Ex-CIA officials helping UAE build spy force: report

WASHINGTON: Former officials of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are helping the UAE build modern spycraft, the Foreign Policy (FP) media outlet reports.

According to the report, the details of the training are contained in an official course schedule reviewed by Foreign Policy and were described by former US intelligence officials who have been involved in the effort. The facilities and courses are part of the UAE’s nascent efforts to create a professional intelligence cadre modelled after the West’s.

Former CIA and government officials were drawn to the Gulf nation by the promise of interesting work and, perhaps even more importantly, lucrative careers. The reports cites a former employee as saying: “The money was fantastic. It was $1,000 a day — you could live in a villa or in a five-star hotel in Abu Dhabi.”

The key figure behind this growing intelligence training operation, according to multiple sources, is Larry Sanchez, a former intelligence officer who helped kickstart a controversial partnership between the CIA and the New York Police Department that tried to pre-empt the radicalization of potential terrorists by tracking people — many of them Muslims — in mosques, bookstores, and other places around New York. Sanchez, a veteran of the CIA clandestine services, has been working for the crown prince of Abu Dhabi in the UAE for the past six years to build large pieces of its intelligence services from the ground up, six sources with knowledge of the matter tell FP.

According to the article, Sanchez is just one of many former Western security professionals who has made his way to the Gulf nation to provide security training. Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, famously moved to the UAE to create a battalion of foreign troops serving the crown prince, details of which were first revealed by the New York Times in 2011. And Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism czar, is also a longtime top advisor to the crown prince of Abu Dhabi as the CEO of Good Harbor Security Risk Management. The UAE’s reliance on foreigners to build its security institutions is not new, but the Gulf state has usually tried to keep the details of that help out of public view, and when it comes to training its nascent intelligence operations, details have been kept particularly quiet. However, the use of former US intelligence employees to build up foreign nations’ spying capabilities is still treading into new territory.

Sanchez’s role in providing a blueprint for the UAE’s intelligence operation, making it from whole cloth, shows just how far private contractors have gone in selling skills acquired from decades spent working for the US military and intelligence community. That sort of work is also now raising legal questions as the US government struggles to decide how laws govern highly trained intelligence officials hawking their skills abroad.

Sanchez declined to comment on an extensive list of questions sent to him by FP.

Six former intelligence officials and contractors described the training operation to FP, but they requested anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence operations, to shield friends and associates still working in the UAE, and to protect their future employability.

Two of those interviewed expressed concerns about whether the company had the proper export licenses for the advanced training, especially as other international instructors arrived on the scene. Even more concerning for employees was that the government-affiliated UAE company now involved in managing the contract, DarkMatter, is currently under investigation by the FBI.

The FBI told FP it does not comment on ongoing investigations.

While former employees had a range of views on whether the training was effective, legal, and in the US interests, they all agreed that having private contractors create a foreign intelligence service was likely unprecedented.

“The dream” one source explained, was to help the UAE create its own CIA.

Larry Sanchez’s road from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to Abu Dhabi went by way of New York. During much of his career at the CIA, Sanchez worked as an undercover operative working under roles in other agencies or organizations. But in 2002, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, sent Sanchez to work in New York with David Cohen, the deputy commissioner of intelligence at the NYPD.

There was already an informal link between the CIA and NYPD: Cohen was also the former deputy director of operations at the agency. In New York, Sanchez provided law enforcement with real-time intelligence about al Qaeda. The NYPD, in turn, sent officers to infiltrate mosques and Muslim communities, as well as any other potentially “radicalizing” places pointed out by tipsters. The goal was to prevent another 9/11-type attack.

While Sanchez was at the NYPD, the department also had an expanding — and unusual — relationship with the UAE. In 2008, the NYPD and the UAE’s government struck an intelligence-sharing deal, and New York police set up a satellite office in Abu Dhabi. The UAE also gave the New York City Police Foundation a million dollars for its intelligence division in 2012, providing funds to enable “the NYPD to station detectives throughout the world to work with local law enforcement on terrorism related incidents,” per a public tax filing.

During his tenure at NYPD, Sanchez developed “an ongoing relationship” with high-level Emirati officials, according to a former law enforcement source. The Emiratis were unfamiliar with “the world of intelligence,” the source explained, and Sanchez went to them and said, “‘Listen, I’m not going to be like some of these other US entities who fly in and then leave, I will be here for you all the time. Call me at 3 a.m., I’m here.’ … He won them over by his commitment to them.”

Even as Sanchez built up his relationship with the UAE, his work at home was gaining scrutiny. A 2011 CIA inspector general investigation into its officers embedded in the NYPD did not find specific violations of the law, but concluded that the perception of coziness between the nation’s top foreign spy agency and a local domestic police department was eroding public trust.

The revelation led to major public outcry from civil liberties organizations tracking privacy after 9/11. The CIA argued its support did not constitute spying on Americans, but civil rights advocates disagreed.

“The CIA is not permitted to engage in domestic surveillance,” Ginger McCall, then the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Open Government Project, told the Times.

By the time the dust had settled and the CIA decided to end its program at the NYPD, Sanchez had already made his way to the Middle East.

When the Twin Towers fell in New York in 2001, the UAE found itself caught up in concerns about international terrorism. The Gulf nation had unknowingly served as a transit hub for the terrorists, and two of the hijackers were Emiratis. The attacks were a turning point for the UAE, said Jon Alterman, the director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“That prompted them to do a number of things involving religious organizations within the UAE, but also on the broad national security front,” he told FP. “There was always a concern with national security, but I think a lot of it was really exacerbated by 9/11.”

The UAE wanted to build up its intelligence infrastructure, and for assistance it turned to the West. Emirati officials have historically aimed to replicate the West’s security structures as closely as possible. When formulating their defense strategy, the UAE examined Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and other Western nations.

The downside of that approach, however, is that the UAE has purchased strategies, putting them together like ill-fitting puzzle pieces and often lacking a central vision and plan, according to those familiar with their work.

During Sanchez’s time in the UAE, a significant Western presence involved in intelligence training was growing. Both Australian and British military intelligence vets worked there, too. But Sanchez benefited from his personal relationship with the ruling family forged during his years working on counterterrorism in New York City.

The US government has also at times assisted directly. In 2010 and 2011, as the Iranians built up their cyberattack capabilities, US government officials and defence contractors travelled to the UAE and help train Emiratis in digital security and offensive cyber operations. While the US government generally embraced the efforts of Gulf nations to build up their own cadre with help from the United States, senior officials drew the line at allowing American citizens to participate in offensive cyber operations, i.e., launching attacks.

In late 2011, US government advisors and contractors helped set up the UAE’s equivalent to the National Security Agency in the US, whose name changed to the National Electronic Security Authority, and now the Signals Intelligence Agency. The US was involved in everything from helping select a safe site with access to power and fibre connectivity to determining which buildings would be public and which classified, according to documents and slides shared with FP by a former intelligence official.

Around this same time, Sanchez and his team arrived and began teaching techniques for domestic surveillance. As president of the low-profile intelligence contractor CAGN Global Ltd., based in Baltimore, Sanchez began manning a team of mostly former law enforcement officers, retired Western intelligence officials, and ex-soldiers to train the Emiratis on how to be spies and paramilitary operators.

The courses, some modelled on the CIA’s training, are broken up into different segments, including a “basic intelligence pipeline” involving straightforward boot camp along with report writing, debriefing, and note taking, the foreign intelligence “external” program, an FBI/law enforcement course, and a paramilitary course, among others.

The training schedule obtained by FP includes “rabbit runs,” where the instructor takes students on a surveillance mission. The students are trained not to draw the attention of another instructor, who is trying to evade them. They’re also taught “the art of observation” and how to spot potential targets.

The external surveillance courses are nearly an exact replica of the CIA’s farm training. “It’s exactly what they teach at the farm … it’s the same material,” one former employee of Sanchez’s firm told FP. According to a second source familiar with the company, the trainers’ use of materials modelled after CIA training actually drew CIA scrutiny and fury, prompting a review of the program that ultimately concluded in Sanchez’s favour.

In one course, for example, former Delta Force operators teach paramilitary skills, such as driving and shooting. “Usually they’ll go to that course before or after being deployed to a place like Yemen,” one of the former instructors explained.

Though the skills being taught to Emiratis are similar to those taught by the CIA, one former instructor argued the courses were simpler — the kind of skills you’d see on an episode of The Americans. “The US is running NASCAR drivers, but we’re teaching driver’s ed,” the source said.

All those interviewed about their experience agreed, however, that while the material taught ranged in complexity, the students themselves were green. “It’s all incredibly new to them,” one of the former instructors said.

As Sanchez and other former US intelligence contractors expanded their training in the UAE, one of the nagging questions for many trainers was over whether what they were doing was completely legal. Americans face restrictions on the kind of military and intelligence training they’re allowed to provide abroad, because the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations, a complex set of rules, classifies such training as “exports.”

Americans who run afoul of those regulations risk prosecution.

Sanchez’s firm, CAGN Global, obtained an export license from the State Department to conduct basic security and intelligence training when it started. But it came under review last year by several government agencies, including the State Department and the CIA. Some instructors were concerned the review had to do with the course expanding beyond its remit, though one source said it had more to do with a missed payment to the State Department and CIA frustration over use of training materials similar to its own. The review appears to have been resolved.

The State Department declined to comment on the record.