The New Spymasters (40 page)

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It was in 2013, almost a decade since Crooke had left the British secret service, that I took the thirty-minute hop by plane from Cyprus to visit him in the Lebanese capital, Beirut.

Kim Philby had come here when he first left SIS. Employed as a correspondent for the
Observer,
he had remained nearly seven years before defecting to the Soviet Union in January 1963. On my way to meet Crooke, I walked down the battered cornice to the marina, past the boarded up King George Hotel, where Philby used to get drunk on whisky every afternoon.

Crooke's haunt was the Albergo, a boutique hotel in a district controlled by the Lebanese Forces militia. Unlike Philby, his afternoon drink was non-alcoholic: a fresh mint and hot water, brewed in a silver teapot. Philby had come to escape his past. Crooke, though, was adamantly sticking to his path. Having become embroiled in Palestine and the Middle East, he refused to be retired. Far from betraying his cause, he was adamantly sticking to it.

After leaving SIS, he had founded a non-government group, the Conflicts Forum. It held meetings and created channels for dialogue between, on the one hand, influential Western thinkers and policymakers and, on the other, leaders of militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, even if they were designated as terrorists. He was not trying to start private negotiations, he argued, but rather to help build understanding and manage expectations on both sides.

I wrote a magazine article about one such gathering he organized in Lebanon headlined ‘Mint Tea with the Terrorists'. It had a few trite lines that were later endlessly quoted back at Crooke. ‘Invited to dinner with the participants in the Beirut talks, and sharing jokes with the Hamas men over tiger prawns, avocado, pasta and cherry tomatoes, I wondered privately how one would explain all this intimacy to the mother of a child killed by a suicide bomber.' I was surprised Crooke saw me again. But, as my article had hinted, in fostering contacts with militants, some commentators and ex-colleagues argued that he sometimes appeared to be crossing the fine line between encouraging the West to understand Hamas and being an advocate for them.

My interest in coming to Beirut this time, however, was less to discuss the merits of this public dialogue and more to do with the value of the kind of officially sanctioned dialogue he had once conducted for the British government and the EU. While it was hardly surprising that the secret services were used if a government wanted clandestine talks with a violent group, did this discreet diplomacy have anything to do with gathering intelligence? And what, I wanted to know, was its connection with spying?

Since the early twentieth century, spying has been almost a synonym for betrayal and, except in wartime or dire emergency, the secret services of powerful countries have rarely used their own intelligence officers as spies, preferring generally to hire agents. But the tradition that Crooke in Palestine and Mark Allen in Libya represented was an older form of spying, more akin to an explorer's journey, where the intelligence officer spoke directly to his enemy or potential enemy. Crooke argued that it was often more profitable to act in good faith and be open. Although he did not say it, in such an approach the spy was the intelligence officer, spying the land himself. But he was neither betraying anyone nor trying to recruit someone to betray someone else. In Crooke's words, the conflation of intelligence with betrayal was ‘very problematic'.

As we talked over mint tea at the Albergo, Crooke ducked further elaboration about why it was problematic. He had no wish to debate espionage. Anyway, he insisted, the question of who was or was not a spy was overrated. How exactly a secret service collected intelligence was not so important. The bigger issue was what sort of intelligence they were after.

By his way of thinking, paraphrased, before 9/11 it would not have mattered whether the ‘man on the rock' next to bin Laden was a spy or a sort of emissary. In the 1990s what had been lacking was any real interest in and attention to the movement from which bin Laden emerged. ‘The thing is that no one made the effort. No one even tried to understand it.' Intelligence agencies had much to concern them. Not everyone could have been diverted to watching bin Laden and his ilk, but, said Crooke, the agencies did not ‘even have a basic institutional capacity to have a feel and understanding of it. They had no real element, no one who took the trouble to meet any of these people and understand them.'

As we spoke in Beirut, civil war raged in nearby Syria and once again, he said, the trouble was not finding sources of information, but rather finding anyone really interested in the roots of the conflict, who dared ‘in a risk-averse era' to be involved in human intelligence – whether through recruiting spies or the sort of dialogue-based engagement he favoured.

Meanwhile, he argued, too much store was set by technical spying, such as the interception of communications. ‘Really, I can't say anything too specific. But the inability of people sitting mostly in London or Washington to understand a conversation involving someone like an Islamist is extraordinary.' Part of the error was cultural understanding, but it was also conceptual – the addiction to wire taps and physical evidence ‘covered up the essential factor that intelligence, real intelligence that you get, is nearly always contradictory and episodic.' In other words, technical information provided false certainty and a sense of precision that human spies never could provide; but uncertainty was what filled real human life.

What of the question he avoided, the relationship between his secret dialogues and spying?

In practice, said other former intelligence officers, covert diplomacy was another part of secret service work and another form of HUMINT, but it was distinct from agent-running. ‘It is not so complicated. When it is in the national interests, we get tasked with these kinds of contacts,' said one former SIS officer. It was not a panacea and was frequently impossible. There was also a world of difference, such intelligence officers said, between Oleg Gordievsky, a real spy who betrayed the KGB and would have been shot if his contacts with SIS had been discovered, and a Hamas official who met the CIA, albeit secretly, with his organization's approval. One of those differences was that the secret agent was there to provide information that was adverse to his group's cause. But a liaison contact would never deliberately betray the detail of some secret plot.

More contact with al-Qaeda in the 1990s may have exposed bin Laden's agenda and perhaps more of his organization's broad strategy and strength. This could have helped forge a counter-strategy to undermine its appeal. But it would not have provided the kind of tactical information required to have discovered the specific 9/11 plot.

There was sometimes a blur. As we have seen, some of the best spies were recruited through real friendships with their recruiters. A liaison relationship could, over time, be turned into a betrayal. Conversely, some people labelled as ‘secret agents' by intelligence agencies were in effect a liaison with the enemy. This could be a way of testing the waters between two hostile powers. In Afghanistan, the former UN official Michael Semple, during his frequent discussions with senior Taliban leaders, heard them describe how agents that Western agencies often thought they had recruited within the Taliban were only talking after consulting widely within their own movement ‘and even their command chain'. Although these were hardly the relationships likely to yield precious secrets, Semple argued, they were often opportunities missed. ‘I believe people thought they were picking off individual traitors but actually their cooperation was far broader than they realized.' The Taliban had accepted various acts of probing. ‘But they hoped they would get something out of it. They weren't being suborned.' Western agencies, he said, while prepared to recruit ‘agents', had no political sanction for wider contacts with the Taliban. And, as the war dragged on, this left them short of understanding and with fewer options in the future. ‘I don't think there has been a long-term investment to ensure that on the Western side there were people who maintained long-term relationships with people sitting in strategic places inside the Taliban.'

Call him an explorer spy or a secret diplomat, the type of intelligence officer that Crooke had exemplified, or that Semple implied was missing in Afghanistan, was a complement but not an alternative, then, to his siblings, the traitor spy and his case officer. It was different work, but equally important.

And whether it was the job of a secret servant or not, Crooke's career demonstrated the nature of the work that needed doing – a gap that was there to be filled between the collection of specific secret intelligence and a government's ordinary diplomacy. And it was needed more than ever as increasing numbers of threats that could not be dealt with in ordinary ways emerged. In most places, an ambassador or his aides simply could not go and meet the leaders of a militant group without causing great offence to the host government or appearing to lend that group support. But the group might have global significance and need to be understood and engaged with. It was not necessary to spy on every non-state group that emerged in the world in some top-secret operation. But a modern spymaster might expect to be called upon to deal with problems like this more and more frequently.

Much of the engagement that both Crooke and Semple described was concerned with acquiring broader understanding – strategic rather than specific detailed intelligence. But, though it was an important component of human intelligence, Crooke questioned if intelligence services were even interested in this. He argued that too often intelligence had become a narrow craft aimed at providing only that specific piece of secret information, such as the location of some designated target, that assisted the government with its narrow policy. Increasingly now a ‘service provider', intelligence agencies were delivering on lists of what the ‘customer' wanted: whether it was delivering a message, confirming a prejudice or eliminating another target. ‘The pressure to perform produces error after error. People need statistics and want to tick the box about how many terrorists they have taken out.'

Crooke had been sacked, his ex-colleagues said, because he was too independent. It had been inevitable, some suggested. A secret service that promoted a different policy from its government was a rogue agency. And a secret servant who publicly lobbied for his own policy was a rogue officer. But while many disagreed with the stance Crooke was said to have taken, and also with some of his activities since his retirement, many shared his frustration at the narrow scope of contemporary human intelligence. What both Crooke and several other former insiders argued was that while political leaders should expect complete loyalty from their intelligence officers, they also needed ones who were free to think and challenge. The point of having spy agencies, and of human intelligence in general, was to have real people with deep insider knowledge of cultures and events abroad who could talk back, who could quietly correct a politician's misunderstanding of the world.

Crooke remained controversial in his former service. One former senior SIS officer said Crooke's view was skewed by his dismissal, but more importantly by improvements since the Iraq debacle. Another said that, before the fiasco over weapons of mass destruction, SIS had been both ‘unbearably arrogant' and too willing to exaggerate intelligence to please its paymasters, but since then it had become far more modest and objective in its approach. As politicians stoked the fires of rebellion in Syria in 2011 and 2012, SIS briefed many policymakers – to precious little effect – that this unrest could lead to decades of civil war. Its capacity to challenge was not entirely missing.

As the huge investment by the CIA in drone wars illustrated, the US intelligence world still had a strong ethos that spying was less about understanding the world and more about hunting bad people. And with no wish to understand the new militants, to enter into their mindset, the enemy's logic could be ‘dehumanized', as Crooke put it, and enemies could be picked off by assassination from the sky. The reasoning was, he said, that ‘they are not really human. Why should we try to understand them?' But the consequence of such thinking was a groundless self-confidence. And despite their assertions that al-Qaeda had somehow been suppressed, America would discover that ‘al-Qaeda' was just a name and that the same threat would be reborn in a different way, under a different name, and that its inspiration was ‘actually spreading much more widely everywhere'.

Chapter 11

Vaccination

‘It is well … for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through'

– Stanley Baldwin, House of Commons, 10 November 1932
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In April 2011, Shakil Afridi, a medical doctor in his forties, knocked on the big steel door of the compound. It was a peculiar place, about eight times larger than other homes in the area, with surrounding walls between twelve and eighteen feet high, and no phone or Internet connection.
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It stood out in Abbottabad, a highland military town north of Islamabad, Pakistan. No one around knew who lived inside, but the doctor planned to use a ruse to find out.

He was, as his name implied, an Afridi, the warrior tribe that controls the Khyber and Kohat mountain passes into Afghanistan. In 1878, during Britain's First Afghan War, a contingent of Afridi had blocked the Khyber Pass to oppose Britain's Army of Retribution, which was returning to reconquer Afghanistan after the massacre of the Kabul garrison. More recently, Shakil Afridi's grandfather had fought with the British Army in the First World War, winning a Victoria Cross for his bravery in the trenches at Ypres.

Today this Afridi had a new guise, as a secret agent for the CIA. When the door opened a crack, he announced that he was on a door-to-door vaccination mission and wanted to vaccinate any children in the household against hepatitis B. He in fact intended to get a sample of their blood, because the CIA hoped it was blood that would produce a DNA match with the most wanted man on the planet.