2RHPZ
05-17-2004, 12:29 PM
CIA paying millions in Qaeda hunt
Foreign leaders fear impact on own intelligence
By John Donnelly, Globe Staff, 11/24/2002
ASHINGTON - The Central Intelligence Agency, returning to some of its cloak-and-dagger
ways to penetrate hostile territory, has handed out tens of millions of dollars
in unmarked bills in recent months to foreign intelligence contacts in the hunt
for Osama bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders, according to US officials
and former CIA members.
Just as the CIA spent several hundred million dollars in $100 bills on hand-picked
warlords to help motivate and arm ground forces in the war in Afghanistan,
agents have been given stacks of US currency to spend in Yemen, Pakistan,
Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, among other countries.
Some intelligence specialists applaud the return to the aggressive development
of local spies - called assets by intelligence officials - as a long-overdue
revitalization of a global operation that had become complacent and risk-averse.
But the practice also is creating great tension with some host governments,
which contend the practice could undermine their own efforts as well as cause
dissension in their intelligence ranks.
CIA agents are covertly giving the cash to members of foreign intelligence
services either to pay for information or to be passed on in recruiting other
sources, according to the US officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
''They have received tremendous cooperation from the intel services in those
countries,'' said a former CIA member, speaking on condition of anonymity. ''The
incident in Yemen is a direct result from the cooperation of the Yemeni
intelligence service.''
On Nov. 5, a CIA drone aircraft fired a Hellfire missile and destroyed a vehicle
carrying six suspected Al Qaeda members. The car contained Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi,
one of the two top Al Qaeda leaders in Yemen. That operation also used
electronic intercepts collected by the National Security Agency, which took
sophisticated surveillance equipment into Yemen with the government's quiet
blessing.
The CIA agents are carrying the currency in denominations of $20, $50, and $100
bills, confirmed two intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of
anonymity. The bills are neither crisp nor in sequence so the money can't be
traced to the US government, much less CIA headquarters, and jeopardize the
safety of local CIA contacts, officials say.
Distributing the money is only one of the tactics being used by US intelligence
and the military, which have come under increasing pressure - especially in the
last 10 days, since the latest purported message from bin Laden. The Al Qaeda
leader warned over a scratchy audiotape that the United States and its allies
would be attacked again.
The disclosure that the United States had Abd al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, a top Al
Qaeda commander, in custody was seen as evidence by some analysts that the
intelligence community was tightening the circle around the terror network's top
operators, including bin Laden. Nashiri, described as the head of Al Qaeda's
Arabian Peninsula operations, allegedly played a role in the bombing of the USS
Cole two years ago and in the Oct. 6 attack on a French supertanker off the
coast of Yemen.
Nashiri's arrest not only removes an important Al Qaeda plotter, but it also
could pay dividends through interrogation. US officials say the arrests of Ramzi
Binalshibh and Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan have been extremely helpful even if
Zubaydah's information is dated.
Those three suspects are some of the few senior leaders to be captured in the
US-led war on terrorism. Muhammad Atef, a top Al Qaeda operative, was killed in
Afghanistan in November 2001 by a missile fired from a CIA drone.
Despite those successes, several senior Al Qaeda-linked leaders remain
unaccounted for - about 80 percent of the leadership. In addition to bin Laden,
those still free include Ayman al-Zawahr, bin Laden's top aide; Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed; and Mullah Mohammed Omar, the former head of the Taliban. Intelligence
officials say they believe the freer flow of cash to informers and agents may
help capture these elusive leaders.
But as intelligence officers go after the top leaders, the CIA is facing strains
in its relationships with some foreign governments, US intelligence officials
acknowledge. A Pakistani official told the Globe that the large disbursement of
cash ''is a recipe for disaster. They are trying to run their own parallel
intelligence organization.''
''The CIA and FBI are saying they want to have their own assets,'' said the
Pakistani official, speaking on condition of anonymity. ''Ten thousand dollars
goes a long way, but it's a very temporary way. The general impression is that
Americans use people like condoms and then walk away.
''Everyone knows that once Osama bin Laden is captured, the Americans are going
to bug out of there. That's why Pakistani intelligence is being very careful
with them,'' the official said.
But intelligence specialists counter that Pakistan has not done enough in
rooting out dissidents in its intelligence ranks. Many people contend that
Pakistan intelligence may be hiding bin Laden and his close advisers somewhere
in the nation's vast lawless regions along the Afghan border.
''Someone's protecting'' bin Laden, said Robert Baer, a former CIA agent and
author of ''See No Evil,'' a scathing account of US missteps in running covert
actions in the 1980s and 1990s in the Middle East and elsewhere. ''This guy has
more support that we can ever imagine. You don't just hide out guys like bin
Laden and have them disappear. ''
Some contend that just before the Tora Bora battle in early December last year,
bin Laden sneaked out through the Baluchistan region and crossed the Arabian Sea
to his ancestral home in Yemen. The US military and CIA say they are beginning
to improve their network of sources in that region. The US military, in
particular, has set its aim on deepening its relationship with Djibouti on the
tip of the Horn of Africa. Many of the unmanned US Predator drones are now based
in Djibouti to spy over Yemen.
Surveillance is another key tool. The most obvious targets are the frequently
chosen messengers of Al Qaeda: reporters working for the Al-Jazeera TV network.
One US official said a reporter of particular interest to US intelligence
officers is Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, the bureau chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, who
has received several of bin Laden's communiques, including an audio recording on
Nov. 12 in Islamabad in which bin Laden applauds the recent terrorist attacks in
Bali and Yemen.
The release of the audiotape should spark an intensified effort to catch bin
Laden, said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings
Institution, a centrist Washington think tank. ''The best way to make the
argument is to look around the world at top terrorist leaders and what happens
to the organizations under them once the leaders are caught. You see a
remarkable drop-off with their capture.''
In recent weeks, US intelligence has reported a substantial increase in phone
calls and messages made by those linked to Al Qaeda. Jay C. Farrar, a military
analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a centrist
Washington think tank, said the US intelligence community should be responding
to that increase in activity in equal measure.
''The reality is you've got to step back and take a look at all the
possibilities,'' Farrar said. ''It is like a police investigation of a murder.
You eliminate things that don't bear fruit, you keep working on those that give
you an opening.
''The feeling is that inevitably someone is going to make a mistake, and the
more you stay on it, the more you concentrate, the better able you'll be to see
that first stumble.''
Offering multimillion-dollar public rewards for bin Laden hasn't worked. Now,
the CIA hopes, furtive payments of a few hundred dollars to the right local
agents will.
John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 11/24/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
Bribes, not bombs, defeated Taleban
by elaine monaghan
CIA spent ?45 million buying off hostile leaders, according to a new book on the
war
THE United States won the war in Afghanistan not so much through its
overwhelming military might as through the simple, age-old technique of bribery,
according to a book published in the US today.
Bob Woodward, the Washington Post journalist, claims that CIA agents, led by a
team called ?Jawbreaker?, bought off a number of Taleban commanders and other
hostile factions with a mere $70 million (?45 million).
In Bush at War, Mr Woodward tells how, as US aircraft rained bombs on
Afghanistan, 110 CIA officers and 316 special forces personnel were causing just
as much damage on the ground with their cash handouts.
That´s one bargain, President Bush told Mr Woodward as he wondered aloud what
the Soviet Union had spent during the nine years in which it tried in vain to
suppress the Afghans in the 1980s.
The CIA?s pay-offs were a drop in the ocean compared with the estimated $10
billion overall cost of the war in Afghanistan, but experts agree that they did
much to shorten the campaign by buying off Taleban forces and giving money up
front to their only organised opponent, the Northern Alliance.
According to Mr Woodward´s account, a ten-man paramilitary team code-named
"Jawbreaker" set the tone after landing in Afghanistan on September 26, 15 days
after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Centre. They carried $3
million in a single attaché case.
The team leader, Gary, dumped half a million dollars in ten stacks of $100
bills in front of the head of the Alliance?s intelligence and security service
and told him to do with it as he wished. The next day, he delivered $1 million
to the commander of the Alliance forces, who is now Afghanistan?s Foreign
Minister, Mr Woodward wrote.
?Hank?, the head of the CIA?s counter-terrorism special operations, knew the
value of cash to Afghanistan?s impoverished fighters, whose commanders had
themselves been bought off by the Taleban some years before.
?Warlords or sub-commanders with dozens or hundreds of fighters could be bought
off for as little as $50,000 in cash,? he told Mr Woodward. ?If we do this
right, we can buy off a lot more of the Taleban than we have to kill.?
One commander, offered $50,000 to defect, asked for time to reflect. US special
forces then dropped a precision bomb right outside his headquarters and called
him back, this time offering only $40,000. He accepted.
?It?s the way things work there. Ever since the Soviet War, there have been no
governing structures. It?s really a question of who has got the cash and who has
got the weapons,? P. W. King, the co-ordinator of a project on US policy towards
the Islamic world at the Brookings Institution, said.
Julie Sirrs, a former Defence Intelligence Agency analyst and expert on
Afghanistan, agreed. ?If they would have done this a few years ago, maybe we
wouldn?t have had this problem,? she said. ?The Northern Alliance was so cash-strapped,
it needed money to feed its horses.?
The one thing that American money could not buy, however, was information
leading to the capture of either Osama bin Laden or Mullah Mohammed Omar,
supreme leader of the Taleban.
The White House said yesterday that intelligence experts had concluded that the
voice on an audiotape received by the al-Jazeera television station last week
was that of bin Laden, proving that the al-Qaeda leader was alive.
Mr Woodward recounts the parting instructions given to ?Gary? by the head of the
CIA?s counter-terrorism centre before he left for Afghanistan. ?You have one
mission,? he was told. ?Go find the al-Qaeda and eliminate them . . . Get bin
Laden, find him. I want his head in a box . . . I want to take it down and show
the President.?
In his first cable back, ?Gary? rather optimistically requested some heavy-duty
cardboard boxes, dry ice and some pikes.
Foreign leaders fear impact on own intelligence
By John Donnelly, Globe Staff, 11/24/2002
ASHINGTON - The Central Intelligence Agency, returning to some of its cloak-and-dagger
ways to penetrate hostile territory, has handed out tens of millions of dollars
in unmarked bills in recent months to foreign intelligence contacts in the hunt
for Osama bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders, according to US officials
and former CIA members.
Just as the CIA spent several hundred million dollars in $100 bills on hand-picked
warlords to help motivate and arm ground forces in the war in Afghanistan,
agents have been given stacks of US currency to spend in Yemen, Pakistan,
Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, among other countries.
Some intelligence specialists applaud the return to the aggressive development
of local spies - called assets by intelligence officials - as a long-overdue
revitalization of a global operation that had become complacent and risk-averse.
But the practice also is creating great tension with some host governments,
which contend the practice could undermine their own efforts as well as cause
dissension in their intelligence ranks.
CIA agents are covertly giving the cash to members of foreign intelligence
services either to pay for information or to be passed on in recruiting other
sources, according to the US officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
''They have received tremendous cooperation from the intel services in those
countries,'' said a former CIA member, speaking on condition of anonymity. ''The
incident in Yemen is a direct result from the cooperation of the Yemeni
intelligence service.''
On Nov. 5, a CIA drone aircraft fired a Hellfire missile and destroyed a vehicle
carrying six suspected Al Qaeda members. The car contained Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi,
one of the two top Al Qaeda leaders in Yemen. That operation also used
electronic intercepts collected by the National Security Agency, which took
sophisticated surveillance equipment into Yemen with the government's quiet
blessing.
The CIA agents are carrying the currency in denominations of $20, $50, and $100
bills, confirmed two intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of
anonymity. The bills are neither crisp nor in sequence so the money can't be
traced to the US government, much less CIA headquarters, and jeopardize the
safety of local CIA contacts, officials say.
Distributing the money is only one of the tactics being used by US intelligence
and the military, which have come under increasing pressure - especially in the
last 10 days, since the latest purported message from bin Laden. The Al Qaeda
leader warned over a scratchy audiotape that the United States and its allies
would be attacked again.
The disclosure that the United States had Abd al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, a top Al
Qaeda commander, in custody was seen as evidence by some analysts that the
intelligence community was tightening the circle around the terror network's top
operators, including bin Laden. Nashiri, described as the head of Al Qaeda's
Arabian Peninsula operations, allegedly played a role in the bombing of the USS
Cole two years ago and in the Oct. 6 attack on a French supertanker off the
coast of Yemen.
Nashiri's arrest not only removes an important Al Qaeda plotter, but it also
could pay dividends through interrogation. US officials say the arrests of Ramzi
Binalshibh and Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan have been extremely helpful even if
Zubaydah's information is dated.
Those three suspects are some of the few senior leaders to be captured in the
US-led war on terrorism. Muhammad Atef, a top Al Qaeda operative, was killed in
Afghanistan in November 2001 by a missile fired from a CIA drone.
Despite those successes, several senior Al Qaeda-linked leaders remain
unaccounted for - about 80 percent of the leadership. In addition to bin Laden,
those still free include Ayman al-Zawahr, bin Laden's top aide; Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed; and Mullah Mohammed Omar, the former head of the Taliban. Intelligence
officials say they believe the freer flow of cash to informers and agents may
help capture these elusive leaders.
But as intelligence officers go after the top leaders, the CIA is facing strains
in its relationships with some foreign governments, US intelligence officials
acknowledge. A Pakistani official told the Globe that the large disbursement of
cash ''is a recipe for disaster. They are trying to run their own parallel
intelligence organization.''
''The CIA and FBI are saying they want to have their own assets,'' said the
Pakistani official, speaking on condition of anonymity. ''Ten thousand dollars
goes a long way, but it's a very temporary way. The general impression is that
Americans use people like condoms and then walk away.
''Everyone knows that once Osama bin Laden is captured, the Americans are going
to bug out of there. That's why Pakistani intelligence is being very careful
with them,'' the official said.
But intelligence specialists counter that Pakistan has not done enough in
rooting out dissidents in its intelligence ranks. Many people contend that
Pakistan intelligence may be hiding bin Laden and his close advisers somewhere
in the nation's vast lawless regions along the Afghan border.
''Someone's protecting'' bin Laden, said Robert Baer, a former CIA agent and
author of ''See No Evil,'' a scathing account of US missteps in running covert
actions in the 1980s and 1990s in the Middle East and elsewhere. ''This guy has
more support that we can ever imagine. You don't just hide out guys like bin
Laden and have them disappear. ''
Some contend that just before the Tora Bora battle in early December last year,
bin Laden sneaked out through the Baluchistan region and crossed the Arabian Sea
to his ancestral home in Yemen. The US military and CIA say they are beginning
to improve their network of sources in that region. The US military, in
particular, has set its aim on deepening its relationship with Djibouti on the
tip of the Horn of Africa. Many of the unmanned US Predator drones are now based
in Djibouti to spy over Yemen.
Surveillance is another key tool. The most obvious targets are the frequently
chosen messengers of Al Qaeda: reporters working for the Al-Jazeera TV network.
One US official said a reporter of particular interest to US intelligence
officers is Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, the bureau chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, who
has received several of bin Laden's communiques, including an audio recording on
Nov. 12 in Islamabad in which bin Laden applauds the recent terrorist attacks in
Bali and Yemen.
The release of the audiotape should spark an intensified effort to catch bin
Laden, said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings
Institution, a centrist Washington think tank. ''The best way to make the
argument is to look around the world at top terrorist leaders and what happens
to the organizations under them once the leaders are caught. You see a
remarkable drop-off with their capture.''
In recent weeks, US intelligence has reported a substantial increase in phone
calls and messages made by those linked to Al Qaeda. Jay C. Farrar, a military
analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a centrist
Washington think tank, said the US intelligence community should be responding
to that increase in activity in equal measure.
''The reality is you've got to step back and take a look at all the
possibilities,'' Farrar said. ''It is like a police investigation of a murder.
You eliminate things that don't bear fruit, you keep working on those that give
you an opening.
''The feeling is that inevitably someone is going to make a mistake, and the
more you stay on it, the more you concentrate, the better able you'll be to see
that first stumble.''
Offering multimillion-dollar public rewards for bin Laden hasn't worked. Now,
the CIA hopes, furtive payments of a few hundred dollars to the right local
agents will.
John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 11/24/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
Bribes, not bombs, defeated Taleban
by elaine monaghan
CIA spent ?45 million buying off hostile leaders, according to a new book on the
war
THE United States won the war in Afghanistan not so much through its
overwhelming military might as through the simple, age-old technique of bribery,
according to a book published in the US today.
Bob Woodward, the Washington Post journalist, claims that CIA agents, led by a
team called ?Jawbreaker?, bought off a number of Taleban commanders and other
hostile factions with a mere $70 million (?45 million).
In Bush at War, Mr Woodward tells how, as US aircraft rained bombs on
Afghanistan, 110 CIA officers and 316 special forces personnel were causing just
as much damage on the ground with their cash handouts.
That´s one bargain, President Bush told Mr Woodward as he wondered aloud what
the Soviet Union had spent during the nine years in which it tried in vain to
suppress the Afghans in the 1980s.
The CIA?s pay-offs were a drop in the ocean compared with the estimated $10
billion overall cost of the war in Afghanistan, but experts agree that they did
much to shorten the campaign by buying off Taleban forces and giving money up
front to their only organised opponent, the Northern Alliance.
According to Mr Woodward´s account, a ten-man paramilitary team code-named
"Jawbreaker" set the tone after landing in Afghanistan on September 26, 15 days
after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Centre. They carried $3
million in a single attaché case.
The team leader, Gary, dumped half a million dollars in ten stacks of $100
bills in front of the head of the Alliance?s intelligence and security service
and told him to do with it as he wished. The next day, he delivered $1 million
to the commander of the Alliance forces, who is now Afghanistan?s Foreign
Minister, Mr Woodward wrote.
?Hank?, the head of the CIA?s counter-terrorism special operations, knew the
value of cash to Afghanistan?s impoverished fighters, whose commanders had
themselves been bought off by the Taleban some years before.
?Warlords or sub-commanders with dozens or hundreds of fighters could be bought
off for as little as $50,000 in cash,? he told Mr Woodward. ?If we do this
right, we can buy off a lot more of the Taleban than we have to kill.?
One commander, offered $50,000 to defect, asked for time to reflect. US special
forces then dropped a precision bomb right outside his headquarters and called
him back, this time offering only $40,000. He accepted.
?It?s the way things work there. Ever since the Soviet War, there have been no
governing structures. It?s really a question of who has got the cash and who has
got the weapons,? P. W. King, the co-ordinator of a project on US policy towards
the Islamic world at the Brookings Institution, said.
Julie Sirrs, a former Defence Intelligence Agency analyst and expert on
Afghanistan, agreed. ?If they would have done this a few years ago, maybe we
wouldn?t have had this problem,? she said. ?The Northern Alliance was so cash-strapped,
it needed money to feed its horses.?
The one thing that American money could not buy, however, was information
leading to the capture of either Osama bin Laden or Mullah Mohammed Omar,
supreme leader of the Taleban.
The White House said yesterday that intelligence experts had concluded that the
voice on an audiotape received by the al-Jazeera television station last week
was that of bin Laden, proving that the al-Qaeda leader was alive.
Mr Woodward recounts the parting instructions given to ?Gary? by the head of the
CIA?s counter-terrorism centre before he left for Afghanistan. ?You have one
mission,? he was told. ?Go find the al-Qaeda and eliminate them . . . Get bin
Laden, find him. I want his head in a box . . . I want to take it down and show
the President.?
In his first cable back, ?Gary? rather optimistically requested some heavy-duty
cardboard boxes, dry ice and some pikes.