Front Burner - Inside a CIA agent's mission to infiltrate Al-Qaeda

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

After the events of Sept. 11, sweeping changes were made to U.S intelligence and counterrorism practices as part of the American-led 'war on terror'. Agencies like the CIA started focusing less on traditional forms of espionage, and became more of an organization centred on assassination and hunting non-state actors.As part of that broader effort, a plan was born: what if the CIA were able to conscript a white American man to infiltrate the inner workings of Al-Qaeda? Journalist Zach Dorfman spent years investigating one such deep cover operation — and tells us how the program reached the desk of then President George W Bush, and would chart the secretive intelligence agency on a course that would go on to define its future. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. The art of espionage. It has been a key part of war in the modern era. And most countries around the world have made deep investments in their spying operations. in their spying operations.

You probably saw earlier this month that the Russian government got a number of their own spies back in the largest prisoner swap between Russia and the West since the Cold War. The children of a Russian spy couple found out that they were Russian on the flight home.

It really was something right out of the TV show, The Americans. Speak Russian. the TV show The Americans. Speak Russian. We love you very much, Sonia. She said we love you very much.

Today, Zach Dorfman is on the show. Zach has been covering national security issues for years, and he has this fantastic, comprehensive piece in Rolling Stone magazine right now. He did extensive interviews with more than two dozen former CIA officials for it, talking to them about the secretive program the CIA unrolled after 9-11, where they put spies in really deep cover situations. It centers on this young guy from the Midwest and his journey embedding himself with Islamic radicals in the Middle East. And it really grapples with the dubious ethical lines that define much of the secretive work done by intelligence organizations like the CIA and others. All right, let's get to it. Hi, Zach. Thanks so much for coming on to FrontBurner.

Thanks so much for having me. So let's begin with the man at the center of this story, someone we know only by pseudonym. He goes by Anthony Lagunas. He's described in your story as a young white man from the American Midwest. And what can you tell me about him? What else can you tell me about him? Well, he, you know, he remains a bit of a mystery, right? Anthony Lagoonis isn't really his name. It's his pseudonym. And this was the name he went by within the CIA, because most people within the CIA didn't even know his real name. But

as you mentioned, he was a white American guy from the Midwest. According to my reporting, he was in his mid to late 20s when he joined the agency and he loved to surf. Apparently he had a scar down one of his arms from a barracuda bite. So he had this kind of distinctive needle scar. And, you know, he was, you know, he liked to party. You know, this was a picture of somebody who was, you know, a little bit of a wild child and at the same time was a recruited intelligence officer who went into the CIA just before 9-11. Right. And as your story goes, he's recruited into this secretive, deep cover CIA program, and he spends more than half a decade undercover.

He's believed to have infiltrated groups like al-Qaeda, really, at the height of the group's power. And tell me more about this program and just what exactly Anthony Lagunas was expected to do as part of it? So within CIA, you know, broadly speaking, there's two kinds of operations officers. There's folks who are under official cover and non-official cover. And official cover is what most spies abroad are under. And that tends to be in the U.S. State Department cover, Foreign Service cover, right? You pose as a diplomat, but in reality, you're a spy. You know, what that means, in effect, is that it's not your connection to the U.S. government that's hidden. It's the fact that you're actually a intelligence officer or a spy undercover,

right? There's a much, much smaller group of folks who are under what's known as non-official cover. And that's the kind of cover Laguna's under. And non-official cover are deep cover spies. Those are the folks who pose as traditionally business people. And those folks have no connection to the US government, right? So it's not only that they're a spy, but it's that they truly are posing as somebody that they're not. And in fact, many of them pose as nationalities other than American, right? So they'll pose as a businessman from, I don't know, a European country, and they'll actually be an American citizen, and they'll actually be working for the CIA. actually be an American citizen and they'll actually be working for the CIA.

So Lagudans was a non-official cover officer, but he was even, what he did was even rarer because instead of being a business person, he went undercover as an Islamist radical. Tell me more about that. Tell me more about what you know about what he actually did. Well, in the very, very early months after 9-11, the CIA realized that if it was going to get close to people who had information about Al Qaeda, right, this was the height, I mean, this is the absolute early days and height of the war on terror. So the CIA realized we need to penetrate these foreign terrorist groups. And how to do that? Well, you know, a business person working for a major tech company wasn't going to do it. You need to actually have people who could pose as

Islamist radicals themselves. And so the idea behind Lagunas was, okay, we got this white guy and we're going to, you know, he has, you know, Lagunas had a little bit of knowledge of Arabic and there was this idea that, you know what, we're going to have him pretend to convert to Islam and radicalize and go abroad and try to get as close as possible to Al Qaeda or other affiliated terrorist groups. Spent significant amounts of time in Egypt, I was told, and other places. And he lived and worked at a madrasa. He slept on the floor there. He studied, you know, Arabic and the Quran. He did this for years. For a time, he began to get close to extremist circles. And what do we know about how close he got and how successful he ultimately was?

Well, there's significant controversy to this day within CIA about the fruits of his operation. And that's actually one of the things that was so striking. I mean, I spoke to former CIA officials who said, you know, in my entire agency career, you know, we never had a case like this where there was such polarization around, you know, how effective this operation was. So to some folks within the agency, Lagunas was heroic. He got, you know, he got into Al-Qaeda. heroic. He got, you know, he got into Al Qaeda. He produced incredibly valuable intelligence that was routinely passed upwards to the CIA director and, you know, then President George W. Bush. And he was the best shining example of this, you know, bravery and savoir faire of the CIA's non-official cover war in the post 9-11 era. Right. So that's one side. Right. This guy

is, you know, he's basically a superhero. Right. And at one point he actually briefs the president. Right. Which I understand is quite rare. It's extraordinarily rare for a rank and file CIA officer to meet the president. I mean, the president of the United States meets with the CIA director, and there are dedicated high-level intelligence briefers who will routinely meet with the president. But that is an extremely small number of folks. Lagunas was on a rare trip back, on a rare trip back to the United States from his deep cover assignment abroad. He was snuck into the White House to meet George W. Bush, right? I mean, which was that he had produced so much extraordinary intelligence that he kind of earned it. The other interpretation or the other sense within the agency was that it was more aesthetic it was that he looked really really good like he actually played the part so well he had this big long beard and he convincingly played the part of

this convert jihadist right but that he actually hadn't produced the kind of intelligence that um you know would lead to deserving a one-on-one audience with the president of the United States, right? So it was really, you know, the CIA trying to impress the president, right? Whether or not the person they were putting in front of him had, you know, done the amazing things that the president might have believed he had done. So it's, you know, whether he, you know, was heroic or whether he was kind of a PR opportunity for the CIA is still kind of a controversial point within CIA circles to this day. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people, and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing.

In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Fair for me to say that, you know, the people who would be proponents of the PR opportunity camp, one of the arguments might be that they needed some PR after 9-11. Like, it was seen as a catastrophic failure for the CIA. And that's precisely right.

And the CIA missed 9-11. I mean, that's it was a I don't I don't mean to make light of it, but it was a deeply traumatic event for Langley, for CIA itself. Warning is not good enough without the structure to put it into action. We all understood bin Laden's attempt to strike the homeland, but we never translated this knowledge into an effective defense of the country. We inside the CIA felt that it was our fault. We should have been able to find these guys overseas. We should have been

able to disrupt the attack. At the very least, we should have worked with the FBI, which we famously didn't. So there was this feeling of collective guilt. How palpable was that? And so once President Bush flipped around and the CIA transformed post-911 and there was around and the CIA transformed post 9-11. And there was, you know, this, this extraordinary refocusing away from, you know, the CIA's bread and butter, right, during the Cold War, which was the Soviet Union, Russia, nation state threats, China, Iran, North Korea, and toward counter terrorism toward, you know, what became the, you know, the primary foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration, which is the war on terror. It's a battle and it's a war of a series of battles that sometimes we'll see the fruits

of our labors and sometimes we won't. It's a war that's going to require cooperation with our friends. It is a war that requires the best of intelligence. You see, the enemy is sometimes hard to find. They like to hide. They think they can hide, but we know better. I mean, for the CIA, it needed to show wins to the president fast, right? And it needs to prove not only that, you know, this failure on 9-11 was a one-off, but it also needed to prove that it could provide the kind of intelligence and support that Bush needed to prosecute this global war on terror, right, that had the CIA transform into much more of a paramilitary organization than had been

pre-911. We have with us Mr. George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence. The war on terrorism, Mr. Chairman chairman has dealt severe blows to al-qaeda and its leadership drawing on both our own assets and increased cooperation from allies around the world we are uncovering terrorist plans and breaking up their cells these efforts have yielded the arrest of nearly 1 000 al-qaeda operatives in over 60 countries and have disrupted terrorist operations and potential terrorist attacks. In the interpretation of some of the folks I spoke with, you know, this was part of the broader kind of PR campaign

that the CIA was trying to kind of work over President Bush on. And I just wonder if you could elaborate for me on why these folks exactly don't think that this guy necessarily produced intelligence that was worthy of the hype around him. Well, I think there's a couple of things there. And one, you hit the nail on the head on one of those, which was that in a program such as Laguna says, there's something within CIA called compartmentation

where like there are multiple levels of secrecy within the building. So some of the folks in this book would say, look, the people who say that he didn't provide this intelligence, they just didn't, they just didn't have the full knowledge of this program, right? And that's a, that's a reasonable argument. Part of the problem, though, is, of course, is that it can be used as a shield, right? Where somebody says, well, you know, they just didn't know the full story. Well, maybe they didn't, right? I mean, this is the game of shadows, right? This is the wilderness of mirrors that you get when you report in an organization like the CIA. It's a secret intelligence agency, right? But there's another important dimension

to the controversy over the Gunas' story, and that has to do with kind of fundamental questions about the nature and role of intelligence in the 21st century, particularly in the war on terror. As I mentioned before, you know, the CIA spent the Cold War with one overwhelming focus, the Soviet Union and its allies, right? It was nation state. It was, it was, this is a secret intelligence agency that is focused on recruiting sources and stealing secrets, right, against another government. And after 9-11, the shift went toward non-state groups, went toward terror groups, and went to paramilitary activities that more often than not dealt with things like targeted assassination. And so within the CIA, there was a sense within the CIA's counter-terrorist center, which

ran the war on terror essentially, that the only important intelligence was intelligence that led the CIA to be able to kill suspected terrorists. And so for those folks, there was this idea that like, look, okay, so there's this guy living in a madrasa, and maybe he's making buddy-buddy with some folks who may have extremist ties. But if he's not providing us intelligence that says, this Taliban leader is going to be in this place at this time to facilitate a drone attack, well, that's like not really very valuable. And so, you know, in a way, he became like a Rorschach test about the first principles of intelligence work in the war on terror. Were there ever any questions around whether or not it was appropriate to have the CIA like materially support someone undercover like this, essentially offering material support

to a terror group? I guess you can make that argument. How do they navigate those questions, those ethical dilemmas? That's a great question. And I spoke to folks who dealt with this because that's a question that, you know, after reporting this story out for some time, I began to wonder the same thing. How do you, what are the trade-offs involved? When you send somebody into a terrorist organization, if you're going to do that, they have to act like terrorists, right? And I mean, that means you might be supporting logistical operations, but in theory, that could be actually, you know, assisting in providing financing for even theoretically carrying out terrorist acts

yourself, right? And there's a real there's just fundamental questions of morality there so my understanding is that um there there was a interagency you know legal review essentially that was set up to deal with uh folks like lagunas um and the programs the program that which of which he was a part. And there were some like fairly strict limits and ideas that you could not yourself participate in terrorist acts. But they got something called material support waivers, right, which was this idea that like, you know, they were they were joining and participating in an assisting terrorist organization. So they had these legal waivers that governed their behavior. But when I spoke to some folks who had some real direct understanding of the legal system around this, you know, they said to me. You know, we put them in an impossible position and we recognize that.

you know, we put them in an impossible position and we recognize that, right? We said to them, look, don't get yourself in a position where you're going to be shooting at US troops in Afghanistan. But if you are in that position, I don't know, shoot over their heads. Like that's, that was literally, that was literally the guidance they got. Right. And I spoke to, you know, to somebody who recalled a conversation with Lagunas where he expressed, you know, frustrations precisely with this, which was like, you know, they're they're putting me in an impossible position. Right. Because they want me if I'm going to convincingly infiltrate terrorist organizations. There's only so many times I can beg off on certain activities before they're going to start suspecting me. So there's a moment where, you know, their lives as undercover officers, deep cover officers are on the line.

The stress of operating in a situation like that, I feel like there are just so few parallels, right? I know much of your piece deals with how that work came at great personal cost for Anthony Lagunas. And what did that cost look like? So when I spoke to folks that knew him and also were familiar with the kind of broader program that he was a part of, you know, they said to me, look, people like Laguna's are screened for this, right? We need people with really unusual psychological profiles and who can live under extreme stress for long periods of time while kind of like cleaving themselves from themselves. You know, according to the reporting that I did, Lagunas was fine for a while doing this, right? He was okay spending years as somebody else and pretending to be a convert to Islam and pretending to, you know, to be essentially, you know, a radical, I mean, to be a violent extremist. But over time, what seems to have happened was it became harder and harder for him to kind of come back. When he would visit CIA for debriefings very, very occasionally when he was able to, there was this understanding,

this sense that something wasn't quite right with this guy, right? Like that he had maybe been pushed too far over the edge. And so by about 2010, when he was pulled out from this undercover assignment abroad and was still undercover, but no longer as an Islamist extremist, there was a sense among people that knew him that he was a different person and that something was, you know, kind of broken inside of him. I mean, just to put it bluntly. And I just think it's an example of, you know, look, even folks that have that extraordinary ability that he had can only be pushed so far. And it's like he was pushed over the edge. And then what happened to him when he eventually comes home?

So he was reassigned to a CIA base in Los Angeles. CIA mostly operates abroad, but it does have domestic bases. There's something called the National Resources Division. And he was, according to my reporting, you know, he's still deep undercover, but he was working in some Hollywood connected CIA front. He comes back. He's not the same. Eventually, he ends up in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and he's still with the CIA at this point. And it's there in the fall of 2016 that he dies very, very suddenly. And, you know, accounts differ about precisely what the cause of death is. You know, accounts differ about precisely what the cause of death is. You know, some folks, you know, point to alcohol or drug use. Some folks say, you know, it was more just, you know, bluntly it was a suicide. But what everybody says is that, you know, this was the result of these very long, very hard years that he spent so deep undercover. So, you know, he's a casualty of the war on terror,

though, right? Like somebody who did the impossible and, you know, emerged a changed person and perhaps did not receive the care that he needed for somebody who had done something so immensely stressful. And so, you know, when he died in 2016, he became known as kind of a cautionary tale within CIA about the difficulty of the kind of work that he did, that others did, and also maybe the lack of available health care and mental health care for folks within the agency.

comprehensive these deep cover spy networks are today, whether we're talking about the U.S. or foreign operations in places like Russia, China, Iran, Israel even, how much has changed from, you know, the regime that existed during the war on terror? Do you have another few hours? I mean, I do. I could listen to this all day. The short answer is intelligence services all over the world still use deep cover spying. It will never go away. Some countries have a longer track record of this sort of thing. The U.S. certainly still has deep cover spies. The program has shrunk from its post 9-11 high watermark when there was a vast expansion of the program. It's contracted since then, but it still exists. The Russians are probably the greatest practitioner of these deep cover spies. You know, throughout the Cold War and even to today, they have these networks of folks that go undercover for years, decades. In the latest major spy trade that brought Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gerskovich back to the U.S., who did the Russians want? They wanted undercover spies who had been arrested in Europe, including folks who's, you know, they're posing

as I believe, you know, Argentinian artists in Slovenia. And the two deep cover spies had two children who did not know they were Russian. I know this is crazy. And they learned about it on the plane. They think their first language is Spanish and their second language is probably Slovenian. You know, I mean, they have no idea they're Russian. Anyway, I mean, that is the think their first language is spanish and their second language is probably slovenian you know i mean that is they have no idea they're russian anyways i mean that is the stuff about a spy right where um yeah and the israelis also have as you mentioned a um a track record of um deep cover spies as well going back many many many, including at least one very famous case of a Mossad officer who spent years undercover in Syria before he got executed. So yes, countries still do it. It's very dangerous

work. Because again, if you're not posing as a, you know, Foreign Service officer, you don't have diplomatic immunity. And so you are, instead of being kicked out of the country, you can be imprisoned, you can be tortured, you can be killed. And that was certainly a real library for Lagunas and folks doing the kind of work that he did. Okay. Zach, thank you so much for coming by and sharing all of your reporting with us and your expertise. It was like super interesting. Yeah, I'd be happy to come back anytime. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson.

Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.