Fawaz Yunis, responsible for the hijacking in 1985 of a Royal Jordanian aircraft that was carrying four Americans. In 1987 Operation Goldenrod went into effect, in which, according to the court record, ‘Undercover FBI agents lured Yunis onto a yacht in the eastern Mediterranean Sea with promises of a drug deal, and arrested him once the vessel entered international waters.’ Yunis was sentenced to thirty years, of which he served sixteen and was then deported.
The most horrific terrorist incident prior to 9/11 was the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988. Despite a massive investigation by all the various intelligence agencies affected, there remains considerable doubt over exactly who was involved with this — Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, an agent for Libyan intelligence, the Jamahariya Security Organization, was found guilty in 2000, but until his death in 2012 persistently maintained his innocence (he only dropped his appeal against his sentence in exchange for being returned to Libya in 2009 when allegedly he only had weeks to live). Libya accepted responsibility for the explosion in 2003, but this may have been a method of gaining readmission to the international community. About all that the court in the Netherlands could say for certain was that ‘the cause of the disaster was the explosion of an improvised explosive device, that that device was contained within a Toshiba radio cassette player in a brown Samsonite suitcase along with various items of clothing, that that clothing had been purchased in Mary’s House, Sliema, Malta, and that the initiation of the explosion was triggered by the use of an MST-13 timer’. Even some of those findings have subsequently been thrown into doubt.
Initial investigations focused on the PFLP and Syrian involvement, particularly since the PFLP had warned in 1986 that ‘There will be no safety for any traveller on an Israeli or US airliner.’ One of their cells in Germany was working on similar — although not identical — bombs, and it is alternately possible that after the cell was arrested in October 1988, thanks to the efforts of a Jordanian spy who posed as their bomb maker, the PFLP bosses subcontracted the bombing to the Libyans in the same way that they used the Japanese Red Army at Lod. Former FBI Special Agent Richard A. Marquise, the Chief of Terrorist Research and Analytical Center at FBI headquarters in the eighties, noted in 2008: ‘Did Iran contract with the PFLP-GC? Probably! But it cannot be proven in court. Did Iran ask Libya and [Palestinian terrorist] Abu Nidal… Perhaps, but that too cannot be proven and never will be unless a reliable witness or two comes forward with documentary evidence.’
However, the major terrorist threat of the next twenty years, until the assassination of its leader in May 2011, was only just coalescing into existence when Pan Am 103 fell from the sky. Al-Qaeda was formed by the Saudi Arabian-born Osama bin Laden around 1988 from elements of the international Muslim brigades opposed to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. According to the 9/11 Commission, that investigated the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, bin Laden ‘built over the course of a decade a dynamic and lethal organization’ whose aims are simple: it wants to eliminate Western influence from Muslim countries, and dispose of what it regards as ‘corrupt’ regimes.
Bin Laden never made any secret of his aims: ‘The US knows that I have attacked it, by the grace of God, for more than 10 years now… Hostility toward America is a religious duty, and we hope to be rewarded for it by God,’ he told
In the early nineties, having been thrown out of Saudi Arabia, bin Laden moved to Sudan, where he set up training camps for warriors in a ‘jihad’. One of the first attacks linked to the group was that on the World Trade Center in 1993, when six people were killed and more than a thousand injured by a 500 kg bomb planted in the parking lot. Behind that attack was Ramzi Yousef, the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who in turn claimed to be the instigator of 9/11. (A British security expert based at the World Trade Center, Rick Rescorla, had reported that the parking lot was an obvious target for terrorists two years earlier; this was ignored, as was his subsequent report that the WTC would be attacked from the air. Rescorla lost his life escorting people out of the South Tower on 9/11.)
Al-Qaeda was linked to the downing of two Black Hawk helicopters in Somalia in 1993, as well as the June 1996 bomb at the Khobar Towers, an American military housing complex near Dhahran in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen Americans. Shortly before this, bin Laden moved from Sudan to Afghanistan and in September 1996, called on his followers to ‘launch a guerrilla war against American forces and expel the infidels from the Arabian Peninsula’. A further fatwa (an Islamic legal pronouncement) was issued on 22 February 1998, by bin Laden and four of his associates in the name of the ‘World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders’, calling for the killing of Americans, saying it is the ‘individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it’. Six months later, 225 people were killed, and over four thousand wounded, when bombs were driven into American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which led to airstrikes by the US against al- Qaeda positions in Afghanistan and Sudan. Bin Laden was indicted in the US courts for these attacks. In October 2000, two suicide attackers rammed a boat carrying explosives into the USS
Those weren’t the only attacks linked to al-Qaeda in the nineties by the world’s intelligence services. The 1992 bombing of the Gold Mihor Hotel in Aden and the Luxor Massacre of November 1997 were both al-Qaeda funded operations, while a triple strike planned for January 2000 was foiled by the arrest of the Jordanian cell responsible for one part; the destruction of a skiff planned to sink USS
All this came at a time when the role of the intelligence agencies worldwide was being questioned. The sudden and dramatic end of the Cold War had left many wondering if countries needed secret services such as the CIA or MI6. In Britain, it was decided that the existence of MI6 would be revealed publicly, which, as the then-head of service Sir Colin McColl pointed out, many believed would be the start of a ‘slippery slope… Our work is about trust; trust between government and people running the service; and the service and people all over the world working for it,’ he told a BBC Radio documentary celebrating a hundred years of MI6 in 2009. In the end, what the Intelligence Services Act in 1994 did was simply confirm the services’ existence, but didn’t go into any form of operational detail. A team of management consultants were brought into MI6, who slimmed the service down considerably.
Similar events were happening at MI5, with the first female Director-General, Stella Rimington, taking a much more public role. Consideration was given in 1994 to amalgamating the two services, but this was not implemented. A disaffected MI5 officer, David Shayler, tried to emulate Peter Wright with revelations about the service’s activities (even appearing on light-entertainment programme
President Clinton’s incoming DCI R. James Woolsey, who succeeded Robert Gates, told his confirmation hearings in 1992 that he was considering alternate activities for the CIA, such as possibly sharing their business intelligence with private companies. As he pointed out, the West had ‘slain a large dragon’, but still lived ‘in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes’. There was more intelligence sharing with old enemies — particularly over such issues as the whereabouts of nuclear missiles and other materiel that might have fallen into terrorists’ hands after the breakup of the Soviet Union. ‘We are partners now,’ the chief spokesman of the FSB, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Yuri Kobaladze said in an interview, ‘although it will take some time to find the right way to deal with each other. We have universal problems like proliferation and international terrorism. These are our enemies. That’s why we have to cooperate with the US and the rest of the world.’
For spies, the ground rules had changed. During the Cold War, spies operating undercover in a foreign country could normally expect interrogation and imprisonment followed by the likelihood of exchange (although of course there was always the chance of execution). Former Deputy DCI Admiral Bobby Ray Inman explained in 1993 that terrorists and the drug-traffickers didn’t play by those ‘gentlemanly’ rules. ‘When you try to penetrate them and they suspect you, they don’t put you in jail. They shoot.’
CIA morale was hit by the cost-cutting insisted on by the administration — although the plans were only for it to revert to the size it had been during the Carter presidency — and even more by the revelation of Aldrich Ames’ treachery. Despite the KGB being wound up when the Soviet Union was dissolved, Ames’ loyalty had continued to be to his Russian paymasters, and he gladly provided material to the SVR.
The CIA had suspected there was a mole as early as 1986, and Jeanne Vertefeuille (often likened to John le Carre’s fictional obsessed researcher Connie Sachs from
