The New Spymasters (31 page)

The Sunni radical movement that morphed, among other incarnations, into al-Qaeda had, as a whole, a prolonged experience of contact with intelligence services. Among the junior ranks of militant Islam – the fresh recruits destined to wear the suicide vests, for example – though plenty were paranoid about spies in their midst, most were ignorant about spycraft. Many were ‘clean skins', meaning there was no intelligence on file about them, and so had little first-hand knowledge of the intelligence services. The senior veterans were different; their lifetime's struggle had been defined by their stand against different agencies of state security, with whom they had often come into direct contact. Much of what passes for jihadi philosophy had been conceived in the torture chambers and dungeons of the Middle East secret police. (One of the most influential thinkers of political Islam, Sayyid Qutb, wrote his 1964 jihadist manifesto,
Ma'alim fi-l-Tariq
(Milestones), while in the custody of Egyptian State Security and incarcerated in Al Aqrab, the feared Scorpion prison in Cairo.) The violent tactics of the Salafists, those like Qutb and, later, members of al-Qaeda who looked back to the early life of the Prophet Muhammad as inspiration for their politics, developed from these experiences. Secret terrorist cells developed as weapons of resistance to this secret state power in societies where open political opposition was prohibited. And the relationship with the spymaster was not just repressive. At different times, militant groups were actively supported by or at least tolerated by the state. Because of the violent nature of these groups, contact with the state needed to remain secret and was therefore invariably handled by intelligence operatives.

The very top of al-Qaeda had extensive experience of such a relationship. Contrary to the conspiracy theory, Osama bin Laden, its leader, was never funded or supported by the CIA. But, as a financier of Arab fighters in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, bin Laden for a long time had dealings with the Saudi GIP. As Steve Coll, his family's biographer, recorded, ‘Prince Turki [the former GIP chief] and other Saudi intelligence officials said years later that bin Laden was never a professional Saudi intelligence agent. Still, while the exact character and timeline of his dealings [with GIP] remain uncertain, it seems clear that bin Laden did have a substantial relationship with Saudi intelligence.'
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According to Coll, some in the CIA later concluded that ‘bin Laden operated as a semi-official liaison' between the Saudi GIP, international Islamist religious networks and ‘the leading Saudi-backed Afghan commanders'.
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In other words, although secret services might find it hard to penetrate Islamist networks, it was not because they had ever lacked contact or access to them. Before they headed for the mountains, these radical groups had emerged from a wider struggle that, from its inception, had been alternately monitored and encouraged, inspired and repressed, by the secret services. The story of the West versus al-Qaeda is one of an almost continuous confrontation with secret agencies. This did not occur only in the Middle East. A normal American or European citizen might never come across MI5 or the FBI. But a militant Islamist could come across them when he was stopped at the borders, or called into the embassy for a ‘few questions', or received an early-morning knock on the door. Those who fought on the front line often got to meet their enemy.

But if they had some experience of the spymasters, did the militants have much skill at running spies themselves? Few really knew for sure. Volunteers for al-Qaeda were certainly expected to behave a little like spies, at least when they operated in the West. When they took their
bayat
(oath) they were sworn into a secret society and the terrorist shared the secret agent's need to be covert. While preparing for an attack, a jihadi needed to blend in with normal society, or at least manage well enough to avoid attention. As Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi had explained to Nasiri in Afghanistan, they might also have to collect information like spies:

We must fight the Zionists efficiently … We need brothers who can live among them, who can watch them, surveil them. We need blueprints and photos of their clubs, their synagogues, their banks, their consulates … We can't just send anyone to do this job … We need a brother who can resist all temptation, and remain pure in himself while he lives amongst the kafir. We need someone with unlimited resources of patience and determination.
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Apart from the need for operational security, al-Qaeda demonstrated early on its awareness of the need for good counterintelligence. As far back as the late 1990s the widely circulated ‘Jihad Manual' warned about the spies favoured by the US. One section read:

Types of Agents Preferred by the American Intelligence Agency [CIA]:

1. Foreign officials who are disenchanted with their country's policies and are looking towards the U.S. for guidance and direction.

2. The ideologist (who is in his country but against his government) is considered a valuable catch and a good candidate for American Intelligence Agency [CIA].

3. Officials who have a lavish lifestyle and cannot keep up using their regular wages, or those who have weaknesses for women, other men, or alcoholic beverages. The agent who can be bought using the aforementioned means is an easy target, but the agent who considers what he does a noble cause is difficult to recruit by enemy intelligence.

4. For that purpose, students and soldiers in Third World countries are considered valuable targets. Soldiers are the dominating and controlling elements of those countries.
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Al-Qaeda's targets for recruiting their own spies were listed in the same document as:

1. smugglers;

2. those seeking political asylum;

3. adventurers;

4. workers at coffee shops, restaurants, and hotels;

5. people in need;

6. employees at borders, airports, and seaports.

But it warned: ‘Recruiting agents is the most dangerous task that an enlisted brother can perform. Because of this dangerous task, the brother may be killed or imprisoned. Thus, the recruitment task must be performed by special types of members.'
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A more authoritative al-Qaeda study on intelligence techniques was written in October 2006 by someone described by counterterrorism researchers at the US Military Academy, West Point, as al-Qaeda's spymaster.
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In his 152-page pamphlet, ‘The Myth of Delusion', Muhammad Khalil al-Hakaymah demonstrated avid reading of publicly available material about weaknesses in US human intelligence. He explained why both the FBI and the CIA had trouble finding reliable agents: the agencies' shortages of Arabic translators and operatives, how older intelligence professionals had been driven out by younger, more ideological officers, and how overdependence on the polygraph (a lie-detecting machine) as well as excessive security measures had hindered recruitment.

Al-Hakaymah failed to predict the coming drone war. He warned that the greatest intelligence threat to al-Qaeda was penetration by spies rather than by technology. He wanted al-Qaeda to ready its defences. According to him, in the old days Western spies came disguised as ‘businessmen, journalists or clergy' but the New Spies, after all the lessons learned from 9/11, would ‘closely and literally imitate the operating system of the Islamic Jihadist groups'. It was a new Great Game (my words), with ‘young officers seeking adventure and risk to their lives, wearing Islamic costumes and practicing the rite of the Muslims if necessary to protect their cover by melting into Arab and Islamic societies'.
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Three years after al-Hakaymah wrote his article, there was no sign that any such penetration by Western agents had really materialized. The CIA was not getting even close. Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri eluded capture and a sanctuary remained for Islamists in the mountains of Pakistan, in most of Somalia and parts of Yemen. Nevertheless, al-Qaeda was starting to lose momentum. Not only had key operational leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohamed (the suspected architect of 9/11) been captured and imprisoned, the organization was showing its political ineptness. It haemorrhaged popular support due to what many fellow radical Muslims saw as its relentless focus on ‘martyrdom operations' (suicide attacks), in which other Muslims, particularly in Iraq and Pakistan, were the usual victims.

Al-Hakaymah recognized what was occurring and that al-Qaeda's greatest danger was itself. In another article, ‘Towards a New Strategy in Resisting the Occupier', he encouraged listening to public opinion and criticized mass casualty attacks that killed Muslim civilians.

However, not all jihadi thinkers were dismayed by the bloodshed. Activists like Humam revelled in it. One of his idols was fellow Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the human butcher who led al-Qaeda in Iraq on a murderous wave of hostage-taking, videoed beheadings and indiscriminate car bombs. In 2005, al-Zarqawi's supporters had mounted a triple suicide attack on luxury hotels in Amman that left sixty dead. A year later he too was dead, killed in a targeted strike by US forces.

Just before Humam was arrested, he had dreamed of al-Zarqawi frequently. In these dreams he would see al-Zarqawi in his house. Humam asked him, ‘Aren't you dead?' and al-Zarqawi replied, ‘I was killed, but I am as you see me, alive.' As Humam remembered it, ‘His face was like a full moon, and he was busy, as if he was getting ready for an operation. I wished I could take him to a secure place, and take him out in my car, and I also wished that we could be bombed so we could be killed together.'
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The al-Qaeda propagandist al-Hakaymah was dead now too. In 2008, he had travelled back from a sanctuary in Iran to join his brothers on the front line in north-west Pakistan. The US was offering a million dollars as a bounty for his death or capture, but in November 2008 he was killed in a drone strike in northern Waziristan. Technology was catching up.

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Two months after his arrest in Jordan, Humam caught a plane to Pakistan and began his real-life spy mission. He had told his family (all except his younger brother) that he was travelling to Turkey to take some exams. Over the course of his eight-hour journey, flying via Dubai, he could reflect back on a hectic last few weeks.

When he had returned from interrogation, he seemed to his family a quiet, broken man. ‘Did they beat you?' his father asked. ‘No,' Humam replied. ‘They humiliated me.'
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At night, Humam began cautiously slipping out to meet with someone he knew as Abu Zeid, his new GID handler. Abu Zeid's real name was Sharif Ali bin Zeid al-Aoun. He was no ordinary intelligence officer but a member of the Hashemite royal family, the rulers of Jordan. A former intern with US Senator John Kerry and an alumnus of Boston University, bin Zeid was a highly Westernized fluent English speaker. He had also become friends with a CIA officer recently stationed in Amman, Darren LaBonte, who had previously served as an Army Ranger and later with the FBI. The two had both married that year and their wives, Fida and Racheal, socialized together. To the CIA, bin Zeid seemed like one of Jordan's best. They constantly sought him out for advice and as a trusted liaison with the GID. But was he the right man to handle Humam?

To the slim, ascetic and conservative Palestinian, the intelligence officer must have looked like a polar opposite. Bin Zeid was rather overweight and affluent, driving round in an expensive 4x4. During the days after Humam's release, bin Zeid took him to smart restaurants to chat. The bills totalled over $70 per visit – an extravagance in Amman. He took Humam to the glitzy Safeway superstore and bought him up to $400 worth of groceries for his family. Was he being tempted by this taste of the lifestyle that could be his if he cooperated? Or was Humam just swallowing his feelings of repulsion?

During their chats, bin Zeid outlined the benefits of being a spy. If Humam went to the ‘land of jihad' and helped to capture or kill a top al-Qaeda target, his reward would be huge. ‘They tried to entice me with money and offered me amounts reaching into the millions of dollars according to the man being targeted, particularly the leaders of Qaida al-Jihad in the Land of Khorasan … these weren't mere empty promises.'
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Although it is hard to know what he really felt, Humam would speak dismissively later about his GID handler, claiming, ‘The intelligence officer was an idiot.' Bin Zeid was proposing a mission to the very place that Humam had been longing to go to, albeit for different reasons. ‘The amazing thing which I could hardly believe is that I had been trying to mobilize to Jihad in Allah's path but had been unsuccessful. Then this idiotic man comes along and proposes that I go to the fields of Jihad. All praise is due to Allah … it was a dream come true!'
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So, on a March day, Humam walked down the steps of the plane in the frontier city of Peshawar. He was entering what had become one of the world's greatest hotspots for intrigue and espionage. As an Arab, he would have been conspicuous. The local secret police were on the lookout for foreigners who were arriving in large numbers to train for and partake in ‘jihad'. Everything these Arab fighters did spelled trouble for Pakistan. (While, in the CIA's view, the ISI gave concrete support to the Afghan Taliban, foreign fighters linked to al-Qaeda were mortal enemies of the Pakistan state.) But as a trained medical doctor, Humam had a good cover story, with a convincing account of what he was doing in these parts. The Jordanian GID had provided him with money, paid for his ticket and helped him to forge the documents he needed for his Pakistani visa.
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Humam probably crossed town, like most people did, in a three-wheeled motorized rickshaw. His destination was the crowded Kabuli market, where buses set off for the tribal areas along the border. These were supposed to be closed to foreigners like him, but he caught a bus to Kohat, a gateway town to the tribal areas, then went onwards into North Waziristan, the principal sanctuary of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And then he disappeared. Had he been arrested? Or killed? Or was he too scared to perform his mission? From March until August, his handler, Ali bin Zeid, and Darren LaBonte of the CIA, could only wonder. He would not have been the first agent sent into the frontier region to vanish without a trace.