Robert Fisk: America's desire to be loved and feared has long misled CIA

[StarfarerBill]

In the vast American embassy in the hills outside the Jordanian capital Amman a senior US Special Forces officer runs an equally special office. He buys information from Jordanian army and intelligence officers – for cash, of course – but he also helps to train Afghan and Iraqi policemen and soldiers. The information he seeks is not just about al-Qa'ida but about Jordanians themselves, about the army's loyalty to King Abdullah II as well as about the anti-American insurgents who live in Jordan, primarily Iraqi but also Iraqi al-Qa'ida contacts with Afghanistan.

It's easy to buy army officers in the Middle East. The Americans spent much of 2001 and 2002 buying up the warlords of Afghanistan. They paid for Jordanian troops to join their own occupation army in Iraq – which was why the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad was ruthlessly bombed by Washington's enemies.

What the CIA's double agent Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi did – like so many al-Qa'ida followers, he was a doctor – was routine. He worked for both sides, because America's enemies long ago infiltrated Washington's "allies" in the Arab intelligence forces. Even Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who effectively led the al-Qa'ida side of the insurgency in Iraq and was himself a Jordanian citizen, maintained contacts within Amman's General Intelligence Department, whose own senior officer, Sharif Ali bin Zeid, was killed along with seven Americans this week in the CIA's greatest disaster since the Beirut US embassy bombing of 1983.

There is, however, nothing romantic about espionage in the Middle East. Several of the CIA men killed in Afghanistan were in fact hired mercenaries while the Jordanian "mukhabbarat" spooks, for whom both bin Zeid and al-Balawi worked, use torture routinely on Jordan's supposed enemies; indeed, they tortured men who were equally routinely "renditioned" to Amman by the CIA under the Bush administration.

The mystery, however, is not so much the existence of double agents within the US security apparatus in the Middle East, but just how a Jordanian "mole" could be of use in Afghanistan. Few Arabs speak Pushtun or Dari or Urdu, although a larger percentage of Afghans would speak Arabic. What it does suggest, however, is that there have been much closer links between the anti-American Iraqi insurgents based in Amman and their opposite numbers in Afghanistan.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-americas-desire-to-be-loved-and-feared-has-long-misled-cia-1859008.html