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‘Mongoose One, on the move,’ she said.
Anyone who has ever been involved in what Kipling called ‘the Great Game’ and what James Jesus Angleton of the CIA referred to as ‘a wilderness of mirrors’ will surely agree the greatest enemy is the UCU.
The Unforeseen Cock-Up has probably wrecked more covert missions than treachery or brilliant counter-intelligence by the other side. It almost put an end to Operation Crowbar. And it all started because everyone consumed by the new atmosphere of cooperation was trying to be helpful.
The pictures from the two Predators which were ‘spelling’ each other over the UAE and the Arabian Sea were going back from Thumrait to Edzell air base, which knew exactly why, and American army CENTCOM at Tampa, Florida, which thought the British had simply asked for some routine aerial surveillance. Martin had insisted that no more than twelve should ever know he was out in the cold, and the number was still only at ten. And they were not in Tampa.
Whenever the Predators were over the Emirates, their images contained a teeming mass of Arabs, non-Arabs, cars, cabs, docksides and houses. There were far too many to begin checking out everyone. But the dhow called the Rasha and her elderly master were known about. So when she was in dock anyone visiting her was also of possible interest.
But there were scores. She had to be loaded and unloaded, refuelled and victualled. The Omani crewman scrubbing her down exchanged pleasantries with passers-by on the quayside. Tourists wandered by to gawp at a real trading dhow of traditional teak. Her skipper was visited on board by his local agents and personal friends. When a single clean-shaven young Gulf Arab in white dishdash and white filigree ‘thub’ skullcap conferred with Faisal bin Selim, he was just one of many.
Edzell’s operations room had a menu of a thousand faces of confirmed and suspected AQ members and sympathizers and every image from the Predators was electronically compared. Dr Al-Khattab did not trigger red flags because he was not known. So Edzell missed him. These things happen.
The slim young Arab visiting the Rasha rang no bells in Tampa either, but the army sent the images as a courtesy to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, and the National Reconnaissance Office (Spy Satellites) in Washington. The NSA provided them as a service to their British partners at GCHQ Cheltenham who had a good, long look, missed Al-Khattab and sent the images to the British Security Service (Counter-intelligence), more commonly known as MI5, at Thames House, just down the embankment from the Houses of Parliament.
Here a young probationer, keen to impress, ran the faces of all the visitors to the Rasha through the Face Recognition database.
It is not all that long ago that the recognition of human faces relied on talented agents who worked in half-darkness poring with magnifying glasses over grainy images to try to answer two questions: who is the man/woman in this photo and have we ever seen them before? It was always a lonely quest and took years before a dedicated scrutineer developed the sixth sense that could recall that the ‘Chummy’ in the photo had been at a Vietnamese diplomatic cocktail party in Delhi five years earlier and was certainly for that reason from the KGB.
Then came the computer. Software was prepared that reduced the human face to over six hundred tiny measurements and stored them. It seems every human face in the world can be broken down by measurement. It may be the exact (to the micron) distance between the pupils of the eyes, the width of the nose at seven points between eyebrows and tip, twenty-two measurements for the lips alone, and the ears . . .
Ah, the ears. Face analysts love the ears. Every crease and furrow, wrinkle and curve, fold and lobe, is different. They are like fingerprints. Even the ones on the left and right side of the head are not quite the same. Plastic surgeons ignore them, but give a skilled face-watcher both ears in good definition and he will get his ‘match’.
The computer software had a memory bank far bigger than a thousand faces stored at Edzell. It had convicted criminals of apparently no political persuasion at all, because even they can work for terrorists if the price is right. It had immigrants, legal and illegal, and not necessarily Muslim converts. It had thousands and thousands of faces taken from demonstrations, as the protesters rolled by the hidden cameras, waving their placards and chanting their slogans. And it did not confine its database to the United Kingdom. In short it had over three million human faces from all over the world.
The computer broke down the face talking to the master of the Rasha, compensated for the oblique angle of shot by picking the single image where the man raised his head to look at a jet taking off from Abu Dhabi airport, secured its six hundre
d measurements and began to compare. It could even adjust for added or shaved facial hair.
Fast though it worked, the computer still took an hour. But it found him.
He was a face in a crowd outside a mosque just after 9/11 cheering enthusiastically whatever the orator was saying. This orator was known as Abu Qatada, fanatical Al-Qaeda supporter in Britain, and the crowd he was addressing that late September day of 2001 was from Al-Muhajiroun, a jihad-supporting extremist group.
Abstracting the face of the student from the file, the probationer took it to his superior. From there it went up to the formidable lady running MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller. She ordered that the man be traced. No one then knew the probationer had uncovered the chieftain of Al-Qaeda in Britain.
It took a bit more time, but another match came up; he was receiving his doctorate at an academic ceremony. His name was Ali Aziz al-Khattab, a highly anglicized academic with a post at Aston University, Birmingham.
With what the authorities had, he was either a highly successful long-term sleeper or a foolish man who in his student days had dabbled with extreme politics. If every citizen in the second category were arrested there would be more detainees than policemen.
For sure, he had apparently never been anywhere near extremists since that day outside the mosque. But a fully reformed foolish boy is not spotted conferring with the captain of the Rasha in Abu Dhabi port. So . . . he was in the first category: an AQ sleeper until proven otherwise.
Further discreet checks revealed he was back in Britain, resuming his laboratory work at Aston. The question was: arrest him or watch him? The problem was: one aerial photograph that could not be revealed would not secure a conviction. It was decided to put the academic under surveillance, costly though it was.
The quandary was solved a week later when Dr Al-Khattab booked a flight back to the Arabian Gulf. That was when the SRR was brought in.
Britain has for years possessed one of the best ‘tracker’ units in the world. It was known as the 14th Intelligence Company, or the Detachment, or more simply ‘the Det’. And it was extremely covert. Unlike the SAS and the SBS it was not designed as a unit of ultra-hard fighters. Its talents were extreme stealth and skill at planting bugs, taking long-range photos, eavesdropping and tracking. It was particularly effective against the IRA in Northern Ireland.
In several cases it was the information provided by the Det that enabled the SAS to set an ambush for a terrorist attack unit and wipe them out. Unlike the hard units, the Det used women extensively. As trackers they were more likely to pass as harmless and not to be feared. The information they were able to bring back was indeed very much to be feared.
In 2005 the British government decided to expand and upgrade the Det. It became the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. It had an inaugural parade in which everyone, including the presiding general, was only photographed from the waist down. Its headquarters remain secret and if the SAS and SBS are discreet, the SRR is invisible. But Dame Eliza asked for them and got them.
When Dr Al-Khattab boarded the airliner from Heathrow to Dubai there were six from the SRR on board, scattered invisibly among three hundred passengers. One was the young accountant in the row behind the Kuwaiti.
Because this was just a shadowing operation, no reason could be seen not to ask the Special Forces of the UAE for cooperation. Ever since World Trade Center bomber Marwan al-Shehhi was discovered to have come from the UAE, and even more since the leak that the White House was tempted to bomb the Al-Jazeera TV station at Qatar, the UAE had been extremely sensitive about Islamist extremism, and nowhere more than in Dubai, headquarters of the Special Forces.
Thus two hired cars and two rented scooters were available for the SRR team when it landed, just in case Dr Al-Khattab was being picked up. It was noted he had carry-on baggage only. They need not have bothered; he rented a small Japanese compact which gave them time to move into position.
He was tailed first from the airport to the Creek in Dubai where once again the Rasha was moored after her return from Gwador. This time he did not approach the vessel but stood by his car a hundred yards away until Bin Selim spotted him.
