Normally I select a model or actress as an article's Hot Stratfor Babe, but all the talk of spies immediately brought Mata Hari to mind. Hence, and no doubt greatly mitigating her reputation as a seductress and German Spy, she has been selected as this article's Hot Stratfor Babe.
She was born Margaretha Zelle and at the age of 18, after a family bankrupcy, she answered a newspaper ad and married a much older Dutch army officer. They moved to Java where she studied the local culture. The husband was an alcoholic and abusive, so when they returned to Europe she left him.
She took up performing to support herself, and eventually drifted into exotic dancing where she claimed she was a Java princess of priestly Hindu birth and other such malarkey. She was extremely successful and also extremely promiscuous, which led her into a number of affairs with wealthy men.
It is not clear that she actually was a spy in WWI. Being a neutral she could freely travel, and she ended up being questioned in Britain where she claimed she was a French spy. Meanwhile the French had intercepted a poorly coded radio message which led them to believe she was a German spy.
In spite of the sketchy evidence against her, and perhaps hurt by her own tendency to spin yarns, she was convicted of espionage by the allies and executed by firing squad in 1917.
As a bonus, at the end of the article, I've included a video clip of from a 1931 movie of Greta Garbo vamping it up as Mata Hari as she seduces some poor sap. You'll have to watch it to see if he falls for her charms, and what dastardly deed he will have to do if he does.
THE BIN LADEN OPERATION: TAPPING HUMAN INTELLIGENCE
By Fred Burton, May 26, 2011
Since May 2, when U.S. special operations forces crossed the Afghan-Pakistani border and killed Osama bin Laden, international media have covered the raid from virtually every angle. The United States and Pakistan have also squared off over the U.S. violation of Pakistan's sovereign territory and Pakistan's possible complicity in hiding the al Qaeda leader. All this surface-level discussion, however, largely ignores almost 10 years of intelligence development in the hunt for bin Laden.
While the cross-border nighttime raid deep into Pakistan was a daring and daunting operation, the work to find the target -- one person out of 180 million in a country full of insurgent groups and a population hostile to American activities on its soil -- was a far greater challenge. For the other side, the challenge of hiding the world's most wanted man from the world's most funded intelligence apparatus created a clandestine shell game that probably involved current or former Pakistani intelligence officers as well as competing intelligence services. The details of this struggle will likely remain classified for decades.
Examining the hunt for bin Laden is also difficult, mainly because of the sensitivity of the mission and the possibility that some of the public information now available could be disinformation intended to disguise intelligence sources and methods. Successful operations can often compromise human sources and new intelligence technologies that have taken years to develop. Because of this, it is not uncommon for intelligence services to try to create a wilderness of mirrors to protect sources and methods. But using open-source reporting and human intelligence from STRATFOR's own sources, we can assemble enough information to draw some conclusions about this complex intelligence effort and raise some key questions.
The Challenge
Following the 9/11 attacks, finding and killing bin Laden became the primary mission of the U.S. intelligence community, particularly the CIA. This mission was clearly laid out in a presidential "finding," or directive, signed on Sept. 17, 2001, by then-U.S. President George W. Bush. By 2005 it became clear to STRATFOR that bin Laden was deep inside Pakistan. Although the Pakistani government was ostensibly a U.S. ally, it was known that there were elements within it sympathetic to al Qaeda and bin Laden. In order to find bin Laden, U.S. intelligence would have to work with -- and against -- Pakistani intelligence services.
Finding bin Laden in a hostile intelligence environment while friends and sympathizers were protecting him represented a monumental intelligence challenge for the United States. With bin Laden and his confederates extremely conscious of U.S technical intelligence abilities, the search quickly became a human-intelligence challenge. While STRATFOR believes bin Laden had become tactically irrelevant since 9/11, he remained symbolically important and a focal point for the U.S. intelligence effort. And while it appears that the United States has improved its intelligence capabilities and passed an important test, much remains undone. Today, the public information surrounding the case illuminates the capabilities that will be used to find other high-value targets as the U.S. effort continues.
The official story on the intelligence that led to bin Laden's Abbottabad compound has been widely reported, leaked from current and former U.S. officials. It focuses on a man with the cover name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a Pakistani Pashtun born in Kuwait who became bin Laden's most trusted courier. With fluency in Pashto and Arabic, according to media reports, al-Kuwaiti would be invaluable to al Qaeda, and in order to purchase bin Laden's property and run errands he would also need to be fluent in Urdu. His position as bin Laden's most trusted courier made him a key link in disrupting the organization. While this man supposedly led the United States to bin Laden, it took a decade of revamping U.S. intelligence capabilities and a great deal of hard work (and maybe even a lucky break) to actually find him. [continued after jump]
