Talking to Terrorists: A Personal Journey from the IRA to Al Qaeda. Peter Taylor

are heavily armed and that they’re likely to use explosives, so we’re thinking that as soon as we walk in there, it’s going to be fireworks, real combat. It’s a good moment. There was emotion and fear, fear that is in your stomach before you go up and meet your adversary. Here you are playing with life and death.’ Lévêque’s colleague Roland Martin described the final moment before storming the plane. The members of the team piled one hand on top of the other in a pyramid of physical and spiritual solidarity. ‘All these hands became one single, powerful hand which had the strength to take on the terrorists. That was it.’

      At 5.15 p.m. the GIGN, masked and dressed in black, raced to the plane on a motorised passenger gangway and attacked through the rear and side doors. The stewardess Claude Burgniard remembers, ‘They were not human beings. They were machines.’ There was a fierce gun battle as the terrified passengers dived for cover between and under the seats. Yahia and two of the other terrorists were shot dead while offering determined resistance. That left one, Yahia’s number two, who was also determined to go down as a martyr, with gun blazing. ‘Then we had to deal with this warrior,’ Roland Martin told me. ‘I described him as a warrior because to launch a counter-attack single-handedly against the GIGN meant that he was doing his duty.’

      When the noise and smoke cleared, all four terrorists were dead. Ten members of the GIGN were wounded. Miraculously, all the hostages were alive. They had been held prisoner on the plane for fifty-four hours. Their liberation took just twenty minutes. The Eiffel Tower survived too.

      There is a fascinating and instructive postscript to the story. Among the political leaders of the Islamic Salvation Front who were arrested in the wake of the cancellation of the multi-party elections was a charismatic young cleric called Ali Belhadj, who had studied at Wahhabi schools^w in Saudi Arabia and had risen to become the organisation’s number two. He had been one of the prime movers of the demonstrations that had prompted the government to grant elections. I remember seeing remarkable video footage of a vast Islamist rally in Algiers shortly after the arrests in which Ali Belhadj’s seven-year-old son Abdelkahar, in full junior Islamic dress, addresses a vast crowd, calling for an Islamic state and the release of his father, who was serving a twelve-year sentence for armed conspiracy against the regime.⁷ ‘There are a billion Muslims and we don’t have a state that rules by God’s holy law,’ he shouts in the high-pitched voice of a child. ‘Isn’t that a dishonour and shame on us all?’⁸ The crowd roars its approval as the little boy is hoisted aloft by his father’s supporters. That powerful image brought vividly home to me the force and potential of political Islam.

      We then found some even more remarkable footage that was shot many years later, in 2007. It was in a propaganda video made to launch ‘The Al Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb’.^x There, standing in the woods in combat gear and holding a Kalashnikov, was Adbelkahar Belhadj, no longer the seven-year-old hero fêted at the rally, but now a fully-grown and fully-armed Al Qaeda combatant. The cause lives on, running through the blood of families in Ireland, the Basque country, Palestine, Kashmir and other conflict zones around the world. To its adherents, setbacks like the killing of the four Algerian hijackers make it even stronger.

      Chapter Four

      Talking to the Interrogators

      For the security and intelligence services, talking to terrorists is often the most effective way of countering them. Information and admissions gained during interrogation are vital not only in stopping terrorist attacks and bringing their perpetrators to justice, but in helping to paint a bigger picture of the organisation to which they belong. And there’s always the possibility of a bonus: turning the suspect and sending him back to the organisation from which he came in order to provide HUMINT – human intelligence – from within.

      The problem is that most terrorist suspects refuse to talk, and many have been trained in Afghan camps by Al Qaeda in counter-interrogation techniques. Time and again FBI agents I talked to emphasised the need to establish a rapport with the suspect that might eventually help to break his resistance. To do so, they said, required experience, patience and persistence – and the additional element of luck. These agents were institutionally and personally opposed to the ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques that the George W. Bush administration authorised the CIA to use in the wake of 9/11 to break important terrorist suspects, known as ‘High Value Targets’ (HVTs). They believed that such methods were not only ineffective, but counter-productive (see pp. 131, 293–4), and that talking to terrorists produced more valuable intelligence than subjecting them to humiliation and physical suffering that was tantamount to torture. The interrogation of the Al Qaeda suicide bomber Mohammed Al-Owhali by the FBI agent Steve Gaudin is a perfect case study. Al-Owhali miraculously survived the bombing of the US Embassy in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, in 1998, at the time I was still involved in the Northern Ireland peace process. The story illustrates not only the classic rapport-based interrogation techniques, but the evolution of Al Qaeda and its modus operandi through the 1990s.

      After the Soviet defeat in 1989, the United States pulled the plug on Afghanistan. America’s purpose had been served: the Soviet Union had been humiliated; the West had won. Afghanistan was now left to its own devices. Nation-building didn’t feature on the United States’ agenda.

      Osama Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia, a hero and celebrity who had vanquished the Russian infidels and was now ready to put his Afghanistan-acquired military skills and his nascent Al Qaeda organisation at the service of the Saudi royal family. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bin Laden offered to summon his army of Afghan veterans to wage jihad against the Iraqi interloper. His offer was politely refused by King Fahd, on the grounds that the Kingdom had a better offer from the Americans, backed by their British allies, in a coalition that included Muslim forces from Egypt, Morocco, Kuwait, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Bangladesh and, of course, Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden was thanked, and the hope was expressed that he would continue to serve Saudi Arabia as his family had done so loyally over so many years.¹