Much ado about a missile

Asia Times
August 15, 2003
By B Raman

There has been much media hype about a joint operation mounted by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Russia's Federal Security Service, and the MI5 (Security Service) and MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service) of the United Kingdom that resulted in the arrest of three persons, one of them a British arms smuggler, and the recovery of a surface-to- air missile (SAM) of Russian make, which had been procured in Russia and smuggled to the United States for possible sale to jihadi terrorists.

The operation has been projected as reflecting unprecedented cooperation among the services of the three countries and as yet another success in the war against terrorism. A Russian claim that the missile was intended to be used against the US Air Force aircraft in which President George W Bush normally travels has been denied by the FBI.

The most important point to underline is that this was a sting operation mounted by the FBI with the cooperation of the services of Russia and the UK. Two unposed and hence unanswered questions in this regard are: first, was it a sting operation from the beginning until the end and, if not, at what stage it became one; and, second, whether the Russian and British services also knew that it was a sting operation.

A sting operation in such cases is one in which an intelligence officer, in order to trap smugglers willing to sell arms to terrorists and their accomplices, approaches the targeted smuggler, posing as a terrorist, and seeks his help in procuring the weapon in return for a huge sum of money. The sting operation results in the identification of arms smugglers willing to sell arms even to terrorists and their accomplices who are prepared to help them in procuring the arms and not in the identification and neutralization of the terrorists themselves.

There are certain other intriguing aspects of this operation. According to reports telecast by the British Broadcasting Corp, the FBI sought the cooperation of the Russian service, which cooperated after obtaining the clearance of President Vladimir Putin. The person who went to St Petersburg for the procurement of the missile was then kept under surveillance by the Russian service.

In that case, the Russian service should have come to know from whom the smuggler obtained the missile and should have arrested him for dealing in the sale of missiles. No such arrest in Russia has been reported so far. This gives rise to another interesting possibility. The man who offered the missile to the smuggler was himself a Russian intelligence officer who formed part of the sting operation, and he posed as a seller of missiles to the smuggler.

It is of note that the container containing the missile managed to pass undetected the security and customs services of both Russia and the United States and reached a container port in the US city of Baltimore. This indicates either that the concerned services of both Russia and the US were lax in their physical security or, as part of the sting operation and at the request of the FBI, they let it pass so that the FBI could make the arrests in the United States, where the courts award strong punishments, even in sting operations. Courts of other countries, particularly in Western Europe, look with suspicion on sting operations and are often reluctant to impose severe penalties.

Unless one knows the answers to the following questions too, one would find it difficult to assess the real significance of the operation and the correctness of the claims made by the security services of the three countries: What was the object of the sting operation, to identify and trap the missile smuggler, or the seller of the missile, or the terrorists looking for them?

This should not, however, detract from the serious concerns of the intelligence and security services all over the world over the possibility of terrorists acquiring SAMs. During the Afghan war of the 1980s against the Soviet troops, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) issued a large number of its shoulder-fired Stinger missiles to the Afghan mujahideen. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988, it mounted a special drive to buy back from the mujahideen the unused missiles. The drive was not successful. The CIA's anger against Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) for its non-cooperation in this drive was one of the reasons that led to then president Bill Clinton's decision in the beginning of 1993 to place Pakistan for six months on a so-called watch list of suspected state sponsors of international terrorism.

Under US pressure, Nawaz Sharif, the then Pakistani prime minister, had to sack Lieutenant-General Javed Nasir, his director general of the ISI, and some other senior officers of the ISI named by the United States as responsible for encouraging the mujahideen not to give back the unused Stingers to the CIA.

The collapse of the USSR in 1991 also led to the leakage of a number of SAMs of Soviet make into the smugglers' market. When the Najibullah government collapsed in Kabul in April 1992, ISI officers rushed there and took possession of all the unused Soviet missiles in the stocks of Najibullah's army. The subsequent disposal of these missiles has not been accounted for. Some of them landed in the hands of the jihadi terrorists of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of Sri Lanka. There were also unconfirmed reports of the Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front of the southern Philippines getting some of them through the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen of Pakistan.

Among terrorist groups that are known to have used SAMs against flying aircraft or helicopters are the LTTE and the Chechens. In its operations in Mombassa against Israeli nationals last year, al-Qaeda was reported to have fired a missile at an Israeli commercial aircraft flying tourists back to Israel, but the pilot managed to take evasive action.

In India, too, since 1989, the possibility of terrorist groups getting hold of SAMs, either from the ISI or from the arms smugglers, and using them against Indian aircraft has been of major concern to intelligence and security agencies.

B Raman is additional secretary (retired), Cabinet Secretariat, government of India, and is currently director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai; he is a former member of the National Security Advisory Board of the government of India. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was also head of the counter-terrorism division of the Research & Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency, from 1988 to August 1994.

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