Intelligence

August 25, 2008

In Nuclear Net’s Undoing, a Web of Shadowy Deals | Khan

In Nuclear Net’s Undoing, a Web of Shadowy Deals - Series - NYTimes.com

By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER

The president of Switzerland stepped to a podium in Bern last May and read a statement confirming rumors that had swirled through the capital for months. The government, he acknowledged, had indeed destroyed a huge trove of computer files and other material documenting the business dealings of a family of Swiss engineers suspected of helping smuggle nuclear technology to Libya and Iran.

The files were of particular interest not only to Swiss prosecutors
but to international atomic inspectors working to unwind the activities
of Abdul Qadeer Khan,
the Pakistani bomb pioneer-turned-nuclear black marketeer. The Swiss
engineers, Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, were accused of having
deep associations with Dr. Khan, acting as middlemen in his dealings
with rogue nations seeking nuclear equipment and expertise.

The Swiss president, Pascal Couchepin, took no questions. But he
asserted that the files — which included an array of plans for nuclear
arms and technologies, among them a highly sophisticated Pakistani bomb
design — had been destroyed so that they would never fall into
terrorist hands.

Behind that official explanation, though, is a far more intriguing
tale of spies, moles and the compromises that governments make in the
name of national security.

The United States had urged that the files be destroyed, according
to interviews with five current and former Bush administration
officials. The purpose, the officials said, was less to thwart
terrorists than to hide evidence of a clandestine relationship between
the Tinners and the C.I.A.

Over four years, several of these officials said, operatives of the
C.I.A. paid the Tinners as much as $10 million, some of it delivered in
a suitcase stuffed with cash. In return, the Tinners delivered a flow
of secret information that helped end Libya’s bomb program, reveal
Iran’s atomic labors and, ultimately, undo Dr. Khan’s nuclear black
market.

In addition, American and European officials said, the Tinners
played an important role in a clandestine American operation to funnel
sabotaged nuclear equipment to Libya and Iran, a major but little-known
element of the efforts to slow their nuclear progress.

The relationship with the Tinners “was very significant,” said Gary S. Samore, who ran the National Security Council’s
nonproliferation office when the operation began. “That’s where we got
the first indications that Iran had acquired centrifuges,” which enrich
uranium for nuclear fuel.

Yet even as American officials describe the relationship as a major
intelligence coup, compromises were made. Officials say the C.I.A.
feared that a trial would not just reveal the Tinners’ relationship
with the United States — and perhaps raise questions about American
dealings with atomic smugglers — but would also imperil efforts to
recruit new spies at a time of grave concern over Iran’s nuclear
program. Destruction of the files, C.I.A. officials suspected, would
undermine the case and could set their informants free.

“We were very happy they were destroyed,” a senior intelligence official in Washington said of the files.

But in Europe, there is much consternation. Analysts studying Dr.
Khan’s network worry that by destroying the files to prevent their
spread, the Swiss government may have obscured the investigative trail.
It is unclear who among Dr. Khan’s customers — a list that is known to
include Iran, Libya and North Korea but that may extend further — got the illicit material, much of it contained in easily transmitted electronic designs.

The West’s most important questions about the Khan network have been consistently deflected by President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan,
who resigned last Monday. He refused to account for the bomb designs
that got away or to let American investigators question Dr. Khan,
perhaps the only man to know who else received the atomic blueprints.
President Bush, eager for Pakistan’s aid against terrorism, never
pressed Mr. Musharraf for answers.

“Maybe that labyrinth held clues to another client or another rogue
state,” said a European official angered at the destruction.

The Swiss judge in charge of the Tinner case, Andreas Müller, is not
terribly happy either. He said he had no warning of the planned
destruction and is now trying to determine what, if anything, remains
of the case against Friedrich Tinner and his sons, Urs and Marco.

Some details of the links between the Tinners and American
intelligence have been revealed in news reports and in recent books,
most notably “The Nuclear Jihadist,” a biography of Dr. Khan by Douglas
Frantz and Catherine Collins. But recent interviews in the United
States and Europe by The New York Times have provided a fuller portrait
of the relationship — especially the involvement of all three Tinners,
the large amounts of money they received and the C.I.A.’s extensive
efforts on their behalf. Virtually all the officials interviewed spoke
on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss
matters that remain classified.

The destroyed evidence, decades of records of the Tinners’
activities, included not only bomb and centrifuge plans but also
documents linking the family to the C.I.A., officials said. One
contract, a European intelligence official said, described a C.I.A.
front company’s agreement to pay the smugglers $1 million for
black-market secrets. The front company listed an address three blocks
from the White House.

The C.I.A. declined to comment on the Tinner case, but a spokesman,
Paul Gimigliano, called the disruption of Dr. Khan’s network “a genuine
intelligence success.”

With the evidence files destroyed and a trial in question, it is
unlikely that the full story of the Tinners will be told any time soon.
If it is, it is unlikely to come from the elder Mr. Tinner.

Approached at his home in Haag, Switzerland, near the Liechtenstein
border, Mr. Tinner, 71, was polite but firm in his silence. “I have an
agreement not to talk,” he told a reporter.

Beginning a Double Life

An inventor and mechanical engineer, Friedrich Tinner got his start
in Swiss companies that make vacuum technology, mazes of pipes, pumps
and valves used in many industries. Mr. Tinner received United States
patents for his innovative vacuum valves.

By definition, his devices were so-called dual-use products with
peacetime or wartime applications. Governments often feel torn between
promoting such goods as commercial boons and blocking them as security
risks.

As recounted in books and articles and reports by nuclear experts,
Mr. Tinner worked with Dr. Khan for three decades, beginning in the
mid-1970s. His expertise in vacuum technology aided Dr. Khan’s
development of atomic centrifuges, which produced fuel for Pakistan’s
nuclear arsenal, now variously estimated at 50 to 100 warheads.

Yet while Mr. Tinner repeatedly drew the attention of European
authorities, who questioned the export of potentially dangerous
technology, he never faced charges. Mr. Tinner’s involvement with Dr.
Khan deepened beginning in the late 1990s, when, joined by his sons, he
helped supply centrifuges for Libya’s secret bomb program.

In 2000, American officials said, Urs Tinner was recruited by the
C.I.A., and American officials were elated. Spy satellites can be
fooled. Documents can lie. Electronic taps can mislead. But a
well-placed mole can work quietly behind the scenes to get at the truth.

For instance, the United States had gathered circumstantial evidence
that Iran wanted an atom bomb. Suddenly it had a direct view into
clandestine Iranian procurement of centrifuges and other important
nuclear items.

“It was a confirmation,” recalled Dr. Samore, the former national security official who is now director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“That was much more significant than Libya,” because that country’s
atomic program was in its infancy whereas Iran’s was rushing toward
maturity.

Despite considerable income from their illicit trade, the Tinners
had money problems, a European intelligence official said. Eventually,
Urs Tinner persuaded his father and younger brother to join him as
moles, and they began double lives, supplying Dr. Khan with precision
manufacturing gear and helping run a centrifuge plant in Malaysia even
as their cooperation with the United States deepened.

At the time, Washington was stepping up efforts to penetrate Libya’s
bomb program. In early 2003, the European official said, the Tinners
and C.I.A. agents met at a hotel in Innsbruck, Austria, to discuss
cooperative terms. Several months later, in Jenins, a Swiss mountain
village, Marco Tinner signed a contract dated June 21, 2003, with two
C.I.A. agents, the official said.

The contract outlined the sale of rights that the Tinners held for
manufacturing vacuum gear, and of proprietary information about the
devices. In exchange, $1 million would be paid to Traco Group
International, a front company Marco Tinner had established in Road
Town, the capital of the British Virgin Islands, on the island of
Tortola.

In the contract, according to the European intelligence official,
the two C.I.A. agents used cover names — W. James Kinsman and Sean D.
Mahaffey — and identified their employer as Big Black River
Technologies Inc. In military and intelligence work, “black” means
clandestine. In the contract, Black River gave an address on I Street
in Washington, the intelligence official said. But no business
directory lists the company, and employees in the mailroom at the
address said they had no records for a company of that name.

Four months after the signing of the contract, American and European
authorities seized cargoes of centrifuge parts bound for Libya. “The
Tinners were a source,” a former Bush administration official said.

Two other officials credited the Tinners with helping end the Libyan
bomb program. In Libya, investigators found the rudiments of a
centrifuge plant and a blueprint for a basic atom bomb, courtesy of Dr.
Khan’s network. The Bush administration celebrated Libya’s abandonment
as a breakthrough in arms control.

But the secret lives of the Tinners began to unravel. The Malaysian
police issued a report naming them as central members of Dr. Khan’s
network. An official of VP Bank Ltd., Traco’s business agent in the
Virgin Islands, said it ended that relationship in early 2004, when
Marco Tinner was exposed.

Under growing pressure, Dr. Khan confessed. His clients turned out
to include not only Libya but Iran and North Korea, and his
collaborators turned out to be legion.

“We will find you,” Mr. Bush said in February 2004 of Dr. Khan’s
associates, “and we’re not going to rest until you are stopped.”

Acts of Sabotage

After the Tinners were arrested, Swiss and other European
authorities began to scrutinize their confiscated files and to conduct
wide inquiries. European investigators discovered not only that the
Tinners had spied for Washington, but that the men and their insider
information had helped the C.I.A. sabotage atomic gear bound for Libya
and Iran. A former American official confirmed the disruptions, saying
the technical architect of the operation was “a mad-scientist type” who
took pleasure in devising dirty tricks.

An American intelligence official, while refusing to discuss
specifics of the sabotage operation or the Tinners’ relationship with
the C.I.A., said efforts to cripple equipment headed to rogue nuclear
states “buy us some time and space.” With Iran presumably racing for
the capability to build a bomb, he added, “that may be the best we can
hope for.”

The sabotage first came to light, diplomats and officials said, when inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency
traveled to Iran and Libya in 2003 and 2004 and discovered identical
vacuum pumps that had been damaged cleverly so that they looked
perfectly fine but failed to operate properly. They traced the route of
the defective parts from Pfeiffer Vacuum in Germany to the Los Alamos National Laboratory
in New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb. There, according to a
European official who studied the case, nuclear experts had made sure
the pumps “wouldn’t work.”

A more serious disruption involved a power supply shipped to Iran
from Turkey, where Dr. Khan’s network did business with two makers of
industrial control equipment.

The Iranians installed the power supply at their uranium enrichment
plant at Natanz. But in early 2006, it failed, causing 50 centrifuges
to explode — a serious, if temporary, setback to Iran’s efforts to
master the manufacture of nuclear fuel, the hardest part of building a
bomb. (Iran says its nuclear efforts are for electricity, not weapons.)

Gholamreza Aghazadeh, the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy
Organization, told a reporter last year that Iranian investigators
found that the power supply had been manipulated.

After the episode, he added, “we checked all the imported instruments.”

Discussions With Washington

In 2005, Swiss authorities began asking the United States for help
in the Tinner case. Among other things, they wanted information about
the Libyan centrifuge program to press charges of criminal export
violations. For more than a year, the Swiss made repeated requests.
Washington ignored them.

“Its lack of assistance needlessly complicates this important
investigation,” David Albright, of the Institute for Science and
International Security, a private group in Washington, told Congress in
May 2006. Mr. Albright said he had helped Swiss prosecutors write to
the State Department.

The Swiss turned to the I.A.E.A. for help in assessing the Tinner
cache. European officials said the agency was surprised to find
multiple warhead plans and judged that most had originated in Pakistan.
The country denied that Dr. Khan had access to nuclear weapon designs
and questioned the agency’s conclusions.

In late July 2007, according to Swiss federal statements, the
justice minister, Christoph Blocher, flew to Washington for talks with Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence; Alberto R. Gonzales, then the attorney general; and Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director.

Officially, the statements said, the main topic was “cooperation in
the criminal prosecution of terrorist activities.” But the real agenda
was what to do about the Tinners.

A former Bush administration official said different government
agencies had differing views of the case. The State Department wanted
the bomb plans destroyed as a way to stem nuclear proliferation, while
the C.I.A. wanted to protect its methods for combating illicit nuclear
trade.

The C.I.A. also wanted to help the Tinners. “If a key source is
prosecuted,” a former senior official involved in the case said, “what
message does that send when you try to recruit other informants?”

American officials discussed a range of possible outcomes with the
Swiss and expressed their clear preferences. The best result, they
said, would be turning over the family’s materials to the United
States. Acceptable would be destroying them. Worst, according to the
former administration official, would have been making them public in a
criminal trial, where defense lawyers would have probably exposed as
much American involvement as possible in hopes of getting their clients
off the hook.

A Furor Over Destroyed Files

Last March, Mr. Müller became the examining magistrate in the Tinner
case, charged with assessing if a trial was warranted. Soon after, he
was quoted as saying the evidence files contained “obvious holes.”
Sketchy reports of deleted computer files and shredded documents had
been circulating, but he was the first identified official to hint at a
widespread destruction. Then, on May 23, the Swiss president, Mr.
Couchepin, revealed that Switzerland had begun a series of
extraordinary actions just days after Mr. Blocher, the justice
minister, returned from Washington.

Swiss citizens are prohibited from aiding foreign spies. But in his
statement, the president said that in late August 2007, the government
canceled a criminal case against the Tinners for suspicions of aiding a
foreign government. Though unmentioned, the C.I.A. seemed to peer out
from his statement.

On Nov. 14, his statement continued, the government decided to
destroy “the comprehensive holding of the electronic files and
documents” seized from the Tinners. The most dangerous items, the
president said, included “detailed construction plans for nuclear
weapons, for gas ultracentrifuges for the enrichment of weapons-grade
uranium, as well as for guided missile delivery systems.” International
atomic inspectors, he added, supervised the destruction.

Mr. Couchepin said keeping the documents “was incompatible with
Switzerland’s obligations” under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
and added, “Under all circumstances, this information was not to reach
the hands of a terrorist organization or an unauthorized state.”

The statement provoked a political furor. Some politicians and
columnists accused Switzerland of surrendering to Washington’s agenda
and violating Swiss neutrality. Among the strongest critics was Dick
Marty, a prominent Swiss senator. “We could have respected the treaty
by avoiding their publication and putting them under lock and key,” he
was quoted as saying on Swissinfo, the Web site of the Swiss
Broadcasting Corporation. Destroying them, he added, “ could lead to
the collapse of the legal case.”

Many European officials dismissed the government’s arguments about terrorists and rogue states as empty.

“If they had kept the material in federal possession for years, why
not keep holding it?” asked Victor Mauer, a senior official at the
Center for Security Studies of the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology. “Their explanation is not convincing.”

An Action’s Repercussions

In an interview, a senior European diplomat familiar with the
I.A.E.A. said the destruction could have repercussions far beyond the
criminal case.

For one thing, he said, the international atomic agency had been
allowed to examine only parts of the archive. He called it “a good
sample” and judged that the agency had missed no significant clues.
Even so, he said, the agency might “come to regret” its inability to
examine the materials further for insights into hidden remnants of Dr.
Khan’s network.

And while the Swiss president made much of the proliferation danger,
the diplomat insisted that the warhead designs were in many respects
sketchy and incomplete. “These are almost like studies — bits and
pieces,” he said, adding that they “wouldn’t be enough to let you build
a replica.”

So while they might have little or no value for a terrorist with no
atomic experience, the plans might prove quite helpful for an ambitious
state intent on building a nuclear arsenal. He said the agency had no
evidence that Iran had acquired the bomb plans.

The diplomat added that the Swiss had “lots of possibilities” other
than destruction. He said they had no legal obligation to destroy the
files under the nonproliferation treaty, and could have put them under
I.A.E.A. seal in Vienna or Switzerland.

Several European officials speculated that Washington might actually
have kept secret copies of the archive. A senior American official said
the United States had reviewed the material but declined to say if
there were copies.

As for the Tinners, the father was released in 2006, pending legal
action. In a brief interview at his home, Mr. Tinner pleaded ignorance
about basic aspects of the criminal case, such as where the authorities
kept the materials that had belonged to him and his sons. “The
newspapers know more about these things than I do,” he insisted.

Should the case fall apart, the Tinners would join a growing list of
freed associates of Dr. Khan. In June, Malaysia released the network’s
chief operating officer, B. S. A. Tahir, saying he was no longer a
national security threat. The authorities have kept the Tinner brothers
in jail for fear that they might flee the country. In late May, a Swiss
court rejected their bail application, and early this month, the ruling
was upheld. But the judges also told the authorities that they could
not hold the brothers indefinitely without charging them.

With much of the evidence gone, the magistrate, Mr. Müller,
expressed frustration at finding “no answers to the really interesting
questions in this case.” He declined to predict how it might turn out.

“At the moment,” he said, “it is impossible to make any schedule, since the case is in many aspects extraordinary.”

August 25, 2008 at 03:42 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

August 23, 2008

Why Georgia is not start of Cold War II

Why Georgia is not start of 'Cold War II

Why Georgia is not start of 'Cold War II' | csmonitor.com

Despite tensions over missile deals and NATO expansion, the West's ties with Russia are far more nuanced than in Soviet days.
By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the August 22, 2008 edition

Paris - Two weeks into the Georgia crisis, Russia maintains leverage, adroitly playing a great game of obfuscation and tit-for-tat – both militarily and diplomatically – with a disunited West struggling to determine whether this is a new cold war.

Vladimir Putin's idea of the 21st century appears different from that described by President Bush in calling for Russia to withdraw. As NATO officials this week fought to show strong support for Georgia without irreparably damaging ties to Russia, the "new world order" described by Mr. Bush's father as the Soviet empire collapsed seems a faint memory.

Yet while Russia's action has been termed a new cold war, that concept doesn't capture the dramatic global changes since Mikhail Gorbachev disbanded the Soviet Union in 1991, say diplomats and Russian area specialists. In a more globalized world, Russia is at once a competitor, a partner, and an opponent.

"It is the greatest challenge for any statesman today to see what is the right priority," says Pierre Hassner, a Paris-based scholar ofEast-West relations. "Is it Iran, Russia, the price of oil, terrorism? It may in some ways look like the cold war again – but the context today is blurred past recognition."

This week, rhetoric and emotion escalated: As Poland and the US signed a missile shield deal Tuesday, Moscow said Russia "will be forced to react, and not only through diplomatic means" – and is hosting Syria's president today to discuss further military cooperation.

NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said this week it will no longer be "business as usual" with Moscow, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Tbilisi defied Russia threats over NATO expansion and said Georgia will "one day" be a member. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov shot back that "NATO is trying to make a victim of an aggressor [Georgia] and whitewash a criminal regime."

Muddled view of Moscow's intent

Meanwhile, Moscow's intent in Georgia remains unclear. Russian troops on the ground have contradicted official promises; Russian authorities have avidly reinterpreted a French-brokered cease-fire. It remains unclear whether troops will withdraw into South Ossetia, or create their own unbrokered security zone in a swath of Georgia outside Ossetia. Moscow first said its troops would pull out, then said troops would only pull back. All the while, Russian forces have moved freely on Georgian territory and taken control of several cities. The delay is widely seen as a bid to dramatize the West's inability to deter. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili called the delay an opportunity for Moscow to "laugh at" the West.

Russian military authority remains split between a president elected in May with no opposition, and Prime Minister Putin, who once called the breakup of the Soviet Union "the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century."

Such remarks may feed new definitions of a "cold war," as does Putin's putative intent to exert power and influence in weaker states around Russia – particularly any Eurasian oil corridors through Georgia that would deny lucrative tariffs for Moscow.

1950s vs. 2008: Radio vs. iPod

Yet world dynamics in the cold war versus those in 2008 are as different as the transistor radio and the iPod. The interlinked economies of Russia and Europe, vastly freer global media access, the rise of China, greater travel, new generations, disparate wealth, and changed attitudes and expectations – make a different world than during the rigid standoff between the liberal West and communist Soviets. Russia is no longer a self-contained empire animated by the discipline of socialist morality – far from it, and the West is no longer focused on a single opponent. Issues without borders, such as energy, the environment, terror, trade, banking, and mafias – emerged more strongly after the Berlin Wall went down. The West needs Russia's help to constrain Iran.

The term cold war itself may actually block new thinking, argues Paul Goble, a former State Department and CIA analyst and expert on Soviet nationalities.

"The Russian Federation and the United States are not about to enter a new cold war even if tensions between Moscow and Washington rise dramatically," says Mr. Goble. "The cold war pitted an ideologically driven Soviet Union against the free world, a conflict [where] both sides ... devoted enormous resources to defeat the other."

"References to the cold war now are ... unhelpful ...," he adds, "an ideologically driven notion that the only possible choices these two countries have for relations are total conflict or total agreement, neither of which is possible or desirable."

In Poland, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters, "I don't think this is a new cold war."

In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy warned of the risk of a "new cold war" days ago, but has not repeated the phrase. French foreign affairs analyst Daniel Vernet, writing in Le Monde, argues that Russia is acting more like "a czarist power" than a Soviet power – and says the phrase "cold war" is useful to Moscow, since it conceptually divides east and west Europe into old zones of influence in which each side can act with relative impunity.

"We are stuck in relationships in which major powers are not enemies, but not friends," says Mr. Hassner at the Center of International Studies and Research in Paris. "The UN isn't working. The new world order and the democracy surplus never came to be – but there are networks of capital and cooperation between Russia, China, and the West that weren't there before."

A new world, yes, but not cold war

To be sure, thinkers – diplomats, scholars, writers – say the Russian blitz into Georgia represents a new world, but what kind of new world is undefined.

Cold war certainties have given way to an international climate that is mixed up, unpredictable, contrary, and quite corrupt. Russia's action is creating "a new context of fear rippling through its border regions," says Goble, causing "effects we can't even understand yet."

In the post-cold-war world of 2008, there's no one overarching reality that provides an orienting stability. Russians again feel Moscow's power and authority, and are assured by it. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan make NATO, the US, and Europe appear weak. In this world, "if you take one action, it can boomerang and harm something else," says Hassner. The "war on terror" isn't an adequate principle around which to center all focus, he adds.

Some East European analysts say Russia doesn't want to attack or allow hostile relations with the West à la cold war; Rather, Moscow's intent is to exploit the riches and technology of the West.

"Russia's strength is made possible by oil at $150 a barrel," says Bartosz Weglarczyk, foreign editor of influential Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. "If oil is cut to $60 a barrel, Russia is sunk. [Russians] spend less on research and development than Poland. They want bank accounts in the West, to make millionaires off sales to Europe. They don't want a big war. They want to gain influence and manipulate."

Find this article at: http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0822/p01s02-woeu.html

August 23, 2008 at 08:41 PM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

August 11, 2008

General Petraeus hails SAS after Iraq success over al-Qaeda car bombers

August 11, 2008

General Petraeus hails SAS after Iraq success over al-Qaeda car bombers
General David Petraeus

General
David Petraeus, who is stepping down as commander of US forces in Iraq
next month, rejects claims that the battle for Basra this year damaged
links between the US and British Forces. He praised SAS ’savvy’
Deborah Haynes in Baghdad

The SAS has helped to defeat a murderous web of al-Qaeda car bombers in

Baghdad that brought devastation to the capital, the top US commander in
Iraq said yesterday as he heaped praise on the unit’s efforts.

General David Petraeus, who is due to leave his post in Iraq shortly, also
dismissed the notion that American and British military relations had been
strained by the recent offensive in Basra, emphasising that the problem of
tackling militias in the southern port city had been rightfully Iraqi-led.

The four-star general, looking ahead to his next posting in charge of Central
Command, said he would draw on lessons learnt from his four years in Iraq on
how to fight an insurgency when tackling his new area of responsibility,
which includes Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and Lebanon.

He said that Britain’s special forces in Iraq worked alongside their American
counterparts on “many, many cases of very important operations.

“They have helped immensely in the Baghdad area, in particular, to take down
the al-Qaeda car bomb networks and other al-Qaeda operations in Iraq’s
capital city, so they have done a phenomenal job in that regard,” he told The
Times in an interview at his office in Baghdad’s fortified green zone.

On one occasion, SAS troops rented a pink pickup truck, stripped off their
body armour to blend in better with the local population, jumped behind the
wheel and drove through the traffic to catch a key target.

“It was brilliant, actually,” General Petraeus said. “Who dares wins,” he
said, quoting the SAS motto. “They have exceptional initiative, exceptional
skill, exceptional courage and, I think, exceptional savvy. I can’t say
enough about how impressive they are in thinking on their feet.”

The SAS has had at least two squadrons in Baghdad, operating alongside their
American counterpart, Delta Force, and other elements of the American
special forces.

Their principal role is to track down al-Qaeda, still seen as the biggest
threat to stability in Iraq, and catch would-be suicide bombers.

They are also engaged in hunting for hostages, including the five Britons who
were seized from a Finance Ministry building in Baghdad in May last year.

One SAS soldier, named at an inquest as Nicholas Brown, 34, was killed in a
firefight in Baghdad with Shia fighters in March. He is understood to have
been part of a snatch squad sent to arrest a senior militia commander that
ran into an ambush.

About ten members of British special forces have been killed in Iraq since the
2003 invasion.

Turning to Basra, General Petraeus said that the situation leading up to the
operation on March 25 launched by Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, to
reclaim Iraq’s second city from Iranian-backed militias, was very complex,
with many rival Iraqi political interests involved.

“There were Iraqi accommodations in Basra, there were coalition accommodations
in Basra, there were deals,” he said.

“I was very upfront about that, in fact, when I came through London on the way
home from Congress in September and noted that that’s how you end these
kinds of endeavours. Sometimes the deals work out well and sometimes they
don’t, and when they don’t, then you have to go back and rectify the
situation.”

Asked what he made of the deals that were cut in Basra, General Petraeus said
that the Iraqi authorities, including General Mohan al-Furaiji, the head of
security in the province at the time, had been fully supportive of them as
well as being the driving force behind some.

The General said that the Iraqi Government pushed strongly for the British
Forces to hand control of Basra to the Iraqi authorities, something that
happened in December, three months after British soldiers pulled out of the
city completely and moved back to their airport base several miles away.

However, he said, conditions in Basra had become ugly. “There is no question
that the militia, criminality and violence in Basra had reached intolerable
levels. That’s why Prime Minister Maliki ordered the operation there,” he
said.

The Prime Minister launched the Operation Charge of the Knights assault three
or four months sooner than had initially been expected, a move that revealed
the Iraqi forces in Basra were not ready to take on al-Mahdi Army and the
other militia elements that had effective control of the city. In the first
few days of the Basra offensive about 3,000 members of the security forces
fled.

“The early days there were dicey, there is no question about it, and it was an
urban combat zone. It was a fight,” General Petraeus said.

He said that the decision by Brigadier Julian Free, the acting commander of
the British military, to deploy small teams of military advisers with the
14th Iraqi Army division – something that happened six days into the
offensive – along with the arrival of all the thousands of Iraqi
reinforcements, backed by American combat power, helped to turn the
situation around. He denied that the Basra experience had damaged the
relationship between the American and British militaries, something that
some British and American officers have claimed.

General Petraeus said that he had spoken to senior British leaders, including
Gordon Brown and Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, “and once again I have
reiterated the importance that we put on the British contribution”.

General Petraeus, who is credited with helping to reduce violence in Iraq to
its lowest level in more than 4½ years by bringing in 30,000 extra troops in
2007 and encouraging former Sunni insurgents to turn against al-Qaeda, is
due to leave the country next month to begin his new job as head of the US
Central Command, based in Tampa, Florida.

As the man responsible for the Middle East, East Africa and Central Asia, he
will still oversee military strategy in Iraq, while also taking on other
troublespots.

As part of the transition process, he has travelled around the region over the
past six months, including visits to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan,
Lebanon and Turkey, offering information on the situation in Iraq and also
establishing new relations with a view to his future role.

In a signal that Tehran will be on his radar, General Petraeus said: “Everyone
is watching and waiting right now to see if, in fact, Iran is going to
continue to, together with help from Lebanese Hezbollah . . . train, equip
and fund organisations that are a destabilising force in Iraq.” For now, the
activities of Iranian-backed groups have dropped after operations in Basra
and other Shia strongholds forced many militia leaders to escape to Iran,
Lebanon and Syria, he said.

General Petraeus will also be focusing on Afghanistan. However, the General
said that an important lesson he had learnt from Iraq was that every
situation was unique. “Every situation has its own context, its own
circumstances, and the key, of course, is an accurate and nuanced
understanding of the conditions of the situation and the crafting of an
approach that is appropriate for that context,” he said.

“We have to work with our colleagues, our partners in Pakistan as well as
those in Afghanistan in trying to graft a comprehensive approach for the
entire region or that sub-region.”

The general refused to be drawn on plans to reduce further the number of
troops in Iraq, a contentious subject that has featured highly in the US
presidential campaign, with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama,
advocating a speedier withdrawal of troops than his Republican rival, John
McCain.

He is due to present his opinion on the future shape of American operations in
Iraq soon. He said: “We are very actively analysing the situation and our
various options.”

The general said that he had spoken to both presidential hopefuls about Iraq.

“We think that both candidates, having seen Iraq recently, have seen the
progress that has been made, are aware of the both the steps forward and the
additional steps that need to be taken,” he said.

As he prepares to leave, General Petraeus feels that the security gains made
on his watch are less fragile than at the start of the year. “But again I
would still be cautious of my assessment.”

The commander also noted progress on the political and economic front,
encouraging other countries to engage with Baghdad: “Iraq is really open for
business now.”

General Petraeus is due to be replaced in Baghdad in the middle of September
by Lieutenant-General Raymond Odierno, who was formerly his No 2 in the Iraq
conflict.

Arms and the man

— Born to Dutch-American parents in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, on November
7, 1952

— Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the infantry after graduating from
the US military academy at West Point in 1974

— Spent two years at Princeton University, where his doctorate thesis tackled
the lessons of the Vietnam War. His views differed sharply from those of the
military brass nearest to President Bush during the Iraq invasion

— Nearly died in 1991 when a soldier tripped and fired a live round into his
chest. He is reputed to have promoted his assailant to Ranger School, the US
Army’s most prestigious combat leadership course

— Served as chief operations officer for the United Nations mission to help to
establish democracy in Haiti

— Led the 101st Airborne Division into battle during the invasion of Iraq,
then assumed responsibility for the northern city of Mosul

— His second tour in 2004 involved overseeing the training of Iraqi security
forces. After that he spent 15 months writing the army’s manual on
counter-insurgency

— Arrived in Baghdad in 2007 after President Bush appointed him head of
multinational forces in Iraq. Elevated to full army general, he sought to
reduce violence with a surge of 30,000 extra US troops

— In July 2008 confirmed by Senate as the next head of US Central Command,
which is responsible for all military operations from the Horn of Africa to
the Middle East and Central Asia

Sources: Times database; Encyclopaedia Britannica

Petraeus in quotes

On the SAS “Who dares wins and they have exceptional initiative,
exceptional skill, exceptional courage and I think just exceptional savvy. I
can’t say enough about them actually, about how impressive they are in just
thinking on their feet” “We have had many many cases of very important
operations, they have helped immensely in the Baghdad area in particular to
take down the al-Qaeda car bomb networks and other al-Qaeda operations in
Iraq’s capital city so they have done a phenomenal job in that regard”

On the British deal with Shia militias in Basra “There were Iraqi
accommodations in Basra, there were coalition accommodations in Basra, there
were deals. I was very up front about that, in fact when I came through
London on the way home from Congress in September and noted that, that’s how
you end these kinds of endeavours. Sometimes the deals work out well and
sometimes they don’t and when they don’t then you have to go back and
rectify the situation”

On US troop withdrawals from Iraq “It is an opinion that is still being
formulated. We are very actively analysing the situation and our various
options. We are working that pretty intensively. [We] have been reviewing
options for several months: assessing what the best options are and trying
to refine a recommendation to make at an appropriate moment”

On how he will adapt lessons from Iraq for Afghanistan “The biggest
lesson that we’ve all relearnt – and I think we relearn it periodically – is
that every situation is unique. Every situation has its own context, its own
circumstances and the key, of course, is an accurate and nuanced
understanding of the conditions of the situation and then the crafting of an
approach that is appropriate for that context. Within Iraq, for example,
what works in Ramadi may not work in Baquba. You have to constantly assess
and learn and adapt. That approach first of all has to inform what we are
doing in Afghanistan”

On the US presidential candidates “We think that both candidates have
seen Iraq recently, have seen the progress that has been made, are aware of
the steps forward and the additional steps that need to be taken”

August 11, 2008 at 10:48 AM in | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home