‘Iranian mullahs ought to look out… there’s a chance bin Laden is in Iran’

• Head of the CIA wasn’t the calling card that got you the red carpet here for many many years.

India and the United States, during the Cold War, had sort of a cool relationship not a cold one. But we weren’t working to get along. We weren’t working against one another.

• So this was more of a case of benign neglect. Not many people here believe it.

I think that’s true. Our relations with India up until relatively recently, were cool and correct. So intelligence sources weren’t really co-operating much… occasionally here and there on some kind of terrorism matter.

• But here the folklore was that if the monsoon failed, the CIA had something to do with it.

I’m sure that’s true. People (seem to think) that anyone coming from the United States have implanted radio receivers in their teeth or something.

• People around the world took the agency more seriously than maybe you guys did.

Well, the CIA did some very useful things during the Cold War. I think one of the most useful things is operating radio for a year—the Radio Liberty, which was the single most important thing we did during the Cold War. We became a public thing in the mid ’70s. I think still we have had a big impact on the Soviet Union’s demise by helping the mujahideen in Afghanistan—in spite of the historic blowback later as we didn’t stay around and help. We should have stayed back and helped the Afghan people instead of leaving the way we did.

• I used to work for a magazine then. I wrote several times that you can’t abandon Afghanistan now. Now that you’ve used Afghanistan to defeat the Soviets.

That was a terrible decision. Winston Churchill said of the Americans that they always do the right thing, but only after they have exhausted all other possibilities. And we were exhausting that by leaving Afghanistan at the end of the ‘80s.

• Did you point this out? Because your tenure was at a time when the Soviets were leaving. Vacuum was coming up?

Mine was from early ’93 until ’95.

• ’93 was when the Soviets were leaving.

Right after the end of the Cold War. So it was an odd time. It was sort of like beginning of the 1920s in a way. The American people at least sort of thought all the problem was over. The Cold War is over, let’s party. The stock market was booming. It was like the roaring twenties in a way and it was very difficult to get attention for resources, for terrorism and kind of things like that. I had a terrible time and eventually failed to get even a few million extra dollars out of the Congress for language translation work for the CIA. Neither the White House nor the chairman of the senate intelligence would go along with that and see why it was important. This is 1994.

• A tough time. Today you would have no problem at all. You people write your own cheques. Just 9/11 changed all that.

9/11 had a huge impact on the American people and in some ways almost, this created a problem. It has lasted… I think the idea that we had to get away from just resting there and occasionally grabbing someone to prosecute as part of the international legal effort to fight terrorism. That’s gone.

• You know the whole approach towards terrorism has now changed. In your times when you were heading the agency, you looked at terrorists as criminals with many passports.

Well, that was the view. There were barriers. They kept even the FBI and CIA from co-operating. For example in 93 after the first World Trade Centre bombing, the FBI penetrated a plot in New York. There was a lot of material with the FBI in Arabic. They didn’t know what to do with. Boxes and boxes are there. It sat for years in the FBI headquarters in New York.

• There were complaints then on the Indian side. But the complaints still remain after the New York bombings, a series of very similar bombings took place in fact in Mumbai not far from where we are. Many of the patterns were very similar, some of the explosives used were very similar and our intelligence then said we are picking up a lot of things but the Americans refuse to listen to us because the politics of it doesn’t suit them. And they don’t see the connection.

Well, we had blunders. Like always, I think there’s no getting away from that. We were looking at these matters as individual law enforcement problems. And I must say there were people in the CIA who were willing to look at it more broadly but it was the administration policy and it was our loss.

• Did India flash in your radar scale at all in that phase?

Well, I don’t know, I have been out of the agency.

• I said in that phase when you were there.

From early 93-95 there was no really substantial co-operation between us and India, for that matter between us and Pakistan or with most people. It was a world in which we were looking for individual terrorists. We weren’t really going at the movement. We were heavily focussed on Sudan because they had a sort of a terrorist international conference every year or so. And we were trying to find out about bin Laden.

• But they were no warnings that in a couple of years he would become such a monster around the world.

I don’t think so. It was not something that people were spending a lot of time and effort on. They were looking at this as an individual operation.

• Was this Carlos The Jackal syndrome?

Yes, in a sense it was. For example in Sudan. Carlos the Jackal was in Sudan, we helped the French catch Carlos the Jackal and people regarded it as a real major achievement.

• Can you recount for me the story of how you captured Carlos the Jackal? Whatever you can tell, you can leave the rest for your memoirs.

Well, we had some very good assets in Sudan and we were able to figure out what Carlos the Jackal’s patterns were going to be.

We were just moving around, we were just helping the French and the French came up with a way to find out where he was going to be. It was their operation. We had a hand in it.

• He’s sitting in jail now. How different was he from the stories read about him?

I don’t know. I never talked to him or saw him. We were signing other records… once we helped them find him, we signed off.

• You said there are days when you missed the Soviet Union.

In a strange kind of way, because the Soviets were a big bureaucratic enemy and because they did a lot of things the same, which is why it was relatively easy to watch their development and their troop deployment patterns.

And even the way in which they infiltrated groups overseas, they did a lot of things the same way. They didn’t collapse in a particularly predictable way.

• But I think the larger logic is, it was easier to deal with the Soviet Union because they were so predictable and because they were so big and they move so slowly as compared to say the Al-Qaeda which is so fleet-footed and unconventional.

Well, and we had a huge impact on Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. They are now in a lot of different countries and they are capable, and someday they will undertake further attacks not only in the US but elsewhere. It’s going to be a long hard slog years as Donald Rumsfeld put in a different context.

• Even if Osama is caught?

Even if he is caught, even if he and Zawahiri are caught.

• But you’ve been recommending unconventional methods. You said for example, you can’t do intelligence through diplomats undercover because the Hezbollah doesn’t come to cocktail parties.

Exactly. Historically, the United States has few what you called non-official undercover officers i.e. intelligence officers or recruited spies that are not ostensibly part of the US Government. The Soviets over the years, used a lot of non-official undercover officers partly because they were not very recognised by other countries during the first decade or two of existence. We have to do a lot if we are going to recruit spies inside the Hezbollah or inside Al-Qaeda. They have to be like say a Lebanese smuggler or a Bolivian guerrilla. Someone like a younger version of me from Oklahoma, speaking maybe a little bit of Arabic and being an attache at the US embassy, cannot penetrate Hezbollah or Al-Qaeda.

• Some of the best spies in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were volunteers. Why isn’t that happening sufficiently, say with Hezbollah or Al-Qaeda? This ideology has a much stronger pull than that the Soviet ideology.

Well it is, I think it’s different for the Shia and Sunni. I believe that the history of Shi’ite Islam is not one of the Caliphate. Khomeini more or less came up with that or knew, when he created the regime in Tehran. And Hezbollah is essentially entirely in Tehran. I don’t think they are going to be nearly as long lasting as the Sunni Islamists. I am much more worried about Al-Qaeda. And because the Wahabis are saying they want a worldwide Caliphate. Because also the Wahabis have spent something like $85 to 90 billion over the last 25 or 30 years spreading their extraordinary hateful notions around the world. It is sort of Spain in the late 15th and 16th century at the time of Torquemada.

• And the power of that much money and energy. They could do whatever they wanted.

That’s the soil in which Sunni Islamism is growing. It’s sort of like, not all German nationals are angry, not all German nationals in the 1920s or early 1930s became Nazis. But that’s the soil on which Nazism grew. And unfortunately, it’s a very wealthy soil—or oil—which is something we need to do something about.

• I am also fascinated that in many of your speeches you referred to Indian Muslims; you referred to this 130-140 million people and you have your own take on how they look at the world differently. So what makes for this different worldview for Indian Muslims, you think?

Well, they live in a democracy. And they are a minority under democracy like most American Muslims are. It’s a much smaller minority but still we have several Muslims—most of them law abiding, very reasonable people.

France has not integrated its Muslims into its life as much as India or the United States have.

• In India there’s no difference about it. Many of the people sitting here could be Muslims. We don’t even look different.

Right. Well, it’s the same in the United States. We have done a fairly good job in integrating our Muslims and India has done a superb job over the years of integrating, but the European countries in many cases have not. The Germans, for example don’t let Turks in Germany use Turkish government instructing books in Islam, which are very moderate and very sensible and very reasonable. But Saudis will force hatred. So Turks in Germany are getting instructed in Islam from Wahabi books printed in Turkish. I mean the Europeans have done some very foolish things in the way they have dealt with their Muslim minorities.

• Tell me, what are the odds on Osama being caught?

I think they’re pretty good. But it may have to await the influence of Iraqi democracy on Iran because I believe the Iranian mullahs in Tehran ought to look out on the horizon. The storm is not overhead yet, but it is on the horizon. I think there’s a reasonable chance that bin Laden and some of the other senior Al-Qaeda leaders are in Iran, not Afghanistan.

• Oh, it’s possible?

I think there’s a reasonable chance.

• That’s one part of the world where you can’t be looking that closely. That’s very interesting, because popular logic seems to be that it’s the Iranian clergy and the Shia system that will influence Iraq. You are saying the opposite might happen.

I think Mr Khameini and Mr Rafsanjani ought to be quaking as they see this Iraqi Parliament convening and they see the constitution being drafted and they see Shias, Kurds and Sunnis—probably by early next week—putting together the beginnings of a government and all those wonderful Iraqis voting.

• Do you see this wonderful virus travelling to the Saudis as well?

Well, in time. But there are even a few shoots coming up in the deserts of Saudi Arabia with the local elections they have, with the intellectuals protesting a bit more. They have a long way to go. Saudi Arabia is one of the most dictatorial autocratic countries in the world.

• But one of the most cruel legal systems. All these public beheadings, slashings, legitimisation of old systems of punishments. Nobody seems to question them.

Most of us are doing so, and one of the reasons we think we can begin to question, is that we are in some way, not too dependent on them for oil.

• I know that’s what’s occupying your mind these days. You try to persuade people that if you have a car with a bad engine, you are supporting global terrorism.

Well, not quite that. But I do think that (it’s important to move) towards hydraulic gasoline electrics which one gets in the US now—50 miles a gallon, I drive one, a Toyota.

• 50 miles, that’s the claim.

Well, it’s in the 50s in town and in the 40s on the road because you get better mileage in towns.

• I was reading a testimony to a senate committee where you said you came driving that car for your testimony. So what’s the idea—an idea to reduce the consumption of oil, dependence on oil?

Absolutely. It’s not just reducing imports from the Middle East. The world has to do so. It doesn’t do any good for the United States to buy more from Canada and say for Norway to buy more from Saudi Arabia. To reduce reliance on oil, this is a common problem in India and the US.

• How did this theme become such an abiding theme with you? I remember your paper in Foreign Affairs. You with Richard Lugar in 1999—in fact called The New Petroleum—where you first talked about moving away from this. There were other papers defeating the oil weapon. You have been focussed on this aspect of the global war on terrorism.

I have been working on this for 25 years or so. I wrote a review for a book in the early 1980s about this subject. I have always thought that moving away from oil will help free us from some of the constraints we have to deal with in the Middle East. Let’s face it, we have dealt with some of the Saudis and some of the other countries in the Middle East, particularly Saudis, definitely because they are home to such a huge amount of oil. And the only way to deal with that is for us to move towards fuels that are based on agricultural waste, things that can be grown in Indian villages, in American farms and to reduce oil all over. So it’s really kind of a return in some way here to the wonderful notions of Gandhi about the spinning wheels.

• Self-reliance.

Yes, exactly. What we are talking about is essentially local self-reliance for fuel in the same way he was talking about it for common interest.

• You see this also as an essential element in the war against terrorism or the war against dictatorships?

Yes I think so.

• Because there is a linkage of oil reserves and dictatorships somehow?

Yes. I don’t know exactly why, but oil tends to produce centralised bureaucracies and not widespread entrepreneurship just by the nature of it. Look at Nigeria. Those poor, there are rebellions and always fighting and are hungry. They live right on top of one of the world’s largest oil deposits in Nigeria. So you have to move to an energy system, which can have its fuel produced differently.

• A big question for India. India is now become a large consumer of oil.

It’s going to be a huge question, but technologically it’s not difficult as a lot of people think. We are not talking about some Manhattan project with billion of dollars of investment and so forth. The hydraulic gasoline electrics are here, the modern diesels are here, which get very good mileage. In Canada they are producing ethanol from agricultural waste. This technology is just coming on line. But the interesting thing is you don’t need massive factories for this. You can do it at a local level. For some of them you could do with a small plant.