UQ Wire: Alain Chouet 911 Interview With Le Monde

Editor's Note: An April 16 Le Monde article about what the French secret services knew before 9/11 (the translation of which was published on Truthout) included quotations from this interview with former director of France's DGSE Security Intelligence Directorate, Alain Chouet. The full text of the interview he gave to Le Monde (below) - as posted on his web site - contradicts one major conclusion suggested by Le Monde. But we echo Chouet's invitation to the reader to read this text most carefully and draw your own conclusions from his statements.

!!!Warning!!!
Of the interview below, Le Monde, in its April 16, 2007 edition, believed it had only to publish the short extracts underlined here. That's a question of the paper's editorial freedom and I have nothing more to say about it.

What is less customary, is that these extracts have been put to use to bolster the thesis that the DGSE would have informed the United States several months in advance of the possibility of the 9/11 attacks, and that the American government or secret services disregarded that information. That interpretation is in flagrant contradiction with the spirit and letter of the interview that was given. I believe I must point this out most particularly to the reader who will draw his own conclusions [from the full interview].

1 - Briefly, what were your functions at the DGSE, up until your departure from that service in October 2002?

I was the head of the DGSE's Security Intelligence Service (SRS). That is, of the entity within the Intelligence administration that was then charged with the monitoring of crime, espionage, proliferation and terrorism.... As a specialist in Arab language and culture, I devoted several years of my career to working on Arab terrorism and Islamist violence. Before directing the SRS, I had mainly worked 25 years on the ground in the Middle East and the Maghreb, and in Europe within the framework of a variety of missions.

2 - How would you describe the relations between the DGSE and the CIA with respect to counter-terrorism between 1999 and 2001?

Let's distinguish between the anti-terrorist struggle - which assumes a violent act has been or is on the point of being committed, and that identified or identifiable authors of those acts exist - and counter-terrorism - a wider concept that includes all political, police, judicial, diplomatic, social and intelligence efforts aimed at preventing any tendencies towards terrorist violence.

With respect to the strictly-defined anti-terrorist struggle, the relations between the French and American [secret] services have always been good, even excellent, and, in any case, productive and operational. The only problems that may have arisen derived from our American friends' extremely pettifogging system, but these have most often been overcome through the interpersonal relations of lower echelon and field personnel.

With respect to the more general case of Islamic counter-terrorism, the divorce was (and, in my opinion, remains) profound. Since the 1980s, the CIA from the Maghreb to the Philippines has played the card of fundamentalist Sunni Islamist movements to counter Soviet or Iranian influences - local Communist or "progressive" parties - to assure a cordon sanitaire around Saudi Arabia, etc. We disagreed with this strategy, which led to deep disagreements.

3 - Did these two institutions maintain comparable apparatuses to monitor al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, in Saudi Arabia, in Yemen, in Africa? Differences and similarities?

In proportion to their total respective manpower resources, yes. But that makes a big difference.... Nonetheless, the result is not always proportional to the numbers, and, in comparing our notes, it often appeared to us that we knew as much or more about these matters as did our American colleagues. I remind you that up until the Nairobi and Dar es-Salam attacks, al-Qaeda (still known then as the "Services Bureau") was considered a tool, even an ally, by the United States, rather than an adversary. That was not our opinion.

4 - How did the two services react in the face of the identification of the threats al-Qaeda then represented?

The American services were long persuaded that they controlled the movement, either directly or vicariously through the Pakistani or Saudi secret services. That conviction often led them to lower their guard or to remain blind to certain tendencies.

5 - If one of the two secret services identified a threat bearing on the other's country, did it transmit that information to the other?

If it didn't, we don't know anything about it.... That said, and as far as I know, all identified threats - even indirect or minimal ones - were reported in both directions. That is not to say that they were taken into account. I am thinking specifically about the case of Zacarias Moussaoui.

6 - A January 5, 2001 memorandum details a plan confirmed by Osama bin Laden to hijack an airplane on the basis of intelligence supplied by the Uzbek security services. How did the cooperation with the latter originate?

If my memory is correct, it originated with the alliances run by General Rachid Dostum, one of the main Afghan warlords, himself an Uzbek also, and who then battled against the Taliban. To please the neighboring Uzbek security services, Dostum infiltrated some of his men into the heart of the Uzbek Islamic Movement, right up to the command structure of the al-Qaeda camps. That's how he informed his friends in Tashkent, knowing very well that that intelligence would later be passed on to Paris, Washington or London.

By the way, with respect to that memorandum, it is unusual to pass a paper on without double-checking. Its contents also originated with other sources on the ground that confirmed what the Uzbeks told us.

7 - Before September 11, 2001, had the secret service acquired a good understanding of the principal institutions that were helping al-Qaeda?

We understood that what was expensive was not the terrorist operations themselves, but everything that prepares the recruitment of volunteers for violence: financing the mosques, the clubs, the Salafist imams, the religious schools, the training camps, the support and maintenance of "martyrs'" families. Only powerful financial institutions could supply for all that. Very heavy evidence points to a certain number of private donors in the Arabian Peninsula, as well as to a certain number of banks and welfare institutions maintained by Saudi or Gulf funds. The American Department of the Treasury itself acknowledges and deplores these facts in a public report dated November 8, 2005.

8 - The name of a Saudi banker, Khaled bin Mahfouz, is regularly cited with respect to the private financial support provided to Osama bin Laden. Is there any basis for that?

Yes. We monitored their relations for several years. Up until 1998, Osama bin Laden and Khaled bin Mahfouz frequently met by arrangement in London at the secondary residence of the latter. We alerted the British secret services - which were obviously aware of this problem, but prevented by the rules of law in Great Britain from tackling it head-on. The DST [Direction de la surveillance du territoire] encountered the same type of problem in the affair of Rachid Ramda, the financier of [Algeria's] GIA [Armed Islamic Group] attacks in France.

In 1997, we even discovered that Khaled bin Mahfouz had contributed to buy a Somali warlord so that he would allow Osama bin Laden to set up an autonomous terrorist training camp on Somali territory, so that OBL could do what he liked with it, without having to answer to the Somali clans. Their relations went that far.

9 - According to you, did the Saudi intelligence services (GID) implement everything necessary to capture Osama bin Laden or have him delivered to them, during the period from August 1998 to August 2001?

Like many of the region's secret services, the GID does not really do intelligence, but protection of the regime, and it does that rather well.

For various reasons, many specialists on this issue are persuaded that Osama bin Laden was, at least until 1998, a GID agent manipulated at the highest level by Prince Turki. OBL, in fact, stepped in everywhere that Saudi strategic interests were in play (Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and finally, Afghanistan). His forfeiture of Saudi nationality was a farce for gulls. It goes without saying that when one has a "complicated and sensitive" agent, one does not spend one's time proclaiming that he is your best friend in the world. Quite the contrary.

As far as I know, no one did anything at all to capture him between 1998 and 2001.

I add that according to usually-reliable sources, the last direct contact between OBL and the CIA took place July 13, 2001 in Dubai. It was about getting OBL's support in the negotiation between the United States and the Taliban regime then opening in Berlin. That is to say that our American colleagues still thought they could play that card. That contact, assured by Dubai Station Chief Larry Wilson, was a failure all the way down the line, and it was at that moment that the CIA definitively understood that it had lost control, that the game had become very dangerous, and that a major problem was about to pose itself.

10 - According to you, was Prince Turki's departure as head of the Saudi secret services a consequence of his failure to obtain the terrorist's arrest? Why?

Following the failure in Dubai, the Americans finally understood that OBL had completely lost it, that he had fallen under the heel of Ayman Zawahiri (whom I persist in considering the true head of al-Qaeda), and that the ever-more-precise alerts that all the Western secret services (beginning with our own) were conveying to them about the imminence of a major al-Qaeda action against their interests were not the products of fantasy or perversity.

George Tenet is anything but an idiot. The day after the attacks against the embassies in Africa, the FBI investigations (embassies are federal territory) quickly brought the connections the CIA maintained with bin Laden to light. Consequently, the FBI boss prepared a report for the White House in which he seriously cast doubt on the CIA and its boss. Tenet got off by successfully getting himself proclaimed the "guarantor" of the Israeli-Palestinian Wye Plantation accords concluded under the patronage of the Presidency several days before the FBI report was handed in. Having acknowledged his status as guarantor of those agreements, it was subsequently impossible for the White house to repudiate him. The FBI report was filed in the wastebasket.

But in 2001, no escape-hatch like that was possible. Consequently, it was necessary to erase all traces of CIA involvement, as well as that of their little pals at the Saudi GID in particular, so as to shelter them from major accusations in case of a major clash. As the connections between Turki and OBL were a little too well-known by all kinds of experts, Turki was asked to put himself out to pasture for a little while.

11 - What relations did the CIA maintain with the Saudi intelligence services between 1999 and 2001?

The best, for what it is worth....

12 - As far as you were able to know, given the data the CIA passed on to American political decision-makers, did the latter do all they could to reduce al-Qaeda's resources with respect to the perception of its capabilities?

With respect to what Western secret services (and we, in particular) had gathered, if it was clear that something major was in the works, not one of us had envisaged that it could happen on American territory itself.

On the one hand, our connections on the ground - in particular the FBI - assured us that their control over their own territory was absolute and flawless. Duly noted.

On the other hand, all the indications seemed to imply that the objective would be an American target in Europe or American airliners somewhere in the world. And I have to acknowledge that we were reinforced in this analysis by the disinformation operation very cunningly conducted by Khaled Sheikh Mohammed when he "delivered" Djamel Beghal to the Emirates. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed distrusted Beghal. That's why he gave him to us, all the while using him as a vector for disinformation, so that we would all concentrate on anti-American attacks in Europe. The substance of Beghal's plan consisted of perpetrating an attack against the American embassy in Paris: It was a complete fabrication. He didn't have the means to realize that operation.

But during the summer of 2001, the US authorities did indeed do everything to protect their interests, infrastructures and citizens in Europe. And that in spite of the very brief amount of time available, since the American "realization" of al-Qaeda's true dangerousness in fact dated only from the month of August 2001.

Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.

STANDARD DISCLAIMER FROM UQ.ORG: UnansweredQuestions.org does not necessarily endorse the views expressed in the above article. We present this in the interests of research -for the relevant information we believe it contains. We hope that the reader finds in it inspiration to work with us further, in helping to build bridges between our various investigative communities, towards a greater, common understanding of the unanswered questions which now lie before us.

© Scoop Media