by Stephen Grey
* * *
Secret agents themselves can sometimes live in denial – a psychological concept meaning that they refuse to confront or even acknowledge something difficult or painful. Among agents, the difficulty is their conflicted role within the group they have penetrated: on the one hand, trying to support the group in order to avoid being exposed and stay alive, and on the other, trying secretly to defeat the group. Nasiri’s way of dealing with this dilemma at the time of the Algiers bomb was to brush it aside. He had both a thick skin and other priorities. Recalling the event years later, he said, ‘I was mainly concerned with not getting caught – and getting hold of hash.’3 Of the bombing, he said he felt no guilt. He had needed to establish his cover story. He had also said before, ‘I have no conception of damage. I have no conception of killing. I have no conception of responsibility.’4 But this was a sensitive subject to recall. As the years passed, he would give different answers about that bomb, some of them contradictory.
On Christmas Eve 1994, while Nasiri was still in Belgium and a few weeks before the Algiers bomb blast, a plane was hijacked at Marseilles airport. Special forces stormed the plane in a gun battle. Again, Nasiri had wondered if the weapons involved had come from him. ‘I saw the bullet going off from the Kalashnikov and I thought this is my bullet, the one I buy,’ he said.5
This incident, he claimed, had affected him deeply. The Brussels gang had sat around and gloated as they listened to a tape of the fighting inside the plane. The hijackers had wanted to blow it up over Paris in a giant fireball – with materials that Nasiri feared he had supplied. As he wrote:
Everything on the tape was horrible. It was the first time I truly felt how close I was to all this horror. I know I could have thought about it earlier, but I’d chosen not to. I bought the guns for Yasin [a friend and member of the GIA cell] because it was exciting; because I needed the money … Everything was different now. The people on the plane were real to me … The GIA had tried to kill them all. It was horrifying to me, and when I heard the tape, I knew I was connected to it. I hadn’t pulled the trigger, but maybe I had supplied the guns and the bullets. I was a killer, just like them.6
But, he explained later, it was important to realize he was not against killing. He was not bothered in the least by attacks on the repressive Algerian government or Western forces like the French that interfered. But he did object to the GIA’s tactics of killing other Muslims: ‘They were killing other Muslims inside Algeria and that’s the biggest reason I went to the French Consulate. I was ready to die to stop them because I felt myself part of the killing.’7
* * *
On a cold, grey day in May 2013, I was sitting on a bench outside Cologne’s cathedral by the Rhine, waiting to meet Nasiri. It was a public holiday, the feast of the Blessed Sacrament, Corpus Christi. High above, deep-throated bells were tolling in the soot-stained Gothic spires – the second tallest in the world. A crowd thronged the cobbled square to watch a long procession of worshippers that paraded through the cathedral’s thick wooden doors and sang hymns. It felt like a scene from a Godfather movie, before the massacre.
I saw him strolling up to me. It was nearly twenty years since he had become a spy and Nasiri was now about fifty years old, with a slightly squeaky voice. He had supposedly retired long ago from his intelligence work. As he said, ‘I am still without a job.’ He did have some employment, but he obviously could not stop thinking about the world of radicalism that had been his life. He was keen to explain to me the mentality of the militants. He still followed it all; he was still absorbed by the Islamist mindset.
He talked about the ongoing civil war in Syria and Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist faction that was loyal to al-Qaeda and had just been designated a terrorist group. He presciently thought the Islamists would soon predominate among the rebels. ‘Does it shock you to know that I would go and fight with them tomorrow if I had the chance?’ he asked.
I had wanted to meet Nasiri because he came closer than anyone that I have heard about to being that ‘man on the rock’ the former senior CIA operative had spoken of – the spy who could have sat next to Osama bin Laden and known his thoughts and plans. He had written a book, Inside the Global Jihad, about his time spying inside the training camps that had come to be associated with al-Qaeda. He had met some of its key figures – even before the organization had begun to call itself al-Qaeda. Nasiri was another of the New Spies – the breed of agent hired post-Cold War to be pitted against the new enemies that had emerged in the 1990s, such as the modern Islamist terror group. Though it had been years since he had worked as a spy, he still had the habits of someone who had worked with intelligence agencies. He referred to them, as insiders did, as the ‘services’. He insisted on walking and talking, constantly moving from place to place as if still trying to dodge surveillance. He insisted that I did not publish the name that his handler from the DGSE had used, even though it was certainly a pseudonym. He had made the man a promise, even if he now disliked him. ‘If you make zigzags with your word, you have no chance to meet someone again.’
Among the secret services, Nasiri had always attracted mixed views. His work as an undercover arms dealer helped the French and Belgian authorities to capture an Algerian terror cell active in Brussels. Later, after a trip to the mountains of the Hindu Kush, he had helped reveal what was happening in secret military training camps in Afghanistan. He then moved to London and reported for both the French and Britain’s MI5 on the radicals who were sheltering there. But though Nasiri appeared to be a cool operator, he clashed repeatedly with French and British spymasters.
Finally, he would part company with the secret services, after a breakdown of trust. He was a free thinker. He constantly resisted control. His obstinate behaviour underscored another of spying’s dilemmas, because while such a self-willed agent presented a risk for the agencies, equally his resolve helped to push him further and explained why – even when subject to hostile suspicions – he could hold his ground and worm his way deep into the terror gangs. A case officer would always need to assess the value of someone such as Nasiri against the risk he posed of, say, making their operations public. Really, said insiders, no two cases were ever alike.
He was obviously hard work. As we talked, strolling round down by the Rhine and through the rambling streets of the old town, he described his meetings with the British secret services. They had been pressing him on whether he was being truthful about something.
‘You want to talk to me about the truth?’ he remembered asking an MI5 officer, ‘Daniel’, on one such occasion. ‘And you want to pretend that you are not lying to me even now? You are from a lying profession that tells lies constantly. You lie even to your wife. Can you go into the street and say who you are? Of course not. So why talk to me about the truth?’
The British officer, he said, had just shrugged his shoulders in frustration. That was how MI5 remembered him: as a bit of a handful.
* * *
Fighting terrorism was hardly something new for secret intelligence agencies. For the New Spies it just became a more important pursuit. In different countries, secret services have a history of suppressing terror cells (and in some places sponsoring them as a covert instrument of state power). As they reinvented themselves after the Cold War, and tried to protect their budgets, agencies across the West diverted more effort and resources into collecting secret intelligence on and disrupting terrorist groups. This new work was often in support of the police: for example, as intelligence agencies assisted with recruiting street-level informers and targeting suspects with surveillance, raids and arrests. But it could also mean taking covert measures to try to disrupt the terrorists’ plans and run secret agents inside their groups.
Although countries like Britain and France had had years of counter-terror experience, they like others were slow to adapt to the new threat.
On the British mainland, intelligence work against the IRA had been led by Scotland Yard’s Special Branch. MI5 took c
harge only in 1992, after the end of communism. MI5 had already established a counterterrorism branch in 1984 and it had had some success: for example, interdicting arms shipments from Libya to the Provisional IRA. But with its background as a counterintelligence and vetting agency, MI5 had far less experience than SIS or even the British Army in running live agents, and still less running them inside a violent terror gang. It was used to playing a game as different as chess is to poker. Until after the Cold War, MI5 had been little more than a ‘collating agency’, according to one former SIS officer. ‘They never used to run agents. It was only to meet some secretary from the Communist Party of Great Britain in the park.’ He added, ‘We [SIS] got all the bright guys. They couldn’t get anyone from the fast stream. But now it’s different.’
Apart from general inexperience, by the early 1990s MI5 had been making a successful transition from a mainly anti-subversive agency to the lead anti-terrorist organization. But the intense focus on Northern Ireland made it slow to appreciate the new Islamist threat. As the MI5 official historian, Professor Christopher Andrew, noted:
For most of the 1990s the Service believed that the main terrorist threat to Britain, apart from the Provisional IRA, came from Middle Eastern state-sponsored terrorism, and particularly from operations by the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), whose chief targets included the British writer Salman Rushdie. While continuing to warn of the threat from MOIS, the Service told police Special Branches in December 1995 that: ‘Suggestions in the press of a world-wide Islamic extremist network poised to launch terrorist attacks against the West are greatly exaggerated.’8
That statement was issued by MI5 just as Nasiri was completing his training in Afghanistan and would soon come to work for the agency in London. It took a public declaration by Osama bin Laden in 1998 for MI5 and most others to start paying attention to al-Qaeda.
In contrast to Britain and France, the US did not have an empire to lose and had little experience of domestic terrorism. But with the formation of the CIA, its clandestine service – the Department of the Third World – had gained long experience of working semi-secretly with different foreign governments that clung to power in the face of communist-led rebellions that sometimes used terror tactics.
Jack Devine, a former acting head of the CIA’s clandestine service, worked in Latin America in the 1970s. ‘It was hot full of revolutionaries. The difference was that terrorists then were more discriminating. They were going for government officials.’ Devine said he grew up as an officer in the field and emphasized that he ‘only had a vision into the country I was in’. He said recruiting agents among terrorists had gone in cycles. ‘We were universally successful. All of these groups were penetrated and we had sources in every group.’ But it came and went. ‘For a while we would have a good source and then he would get shot or no longer have access.’
According to Devine, the key to recruitment was access. To find targets, you might work with a local police force, which could bring potential sources into a police station. Against more rural movements, the liaison might be with the military. ‘Sometimes the only way you were going to get inside these groups was to head up the hill with a gun. Maybe you could capture some and let some [recruited agent] escape – let them work their way back inside the group.’9
In the 1980s, under President Reagan, the US and the CIA became increasingly embroiled in combating terror groups in the Middle East after a series of attacks that targeted Americans. Going on the offensive, the CIA went after groups like the pro-Palestinian Abu Nidal Organization and, less successfully, Iranian-sponsored organizations like Hezbollah in Lebanon that were engaged in hostage taking. In 1986, the CIA formed a counterterrorism centre led by a colourful clandestine service officer named Duane ‘Dewey’ Clarridge. Later indicted and then pardoned over his role in the arms-for-hostages Iran-Contra scandal, Clarridge believed in action. His legacy was the CIA focus on using disruptive measures (like snatch operations) to fight terrorism.
In continental Europe, Germany had been confronted with the Baader-Meinhof terrorist campaign and Italy with the Red Brigades in the 1970s, but at the end of the Cold War it was France that was best prepared among all Western countries to combat Islamist terrorism.
During the collapse of its empire, France had, like Britain, faced lengthy terror campaigns. The Algerian war of independence had spilled over into mainland France. And the French had thereafter also faced bombs and shootings from separatist groups on its Celtic fringes, particularly on the island of Corsica and among the Basques (in the region straddling the mountainous border with Spain). Because of its involvement in North Africa, and Algeria in particular, a total of five million people of Arab origin lived in the country; France came to be, unenviably, both a safe haven for Algerian dissidents and a target for them because it backed the Algerian government. Because of this, France took early notice of the threat posed by a new wave of Islamist militants at whose nucleus were fighters who had returned from fighting as part of the mujahideen against the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the 1980s. French agencies began to think about tactics to put spies among them. In 1995, while Nasiri was in Afghanistan, the GIA struck the Paris metro, killing eight and seriously wounding nearly 200 people.10
Louis Caprioli is a former assistant director of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), a branch of the French National Police, which was France’s domestic intelligence service. He explained that, like MI5, his agency had been founded to undertake counterintelligence, which was conducted at a relatively relaxed pace. By contrast in counterterrorism, ‘You have to always be ready to immediately neutralize a network and you work in a world of prevention; you are always working in urgency.’ Dealing with the KGB had also been far more focused, concentrating on a handful of people, whereas tracking a terrorist group might involve hundreds of people who were suspected of being involved.
‘When we worked on the services like the KGB, we were dealing with organizations that had a structure,’ he said. At first, terror groups also had a hierarchy, mirroring the states like Libya and Syria that sponsored them. The Palestinian terror groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) or Fatah, which had carried out the aircraft hijackings of the 1970s, were also highly structured. By the time the Islamists came along the French might have been used to terrorism, ‘but we were no longer facing such a hierarchical organization’. This required new tactics.
Running spies, Caprioli taught, had always been hard; it was now harder still. ‘The agent is the best thing in the world, but he is also the most dangerous person in the world to the handler. He’s the man who can betray you at any moment. So if you lose your critical approach, you can have a ten-month relationship and one day, for whatever reason, the agent turns and you go to a meet thinking that he’s a friend and you’re dead.’
The French also saw how a legal framework needed to be put in place to allow the police to act on the intelligence that was gathered from secret sources. Caprioli described an operation back in 1983 when the DST had recruited a ‘well-placed source’ inside an Armenian terror group. ‘We had them under physical surveillance, everything. We were working on eighty people. It was enormous.’ But, despite the operation, they did not prevent an attack. At 2.07 p.m. on 15 July 1983 a bomb went off at the Turkish Airlines office at Paris’s Orly Airport. Eight were killed and fifty injured. They knew who was responsible and when they raided the suspects’ homes they found forty kilos of explosives, rifles and grenades, together with plans for more attacks. ‘But it was a failure,’ said Caprioli. They had not prevented the loss of life.
Over the course of 1995 and 1996, the French law was changed to permit preventive detention of terror suspects and convictions for ‘association’ with lawbreakers.11 These measures were repressive, but they seemed to work. From July to October 1995, there were eight bombings or thwarted bombings in Paris, killing eight and injuring around 200 people. In 1996, there was just one bom
bing that killed four people. Attacks by the GIA and the Basque and Corsican separatists dwindled, just as preventive arrests escalated.
* * *
Omar Nasiri’s journey into this world of violence and repression began with his brother’s discovery of religion and his own feelings of alienation. He was born in Morocco but had lived in Belgium between the ages of five and fifteen. When his mother brought the family back to their homeland, his Arabic was poor and he came to feel a stranger. Then, while Nasiri was in his late teens, his brother, who had remained in Belgium, discovered radical Islam and encouraged Nasiri to follow him.
Like many youngsters, Nasiri had been influenced by the Afghan War, in which it appeared that Islamic fighters in flimsy sandals had brought down the Soviet Union. Among radicals like his brother, it was an inspiration for resistance against all oppressors. They had brought down a superpower – the opportunities for toppling other regimes seemed limitless. While the 1979 Iranian Revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini had radicalized the Shia branch of Islam, it was the 1980s Afghan War that had a similar impact on the much larger Sunni branch of Islam, in particular because of a decision by the US’s conservative Sunni ally, Saudi Arabia, to exhort and fund young Sunni Muslims from across the world to join the fighting.
‘The war in Afghanistan brought me back to feeling as a Muslim and a Moroccan,’ said Nasiri.12 But probably more significant for him than religion or politics was the fact that joining his brother and his group in Belgium felt like an escape route out of Morocco. He learned to pray just like his brother and in 1993 he was invited to join him in Brussels.
Once in Belgium, Nasiri slipped into his brother’s social network and got involved in distributing issues of the GIA’s magazine, Al-Ansar. More importantly, he showed a knack for developing contacts in Belgium’s criminal underworld, from where he learned how to buy and transport weapons and shift them to the militants. He had little conscience. ‘Do you want me to say I was crying every night? I didn’t even think about it,’ he would tell the BBC.13