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An American spymaster’s tales from the CIA

Tenet, CIA Director from 1997 to 2004, claims Dick Cheney cynically manipulated intelligence on Iraqi WMD to justify the decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. Tenet rightly protests “as if Cheney needed me to say slam dunk to go to war”. He confirms that ideological zealots like Rumsfeld, Wolfwoitz, Feith and Cheney hijacked the foreign policy agenda of the Bush White House, with predictably disastrous consequences for both America and the Islamic world.

The CIA has played a seminal role in the secret history of the modern Middle East. After all, a CIA coup returned the Shah of Iran to power in 1953 and facilitated SAVAK’s political repression for the next twenty six years, a key factor in revolutionary Iran’s visceral anti-US Great Satan animus. The CIA also helped the Baath Party seize power in 1963 because it helpfully slaughtered Iraqi Communists allied to Brigadier Kassem. The Agency assisted Washington’s tilt to Baghdad in the 1980’s by providing the odious Saddam regime with satellite reconnaissance data on Iranian battlefield positions even as he used poison gas against Kurdish secessionists in Halabja. The fabled Afghan jihad was, of course, the CIA’s classic Cold War triumph. Reagan’s DCI Casey used his wartime experiences as an OSS spymaster running agents against Nazi Germany to enlist Pakistani, Saudi and Chinese intelligence in a venture to make the USSR bleed in the Hindu Kush.

While the Afghanistan war accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union, its terrible legacy was the Taliban, Pakistan’s descent into a hellish spiral of violence, terror in the skies of New York and Washington, another bloody and unwinnable war in Afghanistan. In Lebanon, the CIA’s Phalangist clients were outwitted by the Syrians and Hezbollah, reduced to impotence after a suicide truck bomber massacred 241 Marines in their West Beirut barracks and forced Reagan to withdraw US peacekeeping troops, to abandon the West’s clients to their fate, as in Saigon 1975. It is ironic that American intelligence underwrote the litany of policy failures that triggered such violent blowback, that enabled the enemies of the West to triumph in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran and even Pakistan.

Tenet’s book fascinated me because it confirmed my suspicion that the CIA was more amateurish Keystone Cops than the omnipotent intelligence colossus imagined by America’s enemies in the Middle East. For instance, Tenet shockingly revealed that the Department of Operations, that runs America’s spies worldwide, had only six trainees in its clandestine case officer programme when he took over in 1997, at a time when Bin Laden and Dr. Zawahiri trained hundreds of radical Islamists in their Afghan training camps. The CIA was unable to leverage the ethnic kaleidoscope that is modern America to infiltrate the inner sanctums of Al Qaeda, the Saddam regime or Hezbollah. A CIA attempt to topple Saddam’s regime from Iraqi Kurdistan in 1996 ended in tragedy and betrayal, with Saddam’s mukhabarat executing dozens of anti-Baathist military officers fingered by double agents the CIA failed to filter. Tenet writes that the FBI had more special agents in Manhattan than CIA had case officers all over the world in 1998, the year Osama declared his jihad against the US.

The Clinton Administration threatened American national security with its casual, even callous attitude to the CIA. George Tenet’s four predecessors barely spent a combined five years as DCI. Tenet was a default choice, casually promoted, a Beltway apparatchik, the staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, more schmoozer than spy. Internecine turf battles among America’s multiple intelligence agencies were easily exploited by foreign powers and middlemen. For instance, Rumsfeld’s Pentagon ran a de facto rival intelligence service that spoon-fed dubious data from the Mossad to the Bush White House, including the self-serving, phony linkage between Saddam and Al Qaeda. The DIA paid Ahmed Chalabi $350,000 a month while Tenet’s CIA concluded that the disgraced owner of the failed Petra Bank, convicted and sentenced to 22 years of jail by a Jordanian court, had no real support base in Iraq. In fact, Tenet was stunned when Chalabi showed up in Baghdad in a US Army C-130 plane despite the vocal opposition of the Agency and State. With such vivid examples of bureaucratic ineptitude, strategic myopia and woeful ignorance of the Islamic world, I am no longer surprised by the CIA’s monumental intelligence failures in Pahlavi Iran, 9/11, the invasion of Kuwait and the Iraqi civil war.

Tenet’s book reveals the James Bond dimension in the secret game of nations. He describes teams of Dari and Farsi speaking CIA agents who roamed the Afghan provinces on horseback with millions of dollar banknotes in cash, offering Pakhtun tribal chieftains the choice between money, guns, grain, even horse saddles if they abandoned the Taliban or a 2000 pound laser guided bomb if they did not. He describes how the CIA penetrated and tagged Dr AQ Khan’s international nuclear component smuggling network and now he himself acted as General Musharraf’s case officer in New York and Islamabad. Musharraf’s subsequent purge of the ISI and the military high command was instigated by the CIA.

Tenet describes Colonel Gaddafi’s volte-face on Libyan WMDs with secret meetings in European luxury hotels and desert campfires. He describes the ghastly ease with which a terrorist group could acquire and detonate a nuclear warhead in an American city. He alludes to “enhanced interrogation techniques” that persuaded captured Taliban and Al Qaeda bosses to break, to pinpoint safe houses, sleeper cells, camps and terrorist networks. The Predator drone has emerged as the CIA’s aerial assassin all too successfully in Yemen, the Bajour Agency and the villages of Afghanistan. Incredibly, the CIA’s counter terrorism head is a certain Mr Ben Bonk. Tenet’s book confirmed my nagging belief. The only thing more dangerous than being America’s enemy in the Middle East is to be its friend.

Matein Khalid is a Dubai-based investment banker and economic analyst