Lifting the Veil on the Secret World
by Patrick Seale

In politics, things are not always what they seem. The front of the stage rarely reflects what goes on in the wings. Several recent developments seemed to illustrate the often blatant contradiction between appearance and reality.

In Normandy last week, at the ceremonies celebrating the 60^th anniversary of the D-Day landings, Jacques Chirac and George W Bush outbid each other in professions of eternal friendship between France and the United States. Yet, it is hardly a secret that the chasm in transatlantic relations has never been wider and that most European leaders – and their publics – fervently pray that Bush will be defeated at next November’s American presidential elections.

The decorous debate at the United Nations, culminating in a unanimous vote by all fifteen members of the Security Council transferring ‘full sovereignty’ to Iyad Allawi’s interim government, bears little relation to the violence and insecurity, the car bombs and daily killings on the streets in Iraq. No one can be sure that the timetable laid down in the new Resolution will not be drowned in blood.

It provides for elections by 31 January 2005 for a National Assembly, the drafting of a Constitution, and a second round of direct elections for a fully representative government a year later.

Once ‘stability’ has been restored, a sovereign Iraqi government will be able to ask the occupation troops – soon to be renamed the American-led multinational force -- to leave. This at least is the theory of Iraq’s peace process.

A promising path has been traced, but can it be followed? Or will the ugly reality of rivalries and sectarian strife – and especially of lethal attacks against foreign forces -- continue to plunge the country into chaos?

Perhaps the most hopeful news to come out of Iraq is that Prime Minister Allawi plans to reconstitute the Iraqi army, the only institution which can restore order and hold the country together.

When George Bush welcomed leaders of the industrialized world – the so-called G8 -- to the summer resort of Sea Island, in Georgia, there was much talk of bringing ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ to the Greater Middle East. But uppermost in most people’s minds was this week’s revelation that the Bush Administration, on advice from lawyers in the defence and justice departments, appears to have authorised the torture of terrorist suspects -- hardly the best advertisement for American freedom and democracy.

Not so secret intelligence

One striking result of the current world disorder has been a blurring of the frontier between the overt world of politics and the covert world of secret intelligence. Never has intelligence been less secret and more talked about, and never has it assumed so much importance.

In Britain, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) used to be a mysterious figure whose name and appearance were unknown to the public. Today’s head, John Scarlet, has had his name and photograph plastered all over the newspapers.

In the United States, the resignation in early June of CIA Director George Tenet was front-page news, sparking speculation about whether he went of his own free will or was pushed. His departure is seen as a victory for his hard-line adversaries in the Pentagon and the Vice-President’s office, and especially for Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Tenet was appointed CIA Director by President Clinton in 1997, but managed to survive into Bush’s Republican era. As a Democrat, however, he is dispensable. He is the first major victim of the present crisis.

He has been much criticised for a long list of intelligence lapses – the failure to predict nuclear tests by India and Pakistan; the failure to penetrate Al-Qaida and prevent the bombings of two US embassies in East Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbour in 2000, and, above all, the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.

More recently, the CIA failed to discover that, by 2003, Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. If it had doubts about the intelligence on which the Iraq war was waged, it did not express them strongly enough.

It appears that, in his eagerness to please President Bush whom he briefed every morning, Tenet did not stand up against the pro-Israeli hawks who pressed for war against Iraq on the basis of flimsy, fabricated or false intelligence, largely supplied by Ahmad Chalabi’s defectors and by Israel’s Mossad.

Did Chalabi make monkeys of the entire American intelligence community? Did he tell Iran that the US had cracked its codes and was listening in to its secret intelligence communications? Chalabi has denied the accusations, but the CIA and the FBI are said to be investigating

In a new book entitled A Pretext for War, the intelligence expert James Bamford comes very close to stating that the Washington hawks were, wittingly or unwittingly, acting as agents of Israel’s hard-line Likud party. He suggests that when it pre-emptively invaded Iraq last year, Washington mistook Israel’s interests for its own.

According to Time Magazine’s review of Bamford’s book (in its 14 June issue), a senior Pentagon official, Douglas Feith, set up several secret offices in the Pentagon that received data from Israel’s own intelligence teams and coordinated its findings with them, partly as a way to get around CIA caution in the Middle East.

Once Tenet steps down in mid-July, his acting successor will be his deputy John McLaughlin, who will probably stay in the job until the November elections. Washington is eagerly waiting to see who will then be appointed CIA chief.

If Bush wins the election, the neo-cons are likely to dominate and shape US foreign policy for another presidential term – to the alarm of much of the world. If John Kerry wins, however, he is likely to appoint a man able to reassert the integrity of American intelligence, free from pressures from ideologues and special interest groups.

The Middle East Target

The Arab world has long been a prime target for intelligence agencies, but never so much as today when fear of terrorist attack dominates the thinking in Western capitals. Serious efforts are being made to identify and penetrate militant Islamist factions -- so far, it would appear, with only limited success.

Native Arabic speakers are being recruited by the hundreds into organisations that intercept and monitor international communications, such as Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) or America’s much larger National Security Agency (NSA), which employs some 40,000 people around the world. America’s intelligence budget, divided between fifteen intelligence agencies, is estimated at $40 billion a year.

Ever since the Second World War, reconfirmed in 1947 under the so-called UKUSA Agreement, Britain and the America have shared signals intelligence (SIGINT). Australia, Canada and New Zealand are also partners in this intelligence swapping agreement.

There is hardly a code used by Arab governments that has not been broken and hardly a telephone call, fax or e-mail message in the Arab world that is not read and analysed by eavesdroppers at British bases in Cyprus, at NATO facilities in Turkey, or of course in Israel.

When I lived in Lebanon in the 1960s, a friend of mine was a professor at the American University of Beirut. Every day his American wife would, to my surprise, spend long hours on the top floor of a handsome pink building near the Beirut lighthouse (Manara). What was she doing there? Years later, he told me. On behalf of the CIA, she was listening in to conversations by Pierre Gemayel, Kamal Jumblat, Sa’ib Salam and no doubt many, many others in Lebanon and beyond.

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