A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  Critics of the War on Terror might see a metaphor in AC-130 deployments during Operation Enduring Freedom. Like the gunships, US policy was very good at breaking things, but not so good at putting them back together again. The problem was that while breaking things was entirely understandable – necessary, even, at the outset – it could never provide a long-term solution to the problem of terrorism in Afghanistan. After the Taliban, what?

  ‘There was no planning at all, really, for what would come next,’ says the British diplomat. ‘I thought it was nuts.’

  The night after the attack, Abdul Malik moved back into the family house in Deh Rawood, alone. Everyone else was in hospital or dead. Various government figures, including Hamid Karzai, came to speak to him, and to apologize. None would ever tell him why his family had been targeted, or who – if anyone – had been the source of the mysterious intelligence about Mullah Barader that had led to the attack. Malik could never understand how the US military, with all its technological wizardry, had mistaken a wedding party for an artillery weapon. Three months later, while giving a foreign official a tour of the household, he noticed something high up in a pomegranate tree. It was the intestine of one of his relatives.

  Malik and Tela Gul were married five months afterwards. The wedding was a downbeat affair: only fifty guests were invited. There was no music.

  ‘We three brothers have decided that, if anyone within our family gets married or engaged, there will be no party’ says Uncle Anwar. ‘There will be no music and no dancing. The door of happiness is closed for us now.’

  These are the people to whom Hamid Karzai first appealed for assistance when he re-entered Afghanistan in the winter of 2001. These are the people that teased the US Special Forces for filtering their water. These are the people that gave them turbans better to disguise themselves. They feel differently now.

  ‘The presence of Americans [in Afghanistan] is like eating poison for me every day,’ says Anwar.

  His brother Abdul Bari agrees. Bari’s children had been among the group on the roof that night. He discovered six of their bodies the next morning.

  ‘When you see eighteen people from your family killed in one day, and forty-seven bodies of your relatives in your house, how would you feel?’ he asks. ‘Americans killed eighteen members of my family. Americans are my enemy and the enemy of my family. I cannot forgive Americans for what they did.’

  The third brother, Qudus, agrees. ‘I hate Americans more than pigs.’

  This is not barely concealed anger, or even anger at all.

  It is rage.

  Midway through 2002, at about the time of the wedding party, something rather extraordinary happened in Afghanistan: the US started pulling out its assets.

  CIA officers were appalled. ‘We had very elaborate administrative structures set up to work on Afghanistan,’ recalls one. ‘We had a special operations group, a military advisory group, a high-value targets group: we had all these groups that were focused on very specific aspects of fighting this war in Afghanistan, and then – almost literally overnight – the White House wasn’t interested in Afghanistan any more.’

  For those who knew what to look for, the signs had been there all along. When he was first sent to Afghanistan at the start of 2002, General Dan McNeill had been instructed to leave half of his headquarters at home, including his deputy.

  ‘At that time I wasn’t exactly certain of what that was all about,’ he says. ‘I presumed it had something to do with Iraq. This day I am relatively certain it had to do with Iraq.’

  Michael Scheuer, who headed the Bin Laden Unit at the CIA, came to the same conclusion. ‘In March 2002, around the middle of the month, we began to lose some of our most experienced officers: Arabic speakers, regional experts,’ he recalls. ‘It was quite frankly said they were going to get ready for a war with Iraq.’

  In August, another officer, based in Pakistan at the time, was recalled to the CIA HQ at Langley where he was briefed about the project that would become Operation Iraqi Freedom.

  ‘But we haven’t caught Bin Laden yet!’ he told his briefer. ‘We haven’t finished in Afghanistan!’

  Officials felt differently. ‘Afghanistan was really an accidental war for much of the administration. No one wanted to do it. And once it became clear the Taliban was likely to fall, senior Pentagon officials wanted to turn to Iraq as quickly as possible,’ Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage later commented. ‘It was Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.’

  Ironically, the astonishing speed and success of Operation Enduring Freedom appears to have persuaded the White House the next mission was viable.

  ‘When we succeeded in removing the Taliban in Afghanistan, we received such a welcome from the Afghan people,’ Rumsfeld told Fox News in July 2002. ‘I think it’s nothing compared to what the Iraqi people will say and do when they’re rid of Saddam.’

  4

  Groupthink 7075-T6

  Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.

  Dick Cheney, August 2002

  Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.

  George W. Bush, March 2002

  In September 2000, an intriguing advertisement appeared on the ground-floor corridor of Baghdad’s University of Technology:

  ASSISTANCE REQUIRED

  Sami Ibrahim was on his way to work when he spotted it. Beneath the headline, a technical term stood out:

  PITTING CORROSION, 7075-T6

  At the bottom of the page was a telephone number. Intrigued, the Professor jotted it down, climbed the stairs to his office and thought for a moment.

  Ibrahim had a fair idea who was behind the message. It was no secret the Iraqi military placed advertisements in the country’s leading universities from time to time, requesting assistance with technical problems. It was also no secret that academics who solved these problems were looked upon favourably when the promotions season came around. Besides, the Professor was a patriot. If his government needed help and he was in a position to offer it, why not? Sami Ibrahim took a deep breath, picked up the phone and dialled the number.

  The advertisement – and the extraordinary sequence of events it set in motion – was the result of a decision taken fifteen years earlier. In 1984, midway through the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq’s Military Industrialization Commission (MIC) had decided to move into the rocketry business. At the time the idea made perfect sense: vast quantities of artillery rockets were being expended on the front line. Manufacturing replacements at home would save a lot of money and boost the Iraqi economy.

  Sensibly, the first rockets in the programme were to be direct copies of a relatively straightforward system: the Italian-made, helicopter-launched Medusa 81. Less sensibly, however, before a single Medusa had been successfully produced, the MIC decided to modify the weapon for launch from the ground. The new system, a 48-tube artillery rocket launcher, was christened the Nasser 81.

  From the outset the project was a disaster. Without the blueprints for the Medusa – or any understanding of the design issues behind it – the Iraqi scientists floundered. Prototypes of the Nasser 81 were hopelessly inaccurate. Part of the trick to making a rocket fly straight lies in the amount of in-flight spin. Iraq’s rockets either failed to spin at all or span so fast their motors failed, causing them to drop out of the sky. Western intelligence agencies monitored the programme’s development with great amusement.

  ‘They weren’t very successful at making rockets!’ smirks one ballistics expert. ‘They didn’t work!’

  Baffled by their inability to make rockets that flew straight, the Iraqis gave up trying. The 81 mm rocket programme ground to a halt.

  This, however, created an issue. In Iraq, failure tended to be rewarded with punishment. When the Nasser 81 project stalled, questions about why the rockets didn’t work – and who was to blame – triggered a resurgence of interest in the operation. The programme was resurrected. A new set of blueprints was commissioned. This time there was
a new problem: the rockets exploded in mid-flight. Once again, progress was halted.

  This stopping and starting became the defining characteristic of the Nasser 81 programme. Again and again it started, ran into problems and stopped. No one wanted to admit they couldn’t make the rockets work. Nozzles were realigned, spin was adjusted, propellant changed – but the moment one problem was resolved, another appeared. Over the years, as the design evolved, MIC’s Medusa slowly transmogrified into another, rather different rocket. Tragically for the Iraqis, this one didn’t work, either.

  Finally, in September 2000, MIC convened a panel of seventeen experts to examine the problem. After a decade and a half of haphazard progress, the system was now up and running, but it was hopelessly inaccurate. Recognizing that the Iraqi design, which still didn’t work properly, was now substantially different from the fully functioning Italian one, the committee decided to return the system to its original specifications and start again. But here they faced a substantial problem.

  The rocket bodies for the Nasser 81 were 900 mm-long tubes with an inner diameter of 81 mm and a wall thickness of 3.3 mm, made from a high-strength aluminium alloy known as 7075-T6. In the 1980s, when the programme had started, Iraq had imported 160,000 of these tubes from Germany. Unfortunately, they had been stored outside and had corroded. Tiny pits and cracks in the aluminium surface transferred heat from the burning propellant along the body of the rocket to the warhead, which caused it to detonate prematurely. Worse, since the rocket bodies were no longer smooth, they tended to stick and blow up in the launchers.

  Clearly, something had to be done. Could the corrosion be fixed? The 2000 committee needed advice. In September the MIC advertised for help.

  When Sami Ibrahim called the number on the advertisement he was put through to the Ministry of Higher Education. He explained that he had a PhD in chemical and electrochemical corrosion and had seen the notice. Shortly afterwards, a car arrived at the university. Out stepped a courier with a gift: a 7075-T6 aluminium tube.

  Ibrahim didn’t know what it was or what it was for, but it was clear something was very wrong with it.

  ‘It was severely corroded,’ he recalls. ‘But the corrosion wasn’t all over the place. It was localized. Some of the surfaces were OK.’

  Realizing the problem might make a good research project for one of his students, he called them together, showed them the tube and asked if anyone was interested. A young MSc candidate, Mohammed Abbar, raised his hand.

  Clearly, the 2000 committee wasn’t going to wait for a young postgraduate to complete his thesis, so the Professor stepped in. He examined the chemical composition of the tube, then sliced it into pieces and put them under a microscope. The next time he met the MIC representative, he passed on a few preliminary observations.

  ‘Corrosion is a bit like a disease,’ he told his contact. ‘It can transfer from one surface to another.’

  It was quite possible, the Professor explained, that one of the tubes had been corroded when it was delivered from Germany fifteen years earlier. If that was the case, then storing it outside, in direct contact with the others, would have caused a galvanic reaction, allowing the contagion to spread. Now the entire shipment must be considered suspect. In future, tubes should be individually wrapped to prevent them from contaminating each other. They should also be anodized, ideally with a chromate solution.

  Finally, Ibrahim passed judgement on the rest of the tubes. ‘We classified them into three classes,’ he recalls. ‘One: not corroded at all. These could be used. Two: tubes where the pitting factor was not too high. These could be treated. We could deal with it.’ The third group, however – the most damaged – was beyond repair. ‘The pitting factor was very high. They were not usable at all.’

  Not usable at all. Iraq’s MIC had a problem. They needed new rocket tubes.

  A month after Ibrahim passed on his advice, Garry Cordukes, a Sydney-based aluminium trader, was reading an aluminium forum on the Internet when he came across an intriguing advertisement. A Jordanian company, Atlantic Trading and Communications Corps, was looking for aluminium tubing. The note asked if anyone could recommend a suitable supplier and gave the e-mail address of the company’s commercial manager, Hussein Kamel.

  Cordukes, who owned 50 per cent of a Chinese aluminium extrusion agency, e-mailed Kamel. ‘We can extrude aluminium tube,’ he wrote. ‘Please forward specifications.’

  Kamel replied that he was looking for car parts – specifically, dry-sump pulleys and flanges. The latter were tubes of a rather specific size: 900 mm long, with an outer diameter of 81 mm and a wall thickness of 3.3 mm. The thing was, they were for racing cars. They had to be tough. The only alloy strong enough was 7075-T6. Oh, and one other thing. The aluminium had to be chromate-anodized.

  Cordukes didn’t have the first clue what dry-sump pulleys and flanges were. He didn’t really care. He did care about a new customer who was looking to order somewhere in the region of 60,000 pieces of aluminium. There was an opportunity here. The Australian contacted his factory in China to see if they could, indeed, extrude 7075-T6.

  ‘That’s a hard alloy,’ the production manager told him. ‘Usually it’s used in the aircraft industry.’

  Cordukes explained about the racing cars. ‘That could be right,’ the manager said. ‘It’s high-tensile stuff.’

  Negotiations over the contract were unexceptional. In December 2000, Cordukes sent Kamel a sample of 7075-T6 by DHL. Kamel said it wasn’t quite right, so another was dispatched. This one was closer to the mark. The two businessmen discussed finances and agreed on a price: $10 per tube.

  ‘He screwed me down,’ Cordukes admits today, ‘but we wanted the business, an entrée into a new market.’

  Kamel put in place a letter of credit with the Bank of New York in Shanghai, and on 2 February 2001 the deal was struck: 60,000 tubes for $600,000, to be delivered by cargo ship within eight weeks.

  All appeared normal. It wasn’t. Unbeknownst either to Cordukes or Kamel, the moment the pair had exchanged details of the aluminium order over the Internet, the tubes’ specifications had been intercepted and flagged by a top-secret signals intelligence package known as ECHELON.

  Inside the headquarters of the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Meade, Maryland, 9,500 miles away, warning lights were flashing.

  Like most bureaucrats, Geoff Wainwright read his mail first thing in the morning. Wainwright’s mail, however, was rather different to most. A Customs officer for fifteen years, in July 2000, he had taken a new position with the Australian Department of Defence.

  Assistant Director of Intelligence for the Exports and International Programmes Branch, Wainwright’s job involved liaising with various governmental departments about the import and export of sensitive materials. This threw up a few complications. The new position required him to liaise with officers from Australia’s clandestine intelligence services. At Customs, the thirty-four-year-old had been cleared to access Highly Protected materials. He now needed to be cleared to the Top Secret level. The vetting process would take six months; in the meantime, he was given a provisional clearance.

  Each morning when he arrived at work, Wainwright was presented with a sealed envelope containing classified cables from all over the world regarding materials passing through Australian territory. Most were fairly humdrum. The cable he received in September 2000 was different.

  ‘A signal had been picked up,’ he recalls. ‘There was an Australian company that might be involved in shipping aluminium pipes over to somewhere in the Middle East.’ According to the signal, these were no ordinary aluminium tubes. They were to be made of a specific alloy, 7075-T6. Although they had been ordered from Australia, they were due to be manufactured somewhere in China. Wainwright looked at the signal again. At the top was a code indicating where it had come from. The United States.

  Wainwright had no idea what 7075-T6 aluminium was. So, over the course of the next week, he asked experts inside the count
ry’s intelligence community why the tubes were so important. Further investigation led to some alarming revelations: Hussein Kamel was not Jordanian. Atlantic Trading Corps was not making racing cars. The tubes were destined for Iraq. Worse, there was the nature of the tubes themselves.

  7075-T6 aluminium tubes, Wainwright learned, could be used as rotors in gas centrifuges. Gas centrifuges could be used to enrich uranium-235. Uranium-235 could be used to make a nuclear weapon. Inside Australia’s intelligence community, wheels began to turn.

  ‘There were a lot of meetings on what should happen with this signal,’ says Wainwright today. ‘It came across as something that was pretty important. In Australia, where we are in our part of the world, not a lot of exciting stuff happens. This one had a bit of a profile to it. Somebody had to do something.’

  Wainwright arranged meetings with the major players in the intelligence community, briefed them all on the signal and asked their opinions. No one knew what to think.

  ‘All we were going off was that this person in Jordan was asking this Australian middleman to organize something. We didn’t even know whether the thing had happened, or whether it was going to happen.’ What to do next? Wainwright had a few ideas. ‘Being a Customs officer, my background was to say, “OK, let’s go out and talk to this guy: see if this message has any substance.”’ Everyone agreed.

  The question of who should be responsible, however, was more tricky. The export of aluminium tubes didn’t fall under the remit of either home or foreign intelligence services. Who should be in charge? Eyes turned to Wainwright: he was part of the intelligence community now. He had a background in Customs. He seemed to be on top of things. Let him do it.