The New Spymasters (23 page)

But while the Belgians, French and British worried about attacks at home, they took little interest in the international movement that was coalescing. As Nasiri explained, the Soviet war had inspired the ‘myth of the mujahideen' and this, combined with the seething anger of the Arab street and new extremist ideas, brought together a coalition of radicals that would pose a terrible threat. Within Western security agencies, almost no one cared about what had become of far-off Afghanistan; few people were worried about the alienation of youngsters in the Middle East or were even troubling to learn Arabic any longer; and fewer still bothered to study the potent religious ideas that were swirling around. Small wonder that the intelligence services had little to show when disaster struck.
38
Nasiri may not have had all the mental qualities or the loyalty necessary to make a good spy and to convince the West to take the Sunni radicals seriously, but his story illustrated both that you needed spies in remote places and that it was possible to get them there. It was a chicken and egg problem: unless you had someone in the camp to appreciate what was happening and the threats posed, you were unlikely to be able to persuade somebody to send a spy there. This is why good spying works in tandem with good analysis, because someone needs the wisdom to decide where to look.

Successful spying, then, is driven by tradecraft, resources and the quality of recruits, and also by the direction set. It requires such a concentration of effort that unless something is made a real priority results are unlikely. That was the case with al-Qaeda before the attacks of 9/11.

But there is also the reverse problem. When a subject gets too great a priority and governments want to see success too quickly, the consequences can be equally disastrous. Without great care and professionalism, there is an incentive to exaggerate, even to fabricate, and the spy game can fall into disrepute. This is what happened in the run-up to the Iraq War of 2003, which showed the very personal, human way that spying can turn into lying.

Chapter 6

Caveat Emptor

‘They tried too hard. They wanted to make a difference, to change policy, change the world. That is always a mistake'

– retired senior officer, SIS

An intelligence expert was reading from a book about a secret agent with the code name Curveball. The agent had become famous for telling the world that Iraq's late dictator, Saddam Hussein, had mobile laboratories to make biological weapons (or germ weapons as they are popularly known). The book was labelled non-fiction. It had won many awards. But it began with a statement by the author that he was using a false name for Curveball and that, despite writing 280 pages about him, they had never met.

As the expert – someone who had intimately scrutinized the agent's case – leafed through the pages he started to scribble furious notes in the margin. He was getting angry. The opening pages were a fantasy, he said. They were about Curveball's 1999 arrival in Germany and how he was recruited by the country's secret intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND).

He selected a passage from the book: ‘
Staring out the window, Ahmed Hassan Mohamed could see little of his new home. In the spring or summer arriving passengers at Munich's Franz Josef Strauss International Airport normally glimpse…'

This made the expert angry. ‘He never went there! He arrived overland from France.'

‘
Ahmed's plane flew from North Africa…'

‘It was France!'

The expert listened as I read aloud a long description that continued for three pages: ‘
[his] bags betrayed new riches … the man brought back stuffed dates and preserved lemons, kif candy and almond cookies … Airport workers in neon yellow slickers scurried near the plane … Utility vehicles painted cautionary orange … The long line moved slowly but the traveller [Curveball] was patient…'

‘The first two and a half pages completely made up! I suppose they need to do this to sell books.'

‘
The border officer pressed a button on his desk, and another man … escorted the traveller across the hall to a small office with a desk.
'

‘No.'

He talked to the passport officers. ‘
I am from Baghdad, northeast Baghdad. I live with my mother and father.
'

‘His father was dead.'

‘
I attended the University of Baghdad…'

‘No. It was the Technical University.'

‘
Yes, I am married.
'

‘Divorced.'

‘
Clutching the slips of paper and his bag, he walked purposefully through the huge airport to reach the bus stand outside.
'

‘No. He never went to the airport.'

The account I was reading was from the best-selling book by an American journalist, Bob Drogin. It was the story of a monstrous lie, told by the agent known as Curveball, that was so large he was blamed for helping start the 2003 Iraq War, which led to the deaths of thousands of people. Drogin's 2007 book,
Curveball,
was subtitled
Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War.
A quote on the cover was provided by thriller-writer Frederick Forsyth, who referred to events as ‘the biggest fiasco in the history of secret intelligence'. Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister at the time of the war, took a similar view: ‘It was Curveball. That's it. The war was based on lies.'
1
Of all the evidence compiled about Saddam Hussein, the accusations about germ weapons had been the most compelling and most fleshed out. Curveball had provided that evidence. An official inquiry into the US intelligence failure on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (known as the WMD Commission) had called him the ‘pivotal' source on bio-weapons. The inquiry concluded, ‘Virtually all of the Intelligence Community's information on Iraq's alleged mobile biological weapons facilities was supplied by a source, codenamed “Curveball,” who was a fabricator.'
2

But how did those fabrications come into being and get endorsed by the world's leading intelligence agencies? And what did this process reveal about the profession of spying and the worth of spymasters and HUMINT in the modern age? When conservative-minded US president George W. Bush and liberal-spirited UK prime minister Tony Blair joined forces to launch the Iraq invasion, despite many protests, they were acting in the spirit of the age, giving form to a public desire to intervene ahead of trouble, to prevent massacres and human rights abuses and surprise attacks such as those of 11 September 2001. However, such an approach to foreign intervention required highly accurate, reliable intelligence. A close look at the Curveball case shows that, even when the lives of thousands depend upon it, spying can turn to lying without much of a conscious effort, or even any malice. It also offers clues about how to avoid such disasters in the future.

*   *   *

Drogin had written the book about Curveball before he knew much about the true identity and personal circumstances of this agent. In the way of many journalists, he filled in blanks. ‘Like any author,' he wrote, ‘I flesh out the written record and the memories of participants to bring life to the page.'
3
But in doing so Drogin had inadvertently mirrored the life of the worst kind of secret agent – someone who filled in the gaps in what he knew with second-hand accounts to ‘bring life' to his reports.

As the expert read on, he identified more than forty errors before he got bored. Many were trivial, but some touched on the heart of this story: how the lie had been conceived, born, shaped and matured. Drogin's erroneous information, he said, included details of the key man who debriefed Curveball:

The case officer stood straight-backed and tall … already in his late 50s he had spied for Germany across Africa in the 1980s … He was most fluent in the pitiless vernacular of spying: he used dishonest means – theft, lies, blackmail, and worse – to get at the truth. Even at the BND, most people knew Ahmed's [Curveball's] chief case officer only by his cover-name, Schumann … Schumann's special skill was persuading informants to talk.

All false, he said. Schumann did not exist. There was no such case officer. Everyone had known who handled Curveball and it was no one like that.

‘
Schumann was lost. What did it all mean? He was neither an engineer nor a microbiologist.
'

‘In fact his debriefer, “Dr Peter” [not his real name], was a trained scientist, [with] a PhD.'

‘
… broken English…'

‘No, Curveball spoke English. His university courses were in English.'

‘
… they ran concealed tape recorders and video cameras…'

‘The BND had no secret recordings and no transcripts.'

To criticize Bob Drogin for his mistakes was to miss the point. Without his original scoop, published in the
Los Angeles Times,
which had alerted the world to the con, we might never have heard of Curveball at all. What mattered was not so much the literary techniques he used to tell his story, but more – as Drogin himself suggested in an interview – that the full truth about events in intelligence rarely emerges at the first telling. I asked Drogin if, in an account of intelligence failures, there was ‘an irony in the literary approach where you fill in the blanks'. He said he did not see it that way. ‘I never, ever expected that my book would be the last word: unthinkable.' He pointed to the example of Agent Zigzag, the British wartime double agent whose story took seventy-five years to emerge. There were errors too, he said, in the best-seller
Black Hawk Down
by Mark Bowden, which missed bin Laden's role in training the men who shot down the helicopter, he said.

When he was researching the book, the civil war in Iraq was at its worst and no spy had yet confessed to their role in the US invasion that started the conflict. ‘I was trying to unravel a story that involved a congenital liar. It involved intelligence agencies that lie as a part of their mission, politicians that had no reason to be honest about what happened, and documents that, even if I got access to them, would be wrong.'

Drogin agreed that his account's biggest gap was the ‘criminal' way Curveball was handled by German intelligence. Because where his imaginative sections had misled was in conjuring the idea of a con man that had defeated the efforts of sharp interrogators led by a handler ‘
fluent in the pitiless vernacular of spying
'. And it is at that ground level, not in some Washington intrigue, where the lie was born.

*   *   *

It has long been a widely held view that the Iraq intelligence failure was the result of a plot in Washington and London to embellish the case for a war that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair were determined to fight regardless. In this view, the overall case that Saddam Hussein had been hiding weapons of mass destruction was a fabrication, woven together by systematically exaggerating the accounts of agents like Curveball. ‘It wasn't intelligence, it was propaganda,' said Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired lieutenant-colonel who, at the time of the Iraq War, was a Pentagon analyst. ‘They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together.'
4
In the US, this plot to cow the intelligence establishment was said to have been directed by Vice-President Dick Cheney, whom
The Economist
had already labelled – before he took office – ‘the power behind the throne'.
5
Britain's famously cautious spymasters were, in turn, said to have been bullied into submission by Blair's own Cardinal Richelieu, his press secretary, Alastair Campbell. BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan quoted inside sources who claimed that the intelligence dossier about weapons of mass destruction made public by Britain had been ‘sexed-up'. A headline in a newspaper article by Gilligan read: ‘I asked my intelligence source why Blair misled us all over Saddam's WMD. His response? One word … CAMPBELL.'
6
(In their defence, both Cheney and Campbell denied distorting any facts, but defended their right and duty, as senior officials, to pose challenging questions to intelligence agencies and hold them to account, when appropriate.)

The extent of intelligence manipulation became plain, said critics, in the infamous ‘Downing Street memo', marked ‘UK Eyes Only', which was written on 23 July 2002 by Tony Blair's private secretary, Matthew Rycroft. It was a record of a meeting chaired by Blair and in it Rycroft wrote, ‘This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.' He then went on to quote ‘C', as Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of SIS, was known: ‘C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. 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.'

Dearlove later corrected Rycroft's minutes at the time of the memo's circulation. He asked Rycroft to remove the phrase about fixing intelligence. But to many Dearlove had – wittingly or not – confirmed the broader picture. By rallying convenient facts and half-truths, the senior leadership of the American intelligence apparatus had become stooges for Cheney and his boss, Bush, sacrificing their integrity to persuade a gullible public to accept the war they were determined to launch, regardless.

The official WMD Commission reached a softer, though also damning, conclusion. It alleged that the secret services were reckless with the truth. For instance, on biological weapons, the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which had given Curveball his code name and handled his intelligence, had ‘abdicated responsibility' to vet a crucial source, they said. The CIA's analysts, meanwhile, had emphasized what Curveball reported over and above other intelligence because the tales he told ‘were consistent with what they already believed'. Intelligence chiefs were also faulted for failing ‘to tell policymakers about Curveball's flaws in the weeks before war'.
7