lennart
16-03-04, 16:56
Expect dirty tactics in new war on terror
CONTEMPLATING the horror of modern terrorism with its indiscriminate targets, its deadly practitioners and a shadowy network of organisations whose aim is nothing less than the destruction of western democracy, a French detective described it as "the Hundred Years War of modern times".
Jean-Louis Bruguières, whose experience of fighting terrorism goes back to the 1960s, covering the Black September hijackers, the Red Brigade in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, was the man who tracked down Carlos the Jackal. He believes the war that now has to be waged will be long, dirty and mostly fought out behind the scenes. It means not only infiltrating groups such as al-Qaeda but learning to think like them as well.
As one Australian agent put it: "It is not enough to reinforce the battlements, as the West has been doing. You have to get inside the mind of the terrorist and look back at your own castle walls."
Europe has one advantage here. It has been combating terrorism of one sort or another since the end of the Second World War, by foul means or fair. So foul, indeed, that in the aftermath of that war, US and British intelligence took it to new extremes by recruiting wanted Nazi war criminals to help root out communist cells - in the belief that to catch an enemy agent you needed an expert who thought like one.
Klaus Barbie, known as the Butcher of Lyons, a former Gestapo agent in occupied France, was taken onto the allied payroll, given a new identity and employed for two years in Germany before Nazi hunters got wind of what was happening and began to close in on him.
Helped by his US masters, he was able to escape to South America, where he became the figurehead leader of a group of neo-Fascist death squads. It was only years later that he was caught in Bolivia and brought back to France to face trial for crimes against humanity. He died in prison.
Never again, vowed western agents, would they go down that route.
But of course they did. In Northern Ireland, the British recruited the IRA killer known as Stakeknife to tip them off about terrorist plans, as well as Brian Nelson, the UDA intelligence chief who was prepared to sacrifice the life of a civil rights lawyer to protect his undercover identity.
‘The idea was to send intelligence agencies off on a false trail’
For 20 years, in the Seventies and Eighties, the intelligence agencies of half a dozen European states did their best to infiltrate a loose conglomeration of right-wing terrorists known as the Black Orchestra, which carried out a series of violent attacks, including what was, until Wednesday last week, the worst post-war outrage against rail passengers.
In August 1980, a bomb went off at Bologna station, killing 84 passengers and wounding 200. It took undercover agents two years to discover that it was not, as most people suspected, the work of the left-wing Red Brigade, but of a right-wing group known as the Ordine Nuovo, or New Order, which had links across Europe and even into South America.
The lessons of those investigations could be critical today if the true identity of the group responsible for the Madrid massacre is ever to be established.
Ordine Nuovo, it was found, had developed a political theory which was a chilling foretaste of the terrorism of the 21st century. It came to be known as the ‘strategy of tension’ and its aim was to carry out acts of terrorism which could be blamed, not on right-wing extremists, but on radical left-wing groups.
The idea was that by sending intelligence agencies off on a false trail, panic and confusion would be created, to the point where the army might have to step in to take control.
"In our view, the first move [is] to destroy the structures of the democratic state under the cover of communist activities," read one of their papers.
There is an awful familiarity about that passage today. The immediate presumption in Spain was that ETA must have been responsible for the bombing of the Madrid trains. The explosives were of a type used by ETA, plans were unearthed linking ETA to attacks on trains, and a lorry containing bombs was traced back to ETA.
The evidence all pointed one way. Now, however, it seems that the trail may have been the wrong one, and police find themselves fighting on two fronts, just as they had to do in their war against the Black Orchestra.
That war was won in the end. It was won because the organisations responsible were finally penetrated, exposed and brought to justice. It took a generation to do it, and most of what happened is concealed so deep in intelligence files that some of it has never emerged to this day.
Those same tactics may well be used again. The war that led to the bloody mayhem of last week may take even longer than the last one - and be even dirtier.
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=294892004
CONTEMPLATING the horror of modern terrorism with its indiscriminate targets, its deadly practitioners and a shadowy network of organisations whose aim is nothing less than the destruction of western democracy, a French detective described it as "the Hundred Years War of modern times".
Jean-Louis Bruguières, whose experience of fighting terrorism goes back to the 1960s, covering the Black September hijackers, the Red Brigade in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, was the man who tracked down Carlos the Jackal. He believes the war that now has to be waged will be long, dirty and mostly fought out behind the scenes. It means not only infiltrating groups such as al-Qaeda but learning to think like them as well.
As one Australian agent put it: "It is not enough to reinforce the battlements, as the West has been doing. You have to get inside the mind of the terrorist and look back at your own castle walls."
Europe has one advantage here. It has been combating terrorism of one sort or another since the end of the Second World War, by foul means or fair. So foul, indeed, that in the aftermath of that war, US and British intelligence took it to new extremes by recruiting wanted Nazi war criminals to help root out communist cells - in the belief that to catch an enemy agent you needed an expert who thought like one.
Klaus Barbie, known as the Butcher of Lyons, a former Gestapo agent in occupied France, was taken onto the allied payroll, given a new identity and employed for two years in Germany before Nazi hunters got wind of what was happening and began to close in on him.
Helped by his US masters, he was able to escape to South America, where he became the figurehead leader of a group of neo-Fascist death squads. It was only years later that he was caught in Bolivia and brought back to France to face trial for crimes against humanity. He died in prison.
Never again, vowed western agents, would they go down that route.
But of course they did. In Northern Ireland, the British recruited the IRA killer known as Stakeknife to tip them off about terrorist plans, as well as Brian Nelson, the UDA intelligence chief who was prepared to sacrifice the life of a civil rights lawyer to protect his undercover identity.
‘The idea was to send intelligence agencies off on a false trail’
For 20 years, in the Seventies and Eighties, the intelligence agencies of half a dozen European states did their best to infiltrate a loose conglomeration of right-wing terrorists known as the Black Orchestra, which carried out a series of violent attacks, including what was, until Wednesday last week, the worst post-war outrage against rail passengers.
In August 1980, a bomb went off at Bologna station, killing 84 passengers and wounding 200. It took undercover agents two years to discover that it was not, as most people suspected, the work of the left-wing Red Brigade, but of a right-wing group known as the Ordine Nuovo, or New Order, which had links across Europe and even into South America.
The lessons of those investigations could be critical today if the true identity of the group responsible for the Madrid massacre is ever to be established.
Ordine Nuovo, it was found, had developed a political theory which was a chilling foretaste of the terrorism of the 21st century. It came to be known as the ‘strategy of tension’ and its aim was to carry out acts of terrorism which could be blamed, not on right-wing extremists, but on radical left-wing groups.
The idea was that by sending intelligence agencies off on a false trail, panic and confusion would be created, to the point where the army might have to step in to take control.
"In our view, the first move [is] to destroy the structures of the democratic state under the cover of communist activities," read one of their papers.
There is an awful familiarity about that passage today. The immediate presumption in Spain was that ETA must have been responsible for the bombing of the Madrid trains. The explosives were of a type used by ETA, plans were unearthed linking ETA to attacks on trains, and a lorry containing bombs was traced back to ETA.
The evidence all pointed one way. Now, however, it seems that the trail may have been the wrong one, and police find themselves fighting on two fronts, just as they had to do in their war against the Black Orchestra.
That war was won in the end. It was won because the organisations responsible were finally penetrated, exposed and brought to justice. It took a generation to do it, and most of what happened is concealed so deep in intelligence files that some of it has never emerged to this day.
Those same tactics may well be used again. The war that led to the bloody mayhem of last week may take even longer than the last one - and be even dirtier.
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=294892004