The story of long-term cooperation between the Sudanese regime and American intelligence
Timothy Carney and Mansoor Ejaz
The Washington Post
Sunday, June 30, 2002
Quoted from the English text published on sudaneseonline.com
Early in 1996, CIA Director John Deutch convinced Secretary of State Warren Christopher to withdraw American diplomats from Sudan out of fear for their safety. His concern was based on intelligence information involving the Sudanese government. Although the American embassy was not completely closed, it was evacuated, and relations with Khartoum became very conservative.
Shortly afterward, the US government believed that its analysis was wrong. A key source was either embellishing or fabricating the information, and in early 1996 the CIA canceled more than 100 of its reports on Sudan.
Did the US State Department then return its diplomats to Khartoum? no. Intelligence information has taken on a life of its own. There was a feeling of mistrust. In addition, the embassy became a political and diplomatic football for policymakers and activists who wanted to isolate Khartoum and force it to end the bloody civil war against the south, where the Christian majority is. To this day, the embassy is still understaffed.
This episode still needs reconsideration. The Bush administration, whether in relation to fighting terrorism in Afghanistan, judging the legitimacy of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, mediating between India and Pakistan, or contemplating the feasibility of an attack on Iraq, gave great weight to American (or foreign) intelligence reports. As long as the United States of America leads the war against terrorism and Congress rearranges and supports the American intelligence agencies, the influence of intelligence on foreign and military policy will increase.
But American policymakers must be smart in their use of intelligence information. The story of American policy in Sudan shows how bad intelligence, or good intelligence misused, harms American interests. In Sudan, this information about political Islam confused us, weakened our ability to intervene in the 47-year civil war, and in 1996 undermined our best chance to capture Osama bin Laden and stifle his organization, before he was banished from Sudan and found his way to Afghanistan.
We write based on experience. One of us, Carney, a retired diplomat, was the last US ambassador to Khartoum. The second, Ijaz, director of a monetary fund, played an unofficial role in carrying messages between Khartoum and Washington after the embassy was evacuated.
Possibly the most significant intelligence failure in Sudan is not protecting the safety of American diplomats, but understanding the political environment throughout the Muslim world. This is one aspect of Sudan's cautionary tale: the danger of losing sight of politics when the focus is on terrorism.
During the 1990s, some committed Muslims around the world attempted to formulate a political movement to bridge the gap between the modern world and the medieval sanctity. But instead of attracting this movement, the United States of America piled all Islamic groups into one basket, viewed them as all dangerous, and clung to its relations with authoritarian regimes that felt threatened by Islamic groups, and then made well-organized radicals control the reform movement in the Islamic world.
Khartoum was an important center of Islamic political activity. The National Islamic Front, led by the fiery man - Sorbonne graduate - Hassan Al-Turabi, seized power in a coup in 1989. Al-Turabi held annual conferences that attracted thousands of Islamic radicals to Khartoum to formulate their vision of an Islamic utopia. Al-Turabi described the conferences as cathartic sessions aimed at updating the discourse of Islamic extremism, while the United States government called them terrorist planning sessions, and instead of purifying and analyzing the work of those sessions, it asked Khartoum to close them.
Al-Turabi raised particular concern among the allies of the United States of America in Riyadh, Cairo, Asmara, Addis Ababa, Nairobi, and Kampala. Washington relied on their reading of events in Sudan, instead of relying on its eyes and ears.
There was ground for concern. Sudan's new leaders have expanded their long-standing ties to Middle Eastern terrorist groups. Bin Laden and his followers arrived in 1991. “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, an Egyptian who was later accused of conspiring to blow up a building in New York, obtained a US visa from Khartoum in 1993.
By late 1995, however, many Sudanese leaders began to consider whether their embrace of Islamic radicals was a cause for their defeat, both in terms of threatening their internal security and in terms of hindering their relations with the world at large. But when Sudan helped France capture the notorious terrorist known as “Carlos the Jackal,” American analysts saw this as a cessation of European concern rather than a shift in Sudan’s terrorist policy.
Poor intelligence included false accusations, as well as poor political analysis. False reports of plots against Americans prompted US Ambassador Donald Peterson to threaten "the destruction of your (Sudan's) economy" and "military measures that will make you pay a heavy price." The ambassador who succeeded him, one of the authors of this article, Carney, issued a similar warning in late 1995. The focus on false accusations diverted the United States from calls to address the legitimate grievances of the South Sudanese fighting.
Poor intelligence damaged US counterterrorism policy in August 1998 when cruise missiles, in response to the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, destroyed a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum that Washington claimed was producing chemical weapons. The Clinton White House did not possess any basic facts, such as who owned the factory, for example. Instead, the president relied on unconfirmed assumptions that bin Laden owned the factory.
The intelligence failure had its roots in secondary sources provided by anti-Khartoum allies in the region, especially in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Egypt. If US embassy staff in Khartoum had kept them in place, first-hand information could have identified the correct targets or averted a strike that ultimately strengthened Islamic radical sympathies for attacking the United States. The danger has emerged again recently, with the United States of America identifying distant targets, and in wrong cases, in Afghanistan, relying on intelligence information from questionable sources.
Sudan's story also shows that politics can override good intelligence and can be neglected by policymakers. By 1996, Khartoum's drive to build an Islamic ideological state had weakened. The pragmatists began to prevail over the ideologues. In February 1996, as reported by the Washington Post, Khartoum attempted to cooperate in the war against terrorism. The Minister of State for Defense (currently Sudan's Ambassador to the United Nations), Major General Al-Fatih Urwa, visited the United States of America to offer his merchandise - handing over bin Laden to Saudi Arabia in exchange for easing political and economic sanctions. Saudi Arabia refused.
Three months later, after offering to hand Bin Laden over to US authorities, Sudan expelled him, yielding to the request of Deputy National Intelligence Officer Samuel “Sandy” Berger. In July, Sudan granted US authorities authorization to film two terrorist camps. Washington failed to follow up. In August, Al-Turabi sent an “olive branch” message to President Clinton through Ijaz. There was no response to her.
In October, Qutbi al-Mahdi, the newly appointed Western-educated intelligence chief, provided sensitive intelligence information tracked through Khartoum to one of us, Ijaz, to pass on to the Clinton administration. By Election Day 1996, key Clinton aides, including Berger, knew what information was available from Khartoum and its potential value for identifying, tracking, and ultimately eliminating terrorist cells around the world. However, they did nothing about that information.
A subsequent shift occurred in Sudanese thinking in April 1997. The government canceled its demand that Washington lift sanctions in exchange for cooperation on the issue of terrorism. The Sudanese President made an offer, in a letter through Ijaz delivered to the US authorities, to the counter-terrorism units of the FBI and the CIA to have free and unconditional access to intelligence information in Khartoum.
The shift in Sudanese policy sparked controversy in the US State Department, as State Bureau officers believed that the United States should re-engage Khartoum. By the end of the summer of 1997, they sought to persuade new Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to allow at least some diplomats to return to Sudan to press an end to the civil war and pursue offers of cooperation against terrorism. An official statement was issued in late September.
However, two people objected, the National Security Committee's terrorism specialist, Richard Clarke, and the National Security Committee's African affairs specialist, Susan Reiss, and persuaded Berger, then the security adviser, to overturn Albright's position. The new policy was saved after two days.
The operation that took place within the intelligence agency over the course of a month turned around, hindering the efforts of the United States of America to combat terrorism. In a final attempt to find a way to cooperate with the United States authorities, the head of Sudanese intelligence repeated the unconditional offer to exchange terrorism information with the FBI in a letter dated February 1998 addressed directly to the Special Representative in charge of the Middle East and North Africa, David Williams. But the White House and Susan Reese objected. On June 24, 1998, Williams wrote to Qutbi al-Mahdi, saying that “I am not in a position to accept your generous offer.” The US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up six weeks later.
Only before the Cole attack did the Clinton administration modify its position by sending counterterrorism experts from the FBI to Khartoum for inspection. But that came too late.
We are still living the consequences of the United States of America's policy and the intelligence failure in Sudan. Khartoum offered us the best chance to attract Islamic radicals and stop bin Laden early. If the United States of America is to reckon with its failures that led to the September 11 attacks, we need to understand our failures in Sudan. Solid intelligence that feeds sensible policy can produce wisdom that helps distinguish America from those who seek to destroy it.
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Timothy Carney served as US Ambassador to Sudan from August 1995 until November 1997. Mansoor Ijaz, an American Muslim of Pakistani origin, negotiated Sudan's anti-terrorism offer to the United States in April 1997. Carney's views do not reflect the views of the US government.
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Background painting: The ruins of the palace of the King of Sennar as painted by Caio in 1821