At odds with evens

INTELLIGENCE and security are at odds. Intelligence includes mental abilities like reasoning and problem-solving, official inquisitiveness, and now artificial intelligence. The Iranians are trying to decide which intelligence (if any) President Donald Trump relied upon when he switched planes ‘for security concerns’ at Ankara airport on July 8. That of his Secret Service and military advisers? “They wanted me to go in a different flight, a different plane,” Trump explained. “I just have to do what they say.”
The crew? They hid him in a catering truck, shifting him from Air Force One to a military plane.
His own? In which case, why did he opt for the latter — in his own words, the “greater risk” because the Iranians were more likely “to go for it”? Trump had forgotten the assassination in Turkiye that occurred on Oct 2, 2018, when Saudi agents butchered the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
One recalls that security concerns caused president Bill Clinton to switch planes before his visit to Islamabad in March 2000. A witness reported that “a decoy jet with all of the markings of Air Force One touched down in full view of the news media, and a Secret Service agent resembling the president emerged. Then, an unmarked plane landed, and the real president disembarked”. Clinton had informed the White House Correspondents’ Association head in advance of the planned ruse and especially the safety measures taken to protect the journalists accompanying him. President Trump acted otherwise.
Occasionally, good intentions evoke dark suspicions.
He left his Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Air Force One as sitting ducks. Rubio knew of the switch; Bessent might have done. Perhaps because they were fourth and fifth in the presidential line of succession, they were dispensable. One must laud their unquestioning obedience. Like Tennyson’s Light Brigade, theirs was “not to make reply / Theirs not to reason why”. They and others on board risked flying “into the jaws of Death”.
Had the Iranians attacked Air Force One, Rubio would have earned an involuntary martyrdom, less than the deliberate martyrdom of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He knew that the Israelis were determined to kill him. His movements had been monitored for years by Israeli intelligence, especially by its crack Units 8200 and 9900. Yet on Feb 28 this year, Khamenei waited in his office, deep in Tehran’s Habib Ebrahimi bunker. There were a number of tunnels through which Khamenei could have escaped had he wanted to flee. He could even have hidden in a catering container.
Other victims of Israeli intelligence concede that it is the most cost-effective and ruthless of such services in the Western world. By contrast, the Russians prefer the Borgia subtlety of poisons. The Chinese state agency is a Sino-mirror of the FBI and the CIA. The Saudis prefer a cleaver. Pakistan and India — both overpopulated — rely on human intelligence to conduct espionage on each other. Infiltration can be startlingly high. One recalls being told by a Pakistani high commissioner in New Delhi in the 1980s that it penetrated to cabinet level.
Occasionally, good intentions evoke dark suspicions. In 1990, the former Indian prime minister Morarji Desai received the Nishan-i-Pakistan (the country’s highest civilian honour), conferred earlier by Gen Ziaul Haq, to laud Desai’s “abiding commitment to regional peace”. Later, in 1998, the Indian actor Dilip Kumar (Yusuf Khan) accepted the Nishan-i-Imtiaz. He, too, had to endure the slur that he was actually a Pakistani agent, sans masque.
Now that every adult Pakistani has a national identity card necessary for all legal transactions and travel, each is on the radar of government agencies responsible for intelligence and security. Years ago, one was invited into the IB headquarters in Islamabad, located behind the PM’s Secretariat. The rooms were unnumbered; its staff were anonymous. The IB was headed then by someone with a missing thumb. It did not take long to recognise him when he reappeared in Abu Dhabi, this time as an exile during the Zia years.
That visit evoked another personal recollection. In the 1960s, an IB officer went to London on a training course. The address he had in London’s suburbia bore the house number 26. He walked up and down a row of semi-detached houses: nos. 23, 25, 27, and 29. He peered through the narrow gap between nos. 25 and 27. Exasperated, he knocked on the door of no. 25 and asked: “Where has your neighbour in no. 26 gone?” The owner pointed wordlessly to the opposite side of the street, where stood no. 26, sandwiched between nos. 24 and 28. If still alive, that officer should apply to Trump’s security detail.