Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  I thanked the diplomat and walked back to the hotel through the darkened streets. The following day we confronted the British ambassador, Frances Guy, with the story and she acknowledged how serious it had been. While of course it made a great story for the BBC’s ten o’clock news, I was appalled. It was now December 2003, one month after the devastating bomb attack on the British consulate in Istanbul that killed the consul-general and many others. The circumstances were almost identical, with the target’s location, on a busy crossroads in town, allowing a truck to be rammed straight at the gates and into the courtyard. Yet the plot to blow up the British Embassy in Yemen was discovered in September – two months before the Istanbul attack. In Yemen the British security officer had immediately demanded concrete barriers be placed in front of the gates to thwart any future attacks. He had overcome budgetary protests and got his barriers, yet no one seemed to have got the message that similarly vulnerable British missions in the region were likely targets for truck bombs. When I put this to a Home Office security official back in London, he replied defensively, ‘Well, Istanbul is a long way from Yemen.’ The bottom line, I believe, is that if lessons had been learned quickly from the Yemen plot then the Istanbul consulate attack could have been prevented, or at the very least mitigated.

  7

  London: Spooks and Sources

  LIVING IN CAIRO had been good professionally, but a disaster on the family front. Like many foreign correspondents’ partners, Amanda had not appreciated being left alone for long and indeterminate periods of time while I shuttled around the Middle East, bouncing from one story to another. The BBC had rather planned on my doing a third year out there as Middle East Correspondent, but Amanda had other ideas: ‘You can do another year here in Cairo if you like,’ she told me, ‘but we’re going home.’ So that settled it.

  We returned to London at the worst possible time of year. It was mid-January 2002, bitterly cold, and at first we were living out of suitcases in a hotel room. My job situation was precarious: the Cairo contract having finished, the BBC had offered me just a four-month attachment with Newsnight. ‘After that, it’s up to you to find a programme to take you on.’ I was rather miffed about this – it felt as if I was starting right back at the beginning again – but Newsnight was quick to make the most of my Arabic and soon started sending me back to the Middle East on short reporting trips. In fact at one point, after several days of working particularly hard, I decided not to answer the home phone, but the next thing we knew the Newsnight driver was knocking at the door, saying, ‘Sorry, Mr Gardner, they need you to go to Beirut.’

  It was still less than six months since 9/11 and I found myself being increasingly drawn towards investigative stories: how much did Western intelligence know about Al-Qaeda? What support was there for Bin Laden and his ideology in the Middle East? Where could he be hiding? With less than a week to go before my attachment ended and I was officially out of a job, I was offered a correspondent post, ‘following up on 9/11 stories for the main news bulletins’. Again, it was to be one of these infernal temporary contracts – the BBC offered three months, I insisted on six. And then, suddenly, things just snowballed. I found myself doing live interviews outside the Foreign Office on the latest arrests of Al-Qaeda suspects, and interviews by satellite from our Washington bureau. I needed a title, and since ‘War on Terror Correspondent’ would have sounded ridiculous I suggested ‘Security Correspondent’. A new role was born.

  Just as I was finding my feet in this new job I had a call from the Foreign Office. It was someone in the news department whom I knew from my days in Yemen. ‘Would you like to be able to speak to someone in the intelligence services from time to time, Frank?’ he asked. My antennae began twitching; was this an approach to recruit me, I asked. The diplomat laughed. ‘No. It’s just that there is someone in each service who is officially allowed to brief the media on intelligence issues and there are a number of journalists here who have this access.’ That figured, I thought. There was no way that the broadsheet newspaper correspondents could have known some of the things they wrote about so authoritatively if they were not being briefed by someone inside the intelligence community. Still, I was wary of anyone in government trying to tap me for my sources, and had no intention of becoming a mouthpiece for the intelligence services, so I went to our first meeting very much on my guard. After all, it was only eight years since it had been official government policy not even to confirm the existence of MI6.

  The media officer from MI6 turned out to be a perfectly ordinary and likeable human being. I am not sure quite what I had been expecting: a man in a trenchcoat and trilby, perhaps, staring straight ahead while sitting down beside me and whispering, ‘It is always cold in Minsk in March.’ But of course our meeting was nothing like that. We ordered cappuccinos and got down to setting out the ground rules. There had to be trust, he said, which meant never revealing his name and never attributing anything directly to ‘the Service’ (MI6). If I did so I would no longer be given this access, it was as simple as that. I asked why the media was being given this access in the first place.

  ‘We want to try to ensure the coverage is accurate without compromising operations,’ I was told, ‘because, let’s face it, the media is prone to sensationalism.’

  ‘All right,’ I replied. ‘Now I have a few guidelines of my own. Please never ask me to reveal any of my journalistic sources. I am happy to discuss the Middle East in general terms, but I won’t tell you anything I am not already broadcasting on air.’

  The officer nodded and drained his cup. It has always been of paramount importance to me that I maintain a strict journalistic neutrality, whatever private feelings I may have about the topic I am reporting on. And yet some of my BBC colleagues remained convinced that since I had access to intelligence-agency spokesmen, ergo I must surely be working for them. Quite how they imagined I would have time to moonlight for the spooks in between doing live interviews for Breakfast News, Radio 5 Live, News 24, BBC World and World Service radio, and editing TV reports for the one, six and ten o’clock news bulletins was not clear.

  There followed an introduction to another media officer, this time from MI5, who were rather further along the curve than MI6 in their approach to public relations. Whereas ‘C’, as the head of MI6 is known, intentionally had no public persona, the Security Service’s directorgeneral, Eliza Manningham-Buller, had begun making a number of public speeches to selected audiences. With her background in Irish counter-terrorism she had grasped the seriousness of the terrorist threat from Al-Qaeda and saw it as her duty to reveal the nature of that threat. As part of my effort to broaden my base of sources in government, I also managed to arrange a one-off meeting with the public-relations team from the highly secretive government listening station, GCHQ. But if I had any hopes of getting titbits of gossip about intercepted Al-Qaeda chatter from GCHQ, I could forget it. I learned nothing, as they were authorized to talk only about the boring logistics of their move to new premises.

  Frustratingly, though, the intelligence community in Washington seemed to be as leaky as a sieve. Journalists on the Washington Post or the New York Times were always being given scoops, claiming to have been shown exclusive extracts from classified CIA, Pentagon or Congressional reports. The UK media rarely seemed to be able to match such sensational stories and when they did it was usually quietly denied by the people who knew. Far from the spooks spoon-feeding the media stories, my experience of dealing with them has been more akin to getting blood out of a stone.

  In the aftermath of 9/11, British intelligence began taking a closer interest in the various Islamist activists living in the UK, some of whom had fought in Afghanistan and other jihadi fields of combat. Since the mid-1990s London had been home to just about every Middle Eastern opposition movement in existence: Algerian, Iraqi, Saudi, Egyptian and others. The British government’s policy towards them had been what it called one of ‘watchful tolerance’: as long as the dissidents did not break UK l
aw they would reside here as political refugees. In fact Britain rather prided itself on being a safe haven for people who faced imprisonment, torture and execution in their home countries, even though some of these men were considered to be terrorists elsewhere.

  Britain’s Middle Eastern dissidents took full advantage of these liberal policies. They churned out propaganda against their countries’ governments, held countless meetings, some open, some closed, and even set up satellite broadcasts to audiences back home. They also largely welcomed the attentions of us journalists, who gave them an outlet in the Western media for their stories of government corruption and human-rights abuses. We in turn got a plethora of sources and a different – if sometimes warped – perspective on what was going on in their home countries, which we could never have got from official sources or from the news wires.

  Back in the mid-1990s many of us in the media had assumed that MI5 was watching the dissidents closely. After all, some of these men were not just opponents of their own governments, they were also bitterly opposed to the West and its policies in the Arab world. We were wrong. MI5 back then had very few Arabists on its books and it was not overly concerned by the activities of the Arab émigré community in Britain. Its interests lay closer to home, in the form of the IRA’s threat to target mainland Britain. For them, it was a question of priorities: the IRA posed an immediate threat to British lives; the Islamists didn’t. But the bombings in France were about to change that.

  During the summer of 1995 Algeria’s principal rebel group, the GIA, took its battle on to the streets of France. It set off bombs in the Paris metro, killing eight people and causing horrific wounds to over a hundred others since the bombs were packed with nails inside gas canisters; it also tried unsuccessfully to target a high-speed train to Lyons. GIA’s rationale for these attacks was that since the French government supported the military-backed government in the former French colony of Algeria, then France was, by extension, a legitimate target. The French security services reacted to the bombings with speed and vigour, rounding up numerous suspects and driving many others into hiding. To the frustration of the French, many of the suspected militants they hoped to question simply disappeared into the growing North African community in London. The British government effectively shrugged its shoulders, saying no UK laws had been broken.

  But in the late 1990s, as the threat to Europe from a tiny minority of North African extremists gradually became apparent, MI5 began to look more closely at those extremists living in Britain. It acquired copies of some of the grisly videotapes that were circulating in the extremist underworld in London, Birmingham and elsewhere: tapes from Bosnia, and from North Africa showing ambushes on Algerian army convoys, where the rebels would line up captured conscripts and calmly slit their throats. Yet turning round British intelligence to face the threat of Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism was rather like getting an ocean-going supertanker to change course.

  For decades MI6 had been concentrating on fighting the Cold War, amassing a wealth of in-house expertise and a network of agents familiar with the inner workings of the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe. Likewise MI5, the Security Service which looks after domestic intelligence-gathering in the UK, had focused much of its efforts on counter-espionage, trying to prevent communist-bloc agents from stealing Britain’s secrets. Both services had also spent a lot of time confronting the threat from the IRA. But now they were fighting a new, obscure and extremely dangerous enemy in the form of Al-Qaeda and its affiliated operatives.

  When the news broke in May 2002 that a plot to ram explosives-laden dinghies into Western warships in the Strait of Gibraltar had been thwarted, my persistent questioning was eventually rewarded with a detailed explanation of the intelligence background. It was one of the very few intelligence operations that Whitehall officials were allowed to discuss with the media, perhaps because it had been so conclusive. Working together, British, French, Spanish and Moroccan intelligence had intercepted the plan to launch the dinghies from Morocco’s Mediterranean coast. They had used, I was told, intelligence gleaned from a Moroccan prisoner in Guantanamo Bay which had led investigators there to uncover a network of Saudi and Syrian extremists living in Casablanca. There were several arrests and a trial, although this did not prevent the Casablanca bombings the following year that killed over forty people.

  By the summer of 2002 the whole issue of the US military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay had become deeply controversial. The Pentagon had already suffered a PR disaster in January when the world’s media witnessed the arrival of hundreds of Al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects off transport planes from Afghanistan. They were herded into cages, hooded, manacled, shackled and dressed in bright-orange jumpsuits, a detail later copied by followers of Al-Qaeda when they seized hostages in Pakistan and Iraq. President Bush had designated the prisoners as ‘enemy combatants’ and his defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had branded them as ‘some of the most dangerous terrorists on the face of the earth’. But the numbers were so large – over six hundred inmates – that it seemed doubtful that they could all be key operatives. Most of these men had been swept up by US or Afghan forces following the rout of the Taliban in late 2001, some were Arab aid workers arrested by suspicious police in Pakistan or even sold on to the Americans as ‘terror suspects’ by unscrupulous kidnappers, and some turned out to be innocent Afghan taxi-drivers. I became convinced that the USA was holding its so-called ‘high-value suspects’ elsewhere well out of the public eye, somewhere like Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, or on board a warship in international waters, or possibly in obscure countries where there would be few witnesses to interrogation. But I was still curious to see first-hand how Guantanamo Bay fitted into the US-led War on Terror, and that summer I got my chance. The Pentagon’s Joint Southern Command granted access for a team of four of us from the BBC to fly in with our portable satellite dish and pay a rare visit to the prison camp.

  It was a convoluted journey to reach Guantanamo Bay: London to Washington to pick up the crew, then down to Miami and Puerto Rico, where we boarded a US Navy plane at dawn for the short flight across the Caribbean to Cuba. I had been to Havana and the Cuban coast on holiday in the 1990s and had been expecting lush, tropical scenery. Instead, the plane banked over the barren, desiccated eastern tip of Cuba, where low, cacti-covered hills were bound by a razor-wire fence that marked the border between this leased US colony and Fidel Castro’s socialist paradise. We were ordered to line up behind our bags on the edge of the runway while a team of sniffer dogs probed and slavered their way round our kit, before we were driven through the hills down to the coast and Camp Delta, the new purpose-built prison camp that had replaced the infamous transparent cages of Camp X-Ray.

  Understandably perhaps, the US military was paranoid about security, letting us film almost nothing of Camp Delta. We were given a very narrow arc, about thirty degrees, within which we could point our camera and most of that was blocked by a corrugated-metal shipping container, part of the ongoing construction work to upgrade the camp into a more permanent structure. Al-Qaeda’s chief strategist, Dr Ayman Al-Zawahiri, had recently issued a statement saying it was the duty of Muslims to try to free their brothers from jail in Guantanamo Bay and the Americans were taking no chances: they had round-the-clock surveillance of the harbour with heavily armed patrol boats manned by the US Coast Guard. We were allowed no contact with the inmates, in fact we could not even see them, but we were allowed to interview some of the US military prison staff. One NCO let slip that there had been up to thirty attempted suicides amongst the prisoners and that made instant news. Another told us that some of the more hardcore prisoners had thrown their own faeces and urine at him when he entered their cells. Most interesting to me was the chaplain, an amiable, overweight Friar Tuck character who was sweating profusely in the Caribbean heat.

  ‘Some of these guys thought I was the devil incarnate when they first met me,’ he told us, referring to the Afghan and Arab prisoners. ‘I mean, I w
as the first Christian they had ever met and they reckoned I had a long spiky tail or something. But after a while they found I wasn’t so bad and they began to open up a little. I do believe I have offered them some comfort in these difficult times.’ Overall, I found the attitude of the US military guards to be one of defensive defiance, a sort of ‘Hell, yeah, of course these guys are dangerous, why shouldn’t we lock ’em up?’ It did not seem to trouble anyone I met that incarcerating prisoners without trial or access to lawyers might be wrong or damaging to Muslim perceptions of the West. It had, of course, been only ten months since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington and America was still reeling from the loss of its invincibility, but I would say that the priorities at Guantanamo Bay in August 2002 were, in descending order:

  1. interrogate the prisoners for information on impending Al-Qaeda attacks,

  2. interrogate the prisoners for background information on how they had been recruited, where they had trained, who they knew and so on,

  3. ensure none of them escaped to pose a danger to the USA,

  4. at some time in the future – but no rush here – try the detainees before military tribunals in lieu of civilian courts.

  Other BBC correspondents have had better luck at Guantanamo Bay. One infuriated his escorts by managing to have a shouted conversation with some prisoners, while Gavin Hewitt timed his visit perfectly to coincide with the release of the British captives whose detention without trial had been a source of mild friction between Washington and London. Intelligence officers from both MI5 and MI6 had been going over to Guantanamo Bay to interview some of the detainees, just as they had done in Afghanistan in the months after 9/11. In most cases the British government did not believe that the British detainees posed a threat to UK security; there were other detainees around the world of far more intelligence value whose names were not coming up in association with Cuba, and these were the ones they were most interested in.