Abstract:
The challenge that security forces and militaries the world over have faced in countering terrorism is how
to obtain information about an enigmatic enemy who fights unconventionally and operates in a highly
amenable environment where he typically is indistinguishable from the civilian populace. Gathering "good
intelligence" against terrorists is an inherently brutish enterprise, involving methods a civics class might
not condone.

Gathering `good intelligence" against terrorists is an inherently brutish enterprise, involving methods a civics class might not
condone. Should we care?

"Intelligence is capital," Colonel Yves Godard liked to say. And Godard undeniably knew what he was talking
about. He had fought both as a guerrilla in the French Resistance during World War 11 and against guerrillas in
Indochina, as the commander of a covert specialoperations unit. As the chief of staff of the elite 10th Para
Division, Godard was one of the architects of the French counterterrorist strategy that won the Battle of
Algiers, in 1957. To him, information was the sine qua non for victory. It had to be zealously collected,
meticulously analyzed, rapidly disseminated, and efficaciously acted on. Without it no anti-terrorist operation
could succeed. As the United States prosecutes its global war against terrorism, Godard's dictum has acquired
new relevance. Indeed, as is now constantly said, success in the struggle against Osama bin Laden and his
minions will depend on good intelligence. But the experiences of other countries, fighting similar conflicts
against similar enemies, suggest that Americans still do not appreciate the enormously difficult-and morally
complex-problem that the imperative to gather "good intelligence" entails.

The challenge that security forces and militaries the world over have faced in countering terrorism is how to
obtain information about an enigmatic enemy who fights unconventionally and operates in a highly amenable
environment where he typically is indistinguishable from the civilian populace. The differences between police
officers and soldiers in training and approach, coupled with the fact that most military forces are generally
uncomfortable with, and inadequately prepared for, counterterrorist operations, strengthens this challenge.
Military forces in such unfamiliar settings must learn to acquire intelligence by methods markedly different
from those to which they are accustomed. The most "actionable," and therefore effective, information in this
environment is discerned not from orders of battle, visual satellite transmissions of opposing force positions,
or intercepted signals but from human intelligence gathered mostly from the indigenous population. The police,
specifically trained to interact with the public, typically have better access than the military to what are called
human intelligence sources. Indeed, good police work depends on informers, undercover agents, and the
apprehension and interrogation of terrorists and suspected terrorists, who provide the additional information
critical to destroying terrorist organizations. Many today who argue reflexively and sanctimoniously that the
United States should not "over-react" by over-militarizing the "war" against terrorism assert that such a conflict
should be largely a police, not a military, endeavor. Although true, this line of argument usually overlooks the
uncomfortable fact that, historically, "good" police work against terrorists has of necessity involved nasty and
brutish means. Rarely have the importance of intelligence and the unpleasant ways in which it must often be
obtained been better or more clearly elucidated than in the 1966 movie The Battle of,Algiers. In an early scene
in the film the main protagonist, the French paratroop commander, Lieutenant Colonel Mathieu (who is actually
a composite of Yves Godard and two other senior French army officers who fought in the Battle of Algiers),
explains to his men that the "military aspect is secondary." He says, "More immediate is the police work
involved. I know you don't like hearing that, but it indicates exactly the kind of job we have to do."

I have long told soldiers, spies, and students to watch The Battle of,41giers if they want to understand how to
fight terrorism. Indeed, the movie was required viewing for the graduate course I taught for five years on
terrorism and the liberal state, which considered the difficulties democracies face in countering terrorism. The
seminar at which the movie was shown regularly provoked the most intense and passionate discussions of the
semester. To anyone who has seen The Battle of,41iers, this is not surprising. The late Pauline Kael, doyenne
of American film critics, seemed still enraptured seven years after its original release when she described 7he
Battle of Algiers in a 900-word review as "an epic in the form of a `created documentary"'; "the one great
revolutionary 'sell' of modern times"; and the "most impassioned, most astute call to revolution ever." The best
reviews, however, have come from terrorists-members of the IRA; the Tamil Tigers, in Sri Lanka; and 1960s
African-American revolutionaries-who have assiduously studied it. At a time when the U.S. Army has enlisted
Hollywood screenwriters to help plot scenarios of future terrorist attacks, learning about the difficulties of
fighting terrorism from a movie that terrorists themselves have studied doesn't seem farfetched.

In fact, the film represents the apotheosis of cinema verite. That it has a verisimilitude unique among onscreen
portrayals of terrorism is a tribute to its director, Gillo Pontecorvo, and its cast-many of whose members
reprised the real-life roles they had played actually fighting for the liberation of their country, a decade before.
Pontecorvo, too, had personal experience with the kinds of situations he filmed: during World War II he had
commanded a partisan brigade in Milan. Indeed, the Italian filmmaker was so concerned about not giving
audiences a false impression of authenticity that he inserted a clarification in the movie's opening frames: "This
dramatic re-enactment of The Battle of Algiers contains NOT ONE FOOT of Newsreel or Documentary Film."
The movie accordingly possesses an uncommon gravitas that immediately draws viewers into the story. Like
many of the best films, it is about a search-in this case for the intelligence on which French paratroops
deployed in Algiers depended to defeat and destroy the terrorists of the National Liberation Front (FLN). "To
know them means we can eliminate them," Mathieu explains to his men in the scene referred to above. "For this
we need information. The method: interrogation" In Mathieu's universe there is no question of ends not
justifying means: the Paras need intelligence, and they will obtain it however they can. "To succumb to humane
considerations," he concludes, "only leads to hopeless chaos."

The events depicted on celluloid closely parallel those of history. In 1957 the city of Algiers was the center of
a life-and-death struggle between the FLN and the French authorities. On one side were the terrorists,
embodied both on screen and in real life in Ali La Pointe, a petty thief turned terrorist cell leader; on the other
stood the army, specifically the elite 10th Para Division, under General Jacques Massu, another commander on
whom the Mathieu composite was based. Veterans of the war to preserve France's control of Indochina, Massu
and his senior officersGodard included-prided themselves on having acquired a thorough understanding of
terrorism and revolutionary warfare, and how to counter both. Victory, they were convinced, would depend on
the acquisition of intelligence. Their method was to build a meticulously detailed picture of the FLN's
apparatus in Algiers which would help the French home in on the terrorist campaign's mastermindsAli La
Pointe and his bin Laden, Saadi Yacef (who played himself in the film). This approach, which is explicated in
one of the film's most riveting scenes, resulted in what the Francophile British historian Alistair Horne, in his
masterpiece on the conflict, A Savage War of Peace, called a "complex organigramme [that] began to take
shape on a large blackboard, a kind of skeleton pyramid in which, as each fresh piece of information came
from the interrogation centres, another [terrorist] name (and not always necessarily the right name) would be
entered." That this system proved tactically effective there is no doubt The problem was that it thoroughly
depended on, and therefore actively encouraged, widespread human-rights abuses, including torture.

Massu and his men-like their celluloid counterpartswere not particularly concerned about this. They justified
their means of obtaining intelligence with utilitarian, costbenefit arguments. Extraordinary measures were
legitimized by extraordinary circumstances. The exculpatory philosophy embraced by the French Paras is best
summed up by Massu's uncompromising belief that "the innocent [that is, the next victims of terrorist attacks]
deserve more protection than the guilty." The approach, however, at least strategically, was counterproductive.
Its sheer brutality alienated the native Algerian Muslim community. Hitherto mostly passive or apathetic, that
community was now driven into the arms of the FLN, swelling the organization's ranks and increasing its
popular support. Public opinion in France was similarly outraged, weakening support for the continuing
struggle and creating profound fissures in French civil-military relations. The army's achievement in the city
was therefore bought at the cost of eventual political defeat. Five years after victory in Algiers the French
withdrew from Algeria and granted the country its independence. But Massu remained forever unrepentant: he
insisted that the ends justified the means used to destroy the FLN's urban insurrection. The battle was won,
lives were saved, and the indiscriminate bombing campaign that had terrorized the city was ended. To Massu,
that was all that mattered. To his mind, respect for the rule of law and the niceties of legal procedure were
irrelevant given the crisis situation enveloping Algeria in 1957. As anachronistic as France's attempt to hold on
to this last vestige of its colonial past may now appear, its jettisoning of such long-standing and cherished
notions as habeas corpus and due process, enshrined in the ethos of the liberal state, underscores how the
intelligence requirements of counter-terrorism can suddenly take precedence over democratic ideals.

Although it is tempting to dismiss the French army's resort to torture in Algeria as the desperate excess of a
moribund colonial power, the fundamental message that only information can effectively counter terrorism is
timeless. Equally disturbing and instructive, however, are the lengths to which security and military forces
need often resort to get that information. I learned this some years ago, on a research trip to Sri Lanka. The
setting-a swank oceanfront hotel in Colombo, a refreshingly cool breeze coming off the ocean, a magnificent
sunset on the horizon-could not have been further removed from the carnage and destruction that have afflicted
that island country for the past eighteen years and have claimed the lives of more than 60,000 people. Arrayed
against the democratically elected Sri Lankan government and its armed forces is perhaps the most ruthlessly
efficient terrorist organization-cum-insurgent force in the world today: the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam,
known also by the acronym LTTE or simply as the Tamil Tigers. The Tigers are unique in the annals of
terrorism and arguably eclipse even bin Laden's al Qaeda in professionalism, capability, and determination.
They are believed to be the first nonstate group in history to stage a chemical-weapons attack when they
deployed poison gas in a 1990 assault on a Sri Lankan military base-some five years before the nerve-gas
attack on the Tokyo subway by the apocalyptic Japanese religious cult Aum Shinrikyo. Of greater relevance,
perhaps, is the fact that at least a decade before the seaborne attack on the U.S.S. Cole, in Aden harbor, the
LTTE's special suicide maritime unit, the Sea Tigers, had perfected the same tactics against the Sri Lankan
navy. Moreover, the Tamil Tigers are believed to have developed their own embryonic air capability-designed
to carry out attacks similar to those of September 11 (though with much smaller, noncommercial aircraft). The
most feared Tiger unit, however, is the Black Tigers-the suicide cadre composed of the group's best-trained,
most battle-hardened, and most zealous fighters. A partial list of their operations includes the assassination of
the former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi at a campaign stop in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, in 1991;
the assassination of Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa, in 1993; the assassination of the presidential
candidate Gamini Dissanayake, which also claimed the lives of fifty-four bystanders and injured about one
hundred more, in 1994; the suicide truck bombing of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, in 1996, which killed
eighty-six people and wounded 1,400 others; and the attempt on the life of the current President of Sri Lanka,
Chandrika Kumaratunga, in December of 1999. The powerful and much venerated leader of the LTTE is
Velupillai Prabhakaran, who, like bin Laden, exercises a charismatic influence over his fighters. The Battle of
Algiers is said to be one of Prabhakaran's favorite films.

I sat in that swank hotel drinking tea with a much decorated, battle-hardened Sri Lankan army officer charged
with fighting the LTTE and protecting the lives of Colombo's citizens. I cannot use his real name, so I will call
him Thomas. However, I had been told before our meeting, by the mutual friend-a former Sri Lankan
intelligence officer who had also long fought the LTTE-who introduced us (and was present at our meeting),
that Thomas had another name, one better known to his friends and enemies alike: Terminator. My friend
explained how Thomas had acquired his sobriquet; it actually owed less to Arnold Schwarzenegger than to the
merciless way in which he discharged his duties as an intelligence officer. This became clear to me during our
conversation. "By going through the process of laws," Thomas patiently explained, as a parent or a teacher
might speak to a bright yet uncomprehending child, "you cannot fight terrorism." Terrorism, he believed, could
be fought only by thoroughly "terrorizing" the terrorists-that is, inflicting on them the same pain that they inflict
on the innocent. Thomas had little confidence that I understood what he was saying. I was an academic, he said,
with no actual experience of the life-and-death choices and the immense responsibility borne by those charged
with protecting society from attack. Accordingly, he would give me an example of the split-second decisions
he was called on to make. At the time, Colombo was on "code red" emergency status, because of intelligence
that the LTTE was planning to embark on a campaign of bombing public gathering places and other civilian
targets. Thomas's unit had apprehended three terrorists who, it suspected, had recently planted somewhere in
the city a bomb that was then ticking away, the minutes counting down to catastrophe. The three men were
brought before Thomas. He asked them where the bomb was. The terrorists-highly dedicated and steeled to
resist interrogation-remained silent. Thomas asked the question again, advising them that if they did not tell him
what he wanted to know, he would kill them. They were unmoved. So Thomas took his pistol from his gun belt,
pointed it at the forehead of one of them, and shot him dead. The other two, he said, talked immediately; the
bomb, which had been placed in a crowded railway station and set to explode during the evening rush hour,
was found and defused, and countless lives were saved. On other occasions, Thomas said, similarly
recalcitrant terrorists were brought before him. It was not surprising, he said, that they initially refused to talk;
they were schooled to withstand harsh questioning and coercive pressure. No matter: a few drops of gasoline
flicked into a plastic bag that is then placed over a terrorist's head and cinched tight around his neck with a
web belt very quickly prompts a full explanation of the details of any planned attack.

I was looking pale and feeling a bit shaken as waiters in starched white jackets smartly cleared the china teapot
and cups from the table, and Thomas rose to bid us good-bye and return to his work. He hadn't exulted in his
explanations or revealed any joy or even a hint of pleasure in what he had to do. He had spoken throughout in a
measured, somber, even reverential tone. He did not appear to be a sadist, or even manifestly homicidal. (And
not a year has passed since our meeting when Thomas has failed to send me an unusually kind Christmas card.)
In his view, as in Massu's, the innocent had more rights than the guilty. He, too, believed that extraordinary
circumstances required extraordinary measures. Thomas didn't think I understoodod, more to the point, thought I
never could understand. I am not fighting on the front lines of this battle; I don't have the responsibility for
protecting society that he does. He was right: I couldn't possibly understand. But since September 11, and
especially every morning after I read the "Portraits of Grief" page in The New York Times, I am constantly
reminded of Thomas-of the difficulties of fighting terrorism and of the challenges of protecting not only the
innocent but an entire society and way of life. I am never bidden to condone, much less advocate, torture. But
as I look at the snapshots and the lives of the victims recounted each day, and think how it will take almost a
year to profile the approximately 5,000 people who perished on September 11, I recall the ruthless enemy that
America faces, and I wonder about the lengths to which we may yet have to go to vanquish him.

The moral question of lengths and the broader issue of ends versus means are, of course, neither new nor
unique to rearguard colonial conflicts of the 1950s or to the unrelenting carnage that has more recently been
inflicted on a beautiful tropical island in the Indian Ocean. They are arguably no different from the stark
choices that eventually confront any society threatened by an enveloping violence unlike anything it has seen
before. For a brief period in the early and middle 1970s Britain, for example, had something of this
experience-which may be why, among other reasons, Prime Minister Tony Blair and his country today stand as
America's staunchest ally. The sectarian terrorist violence in Northern Ireland was at its heights and had for the
first time spilled into England in a particularly vicious and indiscriminate way. The views of a British army
intelligence officer at the time, quoted by the journalist Desmond Hamill in his book Pig in the Middle (1985),
reflect those of Thomas and Massu.

Naturally one worries-after all, one is inflicting pain and discomfort and indignity on other human beings ...
[but] society has got to find a way of protecting itself ... and it can only do so if it has good information. If you
have a close-knit society which doesn't give information then you've got to find ways of getting it. Now the
softies of the world complain-but there is an awful lot of double talk about it. If there is to be discomfort and
horror inflicted on a few, is this not preferred to the danger and horror being inflicted on perhaps a million
people?

It is a question that even now, after September 11, many Americans would answer in the negative. But under
extreme conditions and in desperate circumstances that, too, could dramatically change-much as everything else
has so profoundly changed for us all since that morning. I recently discussed precisely this issue over the
telephone with the same Sri Lankan friend who introduced me to Thomas years ago. I have never quite shaken
my disquiet over my encounter with Thomas and over the issues he raised-issues that have now acquired an
unsettling relevance. My friend sought to lend some perspective from his country's long experience in fighting
terrorism. "There are not good people and bad people," he told me, "only good circumstances and bad
circumstances. Sometimes in bad circumstances good people have to do bad things. I have done bad things, but
these were in bad circumstances. I have no doubt that this was the right thing to do." In the quest for timely,
"actionable" intelligence will the United States, too, have to do bad things-by resorting to measures that we
would never have contemplated in a less exigent situation?