The Grocer and Alice’s Cat - FB Ali

It was the dawn of 2010, and the ISI had a problem: Pakistan’s spy agency was losing control over some of its Taliban proteges. The previous year the British and some Europeans, wearying of the unending war, had prevailed upon the UN representative in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, to get peace negotiations started between the Karzai government and the Taliban. With the assistance of the Saudis, Eide arranged some meetings with a few former Taliban leaders and also involved some Afghan officials. These didn’t bother the ISI; what was getting them worried now were reports that the Taliban’s No. 2 man, and operational commander, Mullah Baradar, was involved in these talks. 

The ISI’s predicament was that they didn’t know where Baradar was. While they kept track of the Taliban political leadership, Baradar had disappeared into the large Pashtun community in Karachi’s 18 million inhabitants. The ISI had information on his satellite communication links, but didn’t have the hi-tech equipment to pinpoint his location through them. Their friends in the CIA had such equipment but, even though they claimed the US wasn’t in favour of any peace negotiations, the ISI couldn’t be sure. So, they just told the CIA they needed help to pick up some low-level Taliban operatives in Karachi. 

The CIA obliged, and the ISI nabbed Baradar. A week later they told the CIA: Guess what? We’ve just discovered we got a big fish in that roundup! The CIA was pleased, Kai Eide was not. The nascent peace talks were squashed, and the Taliban leadership got the message: no talking without Pakistani permission. The message to the Karzai government and the West was: if you desire peace talks with the Taliban and other insurgents, come to us and we’ll bring them to the table. 

Months passed and then, all of a sudden, everyone in Kabul started jumping onto the peace talks bandwagon, including, notably, Gen Petraeus. The trouble was they weren’t asking the Pakistanis to help; instead, they were again throwing out feelers directly to the Taliban. The ISI didn’t like this at all; since they couldn’t be sure another leader wouldn’t decide to do some freelancing, they decided to create their own freelancer. The person they settled on was Mullah Mansur, who had replaced Mullah Baradar in the Taliban hierarchy. 

The call went out to ISI operatives to find a Mansur look-alike. The person selected for this role was an Afghan who was running a small grocery shop in Quetta. Since all the Taliban, conveniently, wear turbans and sport large beards, discovery of the imposture was not a big worry; they hoped suitable briefings would take care of other issues. Even though the US commander in Afghanistan was now all for peace talks, the ISI wasn’t so sure about the CIA. So, they decided to have the fake Mansur approach the British spy agency, the SIS, instead. 

The SIS couldn’t believe their luck. Marginalized in Afghanistan by the huge CIA operation, they were facing budget crunch time back at home. Here was a chance to play the lead role in a critical venture, and prove to everyone the importance of their contribution. Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, they didn’t do any serious checking of his bona fides. Even if they’d wanted to, they didn’t have the means; they couldn’t ask the ISI, and they didn’t want to involve the CIA. Their Taliban contact was playing hard to get, so they overcame his hesitations with a large payment upfront, with promises of more to come. 

When they broke the news of their coup to the CIA and the Afghans, both warmly welcomed it but warned of the essential need to keep it hidden from the ISI. A plane landed at the US airbase in Pakistan, picked up ‘Mullah Mansur’, and flew him to Kabul. Adequately briefed, the ‘Mullah’ held his own in talks with the Americans and the Afghans. Everyone was surprised at the very moderate conditions that he put forward for a settlement ‒ except Gen Petraeus, who was convinced that this was the result of the hard knocks he had recently been giving the Taliban. 

The Taliban ‘leader’ had to be persuaded with several hundred thousand dollars to repeat his visits to Kabul. On one of them he was taken by the British to visit with President Karzai, who was generous in the promises that he made about the future. Gen Petraeus made it known to the media that his strategy was succeeding, and had brought the Taliban to the negotiating table. Already he could see the laurels of Afghanistan being added to those of his “victory” in Iraq. Taliban denials that any such talks were going on were met with knowing smiles. 

The ISI had succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. It had managed to have its Quetta grocer conduct talks for months with the Afghans and the Americans as a senior Taliban emissary. It had learnt a great deal of their negotiating positions. This was sweet revenge for the Afghans and the West trying to cut them out of the peace moves. They had now effectively proved that such talks could not be held without using them as the intermediary. Having achieved what they wanted they pulled the plug on the caper; the doughty ‘Mullah Mansur’ and the humble Quetta grocer both suddenly disappeared. Word was quietly leaked as to what had really happened. 

It is not known if the ISI has a mascot. Perhaps they should adopt the Cheshire Cat as one. After all, it was adept at vanishing into thin air, leaving behind only its huge grin hanging in the tree branches. 

[Full Disclosure: The writer does not have, and has never had, any connection with the ISI. (In fact, apart from le Carre’s doomed protagonists, he heartily detests spies ‒ present company excepted, of course). This piece is a connecting of the dots of information available in the public record, while ignoring the chaff scattered by certain (rather red-faced) interested parties. As for Alice, the author finds her saga an indispensable aid in understanding an increasingly crazy world].

 

 

Comments

[John Waring]

To: My Fellow Americans

Subject: the Current Iteration of the Great Game.

Let's take second thought about participating. As our culture is young, rich, and spoiled, we simply do not possess the trans-generational skill in the dark and wily arts of subterfuge necessary to be masters of this particular game. To fall for such a classic ruse is proof positive we have scant business mucking about in that part of the world, In those dense thickets, we are mere babes in the wood. We are so pathetic, grasping at straws, it's damn near hilarious.

[walrus]

Gen. Ali,

I only wish my Father, also among other things an intelligence person at one time, was still alive to read your masterful report on this situation. He would have loved it.

[William R. Cumming]

Thanks General Ali! A must reading post for any who really care about US!

[BillWade]

Gen Petraeus must be livid, won't there be repercussions for the ISI?

[PS]

I'm reading Operation Mincemeat right now, and the British would seem to have forgotten every deception trick they played on the Germans.

[Nightsticker]

Colonel Lang,

Very much enjoyed the F.B. Ali post.
It reminded me of "...a fool lies here who tried to hustle the East".

Nightsticker
USMC 65-72
BI 72-96

[Patrick Lang]

Nightsticker

I used to quote that Kipling to people. Some heard me.

"Four things greater than all things are; women and horses and power and war." pl

[Basilisk]

F.B. Ali,
A wonderful description. David Cornwell himself might approve.

[David Habakkuk]

PS

The organisation which has once again demonstrated its abject incompetence, the SIS, was actually quite marginal to the British intelligence effort – there is a devastating dissection of its inadequacies in the 1968 essay The Philby Affair by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, himself a pivotal figure in the great deception operations.

As you will know, Operation Mincemeat was essentially the creation of Charles Cholmondeley of MI5, and Ewen Cameron, of the Admiralty – the original idea of planting a corpse with faked documents having come from Ian Fleming, likewise of the Admiralty. There is a comic irony here, in that although the initial 'M' in the James Bond novels echoes the initial 'C' used by the head of MI6, Fleming's character is actually based on the formidable and formidably acerbic wartime Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey: Fleming referred to him, satirically I think, as 'Uncle'.

Of deception, Godfrey wrote 'it is quite useless, and in fact dangerous, to employ people of medium intelligence'; he also commented that the deception required the kind of 'corkscrew mind' he did not himself possess: so he went and found people, like Fleming and Montagu, who did. Whether seeing through deceptions likewise requires a 'corkscrew mind' is perhaps a moot point, but it is certainly not a task for people of 'medium intelligence'.

Of equal importance is a single-minded interest in establishing the truth. The summary Mcintyre gives of Godfrey's assessment of the vulnerabilities of German intelligence on which the deception operations capitalised seems relevant today:

'Uncle' John Godfrey identified what he called 'wishfulness' and 'yesmanship' as the twin frailties of German intelligence. 'If the authorities were clamouring for reports on a certain subject, the German secret intelligence was not above inventing reports based on what they thought probable.' The Nazi high command, at the same time, when presented with contradictory reports, was 'inclined to believe the one that fits in best with their own previously formed preconceptions.'

Back in 2004, before Lord Butler's report on the failures of British intelligence over Iraqi WMD appeared, a highly intelligent commentator – the former Foreign Office official and Tory MP Matthew Parris – produced an acerbic assessment of the weakness of today's MI6, in an article in the Times entitled 'Our spies are amiable duffers: it's the Establishment way'.

Himself having once been head-hunted – unsuccessfully – by MI6, and had a good deal of contact with its members since, Parris provides what to my mind is a cogent explanation of why that organisation repeatedly gets things wrong: it employs people of 'medium intelligence'. Correctly, he anticipated that Lord Butler would not confront the problem:

Easy as it would be to blame Mr Blair alone for the mess we are in, (Parris wrote) British spooks should not be allowed to get off so lightly. I know some very nice spooks. I have never met a seriously malevolent or totally unhinged British spy. They are a clubbable crowd. It’s just that I harbour serious doubts as to whether they are much good.

(See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article1013658.ece )

A really frustrating aspect of the situation is that neither Lord Butler nor anyone else seems to grasp a fundamental lesson of wartime experience: that intelligence agencies not led and staffed by people of the requisite abilities end up becoming the instruments of agencies which are. As Trevor-Roper put it in the report he wrote on German intelligence in 1945, spies in wartime could prove 'a positive and serious danger to their employers' if used as a channel for disinformation. The same also goes for peacetime. So this is not a field where indulgence for failure is appropriate.

Where I find it difficult to follow Parris is in his reference to 'the Establishment way'. One could hardly be more 'establishment' than Godfrey and Montagu – the latter of whom was the pampered scion of a great Anglo-Jewish banking family, his uncle having been both Minister of Munitions and Secretary of State for India in the war of 1914-18. Perhaps we have all simply got a bit soft in the head.

[Saeed Malik.]

Thank you Brig Ali for yet another great post--and this one really takes the cake. Despite all the credit laced with notoriety India and the West has been heaping on the ISI, I never believed they could amount to much--indeed I've personally served with so many of the ISI officers, and could not for the life of me believe, how so many perfectly average officers could suddenly be transformed into so many Bonds. But in the "Mullah Mansur" caper they seemed at last to have proved the adage " give a man a reputation and he'll live up to it". I seriously suggest that someone make a comic movie from this one. It would best be entitled," How the General lost the Republican Nomination!"
Saeed Malik

[walrus]

Mr. Habakkuk, see if you can beg borrow or steal the final (?) volume of the official history of British Intelligence in WWII. It is about the deception operations, the Twenty Committee, etc. It is an exquisite and masterly work from memory by Michael (now Sir) Howard - beware, various volumes written by others.

The penetrating insights abound, starting from the seminal "There is no point in just getting the enemy to THINK something, you must get him to ACT on it." Sadly, the author opines that the cooperation between Masterman, Bevan, etc. was such that quite a lot of the work was not documented in much detail, perhaps wisely, as at least one operation involving a parachute that deliberately failed to open, was rather messy.

Regarding "wishfullness" and "Yesmanship" the history details the forensic British examination of the actors in the German intelligence services after the war and catalogues these all too human frailties. For example, German military intelligence always took the British bait about fictitious units hook, line, and sinker and added them to their notional British and American orders of battle and they never removed them, even when it became obvious that they were fakes.

Haven't we seen similar standards of bad behaviour, unfortunately this time on our side, regarding intelligence in the build up to the Iraq war?

As for SIS, what better reputation for an intelligence service to have then that of bungling ineffectual idiots? I am not a great fan of Trevor Roper.

[Jose]

Great post Sir, but maybe the ISI also has a motto...lol

I've never trusted toadstools, but I suppose some must have their good points. - Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland

[par4]

This is better than the latest wikileaks. Homer Simpson or the Three Stooges couldn't be this inept. More proof that we are way past due to start dismantling the empire. We no longer fight wars to win,just enrich the military/industrial complex and now we're becoming a laughing stock. I have a hard time imagining Putin falling for something like this.

[rjj]

Never realized there was a connection between my love of the hoax as high art form and my infatuation with Le Carre's work - or, come to think of it, my morbid fascination with the machinations of Karl Rove.

TANGENT QUERY RELATED TO MISLEADERSHIP + THE SEEMY (sic) SIDE OF THINGS - David Habakkuk, was Peter Fleming in the same line of work? In News from Tartary he Pimpernels it up with over-the-top fecklessness, then around chapter 5 (?) writes what hard-assed, no-nonsense summary of conditions as he found them. Don't remember the details, just the dramatic and contradictory shift in tone. I concluded this was not the whimsical madcap adventure it was purported to be.

[Medicine Man]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, FB Ali. I can't imagine being able to discern these kinds of things with so little to look at. "Corkscrew mind" indeed.

[Fred]

Walrus said:
"... military intelligence always took the ...bait about fictitious units hook, line, and sinker ... and they never removed them, even when it became obvious that they were fakes." "Haven't we seen similar standards of bad behaviour, unfortunately this time on our side, regarding intelligence..."

But Al Quada is everywhere! Sorry, couldn't resist. Of course we've seen this. Too bad Mr. Hope and Change doesn't have any backbone. Nor anyone at a high enough level of government, either.

[optimax]

Thank you, FB Ali, for another illuminating illustation of how the world works, or doesn't work. Reminds me of a line from a movie "Incompetence is the worst form of corruption."

["Mad" Mike Adams]

Mr. Ali,
I think you have great potential as a Standup Comedian/Analyst. Your wit is dryer than a 16 to 1 Martini.
Best Regards,
Mike Adams

[FB Ali]

All,

I am a little overwhelmed at the reception accorded my piece. Thank you all!

As they say, the quality of the audience draws out the best in the performance.

[Taj M Khattak]

Brig F B Ali,
Thanks a lot for a very interesting piece. Really enjoyed reading it.

Best Wishes
Khattak

Taj M Khattak

[M. Azam]

This masterstroke by ISI should come as no surprise. It was the CIA, MI6 and Saudi intelligence that had previously groomed this organization to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan during the cold war. Chickens have come home to roost?

[Patrick Lang]

Azam

No, once again, the mujahideen that the US supported did not include the Taliban. pl

[J]

Let's just have a greater Turkic Empire be re-established and be done with all this nonsense. No? Would not a new Timujin re-arranging the deck chairs help matters?

[Dr>HZK]

excellent,pithy and brimming with dry wit. My grandpa was in the thick of The Great Game. A close relative created the isi. It was damn good in the1950 to 1960 time frame.The original Bond was a lieut. in the TOCHI SCOUTS in MIRANSHAH 1940 --45 Even TE SHAW[LAWRENCE]served in Mrn:Why do all the great ones gather in Waziristan??my brethren will entice you to ask him a favour for which you pay him and also thank him profusely, he has a twinkle in his eye, and yet you call him a savage!!! And he KNOWS that you think he is a savage!!An excellent bit of writing. thankyou. The tame tribesmen like me sit by the sidelines ,impotent but a certain amount of prescience can discern the deceptive behaviour of the civilized west. Our wild brethren with wits much sharper look at the western babes in the field as a wolf looks at a flock of sheep eyeing a juicy young lamb. time .initiative.place.and surprise are at the disposal of the tribesman . The tribesmans dictum "you are hasty if you take revenge earlier than a 100 years. More than 200 years have passed and you have as yet not even scratched the head of the pakhtun/afghan,let alone his mind. good luck. the game goes on .

[Mohammed Shuaib Sheikh]

Whenever a successful raid or operation is completed in Afghanistan we hear from the US and its allies that a senior commender has been killed. If you believe that then by now hundreds of senior commenders must have been killed. FB Ali can you please give us an estimate of "senior commanders" fighting Afghanistan or is it that every Afghan fighter is a senior commander?