Kid-Gloves Antiterrorism

Michael von Wedel and Jürgen Kremb. Die Abrechnung. Herbig Verlag. 318 pages. €19.95.

“But all the investigations, dragnets and other measures that were now gearing up were accompanied by a certain shame and collective bad conscience concerning the fact that the biggest terrorist attack in modern history had been planned by Mohammad Atta and his Hamburg Cell precisely on German soil.” This is how Michael von Wedel, a former chief inspector in Germany’s Federal Office of Criminal Investigations or Bundeskriminalamt (bka), describes the mood at the “German fbi” in early fall 2001 in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Von Wedel would soon find himself handling what was arguably the most important of the anti-terror investigations undertaken by German authorities to show the country’s commitment to cracking down on local terror networks: Until, that is, some two years later — and, by his own account, on the verge of a major breakthrough — he was abruptly taken off the case and suspended. In a new book sensationally titled Settling Accounts: a Former BKA Inspector Tells All, von Wedel looks back on his bka career and the bizarre circumstances surrounding its conclusion. The book has received terse and dismissive reviews in both of Germany’s leading papers Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Süddeutsche Zeitung — and has otherwise largely been greeted with silence. “Shame and a collective bad conscience,” as von Wedel puts it, can be presumed to have something to do with that as well.

For von Wedel’s book shines a highly unflattering light on the bka in general and the agency’s notably half-hearted and ineffectual antiterror efforts in particular. The agency hierarchy and its network of agents are depicted as corrupt, incompetent, and sometimes outright buffoonish. Von Wedel recalls, for instance, one particularly memorable summer afternoon in 1986 when a colleague of his from the bka liaison office in Islamabad turned up at an international meeting of drug enforcement agencies at the Pakistani resort of Murree. The bka agent arrived on the back of a pickup truck outfitted with loudspeakers, which were blaring the Nazi Party anthem, the “Horst Wessel Song.” Wearing gym shorts and a spiked steel helmet on his head, he was “lustily singing along” while holding his arm outstretched in the Hitler salute. “I could have sunk into the ground for shame,” von Wedel writes. Less amusingly, von Wedel also accuses the agency of being responsible for the deaths of a Colombian informant and his girlfriend. Both of them would be murdered by the Cali cocaine cartel after the man was returned to Columbia from Germany in 1997 — a decision that von Wedel describes as “virtually a death sentence.”

Von Wedel already crossed swords with his agency superiors over the fate of the Colombian informant, but his real troubles began in fall 2001 following the 9/11 attacks. Von Wedel recalls the “red lights flashing” at bka headquarters in Wiesbaden as it emerged that the attacks had been organized by a German-based Islamic terror cell: “‘What did we do wrong?’ we asked, ‘How could we prevent further attacks being plotted from Germany?’” There followed a period of what von Wedel describes as “hyperactivity” on the part of German law enforcement agencies. But far from preventing further attacks, barely over one year later, on October 12, 2002, a suicide bombing and a follow-up blast would kill some 202 people on the Indonesian resort island of Bali in what remains the single deadliest al Qaeda attack since 9/11 — and yet again there was a major German connection. The reputed financier of the attack was one Reda Seyam, an Egyptian-born German citizen who had recently taken up residence in Jakarta.

In fact, seyam was already being held prisoner by Indonesian authorities at the time of the bombings. He had been arrested four weeks earlier, in mid-September, on suspicions of involvement in terrorist activity. A captured al Qaeda operative named Omar al-Faruq had told American interrogators of plans to launch a string of attacks against American embassies in Jakarta and other Southeast Asian capitals. Al-Faruq identified Seyam, alias “Abu Daud,” as the head of an Indonesian Qaeda cell. Videos seized at Seyam’s flat depicted paramilitary training exercises and bloody scenes of beheadings and other atrocities. The videos were an important clue, since Seyam — who presented himself and still presents himself as a television journalist — is known to have produced similarly gruesome propaganda videos during an earlier stint of jihadist activism in Bosnia in the early 1990s. A second house rented by Seyam is reported to have served both as a money drop and a “safe house” for terror operatives.

When the news broke of Seyam’s arrest, the bka quickly dispatched two agents to Jakarta to question him. One of those agents was Michael von Wedel. By von Wedel’s account, the official purpose of the trip was to gather information in the interest of filing charges against Seyam in Germany. Germany had only recently introduced a new paragraph 129b into the country’s criminal code that criminalized membership in a “foreign terrorist organization.” Von Wedel’s bka superiors hoped to make Seyam a test case. But von Wedel also notes that the Chancellor’s Office of then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was less interested in prosecuting Seyam than in preventing him from being “rendered” by American agents as al-Faruq had been. It is perhaps not without interest to note that the chief of staff of the Chancellor’s Office at the time, as well as the coordinator of all German intelligence and security agencies, was none other than Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the current German foreign minister and the Social Democratic candidate for the chancellorship in the upcoming German elections.

Von Wedel describes days of fruitless interrogations of Seyam, who “only ever admitted what we already knew.” Asked by his direct superior to exhaust all possibilities to get Seyam to talk, he recalls jokingly responding that the only way to get more out of Seyam would have been “with a baseball bat.” Von Wedel was ordered to return to Germany at once. On his recollection, he left Indonesia on October 7. Five days later the bombs went off in Bali.

Von Wedel claims that Seyam had in fact initially been seized by the cia and the Indonesian intelligence service, the bin, before being turned over to the apparently more “jihadist-friendly” Indonesian police. Although he does not say so outright, a symptomatic remark by von Wedel suggests that the transfer occurred due to German pressure. Recalling his tormented reactions to news of the Bali attack, von Wedel writes:

During those days, I asked myself again and again: what would have happened if the bka had heard a few days later about Reda Seyam being seized by the cia? Would the German then have been interrogated by the Americans at the U.S. army base in Bagram, like his comrade Faruq? Using all the extra-legal methods that one uses there? And would the attack have then been prevented?¹

After the bombings, von Wedel would continue to lead the bka investigation of Reda Seyam, turning up substantial evidence to corroborate the initial suspicions against “the German mujahideen.” According to von Wedel, inspection of transactions documented on the hard drive of Seyam’s computer confirmed that he “must have fueled jihad in the largest Muslim nation in the world with considerable financial resources.” Although von Wedel does not mention it, Muchyar Yara, a former spokesman for the bin, has said that the recently executed Bali bombing co-conspirator Imam Samudra was one of the beneficiaries of Seyam’s largesse. Independently of one another, moreover, two arrested members of the local Qaeda subsidiary, Jemaah Islamiah, identified Seyam as their “boss.”

Despite the evidence against him, however, Seyam would be convicted by an Indonesian court merely for a minor visa infraction. Von Wedel ascribes the astonishing verdict to the reluctance of Indonesian authorities to take harsh measures against Islamic extremists. This explanation, it must be said, rings especially hollow in light of the recent executions by firing squad of Samudra and two of his fellow conspirators. Contemporary reports from the German press hinted that German authorities may in fact have urged their Indonesian counterparts to show leniency to Seyam.

In any case, when Seyam was released from Cipinang prison in Jakarta in July 2003, a team of four bka agents led by von Wedel was on hand to whisk him away to Germany, thus preempting any possible action by the cia to seize him. The episode was first revealed in a December 2005 article in the German intellectual weekly Die Zeit. Citing unnamed sources, Die Zeit depicts the bka operation to “save” Seyam from the nefarious Americans (“they are like unchained dogs”) in almost heroic terms. On von Wedel’s account, it appears to have been far less glorious. Von Wedel had the dubious honor of personally depositing Seyam on a Frankfurt-bound Lufthansa flight where another BKA man was waiting to receive him. At this point, von Wedel writes, “my job as al Qaeda security escort came to an end.” Von Wedel himself remained in Jakarta to pursue his investigations. A few days later, he was summoned to attend a breakfast meeting at the Jakarta Hyatt between “Bill,” the head of the local cia bureau, and a counterpart from Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the bnd. The topic: Germany’s protection of Reda Seyam. The conversation quickly became heated. Von Wedel recalls the scene:

As the man from Pullach [the bnd headquarters in Germany] mumbled something about Seyam being German, after all, and having the same rights as any other German, the cia guy completely lost it.

“You know what? I just hope that it is your wife who is standing beside it the next time a bomb financed by you Germans goes off in Bali.” Then he called for the waiter, paid the check, and walked out of the restaurant without saying another word.

For a long while there was an embarrassed silence at the table. And then my colleague from the bnd said: “But they first have to prove all that.”

The sheepish remark is particularly loaded with irony, since von Wedel accuses the bnd of failing to cooperate with his investigation of Seyam. Barely two weeks later, there was yet another suicide attack in Indonesia, this one at the Marriot Hotel in Jakarta. Twelve persons were killed and some 150 wounded. As von Wedel notes, the chemical composition of the explosives used in the Marriot attack was the same as the composition of those used in the Bali bombings.

Flown back to Germany with a bka escort at taxpayer expense, Seyam was released and would make his way to Neu-Ulm, the reputed epicenter of jihadist activism in Germany. There he would apply for social benefits and move into publicly-subsidized housing. No charges were brought against him. In light of the fact that what began as an investigation into mere membership in a terror organization had in the meanwhile been transformed by a major terrorist attack of which Seyam appeared to be the chief facilitator, the inaction of German prosecutors gives particular cause to pause.

Moreover, as von Wedel points out, charges could also have been brought against Seyam for “crimes like murder and the planning of terrorist attacks” that he had committed earlier. Seyam’s ex-wife Regina Kreis was cooperating with the bka. The German convert to Islam had accompanied Seyam to the jihadist stronghold of Bocina in Bosnia during the Bosnian War. Kreis told von Wedel and his colleagues that Seyam counted both al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and 9/11 facilitator Ramzi bin al-Shibh among his contacts. She also accused him of complicity in horrific war crimes. The most horrific indeed — involving the sadistic executions of three Serb prisoners, one of whom was decapitated — was filmed by Seyam for his propaganda videos. German investigators reportedly have the tape in their possession. Frustrated by the unwillingness of German authorities to take action against her former husband, in 2004 Kreis published a pseudonymous memoir of her life with Seyam entitled Silenced: I was the Wife of a Holy Warrior.

On october 1, 2003, von Wedel was waiting in the coffee shop of the Shangri-La Hotel in Jakarta for what he hoped would be a highly interesting appointment. A Jemaah Islamiah member who had sworn off violence was cooperating with his investigation and had arranged for him to meet the al Qaeda “quartermaster” in Indonesia. On the informant’s account, the quartermaster had organized not only Reda Seyam’s stay in Indonesia, but also a visit by bin Laden lieutenant and reputed 9/11 mastermind Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Von Wedel had notified his headquarters in Germany about the meeting, and that morning he notified headquarters as well about a tip he had received from the informant concerning an impending suicide attack. It was one o’clock in the afternoon and his meeting was scheduled for two.

As von Wedel tells it, at this point he received an urgent phone call from his department head in Germany, who ordered him to cancel the meeting and return to Germany immediately. “You’re totally incompetent,” von Wedel recalls his boss screaming at him. “We’ve initiated disciplinary proceedings against you.” The grounds for the disciplinary action, it would turn out, were von Wedel’s use of his bka cell phone to keep in touch with his sick girlfriend back in Germany. That evening von Wedel suffered what an agency psychologist would later describe as a nervous breakdown. After a failed attempt at suicide using a mixture of whiskey and valium, von Wedel fled the next morning to the seaside resort of Pelabuan Ratu. There he rented a bungalow with a female acquaintance — and evidently without any definite idea what to do next. Following approximately a week of heavy drinking and soul-searching on the Javanese coast, von Wedel would, in effect, be ambushed by three of his colleagues from the bka — who gave him a “proper beating,” as he recalls it — and taken back to Jakarta and then Germany by force.

Von Wedel notes the irony of his returning to Germany under bka escort, just as Reda Seyam had. But in fact the irony is far greater. After all, Reda Seyam requested the aid of the German consulate and returned to Germany willingly. By contrast, as von Wedel points out, the bka’s forced repatriation of him was a violation of Indonesian sovereignty and clearly illegal. The real parallel is thus with the fate that might have befallen Seyam if it had been the cia, rather than the bka, that had accompanied him from Cipinang prison. In an incredible twist, von Wedel, who had come to Indonesia to prevent Seyam from being “rendered” by the cia to Afghanistan or elsewhere, ended up, in effect, being “rendered” to Germany by his own bka colleagues.

Some of the details of von Wedel’s account need to be taken with a grain of salt. His book reads like a novel and it is clear that parts of the story have in fact been fictionalized with the help of co-author Jürgen Kremb of the German weekly Der Spiegel. (A passage that describes the panicked reactions of von Wedel’s bka colleagues after he has absconded from his seaside bungalow in a second escape attempt represents the most obvious example.)

But the book draws attention to what are glaringly real problems with Germany’s handling of local terror networks: problems that are largely overlooked or minimized by Germany’s own media and that — apart from a brief flurry of interest in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 — have been all but entirely ignored by the English-language media. Reda Seyam is not the only suspected al Qaeda bigwig to whom German authorities have shown remarkable indulgence. The Hamburg-based Mamoun Darkazanli is suspected of involvement in several al Qaeda-sponsored attacks during the late 1990s. His name appears on both the U.S. and un lists of designated terrorist persons or entities. A 2003 Spanish indictment identifies him as a “the permanent interlocutor and assistant of Osama bin Laden in Germany.” Germany has refused to extradite Darkazanli and German prosecutors have declined to bring charges against him themselves.

The book draws attention to what are glaringly real problems with Germany’s handling of local terror networks: problems that are largely overlooked or minimized by Germany’s own media and the major English-language media.

The much-ballyhooed conviction of a small fish like Mounir al-Motassadeq for complicity in the 9/11 attacks only sets in relief the inaction of German authorities vis-à-vis far larger fishes like Seyam and Darkazanli. Motassadeq was indeed a personal friend of Atta and the other German 9/11 hijackers and, like them, he had spent time at an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. But he appears himself to have had only the most incidental connection to the 9/11 plot: namely, by virtue of his willingness to attend to the personal affairs of some of the plotters after they left Hamburg for the United States. There is no evidence of Motassadeq having had any direct contact with the hijackers following their departure, much less of his having played the kind of leading role that Reda Seyam appears to have played in the Bali plot.

The obvious question is why German authorities seem so reluctant aggressively to pursue the al Qaeda operatives in their midst. Von Wedel barely touches on this question and when he does, he professes to be as nonplussed as his reader might be. Referring to the early days of his antiterror investigations after 9/11, he writes: “I always had the feeling that my case was being somehow disrupted. But I could never understand who was behind this or why it happened.” The reader is left wondering if von Wedel does not in fact have more of a clue than he lets on. The thanks given by von Wedel to his lawyer for “a couple of important tips” regarding the “legal polishing” of the book only reinforce this impression.

One possible explanation again involves the “shame and bad conscience” that afflicted German authorities following 9/11. The stories of Michael von Wedel and Regina Kreis suggest that the “hyperactive” efforts to prevent further al Qaeda plots from being hatched in Germany quickly morphed into equally “hyperactive” exercises in denial — especially as further plots did in fact turn out to have significant German connections. In addition to the Bali bombings, one should also mention the suicide bombing of the El Ghriba synagogue in Djerba in April 2002. The suspected bomber, Nizar Nawar, placed a call to one Christian Ganczarski in Germany shortly before the attack, apparently to receive the go-ahead from the German convert to Islam. Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Verfassungsschutz, had Ganczarski’s phone tapped and was listening to the conversation. Despite his subsequent admission that he made numerous trips to al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and knew Osama bin Laden personally, German prosecutors brought no charges against Ganczarski. In June 2003, Ganczarski made the mistake of changing planes at Paris’s Charles De Gaulle Airport while travelling from Saudi Arabia to Germany. He was arrested by French police. In February of this year, a Parisian court found him guilty of complicity in the Djerba bombing and sentenced him to 18 years in prison.

A second, and still more troubling, possibility is that German authorities are prepared to tolerate the activities of terror groups so long as Germany itself is not their target. Indeed, as concerns at least one prominent terror group, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, this is widely reported to be the case even in the German media. German terror experts speak of a kind of implicit or “secret” nonaggression pact that permits Hezbollah to operate freely in Germany so long as it refrains from undertaking attacks on German soil. In 2006, German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble acknowledged that some 900 known Hezbollah militants were present in Germany.

Could other terror operatives in Germany, including al Qaeda agents, benefit from similar complacency? The trial of the youthful members of the so-called Sauerland cell does not contradict this hypothesis. Although the four men are accused of having planned to carry out terror attacks in Germany, their targets were American military installations and personnel. It should be noted, moreover, that the German police only intervened after being tipped off by American authorities. As was confirmed — but not further elucidated — in the 2003 trial of Mounir al-Motassadeq, German domestic intelligence agencies in fact had key associates of the Hamburg cell under surveillance years before the 9/11 attacks.

In december 2005, Michael von Wedel was forced into early retirement from the bka following 26 year of service. Five months later, the bka successfully moved to have his agency pension annulled. He notes in the conclusion of his book that he presently lives on a monthly welfare check of €239 a month.

To this day, Reda Seyam remains a free man. According to the German public television network ard, he receives some €2300 a month in social benefits for himself and his family. While still married to Regina Kreis, Seyam took a second wife, with whom he has had several children. The youngest is named “Jihad.” Seyam and his family now live in the comfortable Charlottenburg neighborhood of Berlin. Seyam makes no secret of his support for the jihadist cause, which he has regularly espoused in interviews with the German media. “According to the Quran, it is okay to be a terrorist,” he told the German daily Die Frankfurter Rundschau in July 2003. “According to the Quran, it is an obligation to kill kafir [unbelievers].” As so happens — and as has been studiously ignored by the major English-language media — one of Seyam’s closest friends is Khaled al-Masri: the supposedly “innocent man” whose alleged rendering by the cia in the winter of 2003–04 would become an international cause célèbre.

In February 2007, ard broadcast a documentary on Seyam, including extensive interviews. In it, Seyam praises the Taliban and describes al Qaeda as a group that “is fighting for the good cause.” Asked what he thought, then, of al Qaeda-sponsored terror attacks, Seyam did not condemn them. “No comment,” he replied — a sly smile breaking into a broad grin.