countries
. Green Beret teams from the 10th Special Forces Group began arriving in greater numbers in all three countries in late 2009, and in early 2010 SIGINT teams, including a U.S. Navy EP-3E SIGINT aircraft, were sent to the region on temporary assignment to try to find the AQIM base camps in the desolate northern parts of Mali and Mauritania, signaling that the war in the Sahara was moving to a new and more dangerous phase.
Over the past decade, the tiny and impoverished East African nation of Djibouti, located on the Horn of Africa, has been an important nexus for the U.S. intelligence community's collection efforts against al Qaeda and a host of other Muslim extremist groups who are becoming increasingly active throughout East Africa. The CIA station in Djibouti over the past ten years has run a series of important intelligence collection operations in the neighboring countries of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, and Kenya and across the Red Sea in Yemen.
Four miles south of the U.S. embassy on the outskirts of the city is a former French Foreign Legion base called Camp Lemonnier, which occupies a large tract of land on the south side of the sole major airport in the country, Ambouli International Airport. A number of intelligence collection units are based at Lemonnier, including a U.S. Air Force/CIA Predator drone detachment, a robust HUMINT collection component, and a small SIGINT listening post, which is situated in a separate compound just south of the airfield.
From Camp Lemonnier, the U.S. intelligence community monitors the movement of illegal narcotics between Yemen and Somalia, commerce that finances terrorist groups in both countries.
Another target is the notorious Lord's Resistance Army
, which has murdered thousands of villagers in Uganda and in Congo but now is based in southern Sudan with the blessing of that government's leaders. In Ethiopia there are two small guerrilla groups operating, the Oromo Liberation Front and the Ogaden National Liberation Front, both of which are based in neighboring Somalia, where they are protected by radical militants. Finally, there are the Janjaweed tribal militias in Darfur Province in western Sudan, who between 2000 and 2007 mercilessly slaughtered anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 local tribesmen. What currently makes Darfur of such great interest to Washington, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, is that since at least 2009 the U.S. intelligence community has detected the presence of foreign Muslim fighters claiming allegiance to al Qaeda fighting alongside Janjaweed militia groups against local separatists.