Published in The Bulletin, 29 April 2004
The bottom line at the top of the intelligence pyramid is protect your patch at all costs. It is a mindset that has cost many lives to terror attacks because of a lack of communication. And, amazingly, no heads have rolled, as Phillip Knightley reports.
The furore about Australia’s intelligence community – its failures, tainted reports, politicisation, poor management and damaging disputes with its officers – is not unique. It is typical of what has been occuring in all Western intelligence services since 9/11 blasted them out of their complacent mind set.
Trained to cope with the major Cold War monster, the Soviet Union, they failed not only to identify the new threat but even to imagine what it might be. The collapse of communism (something which, incidentally, came as a complete surprise to every Western intelligence service) left them desperate to find ways of justifying their existence.
How to avoid enquiries into their efficiency? How to avoid the budget cuts which governments were demanding as a “peace dividend”? And, above all, how to avoid anyone asking:“Do we now need these organisations at all, and if so, how best to organise them?”
The CIA’s reaction was to suggest in the early 1990s that it should take over the war on the international drugs trade. It was quickly seen off by the Drug Enforcement Administration which, from years of experience, knew how to handle trespassers on its turf.
The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) persuaded the government to expand its mission statement to include the protection of the nation’s economic well-being. It then turned to commercial and industrial espionage and took to spying on Britain’s trade rivals even if, like France and Germany, they were technically friends.
And all the while Osama bin Laden was out there plotting away, putting the finishing touches to 9/11, doing it in languages and dialects no one in the CIA, the FBI, the DIA, the NSA, GCHQ, JIC, CIS and all those other alphabet soup services could understand—even if “the listeners”, the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ, had been able to intercept them in the first place.
As for infiltrating bin Laden’s group, forget about it. Back in the 19th century the intelligence officer and Arabist Richard Burton, might have got into Mecca disguised as a Muslim pilgrim. But can anyone imagine a 21st century CIA officer, used to his office comforts, passing himself off as a bin Laden follower?
So it is accepted that 9/11 came right out of the blue and the intelligence services are blameless. President Bush says no one had any idea that terrorists might hijack a plane and fly it into a building. And even if America did, the argument goes, how could anyone have known where and when such an attack would take place?
Wait a minute. Can our memories be so short? The hijacking of aircraft by aggrieved Arab groups goes back to the 1970s – remember all those hijacked aircraft lined up on an airfield in Jordan before they were blown up? The use of trucks or boats loaded with explosives and driven by suicide bombers goes back to the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 (a truck with a suicide driver), the bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi in August 1998 (a truck with a suicide bomber), and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000 (a boat with a suicide bomber). Did no one in the US intelligence community paid to think about these things put it all together and say, “What if instead of a truck or a boat a terrorist hijacked a plane and used it as a suicide bomb against an American target?”
What target? Well, Arab terrorists had already tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. Did it not occur to American intelligence officers that terrorists night try it again? That leaves “When?” It has now been revealed at the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the US that there was a stream of reports between April and July 2001 that said that bin Laden was preparing a big attack.
If some bright intelligence officer had put it all together, the world might today be a different place. The sort of heavy security now in force at all American airports might, just might, have stopped the 9/11 hijackers before they got on the planes. So post Cold War western intelligence was off to a dismal start but since then has it been catching up?
Unfortunately no. Two years on, what do we really know about al-Qaida? Is it an organisation or an idea? If it is an organisation, how is it organised? How big is it? What are its aims? Where is it based? How is it controlled? (The idea that the ailing bin Laden runs the whole show from a mountain cave in Afghanistan is ludicrous.)
We are constantly told that certain terrorist organisations have “links” to al-Qaida but we are never told what these links are and how they are maintained. The only answer to any of these questions I have been able to elicit came from Professor Amin Saikal of the ANU Canberra when he spoke at the Sydney Institute on 1 April. I asked him:“What is al Qaida?” and he replied, “It’s a franchise operation.”
So the West had this catastrophic intelligence failure over 9/11. Then we had the intelligence failure of East Timor. Even though Lieut.Col. Lance Collins, probably the best and brightest military intelligence officer this country has ever produced, got it right, no one would listen to him.
Then all the intelligence services got the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq wrong, probably because they were looking the wrong way. Here the point is that there are WMD in Iraq and they HAVE been found. They are called small arms. Most wars since World War 2 have been fought with them and every year they kill more people than the casualties caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
One of the last acts of the dying regime of Saddam Hussein was to throw open Iraq’s arsenals and the largest transfer of small arms from a state to its citizens in the history of modern warfare took place. Iraqi citizens queued up to help themselves to the Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenades, grenades, and pistols they are now using with such deadly effect against the Coalition forces. Philip Alpers, of the Small Arms Survey in Geneva, estimates that there are now between eight and fourteen million small arms in civilian hands in Iraq: “They have the best claim to be a weapon of mass destruction.”
He says further that efforts by the Coalition forces to tackle this huge problem are being hampered by the United States gun lobby which is pushing the view that any constitution for a new Iraq must have an American Second Amendment type clause giving citizens the right to bear arms. So we have had this long string of intelligence failures and a series of pathetic excuses – “The FBI and the CIA weren’t talking to each other… FBI agents weren’t even talking to fellow agents because they were worried that their conversations were being recorded and might be used by defence lawyers… A war game in which a plane was hijacked and flown into the Pentagon was vetoed because it didn’t fit the game’s objectives.”
And how many intelligence heads have rolled? None. Not a single one. Not here. Not in Britain. Not in the United States. The only casualties – and fatal ones at that – have been foot soldiers: Merv Jenkins in Australia and David Kelly in Britain. Each took his own life because he had been made a scapegoat. Jenkins, a Defence Intelligence Organisation officer, suicided after the Australian government discovered that, in addition to passing to his American counterparts doctored reports about the imminent turmoil in East Timor – as ordered by his bosses – he was also giving them the truth.
And in Britain, Dr. David Kelly, a Ministry of Defence intelligence intelligence expert, suicided after he was reprimanded for being too frank with a BBC journalist about the lack of evidence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence community and its political masters have to be called to account. At the moment they are centres of power at the heart of democracies but responsible only to themselves.
How each country tackles this problem will vary. But Australia could set the trend by an early Royal Commission into the issues that Lieut.Col. Collins has so courageously raised.
Phillip Knightley is an award-winning Australian journalist who has lived most of his life in London. He is the author of several books including The First Casualty, a history of war correspondents, and Philby: KGB Masterspy.
