Earlier this month, former New York Times Iraq correspondent Alex Berenson published the paperback version of The Secret Soldier, his fictionalisation of the CIA’s operations in the Middle East. Last week, life imitated art with the news that the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist group has unwound much of the CIA’s spy network in the Lebanon. Below, Alex unpicks this intelligence disaster and human tragedy.
Just as the CIA seemed to have turned a corner…
America’s spy agency had a good run in the last year. First, the CIA helped score a bloodless but crucial victory over Iran by infecting a uranium enrichment plant with a software virus. The rogue code basically turned enrichment machines into out-of-control blenders, setting back Iran’s nuclear program for years. Then, after a decade of searching, it found Osama bin Laden at a mansion in Pakistan. There, Seal Team Six flipped him into martyrdom with extreme prejudice.
But the agency, like the rest of the American intel community, has always been better known for its technical skills than its ability to handle human agents. Now the CIA’s historic weakness has come back to bite it — and may have cost dozens of foreign agents their lives. (In CIA lingo, the term “agents “ refers to foreign nationals spying on behalf of the United States. The CIA never calls its American employees “agents” – they are “case officers” or “operatives.”)
Highly credible reports from the Associated Press and ABC News make clear that the CIA has recently lost two different spy networks targeting Iran and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia that basically controls Lebanon. The United States blames Hezbollah for suicide bombings in Beirut in 1983 and 1984 that killed hundreds of Marines and destroyed the American embassy.
So the CIA has long tried to penetrate Hezbollah and Iran. But in June, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah (pictured), Hezbollah’s commander, announced that the group had discovered CIA informants in its ranks. At the time, the United States denied the story. But in the last few days, American officials have acknowledged that Nasrallah was telling the truth and that Hezbollah arrested a dozen or more agents.
In addition, the Iranian government said publicly this week that it had arrested a dozen CIA agents in a separate ring Iran. The arrests represent a big setback for the American effort to contain Iran’s influence in Lebanon — and to slow its nuclear program and understand its intentions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The human cost is also enormous. Iran and Hezbollah have not disclosed the fate of the spies, but Iran is not known for treating foreign agents kindly. They face long prison terms and possible torture and execution.
Exactly what went wrong in Beirut and Iran may never be fully clear to anyone outside the halls of the agency’s massive headquarters in Langley, Virginia. But sloppy tradecraft and smart counter-intelligence work by the Iranians both seemed to have played a part. According to an ABC report, case officers met with several Hezbollah agents in a Pizza Hut in Beirut. If the report is true, it violates basic tradecraft rules — multiple agents should never meet multiple officers in a public place, much less in a city that’s known to be under the control of a hostile intelligence service. Worse, according to ABC, the CIA referred to the restaurant under the code word “PIZZA.”
Hezbollah and Iran also used sophisticated communications-tracking technology, like examining mobile phone networks to find phones that had been used in strange ways — like being turned off nearly all the time and used for only a couple of short calls a month. The U.S. National Security Agency uses similar database searches to find terrorist networks, and Americans like to believe we have a monopoly on the use of information technology in espionage. But silicon and software know no ideology, and as other countries close the tech gap, the United States must look to Britain and other allies to help improve its Achilles’ heel — the way it recruits and runs agents.
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