Terry Crowdy - The Enemy Within: A History of Espionage

A HISTORY OF ESPIONAGE

FOR SARAH

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction

The common reading of Newtons 1687 Law of Reciprocal Actions

I n 2001 the world was confronted with the most appalling terrorist attack to date. Islamic terrorists crashed two hijacked passenger jets into the Twin Towers World Trade Center in New York City. Another hijacked jet slammed into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. A fourth flight came down in a Pennsylvanian field. It was a tragedy too big for words.

As the numbness of shock wore away, parallels were quickly drawn with the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Considering the hundreds of billions of dollars the United States spends on defence each year, people wondered if anything more could have been done to prevent the attack. More pertinently, had any indication of an attack been given by the intelligence agencies? The answer was, unfortunately, yes.

Long before the attacks, Americas Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had warned that Saudi-born Osama bin Ladens network of Islamic jihadists were planning to attack the United States. On 4 December 1998, the CIA included an article in its Presidential Daily Brief describing how bin Laden and his cohorts were planning operations. The report claimed two members of a terror cell had made a dummy run of an attack at a New York airport, successfully evading security checks. More ominously, they reported that other members of bin Ladens network were receiving hijack training. If all this was known before 11 September, why hadnt the CIA reacted more effectively?

A large part of the answer lies in the somewhat chequered history of the CIA. Although a Cold War invention, the CIAs roots began in World War II, with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was established in 1942. OSS proved itself every bit as capable as the British secret services it worked alongside. For example, OSS agents discovered that Germany was secretly obtaining vital ball bearings from Sweden after the Allies had destroyed its factories. The United States was then able to put diplomatic pressure on Sweden to halt the sales. One of its biggest coups was the recruitment of the spy George Wood in fact Fritz Kolbe an official in the German Foreign Office. Kolbe supplied thousands of documents and reported on the development of the V1 and V2 flying bombs and the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter. In addition to espionage, OSS also set a precedent for US overseas covert intervention. Perhaps less wisely in the long term, OSS provided aid and training to Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh in the war against Japan, despite warnings not to do so by France and China.

At the end of World War II, the OSS was disbanded amid allegations of its becoming an American Gestapo. However, recognising the need for such a service, President Truman ordered the creation of the CIA in 1947. The Company as CIA operatives refer to their agency is independent of all other government agencies and performs a mixture of clandestine missions and espionage on behalf of the US president. In the course of its history it has become no stranger to scandals, the culmination of which hampered its performance in the lead up to the 11 September attacks.

The first major scandal came with the 1961 Bay of Pigs affair. The CIA trained and equipped an army of Cuban exiles to overthrow Fidel Castros communist regime, which had come to power in 1959. The operation was a fiasco and brought down the CIA boss Allen Dulles. In retaliation, Castro invited the Soviets to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba, which brought about the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Many believe that President Kennedys handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion he would not authorize supporting air strikes led to his assassination in 1963. There is a long held, but unsubstantiated, theory that the assassination was a mafia hit; crime bosses being unhappy at losing gambling and drug rackets in Havana.

After the involvement of ex-CIA agents in the 1972 Watergate break-ins and following a series of allegations against the agency, a Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church began investigating the alleged abuses of law committed by US intelligence agencies. It was revealed that the CIA had made attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of the Congo and Fidel Castro. These attempts included the use of a poisoned wetsuit and exploding cigars. After the findings were presented, in 1976 President Ford issued an Executive Order banning the assassination of foreign leaders. In the 1980s the CIA again came under fire, this time for its Central American covert action programmes, its association with drug-runners and for running a private war in Angola. Shaky morale reached its nadir when in the early 1990s CIA officer Aldrich Ames was convicted of spying for the Soviets.

At the end of the Cold War, the CIA found itself on unfamiliar ground. There were big financial and personnel cuts, and as the number of agents declined, so the missions they faced became more varied. Agents found themselves shifted from crisis to crisis one minute in the Balkans, the next in Africa. Certain corners of the world, however, were not covered at all. When it came to the Middle East, the CIA had a major problem recruiting and found itself relying on allies like Saudi Arabia for intelligence. More fundamentally, there was a sense that everything the CIA touched was bound to become a scandal in the eyes of Congress and the media. The CIA became wary of undertaking missions without a complete paper trail leading back to Washington with good legal justification for its involvement. In short, the agency would not take risks at a time when risks probably should have been taken.

Following al-Qaedas 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the Clinton administration felt bin Laden could be taken out as a justifiable act of self-defence. The CIA had already been looking to kidnap bin Laden from his Afghan base and bring him to trial in the United States before the 1998 bombings. A CIA-backed tribal group began planning the operation and mapping out bin Ladens HQ. In 1997 there was a report of an ambush by tribesmen against bin Laden on a road near Kandahar, but the operation failed because of poor tactics on behalf of the ambushing party.

When CIA Director George Tenet revealed that bin Laden was attending a gathering of up to 200 jihadists at a remote camp in Afghanistan, Clinton gave the green light to attack. Not willing to risk ground forces, on the evening of 20 August 1998, 75 Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched at the terrorist camp. At the same time, 13 more Tomahawks were fired at the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum which was thought to have links with al-Qaeda. An Egyptian agent had told the CIA that a soil sample from the vicinity of the plant had tested positive for a chemical related to the production of VX nerve gas. In the wake of the 1995 Tokyo subway Sarin attack, Washington feared bin Laden might be planning something similar.

Although the United States had responded to the embassy bombings, the attacks fell short of their objectives. The Sudanese government invited journalists to visit the al-Shifa plant and were shown an apparently harmless facility. No independent evidence of the CIAs nerve gas claim could be found. Worse, bin Laden survived the American attack and was seen by many in the Arab world as a hero for having done so. In fact he was probably tipped off before the attack. To reach targets in Afghanistan, the cruise missiles had to pass through Pakistan airspace. US planners feared Pakistan might think the missiles had been fired by India and retaliate. After giving Pakistan advance notice of the attack, it appears that details were leaked to bin Ladens Taliban hosts by Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID) then believed to be the Talibans primary patron.