[THS] Alain Chouet 911 Interview With Le Monde

[Peter Webster]

UQ Wire: Alain Chouet 911 Interview With Le Monde

Distribution via the Unanswered Questions Wire
http://www.unansweredquestions.org/ .

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Questions From Le Monde on Franco-American Anti-Terrorist
Cooperation
Alain Chouet Interview
Original Le Monde - Translation By Truthout.org
Thursday 29 March 2007

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.