If the new administration had embraced our Blue Sky concept wholeheartedly and granted us all the authorities we sought that day in March, would we have been able to prevent 9/11? I don"t know. After all, the plot was already well under way, and the terrorism threat was growing daily.
In my first public testimony during the new administration, in February 2001, I told the Senate that "The threat from terrorism is real, it is immediate, and it is evolving.... [A]s we have increased security around government and military facilities, terrorists are seeking out "softer" targets that provide opportunities for ma.s.s casualties.... Usama Bin Ladin and his global network of lieutenants and a.s.sociates remain the most immediate and serious threat.... He is capable of planning multiple attacks with little or no warning."
In other testimony later that spring, I told Congress that "We will generally not have specific time and place warning of terrorist attacks.... The result...is that I consider it likely that over the next year or so that there will be an attempted terrorist attack against U.S. interests." My sense was that something was coming-something big-but to my great frustration we could not determine exactly what, where, when, or how.
We delivered the same message through cla.s.sified briefings and a.n.a.lysts" reports. A March paper stressed the critical role that Afghanistan played in providing sanctuary for terrorism. A paper the next month talked about the growing belief among jihadists that there was some U.S.-led conspiracy against Islam.
During the spring of 2001, at one of the innumerable Deputies" meetings, John McLaughlin expressed frustration at the lack of action. "I think we should deliver an ultimatum to the Taliban," he said. "They either hand Bin Ladin over or we rain h.e.l.l on them." An odd silence followed. No one seemed to like the idea. Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, called John after the meeting and offered a friendly word of advice: "You are going to get your suspenders snapped if you keep making policy recommendations. That is not your role."
Throughout my tenure as DCI, under two administrations, I had a weekly private meeting with the national security advisor. Looking back on the notes from those sessions now, I find that in almost every meeting terrorism was high on the agenda but never more so than in the spring and summer of 2001.
For my regularly scheduled meeting with Condi Rice on May 30, I brought along John McLaughlin, Cofer Black, and one of Cofer"s top a.s.sistants, Rich B. (Rich can"t be further identified here.) Joining Condi were d.i.c.k Clarke and Mary McCarthy.
Rich ran through the mounting warning signs of a coming attack. They were truly frightening. Among other things, we told Condi that a notorious al-Qa"ida operative named Abu Zubaydah was working on attack plans.
Some intelligence suggested that those plans were ready to be executed; others suggested they would not be ready for six months. The primary target appeared to be in Israel, but other U.S. a.s.sets around the world were at risk.
Condi asked us about taking the offensive against al-Qa"ida. Cofer told her about our efforts to work with other intelligence services, penetrate terrorist organizations, and the like.
"How bad do you think it is?" Condi asked. Cofer told her that during the millennium the terrorist threat situation was an "eight on a ten scale." Right now, he said, we were about at a "seven." Clarke told her that adequate warning notices had been issued to appropriate U.S. ent.i.ties.
The FAA issued warning notices, emba.s.sy security was tightened around the world, military installations in the Middle East went on higher alert levels. We were asked to brief other Cabinet members. We returned to CIA headquarters with the hope that our message had been received.
Information about Zubaydah kept popping up in various bits of intelligence. In June 2001 we were informed by the British that Abu Zubaydah was planning suicide car bomb attacks against U.S. military targets in Saudi Arabia by the end of the month. We learned via the FBI"s debriefing of the would-be millennial bomber Ahmad Ressam, for example, that Abu Zubaydah had requested high-quality Canadian pa.s.sports for smuggling operatives into the United States. As part of his bargaining for a reduced sentence, Ressam told the FBI that Zubaydah was considering attacks in several U.S. cities. Ressam provided no details on specific venues, but he did say that Zubaydah was in it for the long haul-that he was willing to spend a year or more in preparation if that would lead to a successful attack.
(When we captured Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002, some media accounts suggested that he was not such an important player. Those accounts are dead wrong. Worse yet, it has been suggested that the Bush administration exaggerated his importance in their comments to the media-again dead wrong. I believe to this day that Abu Zubaydah was an important player in al-Qa"ida operations.) Threat information continued to pour in, almost from every nook and cranny of the planet. Some examples of what my top people and I were confronted with on a daily basis throughout the months leading up to 9/11:
Yemeni terrorists were planning an attack in Jordan.
A group of Pakistanis was planning to bomb the American community in Jeddah, possibly the U.S. or British schools there.
The FARC, a terrorist group in Colombia, reportedly was planning to car-bomb several sites in Bogota, including the U.S. emba.s.sy and a mall frequented by emba.s.sy employees.
Hizbollah was readying large-scale terrorist operations in Southeast Asia.
An extremist group was planning an attack against the U.S. emba.s.sy in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen.
Four Saudi nationals were heading from the United Arab Emirates to Kuwait to attack U.S. interests.
Three suspects arrested in Malaysia in May for attempted robbery had cased U.S. facilities and U.S. Navy vessels in preparation for an attack.
An Algerian-based terrorist cell responsible for planning an attack against the U.S. emba.s.sy in Rome or the Vatican was broken up by the Italians in July and its members deported.
Meanwhile, the leading al-Qa"ida operatives involved in the Cole Cole bombing were in Afghanistan planning new attacks against the United States. bombing were in Afghanistan planning new attacks against the United States.
As for Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former Egyptian Islamic Jihadist leader who had become Bin Ladin"s top deputy, it was almost impossible to turn around without finding him entwined in murderous intrigues, planning to renew terrorist operations throughout Europe. Al-Qa"ida was a.s.sessing advanced operations for a major attack in Israel against U.S and Israeli targets, to be led by Zawahiri. Zawahiri, we learned, was coordinating terrorists in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East.
Still other intelligence a.s.sessments painted a picture of a plot to kidnap Americans in India, Turkey, and Indonesia. That was said to be the work of a renegade Egyptian extremist figure, Rifat Taha Mousa, then living in Damascus. Mousa was so despised throughout most of the Muslim world that he had even been expelled from Iran. Syria had allowed him in after several other Arab countries also handed him his walking papers, then arrested him on a tip we provided. Mousa had put out numerous fatwas against the United States in the several months prior to his arrest. He was also close to the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was linked to the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center. In addition, Mousa had shared a podium with Bin Ladin and Zawahiri in Afghanistan during the summer of 2000. We had a photograph of him seated right between the two of them. Talk about a Toxic Trio.
In June we learned that several Arab terrorist camps were closing in Afghanistan. Al Jazeera reported (erroneously, as it turned out) that Bin Ladin was leaving the country, fearing an American strike against him. The Arab satellite channel MBC broadcast an interview with Bin Ladin and his key lieutenants in which he said there will be a "big surprise" in the coming weeks and a "hard hit against U.S. and Israeli interests." MBC also reported that Bin Ladin"s forces were in a state of high alert. Other reports told of imminent suicide attacks in the Gulf. Al-Qa"ida operatives were leaving Saudi Arabia to return to Afghanistan, which was a concern to us because, as we learned in the aftermath of the Cole Cole attack and East Africa bombings, those responsible had beaten feet just before the attacks occurred. In Afghanistan, Arabs were said to be antic.i.p.ating as many as eight celebrations. Operatives were being told to await important news within days. Zawahiri was warning colleagues in Yemen to antic.i.p.ate a crackdown and urging them to flee. To our great frustration, the Saudis, who probably held more keys to unlocking the inner workings of al-Qa"ida than any other liaison service, were slow-rolling us on the feedback we kept requesting. Finally, at our request, d.i.c.k Cheney called the Saudi crown prince to break the logjam. attack and East Africa bombings, those responsible had beaten feet just before the attacks occurred. In Afghanistan, Arabs were said to be antic.i.p.ating as many as eight celebrations. Operatives were being told to await important news within days. Zawahiri was warning colleagues in Yemen to antic.i.p.ate a crackdown and urging them to flee. To our great frustration, the Saudis, who probably held more keys to unlocking the inner workings of al-Qa"ida than any other liaison service, were slow-rolling us on the feedback we kept requesting. Finally, at our request, d.i.c.k Cheney called the Saudi crown prince to break the logjam.
On June 28, 2001-I remember the date exactly and the event vividly-Cofer Black and I sat down for a briefing on the state of the global terrorism threat. Cofer had again brought along Rich B. It was Rich who did most of the talking. We now had more than ten specific pieces of intelligence about impending attacks, he said. The NSA and CTC a.n.a.lysts who had been watching Bin Ladin and al-Qa"ida over the years believed that the intelligence was both unprecedented and virtually 100 percent reliable. Over the last three to five months we had been witness to never-before-seen efforts by Ayman al-Zawahiri to prepare terrorist operations. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the mastermind of the Cole Cole attack, had disappeared. A key Afghan camp commander was reportedly weeping with joy because he believed he could see his trainees in heaven. All around the Muslim world, important operatives were disappearing while others were preparing for martyrdom. Rich"s June 28 briefing concluded with a PowerPoint slide saying, "Based on a review of all source reporting, we believe that Usama Bin Ladin will launch a significant terrorist attack against the U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks." Five days later, on July 3, we learned as a result of intelligence that Bin Ladin had promised colleagues that an attack was near. attack, had disappeared. A key Afghan camp commander was reportedly weeping with joy because he believed he could see his trainees in heaven. All around the Muslim world, important operatives were disappearing while others were preparing for martyrdom. Rich"s June 28 briefing concluded with a PowerPoint slide saying, "Based on a review of all source reporting, we believe that Usama Bin Ladin will launch a significant terrorist attack against the U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks." Five days later, on July 3, we learned as a result of intelligence that Bin Ladin had promised colleagues that an attack was near.
As the threat reporting intensified, so did our efforts overseas. By late June, in cooperation with foreign partners, we had launched disruption efforts in nearly two dozen countries. Almost twenty of our best unilateral extremist terrorist penetrations around the world had been told to gather as much information as possible on the impending attacks. Either leaders of our counterterrorist team or I had been in direct contact with eighteen chiefs of foreign intelligence services, seeking their a.s.sistance. We talked about specific demarches to the Pakistanis, to close down the Pakistani-Afghan border, and their border with Iran, the preferred transit choice of al-Qa"ida operatives exiting Afghanistan on their way to the Gulf. A worldwide cable to our stations and bases urged immediate action to run down all extremist leads. In the United States, we were working diligently with the FBI to secure and exploit as many terrorist communications as possible. That meant going through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, which considers government requests to authorize surveillance of suspected foreign agents inside the United States. The FISA Court was tremendously helpful, yet it was becoming increasingly evident by early July of 2001 that further legislative improvements were needed because the existing statutes did not give us the flexibility we needed to get on top of a savvy and increasingly sophisticated terrorist network.
American emba.s.sies closed upon our recommendation or beefed up their protection. Navy ships left Middle Eastern ports and headed out to sea. Again, I can"t say what didn"t didn"t happen as a result of those warnings and the high level of alert we were broadcasting, but I"m convinced that the summer and fall of 2001 would have been even more catastrophic-and the bloodshed far more widely spread-had we sat on, ignored, or soft-pedaled what we were hearing. happen as a result of those warnings and the high level of alert we were broadcasting, but I"m convinced that the summer and fall of 2001 would have been even more catastrophic-and the bloodshed far more widely spread-had we sat on, ignored, or soft-pedaled what we were hearing.
On July 5, several senior CTC officers went to the Justice Department to brief Attorney General John Ashcroft about our concerns. They told him that we believed that a significant terrorist attack was imminent and that preparations for an attack were in the late stages or already completed. We continued to believe, however, that an attack was more likely to be conducted overseas. At the end of the briefing the attorney general turned to some FBI personnel and pointed at CIA officers present. "Why are they they telling me this?" he asked. "Why am I not hearing this from you?" CIA briefers thought this was an odd reaction. telling me this?" he asked. "Why am I not hearing this from you?" CIA briefers thought this was an odd reaction.
By July 10, Cofer Black, Rich B., and their counterterrorism team had put this flurry of reporting into a consolidated, strategic a.s.sessment. That afternoon, Cofer asked to see me. The briefing he gave me literally made my hair stand on end. When he was through, I picked up the big white secure phone on the left side of my desk-the one with a direct line to Condi Rice-and told her that I needed to see her immediately to provide an update on the al-Qa"ida threat. I can recall no other time in my seven years as DCI that I sought such an urgent meeting at the White House. Condi made the time immediately, and Cofer, Rich, and I made the fifteen-minute ride to the White House.
When we arrived in Condi"s office, d.i.c.k Clarke and Steve Hadley were waiting for us. Rather than sit on the couch as we usually did for our weekly meetings, I asked if we could arrange ourselves around Condi"s conference table so everyone could follow the briefing charts. I thought the more formal setting and stiff-backed chairs were appropriate for what was about to be said. Rich handed out the briefing packages and took it from there. His opening line got everyone"s attention, in part because it left no room for misunderstanding: "There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months!"
A specific day was impossible to pick: "We know from past attacks that UBL is not beholden to attacks on particular dates," Rich explained. "Bin Ladin warned of an impending attack in May of 1998, but the attacks against the emba.s.sies were not carried out until August. UBL will attack when he believes the attack will be successful." The signs, though, were unmistakable. Key Chechen Islamic terrorist leader Ibn Kattab has promised some "very big news" to his troops, Rich said. A chart displayed seven specific pieces of intelligence gathered over the past twenty-four hours, all of them predicting an imminent attack. Among the items: Islamic extremists were traveling to Afghanistan in greater numbers, and there had been significant departures of extremist families from Yemen. Other signs pointed to new threats against U.S. interests in Lebanon, Morocco, and Mauritania.
Rich"s next chart contained what in the business we call a "gisting," a summation of the more chilling statements we had in our possession through intelligence:
A mid-June statement from UBL to trainees that there will be an attack in the near future.
Information that talked about moving toward decisive acts.
Late June information that cited a "big event" that was forthcoming.
Two separate bits of information collected only a few days before our meeting in which people were predicting a stunning turn of events in the weeks ahead.
The attack will be "spectacular," Rich told Condi and the others, and it will be designed to inflict ma.s.s casualties against U.S. facilities and interests. "Attack preparations have been made," he said. "Multiple and simultaneous attacks are possible, and they will occur with little or no warning. Al-Qa"ida is waiting us out and looking for vulnerability."
Rich went on to summarize our efforts to disrupt specific targets tied to Bin Ladin. Our intent, he explained, was not just to startle or stop specific bad guys. We wanted the targets to spread the word that Bin Ladin"s plans had been compromised. Our hope was that we might cause him at least to delay the attacks, but that could never be anything more than a stalling action. At the end of this graph, underlined, were these words: "Disruption only delays a terrorist attack. It does not halt a terrorist threat."
As we had arranged, Rich swung from that point into arguing that consideration should be given immediately to moving from a defensive to an offensive posture vis-a-vis al-Qa"ida and Bin Ladin. "We have disrupted or delayed the current attack, but the UBL threat will continue to exist," he said. "UBL"s goal is the destruction of the United States. We must consider a proactive instead of a reactive approach to UBL. Attacking him again with cruise missiles after this new terrorist attack will only play to his strategy. We must take the battle to UBL in Afghanistan. We must take advantage of increasing dissatisfaction of some Afghan tribes with the Taliban. We must take advantage of the Afghan armed opposition."
At the end of the briefing, Condi turned to Clarke and said, "d.i.c.k, do you agree? Is this true?" Clarke put his elbows on his knees and his head fell into his hands and he gave an exasperated yes.
Condi looked at Cofer and asked, "What should we do?"
Cofer responded, "This country needs to go on a war footing now now."
"Then what can we do to get on the offensive now?" Condi asked. I can"t recall if it was Cofer or I who answered that question. "We need to re-create the authorities that we had previously submitted in March," one of us said. I reminded Condi again that, before the authorities could be okayed, the president needed to align his policy with the new reality, and she a.s.sured me that this would happen. It was just the outcome I had expected and hoped for when we left Langley for the White House maybe an hour earlier, but the tragedy is that all this could have been taking place four months earlier, if our initial request for expanded authorities hadn"t been so abruptly tabled.
As we were leaving Condi"s office, Rich and Cofer congratulated each other. At last, they felt, we had gotten the full attention of the administration.
When press accounts of the July 10, 2001, meeting surfaced in the fall of 2006, some 9/11 Commission officials said that we had never told them about the meeting. Transcripts of my cla.s.sified testimony in early 2004 showed that I did discuss the meeting with the commission. Why they failed to mention it in their final report is a mystery to me.
Initially some administration officials suggested that the briefing might not have occurred but they later amended their comments to say that while it had taken place, it contained no new or urgent information. Obviously they had not reviewed the briefing slides, especially the one regarding seven pieces of intelligence collected in the previous twenty-four hours that predicted imminent terrorist attacks.
Rich had a.s.sured the group gathered in Condi"s office that day that the NSA strongly discounted the possibility of disinformation. "Throughout the Arab world," he said, "UBL"s threats are known to the public. There will be a loss of face, funds, and popularity if UBL"s attacks are not carried out." Everyone, though, still wasn"t convinced. Sometime shortly afterward, Steve Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, came to see me and asked if I had considered the possibility that al-Qa"ida"s threats were just a grand deception, a clever ploy to tie up our resources and expend our energies on a phantom enemy that lacked both the power and the will to carry the battle to us.
"No," I said to Steve, "this is not a deception, and, no, I do not need a second opinion. I have been living with this for four years. This is real." I told Steve that it would be a tremendous mistake to dismiss what our experience told us was inevitable. "We are going to get hit," I said. "It"s only a matter of time." Steve wasn"t alone. Paul Wolfowitz was raising the same question. To Steve"s credit, after 9/11 he went out of his way to tell me he had been wrong.
We had hoped that the July 10 meeting would finally get us on track, or at least had pointed us in the right direction. Three days later, a meeting of the Deputies Committee was held to discuss the covert-action authorities we had initially requested back in March. But the bureaucracy moved slowly. The authorities granted on September 17, 2001, were substantially the same as the ones we had requested in March.
More intel kept coming in. On July 13 we received intelligence about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was wanted by the Jordanians for his involvement in the millennial plots (and who would go on to mastermind untold numbers of kidnappings, beheadings, and bombings in Iraq before being killed in a U.S. bombing raid in June 2006). Zarqawi, we learned, wanted to arrange a meeting in Iran for apparent operational planning.
At one of my daily briefings, I found out from the Palestinians about a plan to attack the American emba.s.sy in Beirut. Turkish police, I learned, had responded to my calls and begun conducting operations to identify as many Bin Ladin targets in Istanbul as possible. Meanwhile, explosives had been smuggled from Yemen to Saudi Arabia on July 6 for use against U.S. military targets. The Saudis had finally responded to intelligence we had provided them in January, undoubtedly the fruit of the call the vice president had made to Crown Prince Abdullah urging cooperation. In response, we told the Saudis we needed to keep working with them, we needed to keep engaging them, and we needed to keep pushing them toward more timely interaction with us-the same message I would deliver myself to the crown prince two years later, after the al-Qa"ida attacks inside the kingdom.
In mid-July we learned senior al-Qa"ida operatives might be returning to Pakistan contingent on where and when a certain event occurred. Our information told us that some were wondering whether unidentified pressure had halted plans for terrorist attacks. This gave us some hope that our disruption efforts might be having some effect.
The Egyptian service told us that a senior operative from Jemaah Islamiya, a Southeast Asian terrorist organization allied with al-Qa"ida, was planning an attack on U.S. and Israeli interests in order to help win the release of the Blind Sheikh. Four trucks filled with C-4 explosives had been brought to Kampala, in Uganda, and operatives there had begun casing the American emba.s.sy. We immediately contacted the Ugandans and also brought in the Tanzanians and Kenyans. Al-Qa"ida had already proved how effective it could be at striking U.S. interests in Africa.
A European intelligence service warned us about a "concrete and serious" threat emanating from a diffuse Mujahideen network in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Al-Qa"ida operatives were traveling to Europe, they said, but the target and timing of the attack were unknown. The next day, that same service provided specific information about the activities of a foreign operative well known to us. That same day, July 17, sources within the Zawahiri network told us of an attack that was to take place inside Saudi Arabia within days. We immediately informed the Saudis. Yemenis arrested a key Bin Ladin pa.s.sport forger who was involved in a threat against the U.S. emba.s.sy in Sanaa, and we provided them with debriefing requirements. A few days later we received six separate reports that an Afghanistan-based narco-trafficker was facilitating the shipment of explosives and bomb-making kits to al-Qa"ida operatives in Yemen, to be used against U.S. and British interests there. Five members of the group had met with Bin Ladin in Khandahar. From Afghanistan came word that the Taliban intelligence chief, Kari Amadullah, was interested in establishing secret contact, outside the country and without Mullah Omar"s knowledge, "to save Afghanistan." From the Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Masood told us that Bin Ladin was sending twenty-five operatives to Europe for terrorist activities. The operatives, he said, would be traveling through Iran and Bosnia.
The whole world seemed on the edge of eruption.
In a briefing I received on July 24, I learned that Jordan"s King Abdullah had sent word that, in his view, Bin Ladin and his command structure in Afghanistan must be dealt with in a decisive and military fashion. To that end, he offered to send two battalions of Jordanian Special Forces to go door to door in Afghanistan, if necessary, to deal with al-Qa"ida. The offer was a wonderful gesture but would have to have been part of a larger overall strategy in order to succeed. To King Abdullah, Bin Ladin was the greatest threat in the world to his nation"s security, and he wanted us to know that Jordan was ready to act as the pointy end of the spear. Like father, like son, I thought. That apple had fallen right next to the tree. How could anyone help but respect the king of Jordan and his family after something like that?
A CTC update on the terrorist threat situation brought word from another intelligence source that they had detained an a.s.sociate of Zarqawi. Interestingly, this person linked Zarqawi with Abu Zubaydah, expanded our knowledge about Zubaydah"s network in the Gulf and Europe, and provided leads to other operatives in Sudan, the United Kingdom, and the Balkans. In running down the data, we concluded that Zarqawi"s network was larger and better connected than we had antic.i.p.ated. The operative was moved to Jordan for further questioning.
Also on the agenda from CTC that day: two Egyptian extremists had been identified in Indonesia, where the government was quickly moving to disrupt the pair, arrest them, and send them to a country in which they were wanted. The UAE had arrested Djamel Beghal, who had been planning to bomb the U.S. emba.s.sy in Paris.
The operative who was behind the threat to bomb the emba.s.sy had arrived in the United Kingdom. We had so informed the Brits and had alerted the Swedes of the operative"s onward travel home after he left the UK. The Bolivians had arrested six Pakistanis who were planning an airline hijacking. One of those arrested appeared to be related to Kasi, the man who had killed two CIA officers at the Agency"s front gate in 1994. It was likely that the six would be deported to Pakistan, where authorities would question them at our urging.
That same day, we had reporting that Zawahiri was in Yemen and we were pursuing confirmation and a plan to exfiltrate him to the United States. Although we doubted this information, it was our intention to play this hand out. I was also briefed on a major breakthrough in our ongoing effort to technically penetrate al-Qa"ida and Taliban leadership in Afghanistan. Tremendous teamwork with the British service made this possible and was now providing a quantum leap in our coverage of Arabs in Khandahar and of the Taliban leadership.
We were also working on the resumption of a long-stagnant counterterrorist relationship with the Russians. We thought it essential to make the attempt in light of Chechen linkages to al-Qa"ida. To date, the track record of data provision by the Russians had been poor, but we hoped to be able to exploit the unique access we believed they continued to have in Afghanistan.
If you are getting confused, frustrated, or exhausted reading this litany, imagine how we felt at the time living through it. And imagine how I and everyone else in the room reacted during one of my updates in late July when, as we speculated about the kind of attacks we could face, Rich B. suddenly said, with complete conviction, "They"re coming here." I"ll never forget the silence that followed.
Just about this same time, the National Security Council authorized us to begin deploying the Predator by September 1, in either an armed or unarmed reconnaissance mode. According to the order, we were to work out cost-sharing details with the Defense Department. Our belief was that deploying the Predator in unarmed reconnaissance mode was ill advised and unnecessarily exposed the capability. We preferred that the next time it was over Afghanistan that it be equipped to take immediate action if we spotted UBL. But the testing to date on the Predator"s h.e.l.lfire warhead had shown mixed results.
I took the NSC action as a positive sign that the policy makers were beginning to engage the difficult issues of the war on terror, but we still needed a Princ.i.p.als" meeting to thrash out once and for all the administration"s policy regarding our use of an armed Predator. I wanted to have the meeting as soon as possible, but given the technical difficulties with arming the Predator, the NSC decided to put it off until after Labor Day.
That summer, whenever a PDB contained information about possible al-Qa"ida attacks, the president would ask his PDB briefer, Mike Morell, what information we had that might indicate an attack could come inside the United States. With the president heading off to Crawford for much of August, Mike asked our a.n.a.lysts to prepare a piece that would try to address that question. That was the origin of the now-famous August 6 PDB t.i.tled "BinLadin Determined to Strike in the US." Nearly the full text of the item appears in The 9/11 Commission Report. The 9/11 Commission Report. The report makes clear that nothing would have pleased UBL more than to attack in our homeland. But although clear about his desire and intent, we did not have and therefore did not convey information about any specific ongoing plot. The report makes clear that nothing would have pleased UBL more than to attack in our homeland. But although clear about his desire and intent, we did not have and therefore did not convey information about any specific ongoing plot.
A few weeks after the August 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the president stayed current on events. That was my first visit to the ranch. I remember the president graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup and my trying to make small talk about the flora and fauna, none of which were native to Queens. By then, an eerie quiet had settled over our threat reporting-the lull before the storm. We learned much later that Bin Ladin was waiting for the president and Congress to return to Washington, after Labor Day. He knew our customs and habits well.
In August, I directed a thorough review of our files to identify potential threats. I didn"t want to leave any stone unturned, even if that meant replowing old ground. Temporary calm or not, the threat attack was too real for us to sit back and wait. I later learned that CTC officials had begun a similar review even before I asked them to do so. It was during this period that they discovered cables from the year before that suggested that possible al-Qa"ida operatives might have entered the United States. The issue involved two men, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who later boarded American Airlines Flight 77 on the morning of September 11 and helped fly it into the Pentagon. (So much has been written and so much misunderstood about this "watchlisting" issue-and it became such a cornerstone of the 9/11 Commission"s critique of the Agency-that I will deal with it in a chapter all its own.) It was also during this time when I first heard the name Zacarias Moussaoui. (This, too, requires a detailed discussion to be handled in a chapter ahead.) By early September, CIA had a group of a.s.sets from a Middle Eastern service working on our behalf. None of the more than twenty individuals knew they were working for us. They were targeted against a range of terrorism issues. One third of them worked against al-Qa"ida. By September 2001, we had two unilateral agents successfully penetrate terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
On September 4, the princ.i.p.als-Condi, Don Rumsfeld, others, and I-finally reconvened in the White House Situation Room. This was Tuesday, the day after Labor Day. Washington was coming back to life after surviving another sultry August. Under other circ.u.mstances, the Princ.i.p.als" meeting might have had the feel of a reunion. This one didn"t. The meeting was dominated by the same subject that had been lingering unresolved all summer long: whether the president should approve our request to fly the Predator in a weaponized mode. Unfortunately, the Predator still wasn"t ready to do that, although the h.e.l.lfire missile system was slowly edging toward being ready for deployment.
We also needed to debate the question of when the armed Predator was functional, who should operate it? There was a legitimate question about whether aircraft firing missiles at enemies of the United States should be the function of the military or CIA. It was an important issue, or so it seemed at the time, and I was skeptical about whether a military weapon should be fired outside of the military chain of command. But that was before 9/11.
Six days later, on September 10, a source we were jointly running with a Middle Eastern country went to see his foreign handler and basically told him that something big was about to go down. The handler dismissed him. Had we known it at the time, however, it would have sounded very much like all the other warnings we received in June, July, August, and early September-frightening but without specificity.
Less than twenty-four hours later, the unthinkable happened. But to us, it wasn"t unthinkable at all. We had been thinking about nothing else.
CHAPTER 9 9.
9/11.
On the morning of September 11, the day that changed everything, I met former senator David Boren for breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel, at 16th and K Streets in Washington at eight thirty. The president was out of town, traveling in Florida, which meant there was no Presidential Daily Briefing. David had plucked me from obscurity in 1987 to serve as chief of staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which he chaired. I looked forward, as I always do, to getting together with him that morning.
We were just starting to catch up when Tim Ward, who was leading my security detail that day, walked over with a worried look on his face. As befits his position, Tim is a calm, unflappable fellow, but his manner was so urgent when he interrupted us that there was no doubt that something important was on his mind. I stepped away from the table, and he told me that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center"s South Tower. Most people, I understand, a.s.sumed that the first crash was a tragic accident. It took the second plane hitting the second tower to show them that something far worse was going on. That wasn"t the case for me. We had been living too intimately with the possibility of a terrorist attack on the United States. I instantly thought that this had to be al-Qa"ida.
I told Senator Boren the news. He recalls my mentioning Bin Ladin and wondering aloud if this is what Moussaoui had been involved with. It was obvious to us both that I had to leave immediately. With Tim Ward, I climbed back into my car and, with lights flashing, began racing back to headquarters.
All the random dots we had been looking at started to fit into a pattern. As I remember it, in those first minutes my head was exploding with connections. I immediately thought about the "Bojinka" plot to blow up twelve U.S. airliners over the Pacific and a subsequent plan to fly a small airplane into CIA headquarters, which was broken up in 1994.
Our safe American world had been turned upside down. The war on terror had come to our sh.o.r.es.
En route, I called my chief of staff, John Moseman, and told him to a.s.semble the senior staff in the conference room next to my office, along with key people from the Counterterrorism Center. With all h.e.l.l breaking loose, it was hard to get calls through on the secure phone. Essentially, I was in a communications blackout between the St. Regis and Langley, the longest twelve minutes of my life. It wasn"t until I arrived at headquarters that I learned that as we were tearing up the George Washington Parkway at something like eighty miles an hour, a second plane had hit the North Tower.
As the first reports came in of the planes. .h.i.tting the World Trade Center, Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, head of Pakistan"s Inter-Service Intelligence agency (or ISI), and among the people who could have done the most to help us track down Usama bin Ladin pre-9/11, was meeting on Capitol Hill with Congressman Lindsay Graham, Representative Porter Goss, who would eventually replace me as DCI, and others. A half hour later, Mahmood was being chauffeured along Const.i.tution Avenue when someone pointed out a plume of smoke rising from across the Potomac-the first sign that the Pentagon had been struck. Simultaneously, Shafiq bin Ladin, UBL"s estranged brother, was attending the annual investor conference of the Carlyle Group at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, around the corner from me and just blocks from the White House. Three senior CIA officers-Charlie Allen, Don Kerr, and John Russack-were having a long-planned breakfast at the Agency with Navy Commander Kirk Lippold, who had been commanding officer of the USS Cole Cole when the ship was attacked in Yemen. Much of the discussion, naturally, focused on terrorism. The Agency partic.i.p.ants later told me that Lippold was distressed that the American people still didn"t recognize the threat. It will take some "seminal event," he said, to awaken the public. After the breakfast, Lippold went to CTC for some briefings. When the World Trade Center was struck minutes later, Charlie Allen reached the commander and told him, "The seminal event just happened." Amazingly, Lippold rushed back to work, arriving just in time to see American Airlines Flight 77 plow into the Pentagon. when the ship was attacked in Yemen. Much of the discussion, naturally, focused on terrorism. The Agency partic.i.p.ants later told me that Lippold was distressed that the American people still didn"t recognize the threat. It will take some "seminal event," he said, to awaken the public. After the breakfast, Lippold went to CTC for some briefings. When the World Trade Center was struck minutes later, Charlie Allen reached the commander and told him, "The seminal event just happened." Amazingly, Lippold rushed back to work, arriving just in time to see American Airlines Flight 77 plow into the Pentagon.
Even now, five years later, I find it hard to describe the mood in the conference room when I finally arrived. The time, I would guess, was about 9:15 A.M. A.M. Both World Trade Center towers had been hit, and I don"t think there was a person in the room who had the least doubt that we were in the middle of a full-scale a.s.sault orchestrated by al-Qa"ida. Both World Trade Center towers had been hit, and I don"t think there was a person in the room who had the least doubt that we were in the middle of a full-scale a.s.sault orchestrated by al-Qa"ida.
CTC head Cofer Black recalls speaking with Dale Watson, the head of counterterrorism for the FBI, in a kind of cryptic code all that day. I think that was probably true of most of us, to a greater or lesser degree. Sentences didn"t need to be completed; half-expressed thoughts were fully understood. We had been at this so long, planning for it in so many ways.
But antic.i.p.ating an attack and having it happen-seeing the collapse of the World Trade Center-are not the same things. The first is intellectual. The second quickly becomes visceral, and the anxiety level in the conference room in that first hour was extraordinary. Only minutes after the South Tower was. .h.i.t, the Counterterrorism Center received a report that at least one other commercial pa.s.senger jet was unaccounted for. At 9:40, John McLaughlin and Cofer Black took part in a secure video conference with d.i.c.k Clarke, from the White House. By then, the Pentagon had just been hit, and we knew more planes were loose. On the heels of the Pentagon strike, phone calls started rolling in-not intelligence, just friends and colleagues relaying the rumors that were gripping Washington and expressing hope that we would know what was true and what was false: a bomb had gone off in the West Wing of the White House; the Capitol and the State Department were in flames. The fact was, we had no idea what was real and what wasn"t, but everyone was wondering, what next? Reports came in of several airplanes that were not responding to communications from the ground and perhaps heading toward Washington. Several CTC officers reminded us that al-Qa"ida members had once discussed flying an airplane into CIA headquarters, the top floor of which we were presently occupying.
I can remember asking Mike Hohlfelder, the chief of my security detail, what he recommended. "Let"s get out of here," he answered. "Let"s evacuate." I was reluctant. We didn"t want our own workforce or the world to think that we were abandoning ship. But I also didn"t want to risk the lives of our own people unnecessarily, and as someone in the conference room pointed out, in case the building had been targeted, we needed to have our leadership intact and able to make decisions.
At about 10:00 A.M. A.M. word was sent out for a large number of our multi-thousand-person workforce to go home. They soon joined the horrendous traffic jam that choked Washington"s roads. The White House had evacuated fifteen minutes earlier, just after the Pentagon was. .h.i.t. In New York City, the United Nations complex, nearly twelve thousand employees strong, began clearing out at 10:13. Back in D.C., the State and Justice departments and the World Bank followed suit minutes later. word was sent out for a large number of our multi-thousand-person workforce to go home. They soon joined the horrendous traffic jam that choked Washington"s roads. The White House had evacuated fifteen minutes earlier, just after the Pentagon was. .h.i.t. In New York City, the United Nations complex, nearly twelve thousand employees strong, began clearing out at 10:13. Back in D.C., the State and Justice departments and the World Bank followed suit minutes later.
Initially, our senior leadership team moved from my seventh-floor conference room to one on the first floor-a bit safer, but still too vulnerable if an airplane came crashing into the building. We then left the building altogether, exiting via the southeast corner of the headquarters building and heading diagonally across the campus to the Agency"s printing plant, where a makeshift operational capability had been installed.