German ties with CIA prosper despite abuse fears

BERLIN, Sept 20 (Reuters) - German cooperation with the CIA seemed doomed a year ago when media alleged that Berlin was turning a blind eye to CIA torture and abuse, but the two states are now working closer than ever in the fight against terrorism.

Relations have come far since 2001 when Germans learned that three of the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11 2001 attacks on the United States had lived in their country. Indeed, only a year ago, the outlook for cooperation with the CIA was bleak after a German man and a German-born Turk accused its agents of torture.

It is a relationship born of necessity, analysts say.

Earlier this month German police arrested three suspected members of an Islamist group linked to al Qaeda who police say were plotting major bomb attacks. The operation came after a year of surveillance by U.S., German and other authorities.

"The cooperation between the United States, Germany and several other countries that I'm not at liberty to mention is extraordinary," said Nick Pratt, a professor at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany and a former CIA officer.

This has less to do with the cordial relations between Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President George W. Bush than the realisation that failure to cooperate would mean losing the fight against terrorism, analysts say.

"There is an extraordinary amount of coordination ... and information-sharing in terms of the strategic threat picture, and that has resulted in some real world results," spokesman Russ Knocke of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said.

Among those results were this month's arrests, he said.

CIA ABUSE

Links with the CIA came under scrutiny in Germany when media reports alleged Berlin may have aided the U.S. intelligence agency and military in the abductions and interrogations of Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese origin, and Murat Kurnaz, a German-born Turk.

Kurnaz was captured in 2001 and held for 4-1/2 years at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba. Masri says he was kidnapped in Macedonia in December 2003 and flown to Afghanistan where he was held for months as a suspected terrorist.

Especially damning was Kurnaz's unconfirmed allegation that German troops in Afghanistan had participated in his abuse. Berlin says both men were innocent and their arrests a mistake.

Last year parliament launched an inquiry into the actions of German officials in these and other cases, including private questioning of Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and others.

But Berndt Georg Thamm, a German security analyst, said the scandals only hurt "politically and did not affect relations between intelligence agencies".

Analysts said that even before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq when ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was attacking U.S. intelligence on Iraq's alleged banned weapons and Bush's war plans, German agents kept sharing information with Washington.

The reason, analysts say, is quite simply that Germany needs the CIA.

"OPERATION ALBRECHT"

U.S. cooperation was key to "Operation Albrecht", the code name for the biggest German police operation in 30 years that involved hundreds of spies, security agents and police.

The operation began over a year ago when U.S. electronic surveillance intercepted communications between members of a newly formed cell of the Islamic Jihad Union, a radical Islamist group, indicating they were planning major bomb attacks in Germany. They quickly passed the information on to Berlin.

Soon the United States, Germany and several other countries set up a task force that tracked the suspected bombers between Pakistan and Germany, gathering information about them before capturing three of at least 10 suspected cell members in a sting operation in a remote German village earlier this month.

Several security analysts and one diplomat said a top secret, international counter-intelligence centre in Paris known as "Alliance Base" may have been involved in Operation Albrecht.

Named after al Qaeda, Arabic for "the base", it is staffed by U.S., German, British, French, Canadian and Australian spies who share "real time intelligence" on suspects and their plans.

Whether at Alliance Base or elsewhere, analysts and diplomats said German, U.S. and other spies worked around the clock to feed information to agents and officers in the field.

Pratt said it tracked the suspects' travel between Germany and what police called terrorist training camps in Pakistan.

When they returned to Germany, the trio began hatching their plans to turn hydrogen peroxide into a deadly explosive they intended to use in car bombs around Germany, police said.

"When Americans and German facilities were being targeted, the German authorities decided to move," U.S. Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told Congress last week.

But Germany could not have unravelled this plot without information from the CIA, German officials acknowledge. (Additional reporting by Randall Mikkelsen in Washington) ((Editing by Richard Balmforth))