Paul Simpson: A Brief History of the Spy

However, another al-Qaeda courier, Hassan Ghul, said otherwise. Al-Kuwaiti was a trusted part of bin Laden’s inner circle, and was working with Abu Faraj al-Libi, KSM’s successor. When al-Libi was captured in May 2005, he also tried to divert attention away from al-Kuwaiti, making up the name of a courier whom he said was the key player. Attention was focused on the courier network, but leads were in short supply.

When he took power in January 2009, President Obama made the capture of bin Laden one of the CIA’s priorities, and on 2 June 2009 he ordered his new D/CIA Leon Panetta to ‘provide me within 30 days a detailed operation plan for locating and bringing [bin Laden] to justice’. Hopes were pinned on an apparent defector from al-Qaeda, Jordanian doctor Humam al-Balawi, but hope turned to tragedy when al-Balawi blew himself and seven CIA operatives up on 30 December 2009. Al-Qaeda continued operations, even as the CIA turned up the heat against them further — an attempt to down a commercial jet was foiled, and Faisal Shahzad, an American of Pakistani descent trained by the Taliban, tried to blow up his SUV in Times Square on 1 May 2010.

Surveillance on al-Qaeda operatives around the world paid dividends in the summer of 2010 when one of them contacted al-Kuwaiti, who revealed that he was ‘back with the people I was with before’. This was taken to mean that he was back in bin Laden’s inner circle. Human intelligence came to the fore now, as a Pakistani agent, working for the CIA, tracked al-Kuwaiti to Peshawar in Pakistan, then followed him back to the town of Abbottabad, two hours to the east. Al-Kuwaiti was living in a compound that struck the CIA as odd, since it had neither phone nor internet services.

When Panetta heard of this ‘fortress’ he ordered the Agency to investigate every avenue for getting inside the compound. It was clear that there was a chance that this was bin Laden’s location, but after the Curveball fiasco over WMDs seven years earlier, they were determined to ensure that any intelligence used to launch a mission was absolutely certain. The number of families in the compound seemed odd, as did the Pakistani intelligence service’s complete lack of knowledge about it. As deputy director Michael Morell pointed out at one stage, ‘The circumstantial case of Iraq having WMD was actually stronger than the circumstantial case that bin Laden is living in the Abbottabad compound.’

The CIA set up a safe house in Abbottabad, and deduced from the various movements to and from the compound, as well as observation of the amount of laundry left to dry, that there were three families within the compound rather than the two which there would appear to be at first glance. The composition of the third seemed to match bin Laden’s immediate family. It did seem as if the hunt might be over.

The relationship between the Americans and the Pakistanis took a knock early in 2011 when a CIA contractor, Raymond Davis, killed two Pakistani citizens in Lahore. There was already little trust between the two countries and their respective intelligence agencies: the Times Square bomber wasn’t the only anti-American terrorist who had come from Pakistan, and there was a feeling that the Pakistan intelligence agency might not be playing it straight with the CIA. Consequently, the Pakistanis were not informed of the CIA suspicions over the Abbottabad compound.

As plans were drawn up, the information the CIA had painstakingly gained was subjected to a ‘Red Team’ inquiry once more, this time by experts outside the Agency. This meant that every piece of evidence was checked to see if there was an alternate explanation that provided as likely an explanation as the one ascribed by the CIA. The week before the raid went ahead, the Red Team concluded that none of the alternate hypotheses was as likely as the theory that bin Laden was there.

Obama’s DNI, James Clapper, was one of those who felt that it was ‘the most compelling case we’ve had in ten years’ of hunting for bin Laden. Leon Panetta felt that they were ‘probably at the point where we have got the best intelligence we can get’. Both Vice-President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defence (and former CIA DCI) Robert Gates were against a raid; Foreign Secretary Hillary Clinton was in favour. So, after considering everything, was the president.

The raid went ahead on 1 May and at 11.35 p.m. President Obama informed the American people that ‘the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.’

Leon Panetta remembered one of the most unusual events of that night. As he drove from the White House, he heard chants from Lafayette Park. ‘CIA! CIA! CIA!’ Maybe some of the failures of the past were now forgiven.

The conflict in Syria during 2012 brought the idea of a ‘new Cold War’ back into focus. With the CIA assisting the rebels and the Russians helping to maintain the existing regime, at the time of writing it seemed as if ‘proxy wars’ like those waged in the fifties and sixties are being fought once more, as the ideologies of East and West clashed. But beneath all the rhetoric about a change in Russian attitudes following the collapse of the Soviet Union, did anything really change? Wouldn’t it, perhaps, be more accurate to say that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism marked a new phase in the Cold War, which has been fought constantly since then?

It is open to debate as to how much difference there is between the KGB and the agencies that were formed from its members and apparatus. The KGB’s First Directorate — responsible for overseas operations — became the Foreign Intelligence Service, initially headed by Yevgeni Primakov. As its spokesman Yuri Kobaladze pointed out in 1994, their main purpose was information-gathering from overt and covert sources: ‘That does not mean we will stop gathering information on you, and you on us, right? There are friendly states but no friendly intelligence services.’ The Second Directorate eventually became the FSB after Boris Yeltsin disbanded the Ministry of Security following questions about its loyalties during his struggles with the Russian parliament in 1993. Disingenuously, it claimed that it too could close down if the CIA activities in Russia were discontinued.

There was little chance of that. The discovery of Russian spies Aldrich Ames in 1994, and Edwin Pitts and Harold Nicholson two years later — all of whom were willing to work for the KGB’s successors — seemed to justify the pessimistic outlook of some in America who felt that the overt friendliness that was being displayed by the Clinton administration to the former Soviet Union was unwarranted.

FSB Director Nikolai Kovalev commented in 1996 that ‘There has never been such a number of spies arrested by us since the time when German agents were sent in during the years of World War II.’ Around four hundred foreign intelligence staff were either arrested or placed under surveillance in Russia over the previous two years, and the FSB were quick to publicise their successes: Platon Obukhov, a former Russian Foreign Ministry staffer, was arrested in April 1996, for allegedly communicating by radio with a member of the British Embassy staff and passing on political and strategic defence information to MI6. The FSB claimed this was the biggest failure by the British since the time of Penkovsky. Obukhov was sentenced to eight years in prison, but was re-tried in 2002 and sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment. Vladimir Sentsov was also tried for spying for Britain, and received ten years in jail: the worker at a defence institute was charged with selling technological secrets to MI6.