"What"s going on?" I asked John Brennan, who speaks Arabic.
"Nothing good," he told me.
While Arafat"s side was yelling at each other, I got on the phone and updated Bill Burns, the very able a.s.sistant secretary of state for the Middle East, and Jonathan Schwartz, a senior State Department lawyer who helped ensure that nothing I agreed to was inconsistent with U.S. policy or other agreements we were party to.
We negotiated three paragraphs this way. Finally, I thought we were done. After the third paragraph of the letter had been completed, Arafat walked in and said, "I want one more thing." I objected; the bazaar was closed.
We were in the middle of one of these exchanges when a burst of automatic weapons fire rocked the headquarters. After a quick exchange of furtive glances between the chairman and his lieutenants, Arafat and his aides said in virtual unison, "Celebrations. Don"t worry. No danger. People are celebrating something." Earlier in the day, effigies of Bill Burns and me had been burned in the streets of Ramallah.
At last, around two in the morning, we were done, or seemingly done. Arafat sent the three-paragraph letter out to be typed, leaving me alone in his office with John and Geoff. By then, my back was killing me, so I lay down flat on the floor. That"s where I was when the chairman walked in, saw me, said, "Oh, I do this for my back when it hurts as well," and proceeded to lie down next to me and started talking, with his nose about two centimeters away from mine. I could see Brennan and O"Connell thinking, Oh, great! Get off the floor before the cameras show up!
Finally, the freshly typed letter, sealed in an envelope, appeared at the door and was handed to John Brennan. I didn"t trust Arafat"s typist and kept trying to make eye contact with Brennan to silently signal him to open the letter and read it.
He was as exhausted as I and wasn"t getting my message. So I finally blurted out, "John, open the d.a.m.n letter and read it!" He did and found it to be what we were expecting, except that my name was misspelled. Arafat wanted to have the letter retyped, shouting at his staff about the error and insisting that the next version include the salutation "My dear beloved Director Tenet."
That was the last thing I wanted to take back to Washington, especially after we had been whispering sweet nothings on the floor a short while before, so I insisted that we take the letter as it was and head back to our hotel. As we jumped into our vehicles I called Steve Hadley at the NSC to report what we had done and then called Stephanie to let her know that after an arduous eight days, I"d soon be heading home.
En route to Tel Aviv, we also learned that a Greek Orthodox monk had been killed on the West Bank that evening. Sadly, people get killed all the time in the Middle East, but my conspiratorial mind caused me to wonder if this was intended as a message to me.
The next day we hosted a trilateral meeting not far from the Dolphinarium disco itself. Unaware of the excess drama, President Bush called me the next day from Air Force One to offer congratulations. But as so often happened with the Palestinians and Israelis, the political side of the equation didn"t keep pace. A little more than a week later, the whole deal came apart, another roadside ruin on the b.u.mpy path to peace.
I was among the last senior American officials to see Arafat alive, in Ramallah in 2002. He was a disheveled figure by that point, isolated from his people, indeed virtually imprisoned in his headquarters by Israeli tanks. By t.i.tle, though, he was still the leader of Palestine, so I went over to urge him to reform his security services-put them in a unitary chain of command, appoint a minister in charge, and so on. Again, he didn"t greet me at the door. This time, he didn"t dare. This was a much more somber man, a much sadder occasion. Looking at him, I couldn"t escape the feeling that all this-the tanks, the sandbags-was such a waste. There was so much talent among the Palestinians. There were so many similarities between them and the Israelis. And for a very special moment in time, everybody in government-the Palestinian government, the Israeli one, and our own-trusted CIA enough on security issues that we really might have been able to make a difference.
That time had pa.s.sed, though. The window had closed. Sad as it was, we were just going through the motions. Arafat, I"m sure, knew it. He would never lead his people to the Promised Land; he couldn"t even walk out the front door. In fact, he was neither Moses nor Ben Gurion.
PART II.
CHAPTER 7
Gathering Storm
The attacks of 9/11 so dominate the national consciousness that it can be hard to recall that there was a time, not that long ago, when terrorism in general and the war on terror in particular seemed remote from our lives. For most Americans prior to 9/11, terrorism was something that happened "over there." Yes, it would periodically leap into the headlines-for example, when the Marine barracks and U.S. emba.s.sy in Lebanon were bombed in the early 1980s-but almost as quickly the issue would recede.
For me, terrorism was a dominant theme not just during my seven years as DCI but also during my tenure as Deputy CIA Director before that. I don"t claim any special prescience. But you simply could not sit where I did and read what pa.s.sed across my desk on a daily basis and be anything other than scared to death about what it portended.
Beneath the surface of the Islamic fundamentalist world, hatred for the West kept building and building for countless reasons. We could see it approaching. We could see those who were trying to harness this mindless animosity and bend it to their own purposes. And we struggled mightily every day to find ways to defuse or deflect the coming explosion.
The struggle didn"t begin with me. Looking for new techniques to force our own bureaucracy to focus on specific looming intelligence threats, in 1996 then DCI John Deutch drew down from the limited funds in our tight intelligence budget and, as an experiment, set up what we called "virtual stations." The idea was to create stateside units that would act as if they were an overseas operation. They would be housed separately, away from our headquarters compound, and staffed with a small number of people, both a.n.a.lysts and operations officers, who would focus on a single issue.
As it turns out, only one such station was ever established. The issue we selected for our test case was called "Terrorist Financial Links." The unit kept the acronym TFL for a short while, but before long it morphed into something even more focused.
The then-obscure name "Usama bin Ladin" kept cropping up in the intelligence traffic. Bin Ladin was the only son of the tenth wife of a wealthy Saudi construction magnate. The Agency spotted Bin Ladin"s tracks in the early 1990s in connection with funding other terrorist movements. They didn"t know exactly what this Saudi exile living in Sudan was up to, but they knew it was not good. As early as 1993, two years before I came over to CIA, the Agency had declared Bin Ladin to be a significant financial backer of Islamic terrorist movements. We knew he was funding paramilitary training of Arab religious militants in such far-flung places as Bosnia, Egypt, Kashmir, Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, and Yemen.
UBL, as we came to call him, was just one of many examples of the disturbing trend in terror. Longtime threat Hezbollah, Hamas, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and dozens of other disaffected groups competed with him for attention, but by the middle of the decade, UBL was front and center on the Agency"s radar screen. In March of 1995, for example, Pakistani investigators reported that Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, who had just been captured in Islamabad, had spent a great deal of time in recent years at a Bin Ladinfunded guest house in Peshawar.
Before long, the TFL virtual station became the "Bin Ladin issue station." It also soon carried the code name "Alec Station." The unit"s first leader, Mike Scheuer, named it after his son.
The plan from the beginning was that this "virtual station" would run for two years, after which time the experiment would be evaluated and its functions folded into the larger Counterter rorist Center under which it fell. As it turned out, the unit operated for almost a decade.
It was in Afghanistan in the late eighties, during the war to expel the Soviets, that UBL first made contacts with many of the Islamic extremists who would later form the foundation of what was to become al-Qa"ida-Arabic for "the base." In a media interview in 1988, UBL told of a Soviet mortar sh.e.l.l that had once landed at his feet. When it failed to explode, he said, he knew he had a sign from G.o.d that he should battle all foes of Islam. Not long afterward he began using his personal fortune to train and equip militant "Afghan Arabs" for a holy war, or jihad, that would go beyond Afghanistan and eventually reach around the world. (Internet-based conspiracy theorists keep alive the rumor that Bin Ladin had somehow worked for the CIA during the Afghan-Soviet war or had more informal contacts with American officials during that time. Let me state categorically that CIA had no contact with Bin Ladin during the Soviet"s Afghan misadventure.) UBL returned to Saudi Arabia after the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan in 1989, but the Saudis already had enough trouble with fundamentalist extremists, and Bin Ladin soon ran afoul of his own government despite the prominence of his family. Saudi Arabia"s close cooperation with the United States during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, particularly the fact that American troops were allowed on Saudi soil, fueled Bin Ladin"s hatred of the West and further estranged him from the Saudi rulers. In 1991 the Saudis were thrilled to see him decamp for Sudan.
In Khartoum, UBL found a much warmer reception and began to occupy more and more of our attention. The country"s leader, Ha.s.san al-Turabi, invited him to help organize resistance to Christian separatists in southern Sudan and to build a network of companies that would later serve as fronts for Bin Ladin"s worldwide terrorist network. Simultaneously UBL was providing financial help for militant organizations around the Middle East as well as setting up outposts where paramilitary training was provided to jihadists from all over the Muslim world.
Initially, we believed Bin Ladin was princ.i.p.ally a financier, and in January 1996 we described him as such, but Alec Station was quickly putting together a picture of someone who was more than a Saudi dilettante with deep pockets and a hatred for the West. UBL, we were learning, was an engine of evil.
Unfortunately, the U.S. emba.s.sy in Khartoum was shuttered in early 1996 due to a deteriorating security environment and threats to U.S. officials. In retrospect, that was a mistake-we lost a valuable window into the burgeoning terrorist environment there as a result. But if the intelligence gathering got harder, it nonetheless went on.
In Sudan, Bin Ladin opened several businesses in which he employed veterans of the Afghan war against the Soviets. Many of these men would later become al-Qa"ida operatives. The businesses were quite successful and served to multiply Bin Ladin"s already considerable wealth. More worrisome, though, was the increasing evidence that UBL had begun to plan and direct operations himself.
By 1996 we knew that Bin Ladin was more than a financier. An al-Qa"ida defector told us that UBL was the head of a worldwide terrorist organization with a board of directors that would include the likes of Ayman al-Zawahiri and that he wanted to strike the United States on our soil. We learned that al-Qa"ida had attempted to acquire material that could be used to develop chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons capability. He had gone so far as to hire an Egyptian physicist to work on nuclear and chemical projects in Sudan. At al-Qa"ida camps there, his operatives experimented on methods for delivering poisonous gases that could be fired at U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.
The defector also told us that Bin Ladin had sent some of his people to Somalia three years earlier to advise the Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aideed, who at the time was attacking American forces working in support of Operation Restore Hope, a 19921993 U.S. humanitarian aid effort to deal with famine and chaos in Somalia. In fact, the Somalia experience played a significant role in Bin Ladin"s perception of the United States. He has said publicly that the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia demonstrated that Americans were soft and that the United States was a paper tiger that could be defeated more easily than the Soviets had been in Afghanistan. (That perception contributed to his surprise five years later, when CIA, operating with U.S. Special Forces, arrived on the ground in Afghanistan so swiftly after 9/11 and, with the help of Afghan surrogates, so effectively destroyed his sanctuary.) When the United States started putting pressure on the Sudanese to expel Bin Ladin, he became a burden to his hosts. But the question of where he might go was a problem. The Saudis had stripped him of his citizenship in 1994 and certainly didn"t want him coming back to the kingdom. Press reports and the Internet rumor mill continue to contend that the Sudanese had offered to extradite UBL to the United States, but I am unaware of anything to substantiate that.
What we do know for certain is that on May 19, 1996, UBL left Sudan, apparently of his own accord, and relocated to Afghanistan. In many ways this was the worst-case scenario for us. Afghanistan at the time was in the midst of extraordinarily chaotic fighting-even by Afghan standards-that would soon leave the country in the hands of the Taliban, a brutal, backward band of fanatics. Inevitably, UBL was quick to form an alliance with Mullah Omar and the Taliban rulers who had seized control of the country, and arguably, for the first time in history, we had something that was not "state-sponsored terrorism" but rather a state sponsored by a terrorist group.
Very soon, dark warning signs were spilling out of Afghanistan. The British newspaper the Independent Independent published an article in July 1996 quoting UBL as saying that the killing of Americans at Khobar Towers the previous month was the beginning of a war between Muslims and the United States. The next month, August, UBL joined other radical Muslims in promulgating a "fatwa," or religious edict, announcing a "Declaration of War" and blessing attacks against Western military targets on the Arab Peninsula. published an article in July 1996 quoting UBL as saying that the killing of Americans at Khobar Towers the previous month was the beginning of a war between Muslims and the United States. The next month, August, UBL joined other radical Muslims in promulgating a "fatwa," or religious edict, announcing a "Declaration of War" and blessing attacks against Western military targets on the Arab Peninsula.
After 9/11 some senior government officials contended that they were surprised at the size and nature of the attacks. Perhaps so, but they shouldn"t have been. We had been warning about the threat at every opportunity. As the red flags multiplied on the horizon in the years before, we tried our best to call attention to them. In 1995 we published a National Intelligence Estimate called "The Foreign Terrorist Threat in the United States." It warned of the threat from radical Islamists and their enhanced ability "to operate in the United States." The Estimate judged that the most likely targets of a terrorist attack would be "national symbols such as the White House and the Capitol and symbols of U.S. capitalism such as Wall Street." The report said that U.S. civil aviation was an especially vulnerable and attractive target.
In 1997 another National Intelligence Estimate, the coordinated judgments of the entire intelligence community, stressed that "Civil aviation remains a particularly attractive target for terrorist attacks." We know that the message was received. The White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, chaired by Vice President Al Gore, said in its report that "the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence sources have been warning that the threat of terrorism is changing." The report went on to stress that the danger was "no longer just an overseas threat from foreign terrorists. People and places in the United States have joined the list of targets."
In open public testimony in February 1997, I told Congress, "Even as our counterterrorism efforts are improving, international groups are expanding their networks, improving their skills and sophistication, and working to stage more spectacular attacks." In January 1998, at another open hearing, I stressed that "the threat to U.S. interests and citizens worldwide remains high...moreover, there has been a trend toward increasing lethality of attacks, especially against civilian targets.... A confluence of recent developments increases the risk that individuals or groups will attack U.S. interests."
As if to reemphasize my point, a month later Bin Ladin issued another fatwa, this one stating that all Muslims had the religious duty to "kill Americans and their allies, both civilians and military," worldwide. UBL followed up that p.r.o.nouncement with a media interview in which he explained that all Americans were legitimate targets because they paid taxes to the U.S. government.
A PDB briefing prepared for President Clinton on December 4, 1998, was t.i.tled, "Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks." Between April 1, 2001, and September 11, 2001, as many as 105 daily intelligence summaries were produced by the FAA for airline industry leaders. These reports were based on information received from the intelligence community. Almost half of these mentioned al-Qa"ida, Usama bin Ladin, or both.
Unfortunately, even when our warnings were heard, little was done domestically to protect the United States against the threat. To cite two obvious and tragic failures, only after 9/11 were c.o.c.kpit doors hardened and pa.s.sengers forbidden from carrying box cutters aboard U.S. commercial airliners.
In combating terror it was necessary to work closely with foreign allies. None would ultimately have to step up more than the Saudis.
I had many memorable meetings with the Saudis over the years. In the spring of 1998 the Saudis foiled a plot by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri-head of al-Qa"ida operations in the Arabian Peninsula and the mastermind of the attack against the USS Cole- Cole-to smuggle four Sagger ant.i.tank missiles from Yemen into Saudi Arabia.
Vice President Gore was scheduled to visit Saudi Arabia a week or so after the seizure. We would have expected the Saudis to pa.s.s this information to us immediately.
John Brennan, at the time our senior liaison to the Saudis, confronted the Saudi head of intelligence, Prince Turki, about the lapse, but Turki professed ignorance. Brennan suggested I make a quick trip to Saudi Arabia to underscore the importance of sharing such information.
I went to see the crown prince"s brother, the interior minister, Prince Naif, who oversaw the Mabahith, the Saudi internal intelligence service.
My "audience" with him took place in a grand receiving room in one of Naif"s opulent Riyadh palaces, with scores of Saudi officials observing from chairs lining the perimeter of the hall.
Naif opened, as I recall, with an interminable soliloquy recounting the history of the U.S.-Saudi "special" relationship, including how the Saudis would never, ever keep security-related information from their U.S. allies, despite American unwillingness to share important information with Riyadh. After a while, I had had enough.
John McLaughlin and Brennan were by my side. I was struggling to be diplomatic, but they could see the frustration building.
There was a joke around the office calling me "the subliminal man." It was based on a Sat.u.r.day Night Live Sat.u.r.day Night Live skit in which one of the comedians, Kevin Nealon, would say normal things like "How are you, madam?" and then quickly and quietly mutter something different under his breath, such as "You miserable twit." The staff knew that when I was being oh so polite, I was probably thinking something else. McLaughlin wrote a note and pa.s.sed it to Brennan. "The DCI is about to go "subliminal."" He was right. skit in which one of the comedians, Kevin Nealon, would say normal things like "How are you, madam?" and then quickly and quietly mutter something different under his breath, such as "You miserable twit." The staff knew that when I was being oh so polite, I was probably thinking something else. McLaughlin wrote a note and pa.s.sed it to Brennan. "The DCI is about to go "subliminal."" He was right.
I scooted my chair forward toward Naif and, without thinking and with no intention of being disrespectful, put my hand on his knee, something you are never supposed to do with royalty.
I said, "Your Royal Highness, what do you think it will look like if someday I have to tell the Washington Post Washington Post that you held out data that might have helped us track down al-Qa"ida murderers, perhaps even plotters who want to a.s.sa.s.sinate our vice president?" that you held out data that might have helped us track down al-Qa"ida murderers, perhaps even plotters who want to a.s.sa.s.sinate our vice president?"
I don"t remember the response of the crowd in general, although Brennan tells me that you could practically feel the air being sucked out of the room as the Saudis simultaneously gasped for breath at the sight of my touching such a powerful royal patella, but I do remember Naif"s reaction-what looked to be a prolonged state of shock, with his eyes continuously shifting back and forth between my face and my hand on his knee.
I let him go at last, but I a.s.sured him that I would be back the next week, and every week after that if necessary, to ensure that the flow of terrorism-related information between U.S. and Saudi officials was timely and unenc.u.mbered.
Crown Prince Abdullah was decisive in breaking the log jam. Within a week of my visit, Brennan was given a comprehensive written report on the entire Sagger missile episode.
During the latter part of 1998, I was aggressively seeking additional resources from our government to fight terrorism. Twice, on November 5, 1998, and October 15, 1999, I wrote personal letters to President Clinton seeking a major increase in our funding. For the most part I succeeded in annoying the administration for which I worked but did not loosen any significant purse strings. In the aftermath of 9/11, politicians from both parties claimed heroism after the fact, saying they had encouraged the DCI to spend more money on terrorism. No, they didn"t-at least not in any consistent or coherent way. Neither they nor the 9/11 Commission ever understood that you do not simply snap your fingers and throw resources at one problem while your overall capabilities are in such bad shape.
You can"t toss spies at al-Qa"ida when you don"t have them, especially when you lack the recruiting and training infrastructure to get them and grow them. You don"t simply tell NSA to give you more signals intelligence when their capabilities are crumbling and they are "going deaf"-unable to monitor critical voice communications. Nor could you ignore the need to replace costly, aging imagery satellites without which the country would lose much of its reconnaissance capability, essentially "going blind."
The fact is that by the mid-to late 1990s American intelligence was in Chapter 11, and neither Congress nor the executive branch did much about it. Their att.i.tude was that we could surge ahead when necessary to deal with challenges like terrorism. They provided neither the sustained funding required to deal with terrorism nor the resources needed to enable the recovery of U.S. intelligence with the speed required. Nevertheless, while having to do more with less, we made a conscious decision to invest in future capabilities-not to go deaf, dumb, or blind-that allowed us to stay steps ahead of our adversaries. When money flowed to us after 9/11, we were ready to accelerate our efforts. While our budget declined by 10 percent over the decade, we quadrupled the resources devoted to counterterrorism while investments in other national priorities either remained flat or declined. We did this for the most part by robbing Peter to pay Paul. Still, we never had enough people.
While we were trying to restore our capabilities, the world did not stand still. n.o.body relieved us of the burdens of dealing with two wars in the Balkans, tensions in South Asia, China"s military buildup, the threat to Taiwan, or the threats posed by North Korea, Iran, or Iraq. The strain was enormous.
The challenge was not just resources but att.i.tude. The policy of the U.S. government at the time was to treat terrorism as a law-enforcement problem. The Justice Department devoted considerable effort to gathering evidence that could be used in court to bring Islamic militants to trial on charges of conspiracy to commit murder if-and it was a big big if-we could even capture them. At the Agency, we believed that the terrorists sitting around campfires in Afghanistan were probably not losing much sleep over the doings of some U.S. district court-unless, that is, they were planning how to bomb the courthouse itself. if-we could even capture them. At the Agency, we believed that the terrorists sitting around campfires in Afghanistan were probably not losing much sleep over the doings of some U.S. district court-unless, that is, they were planning how to bomb the courthouse itself.
Case in point: Bin Ladin was indicted in June 1998 on charges of plotting to murder U.S. soldiers in Yemen six years earlier. Five months later, he was indicted again, this time in the East African emba.s.sy bombings. I can"t imagine this fazed him in the least since he was living comfortably in his Afghan sanctuary.
Beyond legal action, there are two other tracks that a country can follow to go after a threat like Bin Ladin. It can attempt to use overt military force or the clandestine capabilities of its intelligence services in a "covert action." The Clinton administration tried both methods. The requirements to make each of these methods successful and the rules under which they are conducted are very different.
If we had been able to provide timely and reliable information about where UBL was at a given moment, and and precisely where he was going to be a number of hours hence, while simultaneously a.s.suring policy makers that an attack could be conducted without endangering many innocent women and children, the administration would have ordered the use of military force. precisely where he was going to be a number of hours hence, while simultaneously a.s.suring policy makers that an attack could be conducted without endangering many innocent women and children, the administration would have ordered the use of military force.
Although there were a number of opportunities, we could never get over the critical hurdle of being able to corroborate Bin Ladin"s whereabouts, beyond the single thread of data provided by Afghan tribal sources. Policy makers wanted more. I understood their dilemma. As much as we all wanted Bin Ladin dead, the use of force by a superpower requires information, discipline, and time. We rarely had the information in sufficient quant.i.ties or the time to evaluate and act on it.
The use of covert action is quite different from the use of overt military power. Almost all of the "authorities" President Clinton provided to us with regard to Bin Ladin were predicated on the planning of a capture operation. It was understood that in the context of such an operation, Bin Ladin would resist and might be killed in the ensuing battle. But the context was almost always to attempt to capture him first. This was the way people up and down the CIA chain of command understood the president"s orders. My own understanding of that constraint was deepened in a meeting I had with Attorney General Janet Reno. She made it clear to me and to Geoff O"Connell, the then head of CTC, that she would view an attempt simply to kill Bin Ladin as illegal. Legal guidance by the attorney general matters.
The review of covert-action proposals was very carefully handled. Each time these authorities were updated they showed a deep concern for proportionality and the minimization of loss of life. There was even greater sensitivity shown when the use of surrogates to carry out our will was contemplated.
After 9/11, some policy makers asked rhetorically why I wouldn"t have wanted to kill Usama bin Ladin with covert action when I had tried to do so with cruise missiles. This was a completely misleading argument. Our country has appropriately always viewed the secret activities of CIA far differently from the overt use of military force. Despite what they might have said subsequently, everyone understood the differences at the time. Almost every authority granted to CIA prior to 9/11 made it clear that just going out and a.s.sa.s.sinating UBL would not have been permissible or acceptable.
In the aftermath of 9/11, everyone has become fixated on the word "kill," as if anything but the most vigorous pursuit of the term prior to 9/11 represented some form of risk aversion. It is easy to adopt such a stance after a tragedy like 9/11, but it was simply not the legal or political reality that we operated under prior to that day.
From my perspective, this is a largely pointless debate. Policy makers can sign some covert authorities and lull themselves into thinking that they have done their jobs. But in the absence of hard intelligence-in this case regarding Bin Ladin and the al-Qa"ida leadership structure operating inside Afghanistan-covert action is a fool"s game, an illusory silver bullet. With numerous fleeting opportunities to act militarily, and additional authorities being provided, I came to understand that we were putting the cart before the horse. While in the aftermath of 9/11 some would reflect on this period and say that CIA was either risk averse or incompetent to execute the authorities provided by the president, I understood something else: we had to increase our odds by engaging in old-fashioned espionage inside the Afghan sanctuary. We needed more intelligence, not just about Bin Ladin but about his entire leadership structure inside Afghanistan. That is precisely what we would set out to do. There is one other thing I learned: Ultimately, no matter how hard we worked inside Afghanistan, real increases in the quality of the data acquired there would ultimately occur only when we finally disrupted al-Qa"ida"s environment through direct action, forcing them up out of their comfort zone, putting them on the run, and causing them to make mistakes. Action begets intelligence. As one Special Operations commander told the 9/11 Commission, "You give me the action and I will give you the intelligence."
Over time, the covert-action authorities granted to us by the Clinton administration were modified-for example, to give us the ability to work with groups such as the Northern Alliance to collect intelligence, but not to use the Alliance to take lethal action against Bin Ladin and al-Qa"ida.
We could press ahead on collecting information about Bin Ladin and other terrorists. We could work with foreign intelligence services to disrupt their efforts and throw them off their stride, in the same way a beat cop might keep vagrants moving along. Our Counterterrorism Center worked hard to develop better human sources in Afghanistan so that we would have improved windows into what UBL was planning and where he was. But we were not in the freelance a.s.sa.s.sination business-that"s for the movies, not the complicated real world that CIA operates in.
There were a number of opportunities to use military action against Bin Ladin, but these opportunities were fleeting, and tough decisions would have to have been made in narrow windows of time. My job was to a.s.sess objectively whether the data we had, often only from a single source, could ever get policy makers above a 50 or 60 percent confidence level so they could launch cruise missiles in the next thirty minutes. It never did.
Was this good enough for them? It was not. It was understandable, in the aftermath of 9/11, when everyone"s risk calculus had changed, that people became more aggressive with regard to taking action. I know my officers wanted to be more aggressive, but my job was to lay down what we knew, accurately and objectively. I tried to do so, without a trace of advocacy. My own frustration was that, as much as we all wanted Bin Ladin dead, we didn"t have enough information to give policy makers the confidence they required to pull the trigger.
Hindsight is perfect, of course, and it is easy to say now that launching a major covert action against the Taliban sooner might have made a difference before 9/11. But policy makers across two administrations had reasons to be cautious. They had legitimate concerns about the impact such a plan might have on the stability of the neighboring Pakistani government. Actions in the region could have had unintended consequences regarding the tenuous Indian-Pakistani situation. It may also have been impossible to launch a major a.s.sault against the Taliban without Pakistani concurrence. Two administrations may have waited too long to act. The Taliban and their Afghan surrogates were allowed to remain too comfortable in their sanctuary. Had we been authorized to shake them from their complacency, we might have produced the intelligence that could have averted the coming disaster. I just do not know.
One step we did take in light of our expanded authorities was to work with members of an Afghan tribe that had helped us in 1997 in our search for the murderer Aimal Kasi. The tribe provided some very good tracking data on Bin Ladin. On a number of occasions they were able to relay to us information on where UBL had recently been. Prudently, he moved around a lot, most often between Khandahar and a walled compound outside of town called Tarnak Farms.
During the spring of 1998, the first of what would become several plans to try to capture Bin Ladin emerged. The idea was for our surrogates to s.n.a.t.c.h him in Afghanistan and allow us to bring him back to the United States, if possible, to face trial. Counterterrorist Center officers developed a plan where members of the tribe would be used to break into the Tarnak Farm compound, breaching its ten-foot walls. UBL had several wives there, so exactly where he would be found was mostly a matter of guessing which wife he had decided to grace with his company on any given evening, but we had a pretty good idea which houses inside the compound those wives were most likely to be found.
If the tribe had been able to find UBL and spirit him away, they were going to literally roll him up in a rug, take him to the desert, and hide him away, perhaps for a lengthy period, until the United States could stealthily get an aircraft in to "exfiltrate" him (remove him from Afghanistan clandestinely) so that he could face justice in the United States.
Clearly, this was a plan with a lot of "ifs" and "maybes," including the questions of whether UBL would even be there at the time and, if so, whether tribal forces could get past his protection and locate the house he was in before he fled. Several practice runs seemed to convince the plan"s proponents that it had, at best, a 40 percent chance of succeeding. Others thought the odds considerably worse. From our point of view, trying to effect a capture and having UBL die in a shoot-out was perfectly acceptable, but we couldn"t simply have our surrogates burst in, guns blazing, and hope for the best. That sort of "kill "em all and let G.o.d sort "em out" approach might have had a lot of appeal after the ma.s.sacres of 9/11, but 1998 was a different environment, legally and otherwise. Naturally the tribal leaders thought we were crazy when we tried to explain to them the concepts of restraint and rule of law. Such legal niceties are foreign to Afghans.
Mike Scheuer, the head of Alec Station, was strongly in favor of going ahead with the operation. I took his recommendation very seriously, but six senior CIA officers stood in the chain of command between Mike and me. Most of them were seasoned operations officers, while Mike was an a.n.a.lyst not trained in conducting paramilitary operations. Every one of the senior operations officers above Mike recommended against undertaking the operation. They believed the chances of success were too low and the chances of killing innocent women and children were too high. Geoff O"Connell told me that it was the "best plan we had" but that "it simply wasn"t good enough." Revisionist historians will tell you that the U.S. Special Operations Command evaluated the plan and p.r.o.nounced it a good one. If the plan had been carried out by the Special Operations Command, it might have worked. But no one in the U.S. government authorized us to use elite American troops. Instead we had to rely on a largely untested group of tribal Afghans to conduct the mission.
I had only limited confidence in the tribals. They were good at pa.s.sing information regarding Bin Ladin"s alleged location, but frankly, there were serious concerns about their operational capability. In the end, I made the decision not to go ahead with the plan. I believed it would have been irresponsible of me, knowing of the opposition the plan engendered among my most senior operations officers, to have pa.s.sed it on to the president"s desk. It didn"t take long, though, for that decision to be thrown back in my face.
On Friday, August 7, 1998, about two months after I pulled the plug on the Tarnak Farms operations, the phone at my bedside started ringing sometime before 5:00 A.M A.M. These late-night and early-morning calls were a normal occurrence by then, but there was nothing regular about this one. The senior duty officer in the Agency"s Operation Center was on the line. "Bombs have just gone off at our emba.s.sies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania," he said. "The damage is ma.s.sive; the death toll will be high." High turned out to be an understatement, at least by pre-9/11 terms. There were 240 people killed and some 4,000 wounded in the two attacks. As I dressed and headed to the office, the status of U.S. officials at both sites was still uncertain. It quickly became clear that the emba.s.sy bombings were indeed the work of al-Qa"ida.
A day or so later, I paid a visit to Alec Station, which by this time had been moved back into CIA headquarters. That"s where one of Scheuer"s subordinates, quivering with emotion, confronted me about my Tarnak Farms decision. "If you had allowed us to go ahead with our operation," she said, "those people might still be alive!"
It was a tough moment. Of course I had some self-doubt. But the fact is that al-Qa"ida operations are planned years in advance. We later learned that they first cased the Nairobi emba.s.sy more than four years earlier. A Bin Ladin s.n.a.t.c.h in June would not have stopped either bombing. But given the emotion of the moment, I let the a.n.a.lyst vent and just walked away.
This act demanded some sort of retaliation. Working with the Pentagon, we a.s.sembled a list of al-Qa"idarelated targets that might be struck. One of the difficulties of fighting a terrorist opponent is the paucity of targets susceptible to the application of military force. I recall no discussion of sending in the 82nd Airborne or the like to put U.S. boots on the ground in Afghanistan, but in mid-August, as we were searching for ways to respond, we received a G.o.dsend: signals intelligence revealed that a meeting would be held by Bin Ladin. We were accustomed to getting intelligence about where UBL had been had been. This was a rarity: intelligence predicting where he was going to be going to be.
In tightly held discussions within the NSC, we determined not only to go after Bin Ladin in Afghanistan but also to demonstrate that we were prepared to go after his organization worldwide. On our list of potential targets were businesses in Sudan and elsewhere in which he had been involved. These businesses not only were part of the terrorist financial network but also had possible connections with al-Qa"ida attempts to obtain chemical and biological weapons. But while attacking the terrorist summit meeting in Khost was a "no brainer," the other targets were a matter of considerable debate.
The phone at my bedside rang again early on the morning of August 20. This time it was President Clinton calling from Martha"s Vineyard, where he was vacationing and trying to ride out the Monica Lewinsky storm. I never saw any evidence that Clinton"s personal problems distracted him from focusing on his official duties. Perhaps they circ.u.mscribed the range of actions he could take-he was, after all, losing political capital by the hour-but they certainly didn"t seem to do so in this case. The president wanted to talk about the potential targets, especially a tannery that Bin Ladin owned in Sudan and the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum with which he was involved and which we believed was somehow implicated in the production of chemical agents. A spoonful of clandestinely acquired soil collected from outside the factory gate had shown trace amounts of O-ethyl methylphosphonothioic acid, or EMPTA, a chemical precursor for the deadly VX chemical agent. In the end, the president decided to drop the tannery from the target list. There were too many chances for collateral damage with too small a payoff. But the factory at al-Shifa and the camp at Khost were to be struck by cruise missiles.
I understood why the administration favored cruise missiles. They didn"t require putting pilots at risk, and they carried none of the burden or baggage of inserting combat troops. But in hindsight, I"m not certain at the time we fully comprehended the missiles" limitations. The slow-flying missiles are a good choice for taking out fixed targets such as pharmaceutical factories but are far less ideally suited to targeting individuals who wander around during the several hours between the time the missile is launched and when it lands at its preprogrammed spot.
In all, scores of cruise missiles were launched at the Khost terrorist facility right around nightfall on August 20. The sea-launched Tomahawks had to fly hundreds of miles to reach their targets, including navigating the airs.p.a.ce of Pakistan to get to landlocked Afghanistan. To make sure the Pakistanis didn"t think they were under missile attack from India, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joe Ralston, was dispatched there to alert officials just before the missiles crossed into their airs.p.a.ce that this was a U.S. operation.
We believe that a dozen or more terrorists were killed in the ensuing cruise missile strike, but apparently UBL chose to leave the camp sometime before the missiles arrived, once again dodging a fate he richly deserved. We never were able to determine if his departure was happenstance or if he was somehow tipped off.
Predictably, the plant at al-Shifa was flattened. Later, though, questions arose about how closely it might have been a.s.sociated with UBL and whether there might be some alternative explanation for the EMPTA trace that had placed the plant on the target list. You can still get a debate within the intelligence community on how good a target al-Shifa was. What"s beyond debate is that Bin Ladin"s lucky escape only emboldened him for future operations.
Less than two months after the cruise missile attacks, on November 5, 1998, I wrote President Clinton a letter saying that I needed a ma.s.sive infusion of funds to position the intelligence community where it needed to be in the fight of our lifetime. The signs were everywhere that al-Qa"ida had plans for bigger, more spectacular attacks on U.S. interests. To combat our enemies and to protect American interests, I said, we needed "roughly $2 billion more per year for the intelligence budget above the existing FY-20002005 budget." As happened with earlier requests, we received only a small portion of what we asked for. At the same time, I directed Cofer Black, who had become head of the Counterterrorism Center, to put together a new strategy to attack al-Qa"ida. We called it simply "The Plan." But there was nothing simple about it.
The Plan recognized that our first priority was to acquire intelligence about Bin Ladin by penetrating his organization. Without this effort, the United States could not mount a successful covert action program to stop him or his operations. To that end, The Plan laid out a strong, focused effort, using our own sources, our foreign partners, and enhanced technology, to gather the intelligence that would let us track and act against Bin Ladin and his a.s.sociates in terrorist sanctuaries, including Sudan, Lebanon, Yemen, and, most important, Afghanistan.
To execute The Plan, the Counterterrorist Center developed a program to select and train officers and put them where the terrorists were located. The Center launched a nationwide recruitment program using CIA"s Career Training Program resources to identify, vet, and hire qualified personnel for counterterrorist a.s.signments in hostile environments. We sought native fluency in Arabic and other terrorist-a.s.sociated languages, as well as police and military experience, and appropriate ethnic background. In addition, the Center established an eight-week advanced Counterterrorist Operations Course to teach CIA"s hard-won lessons learned and counterterrorism operational methodology.
In reviewing our record against al-Qa"ida, Cofer concluded that our efforts had stopped several planned attacks against U.S. emba.s.sies. We had significantly damaged UBL"s infrastructure and put some doubt in his mind about the security of his operations. But all this had only set him back. It had not stopped him. Unless we changed our tactics, we would find it harder in the future to achieve operational success against al-Qa"ida. They were learning about us as we were learning about them.