A Brief History of the Spy

interrogation of Zubaida, although he claims that he did so after the revelation of the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib by Army personnel following the 2003 invasion. ‘I was concerned that the distinction between a legally authorized program as our enhanced interrogation program was, and illegal activity by a bunch of psychopaths would not be made,’ he told a CBS documentary in April 2012.

The enhanced interrogation techniques were applied to KSM when he was captured; again, their efficacy is dubious. KSM was deprived of sleep for over seven days; he was waterboarded 183 times; his diet was manipulated. Yet he was still able to try to put his interrogators on the wrong track of the courier who was serving Osama bin Laden, and claimed more responsibility for some of al-Qaeda’s activities than he could have had in an effort to stop the interrogation.

MI5 became embroiled in the rendition and torture controversy when they hit the headlines in 2010. The Guardian ran a story entitled ‘Devious, dishonest and complicit in torture — top judge on MI5’, based on a draft judgement in the case of Binyan Mohamed, who had been arrested in Pakistan, based on information supplied by Zubaida prior to his enhanced questioning, and interrogated by the CIA in Morocco as part of the War on Terror. Mohamed claimed that British officers were present during his interrogation and were passing questions to the interrogators, fully aware that he was actually being tortured. In 2006, MI5 said that Mohamed had only been questioned in Pakistan, where he was arrested, and the officer involved had seen no evidence of torture — although they had not sought assurances from the Americans regarding future treatment.

A 2009 civil case became embroiled in a row over what sensitive materials could be revealed in public, but what the courts saw was sufficient for the Attorney General to recommend that the police investigate MI5. Eventually, Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, announced in January 2012 that there was not enough evidence to prove that the security services provided information about Mohamed when they knew he was at risk of torture, effectively clearing them.

Another case of the British services assisting with rendition wasn’t so easy to dismiss. Abdelhakim Belhadj, who would later lead the Tripoli Military Council during the uprising against Gaddafi, was rendered to Libya by the CIA with British help, then incarcerated and tortured in the notorious Abu Selim jail in southern Tripoli. The documents confirming this were discovered in an abandoned government building after the fall of Gaddafi’s regime, with MI6’s Sir Mark Allen writing to Gaddafi’s head of intelligence, Moussa Koussa, ‘I congratulate you on the safe arrival of Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq [the name used by Belhaj]. This was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over the years.’ Belhadj is suing the British government and Sir Mark Allen for damages, and the Metropolitan Police is investigating the allegations.

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The hunt for Osama bin Laden and other key al-Qaeda members would stretch across the next decade, but that wasn’t the Bush administration’s highest priority. Whether there was a genuine belief that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a party to 9/11, or whether there were those in the American government — notably Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — who saw the terrorist attack as an opportunity to deal with more than one menace at a time, the focus quickly turned to Saddam. While they were busily engaged searching for al-Qaeda, the CIA was also tasked with investigating Iraq, and particularly whether Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.

According to the report prepared by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, set up by President Bush following the invasion: ‘The Intelligence Community’s performance in assessing Iraq’s pre-war weapons of mass destruction programs was a major intelligence failure. The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policymakers.’ At the same time the Butler Report, set up in the UK for the same purpose, noted that the Joint Intelligence Committee’s judgement that Iraq was ‘conducting nuclear related research and development into the enrichment of uranium’ was based on two new agents’ reports, and ‘those reports were given more weight in the JIC assessment than they could reasonably bear’. It pointed out that the judgement ‘went to (although not beyond) the outer limits of the intelligence available’ but that there was ‘no evidence of deliberate distortion or of culpable negligence’.

Whether the evidence was sufficient to justify the various administrations’ desire to create regime change in Iraq or not, there were allegations that the dossier of information had been ‘sexed up’ before it was revealed to the British parliament and media. Major General Michael Laurie told the Chilcott Inquiry into Iraq: ‘We knew at the time that the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care.’ Tony Blair’s communications chief Alastair Campbell has consistently denied the accusation, claiming that he only assisted with the presentational aspects of the dossier. He told Lord Chilcott:

At no time did I ever ask [Joint Intelligence Committee head Sir John Scarlett] to beef up, to override, any of the judgements that he had. At no point did anybody from the prime minister down say to anybody within the intelligence services, ‘You have got to tailor it to fit this judgement or that judgement.’ It just never happened. The whole way through, it could not have been made clearer to everybody that nothing would override the intelligence judgements and that John Scarlett was the person who, if you like, had the single pen.

There were two key elements to the accusations against Saddam: that he was gaining uranium from Niger which could be enriched to produce weapons of mass destruction — that could potentially be prepared for use within 45 minutes, according to the British dossier; and that he was also preparing biological WMDs. ‘We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels,’ Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council, as they debated a resolution over Iraq’s future. ‘The source was an eye witness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities. He actually was present during biological agent production runs. He was also at the site when an accident occurred in 1998. Twelve technicians died from exposure to biological agents.’

The problem was that he wasn’t. The evidence for the latter relied on Iraqi informant Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, code-named Curveball, who was comprehensively proved to be a liar — and who eventually admitted to the Guardian he had manipulated his handlers within the Germany intelligence agency, the BND. ‘I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime,’ he said in 2011. ‘I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy.’

Although by no means all the information regarding Curveball has yet been released into the public domain, the story that has emerged backs up the assertion made by Sir Richard Dearlove in a meeting at Downing Street on 23 July 2002. A leaked memo indicates he reported on his recent meetings in Washington that ‘Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’

Al-Janabi entered Germany in late 1999 on a tourist visa, and then applied for asylum, claiming that he had embezzled Iraqi government funds and faced imprisonment or death if he returned. Once he was in the German refugee system, he began talking about his work as a chemical engineer, which immediately attracted the attention of the BND. (In his interview with the Guardian, Janabi later claimed that he didn’t mention his work until he was granted asylum in March 2000; the BND says that he actually ceased active cooperation after his asylum was granted in 2001.) He revealed that he had been part of a team that equipped trucks to brew bio-weapons, and named six sites that were already operational. Refusing to talk directly to American intelligence, the newly (and as it turned out, appropriately) code-named Curveball provided reams of material to the BND, enough to furnish ninety-five reports to Langley. There analysts evaluated the information, spy satellites checked out the sites named and drawings of the trucks were prepared. The problem, of course, was that without direct access to Curveball, no one could be absolutely sure that they were interpreting what he said correctly.

Curveball’s information was nowhere near as concrete as its use to back up Powell’s speech would suggest. ‘His information to us was very vague,’ one of his supervisors at the BND told the Los Angeles Times in 2005. ‘He could not say if these things functioned, if they worked… He didn’t know… whether it was anthrax or not. He had nothing to do with actual production of [a biological] agent. He was in the equipment testing phase. And the equipment worked.’ He admitted that he had only personally visited one site,