The New Spymasters (28 page)

Henceforth, Asim would be known to the public as the anonymous agent F1. (Although he was known by his real identity to the accused in Barcelona, and his name was given to the court and later published in certain places, it is prohibited to publish his full name under Spanish law.)

The case caused a row between France and Spain. France wanted to know why Asim's cover was blown so easily. Was it necessary for security forces to storm in so urgently after the phone call to thwart the operation? Whatever the rights and wrongs, the case would underline the difficulty of acting on a spy's information without revealing his existence and so ending his operational life.

When the alleged plotters were later brought to court, the case also showed the clash between secret methods and criminal justice. The police case depended on what Asim described, but he was a flawed witness. There was too much he could not say in open court. His story of a conscience-stricken phone call to his police friend was unconvincing and seemed like a lie to avoid having to disclose that he had been an agent all along. If he confessed to being a long-term agent, he might have betrayed other ongoing or previous operations. But concealing it had another consequence: namely, restricting the other alleged plotters' legal defence. If he was a self-confessed agent, defence lawyers could have demanded information about what the authorities knew in advance and made the case that the defendants had been set up.

*   *   *

Asim detailed later what Maulana Shahid explained about the plot. Shahid told him that Baitullah Mehsud himself had made the decision to upgrade Asim's job from bomb-maker to suicide bomber. This was supposed to be an honour. There would be four martyrs. Asim and Mohamed Imran Cheema, the first pair, were to attack the metro. The second pair were to be Mehmood Khalid and Mohamed Shoaib, though it was not clear whether they would target the metro, or trains or buses.

Shahid had brought a white plastic bag. He took it up to the mosque's library with Asim and Maroof. Behind some books they found a black bag. Both bags contained some grey powder.

Shahid took some powder, rubbed it on his fingers and explained to Maroof, ‘The quality is not so good. If something bad happens, I am responsible.'

‘Don't worry. I think this powder is OK. Even if it's bad, we can go and get the new and best one.'

Maroof told the group they should take the powder and some computers to another mosque. First, everyone gathered in the courtyard, where they said a special prayer to bless their forthcoming sacrifice. Emotions ran high and Maroof prayed, ‘Please, God, accept our sacrifice. We are giving away our lives.'

Maroof, by Asim's account, ordered everyone – a group of twelve – to move out of the Tariq bin Ziyad mosque and head for the Tablighi Jamaat movement's other mosque, near Barcelona's Jaume I metro station. It was known as the Mezquita an-Nour (the mosque of light). It had a second floor where visiting Tablighi Jamaat preachers could cook and eat. Each of the group carried a rucksack and they were told to move in pairs. ‘All the people together is too dangerous,' said Maroof.

The new mosque was small. According to Asim, Maroof told the suicide bombers to go upstairs and sleep while the cell leaders, the
maulanas,
stayed below. He said they were going to do some work on their computers, but Asim believed their real intention was to begin assembling the bombs. When the bombs were ready they would launch the attack.

‘When we slept that night, I didn't know if it was going to be the next day, the morning or evening. Only Maulana Maroof knows. They were going to start bomb-making and we don't know what time it will be ready and we have to go into the metro.'

At ten minutes to midnight, members of Spain's elite Unidad Especial de Intervención (Special Intervention Unit) raided the mosque and arrested fourteen men, two of whom were later released without charge. When an officer tried to arrest one of the Pakistanis in the group, Abdul Hafeez Ahmed, whom the police considered the lead bomb-maker, he resisted strongly and was said to have told the arresting officer, ‘In my country, I have killed many policemen like you.'
16

*   *   *

As news of the arrests broke, it was greeted with both excitement and alarm in Spain. ‘A great al-Qaeda terrorist attack aborted', reported
El Periódico de Catalunya.
17
Judge Baltasar Garzón, then Spain's most celebrated anti-terrorism magistrate, said that those arrested were ‘ready to go into action as terrorists in Spain'. The plot had come as a surprise, but it confirmed that jihadis from Pakistan were the biggest emerging threat in Europe. According to Garzón, ‘Pakistan is an ideological and training hotbed for jihadists, and they are being exported here.' In the US, the plot was taken seriously too. Mike McConnell, then director of US National Intelligence, told a congressional committee, ‘We had twenty terrorists show up in Spain that had been trained in Pakistan that were going to be suicide bombers, fanning out over Europe.'
18

The French were not happy, however. The Associated Press news agency reported that counterterrorism teams in France had expressed ‘astonishment' about the way Spanish authorities had handled the case. The French ‘were furious that the use of their agent appeared in Spanish media, and that authorities had decided to make him a “protected witness”'.
19
While that protected status kept F1's name secret for now, the revelation of such a witness had telegraphed to the members of an alleged terrorist group both the existence of an agent and, without too much thought, his identity. Until then, it was suggested, the plotters had thought F1 was one of them. ‘Spain's handling of the French informant has enraged officials at France's intelligence agencies and eroded trust between the countries,' the
New York Times
reported, quoting French and other European officials. ‘The informant's value as a source was destroyed when he was made a prosecution witness and the contents of his statements were leaked to the news media.'
20

It is often hard to decide when to act on intelligence, and even harder if the intelligence warns of a deadly plot. Acting too early may expose the informant or pre-empt the collection of sufficient evidence to convict the criminals. But acting too late could mean that people die. As the Spanish prosecutor González Mota explained, ‘Suicide attacks don't allow for a lot of margin to make a decision. Acting after an attack would be a tragedy.'
21
Particularly in democracies, where political leaders fear being held accountable, the security services will allow few active plots they discover to continue for long if there is any risk of people being killed as a consequence. ‘In counterterrorism, intelligence is subordinate to action,' said a former SIS officer. The murderous intent of terror groups means any plan to use an agent for long-term intelligence collection is regularly pushed aside.

But were the Barcelona plotters – if that is what they were – so close to striking? Interior Minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba admitted to ‘doubts' about how close the cell had been to executing their attack.
22
Was the cover of a very rare and precious spy blown for nothing?

*   *   *

A British intelligence official described a trip he had made to Israel at some time in the 2000s. The chief of Mossad had told the official he was getting complaints: ‘Life as a spy is getting so boring. We all have to live like Muslims!' A whole new generation of Mossad officers were doing all they could to walk, talk and think like their enemy. Not only was the routine of constant prayer, study of the Koran and abstinence from both alcohol and casual sex something of a drawback, but a number of experienced spymasters questioned if such efforts would achieve much.

Ever since the attacks of September 2001, political leaders across the Western world had been handing over cheques for billions to their spy agencies and they were now pestering the spy chiefs, wanting to know if they had anyone inside al-Qaeda. As the senior CIA operative had said, both insiders and outsiders wondered if a ‘man on the rock' next to bin Laden might have prevented 9/11. But was it even possible now to recruit such a spy or was it too late?

In London in 2008, the former chief of SIS Sir Richard Dearlove argued at a Whitehall think-tank meeting that the recruitment of spies was becoming harder because the ‘war on terror' had changed the very nature of the spy game. For instance, in times gone by, the starting point of getting a spy inside any organization was to obtain a list of its members. ‘We used to prize internal telephone directories. They were a key to understanding an organization's structure,' he said.

As former intelligence officers explained to me, while the rudimentary step for an agent of getting a phone directory may have been an apparently trivial act of spying, it took the agent over an invisible line of betrayal; it was a small compromise from which it was hard to turn back. And, as Dearlove pointed out, the phone directory was of intrinsic interest. It allowed a spy agency to map the hierarchy of its adversary. But what was the equivalent of al-Qaeda's telephone directory? The absurdity of the question, Dearlove said, was a measure of how the intelligence world had been shaken up.

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda was headed by a shura, a council with a defined membership that, for example, approved or rejected proposals for major terrorist attacks. Below this ruling shura was a series of subcommittees that organized media activities, finance, military planning, etc.

But as Western agencies got al-Qaeda in their sights, it was as if the organization began to vanish. The so-called Global War on Terror had disrupted al-Qaeda, replacing a centralized terror group with an alliance splintered into interconnected but independent parts. That made al-Qaeda harder than ever to penetrate.

Even before 9/11, al-Qaeda operated franchises. Methods, rules and objectives were mostly public, and satellite groups could make their own choice of targets and time to attack. Islamic terrorists were like a ‘flock of birds' that was ‘coming together and dispersing apparently spontaneously', with a collapsed hierarchy and no permanent relationships, Dearlove explained to the think tank. Within a modern terror group, individuals were expendable. That meant an agent inside had only a very short time in which to gather useful information. There was no clear hierarchy to ascend and penetrate. And, as happened with F1, a recruit might even be expected to volunteer for a suicide mission.

This transient structure called into question whether serious penetration of the movement was either possible or indeed useful. It meant that intelligence might be good for just a few days, or even hours. That was because not only did people and plots change constantly but also, since there was little requirement to consult others, the precise details of any attack or plot might not be decided, let alone communicated to anyone else, until the very final stages.

Spy agencies were used to thinking long-term, a legacy of the Cold War. If it took five years to develop a good agent in the KGB, for example, it might take another five years to steer that same mole into a position in the KGB where he might access important secrets. Likewise in Northern Ireland, an IRA recruit working for the British could take years to become a trusted member of an active service unit. And throughout this period the organization would be testing the recruit's loyalty. This made penetration difficult but also highly rewarding. Once his loyalty had been proved and he had been steered into a useful position, he could acquire knowledge about people, strategy and plans that might be relevant for years ahead.

Getting a source in that kind of position was much rarer now. According to Dearlove, human intelligence was fast becoming a dying art; the type of spying practised and refined for centuries simply did not work any longer. Human intelligence was ‘being undermined because of the difficulty of recruitment of sources'. Instead, he said, we should learn to live with widespread electronic surveillance. ‘In this new environment, what you need is access to data flows', such as Internet chat rooms, emails, telephones, the banking system, emigration and immigration records, travel bookings – all of which need to be analysed with sophisticated computer capability.

He was implying that if it was impossible to penetrate a terror group and find out who was really a threat, then the whole of society might have to be monitored intensively in such a way that suspicious patterns of behaviour could be identified early. We might have to accept a much greater invasion of our privacy.

This was an intriguing analysis. But while he had given a good explanation of why old-style spying was not effective against these new targets, he did not explain why spying could not be done differently. Instead, it was a description of a failure to adapt.

The transient structure of militant Islam certainly demanded a nimbler and more flexible form of spying that was far removed from the painstaking efforts of former times. After 9/11, British secret services tried very hard to get their eyes and ears inside the mosques. MI5 and local police forces all started to recruit informers to sit through sermons and warn about any group of extremists that was beginning to form inside a mosque, or in some more informal place of worship. But, as the spy chief had predicted, the success mostly came not from spying but from the use of the standard counterintelligence techniques: surveillance and interception of communications.

That was not the whole story, though. Little by little, the secret services were teaching themselves to operate in a new, more efficient way, as well as learning the vulnerabilities of the jihadi cells and how to penetrate them. If they could not get to the top or run an agent inside for extended periods, at least they could place the agent far enough inside to gather some useful information.