Spies, Lies and the War on Terror

Paul Todd, Jonathan Bloch, Patrick Fitzgerald

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781848137820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del siglo XX

The advent of the War on Terror has seen intelligence agencies emerge out of the shadows to become major political players. 'Rendition', untrammelled surveillance, torture and detention without trial are now fast becoming the norm. Spies, Lies and the War on Terror traces the transformation of intelligence from a tool for law enforcement to a means of avoiding the law - both national and international. The new culture of victimhood in the US and among partners in the 'coalition of the willing' has crushed domestic liberties and formed a global network of extra-legal licence. State and corporate interests are increasingly fused in the new business of privatising fear. Todd & Bloch argue that the bureaucracy and narrow political goals surrounding intelligence actually have the potential to increase the terrorist threat. This lively and shocking account is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the new power of intelligence.

1

Intelligence and Islamism

We won the Cold War for you. (Pervez Musharraf, 2006)

Islamism and the Cold War

The attacks in New York and Washington DC of 11 September 2001 brought a global movement, radical Islamism, from the desks of intelligence analysts and specialist political commentators to the very centre of world attention. To be sure, awareness of internationally focused Islamist networks and their proclaimed intentions for global jihad against ‘Jews and Crusaders’ – and a wide range of other targets, including the USA in general – had been repeatedly brought home in a series of spectacular actions. The attacks in Lebanon (1983), the earlier 1993 World Trade Center bomb plot, bombings in Saudi Arabia in 1995–96, car-bombings of the US embassies in East Africa in August 1998, and the crippling of the destroyer USS Cole in Aden in 2000, had placed the issue at the top of the intelligence agenda in London, Paris and Washington. The Clinton administration had in 1996 formed a specific ‘Issue Station’ at the CIA, devoted to Osama bin Laden and had also laid the basis for the international ‘rendition’ of suspected terrorists in Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 39, of June 1995.¹

In addition to the organized jihadi strain, there is the fast-spreading phenomenon of a more demotic ‘street’ Islamism, conjoining generational and identity politics with real and perceived grievances spanning discrimination against Muslim communities in the West and international concerns in Iraq, Palestine and across the Muslim world. Whilst this broad mix has often provided the milieu for transition to activism and militant groups, it is nevertheless important to distinguish between mainstream Islam – diverse, historically polyglot and culturally rooted – and the much more rigidly construed world of ‘Islamism’. Although Islamism is itself subject to innumerable schisms and intense doctrinal faction – by no means all of which espouse violent jihad – there is common ground in literalist interpretations of sacred texts and rigorously enforced social micro-management. More ominously for the West, there is also loose but widespread agreement on replacing existing regimes in the Muslim countries with more Islamist ones, an agenda that finds significant support among influential networks within Muslim countries themselves.

What concerns us here is the conjunction between organized, transnational Islamism, given its current form under essentially Saudi influence – and, above all, funding – and the interests of Western powers. Historically, this has been a marriage of convenience, to be sure, but it is one whose outcomes have returned to haunt its erstwhile sponsors in wholly unpredictable ways.

If the rise of al-Qaeda – accurately portrayed at a recent conference as ‘basically a new form of war-making entity’² – and of global networks of Islamist insurgency or ‘terrorism’ in general is almost entirely due to the revolution in IT-based communications,³ the unifying thread of Islamism itself, while avowedly anti-modern, owes much to US/allied efforts in the Cold War and the spread of globalization. Although emerging from the same politico-economic ruptures of the early twentieth century that gave rise to communism, fascism and, indeed, Zionism, the Islamist revival led by such figures as Hassan al-Banna in Egypt and Maulana Maududi in (what later became) Pakistan was long viewed by colonial and then Cold War Western powers as a useful ally against communism and Third World nationalism in general. This was, almost reflexively, taken on board as an element in the management of world affairs, despite the total, almost visceral, opposition to Western values, political structures and social mores evident from the very beginning.

In many recent works, notably the wide-ranging 2005 study Devil’s Game by US analyst Robert Dreyfuss,⁴ much attention has been paid to the systematic cultivation of Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin) and the Shi’a clerical establishment of pre-revolutionary Iran. Here, both existing and emergent currents of Islamism were viewed by authorities in London and Washington as innately conservative forces against nationalism, socialism and the once-vibrant Third World coalition of ‘non-aligned’ nations. Even after the 1978–79 Iranian Revolution, the attempted coup in Saudi Arabia at the Grand Mosque in Mecca in November 1979,⁵ the intensive assaults on civil liberties in Pakistan following the military takeover in 1977 by General Zia, and the assassination of pro-Western Egyptian leader Anwar al-Sadat in 1981, the rising current of international Islamism was still viewed through the essentially unchanged Cold War prism.

The turn of the 1970s, indeed, saw the unfolding of a massive lobby campaign by US neoconservatives and their allies aimed at the supposedly new threat from the Soviet Union. With the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, and much UK support from Margaret Thatcher, the geopolitical focus of what was becoming known as the ‘New Cold War’⁶ was the region from the Horn of Africa through the Gulf to Afghanistan. Clearly, enduring US interests – oil, support for Israel, actual Soviet gains in the region – played their contributory role, but for a small yet increasingly influential section of the renascent US right, a greater prize was on offer: by using the predominantly conservative Islamic states in the Middle East as an ideological – and, soon, military – tool, the USA could move against the Soviet Union itself through its ‘weak underbelly’ – the rapidly growing Muslim populations of Central Asia.

If the February 1979 revolution in Iran – an event quite unconnected to any Soviet efforts, notwithstanding much neoconservative spinning – had propelled the region into public consciousness, it had also, for some, demonstrated the mobilizing power of Islamist ideology. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the influential national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, believed that Russian standing in the so-called ‘Arc of Crises’ could be decisively challenged by mobilizing the religious right,⁷ notably through such groupings as the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). One of many transnational pan-Islamic institutions to emerge on a tide of oil revenues in the 1960s and 1970s period, the OIC was set up in 1969 by Saudi King Faisal, in explicit opposition to Nasser-style Arab nationalism and to the spread of communism, ‘originated by a vile Jew’,⁸ and its main secular exemplar, the Soviet Union. Following the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the OIC convened an emergency session on 27–29 January 1980 in Islamabad. Strongly condemning the ‘Soviet military aggression against the Afghan people’ and calling for diplomatic non-recognition of the pro-Soviet PDPA (Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan) regime, the 36-nation grouping voted to suspend Afghanistan’s membership and also endorsed President Carter’s call for a boycott of the forthcoming Moscow Olympics. At the UN, the budding US/OIC coalition had secured a 104:18 majority, including 57 officially ‘non-aligned’ representatives, ‘strongly deploring the recent armed intervention into Afghanistan’. In addition there were 17 abstentions, with the abstaining Islamic states and even the PLO offering no support for the Russian position.⁹

With the USA facing a virtually unprecedented diplomatic windfall in its Cold War struggle, the Carter administration moved swiftly to secure long-planned-for basing and military prepositioning agreements in the Horn and Gulf regions. However, though Jimmy Carter had declared the Gulf a ‘vital US national interest’ in the January 1980 State of the Union Address and had established a ‘Rapid Deployment Force’ for intervention in the region, these were essentially long-term projects, with little immediate effect.¹⁰ To have significant strategic impact on the ground, the US administration was obliged to turn to a long-standing, though until recently out of favour, ally – Pakistan.

Although the USA had endorsed a series of military regimes in Islamabad since the 1950s, the July 1977 coup of General Zia ul-Haq had been condemned by the new Carter administration. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme had led to a suspension of military aid and relations worsened still further with the February 1979 execution of former prime minister Ali Bhutto and the burning down by mobs of the US embassy. In early February 1980, however, a high-level US delegation arrived in Islamabad, headed by Brzezinski and deputy secretary of state Warren Christopher, offering $400 million in military aid and declaring the Soviet Union ‘a threat to the peace and security of Pakistan, the region and the world.’¹¹ Whilst General Zia was happy enough to accept US commendations of Pakistan’s ‘leadership’ at the Islamic Conference and the UN, the scale of US military aid on offer, modest due to US concern not to offend India, was rejected as ‘peanuts’. Zia was offered private assurances, however, that much more aid would be forthcoming from ‘friendly countries’ where congressional oversight did not apply. Principal among these were Egypt and Saudi Arabia, both of which also featured on Brzezinski’s February itinerary. The Russian move had, indeed, given US hawks in the administration – notably Brzezinski himself and defense secretary Harold Brown – precisely what they wanted in terms of a new strategy for encirclement of the Soviet Union. Brown had arrived in Beijing on 5 January to formalize the growing level of US–China military cooperation. Beijing had been funnelling increasing levels of aid to the Afghan insurgency since 1978 and was a major backer of Pakistan.

If the moves towards renewed Cold War militancy in South Asia can be plainly seen in the later Carter administration – with Brzezinski calling for US aid for Afghan insurgents from July 1979 in the (all too successful) hope of provoking a Soviet ‘Vietnam’¹² – the US alliance with Islamist radicalism would be greatly strengthened during the two terms of Ronald Reagan. The Afghan war was expanded into the CIA’s greatest ever operation, with some $5 billion of direct US aid, matched ‘dollar for dollar’ by Saudi Arabia, and a level of arms and equipment shipments peaking at 60,000 tonnes per year by the late 1980s.¹³ Of equal significance was the massive provision of military training. Although some Afghani fighters were taken directly to US Special Forces establishments such as Fort Bragg, most training took place in border areas of Pakistan, where a large programme was run under the direction of the (US-trained) Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) with help from China, Israel and Britain’s MI6.¹⁴

At the CIA’s Langley headquarters, a relatively junior logistics officer, Mike Vicars, had devised a plan to channel most of the CIA’s direct aid to a 100,000 strong elite force of ‘techno-guerrillas’ (out of a total of some 400,000 fighters in the field). For these, the Agency set up a programme of over twenty different courses, each lasting up to a month, and covering a comprehensive range of irregular warfare techniques. In this way the Afghan fighters were introduced to the latest US thinking on every kind of operation from urban sabotage to large combined-arms ambushes. Also introduced were the latest developments in US communications technology – burst transmitters and frequency-changing radios which could evade detection – and, particularly after Reagan’s ‘by all means available’ National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 166 of November 1984 – advanced Stinger ground-to-air missiles.¹⁵ More controversial – information about which was strongly suppressed at the time – was the instruction given in randomized urban terror methodology, aimed at the Soviet garrisons increasingly confined in Afghan cities. Here, matters were contracted to the British and the ISI. As CIA South Asia operations director Gust Avarakotos recalls, ‘I told them to just teach the Mujahideen how to kill: pipe bombs, car bombs. But don’t ever tell me how you’re doing it in writing. Just do it.’¹⁶ To circumvent further the even remote possibility of inquiry from a continuously supportive US Congress, Britain’s cash-strapped MI6 began receiving a regular CIA subsidy. ‘The Brits were eventually able to buy things that we couldn’t because it infringed on murder, assassinations and indiscriminate bombings’, Avarakotos observes; ‘they basically took care of the “How to kill people” department.’¹⁷

Despite the chaos attending the end of the Afghan War, the CIA and their congressional backers maintained the flow of arms and money to the Afghan mujahideen for a further two years after the January 1989 Russian withdrawal. The final instalment – some $200 million in the Defense Appropriations bill for FY 1992 – was augmented by a large shipment of Soviet-era weaponry captured after the ‘Desert Storm’ Iraq campaign.¹⁸ If many in Congress were beginning to question the wisdom of arming obvious warlords such as Hezb-i-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, doubts were sidelined until the end of the first Bush administration, to avoid offending Saudi Arabia. However, whilst the incoming Clinton administration lacked the decades-long intimacy with the House of Saud enjoyed by the oil-magnate Bush family, help would soon be sought again from Riyadh to bankroll a new Islamist insurgency – Bosnia.

Blowback from the Balkans: al-Qaeda in Europe

As recently declassified US intelligence reveals, the break-up of Yugoslavia along ethnic-sectarian lines was looking an increasing likelihood to US and European governments by the turn of the 1980s, and with it the prospect of ‘serious inter-communal conflicts’ and a level of violence long-lasting, ‘intractable and bitter’. Also correctly predicted in the October 1990 joint CIA/National Intelligence Council Report was the extreme reluctance of the Western powers, and the USA in particular, to become actively involved.¹⁹ Whilst this hands-off approach was to continue to the end of the George H. Bush administration, preoccupied by the 1991 Gulf War and the forthcoming 1992 US elections, a new alliance was emerging between the increasingly pressed Bosnian Muslim government of Alijas Izetbegovic and Washington’s principal Gulf ally, Saudi Arabia.

To be sure, the ruling Democratic Action Party (Stranka Democratske Akcije – SDA) of Bosnia and, to an extent, Izetbegovic personally, were at least publicly supportive of pluralism in Bosnia and seeking support from the West and a range of secular parties in Bosnia itself. From the outset, however, the growing conflict in the Balkans was drawing attention from the fast-spreading Islamist movement – increasingly dispersed after the fall of the Afghan PDPA government in 1992 – and their major international sponsors in the Gulf. Following the 6 April 1992 recognition of Bosnia’s independence by the USA and European Community (EC) and the outbreak of heavy internecine fighting in the Serb-dominated north and the capital Sarajevo, delegations from a range of Islamist activist organizations, including the established Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ)/Tansim a...