Even without adequate information technology or the funding to procure it, we weren’t ignoring the threat of foreign terrorists in the United States and beyond our borders. Far from it. Ever since the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the Bureau had been all but obsessed with terrorism and its proponents.
Thanks to excellent investigative work by FBI agents and skilled prosecution by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York, Sheikh Abdel Rahman, the head of a terrorist organization known as the Islamic Group, has been in prison since 1995, serving a life sentence plus sixty-five years for his lead part in the first attack on the World Trade Center. More important, as all of our CT agents knew, Rahman was the spiritual leader for the al Qaeda leadership. That same investigation uncovered and thwarted further plans by Sheikh Rahman to blow up tunnels, bridges, and landmark buildings in Manhattan, including the United Nations headquarters—the so-called Day of Terror plot.
Two of Rahman’s associates in the 1993 attack, Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, escaped to Pakistan before we could apprehend them, but we never stopped pursuing either man. In 1995, FBI agents snatched Yousef out of a guesthouse in Pakistan known to be sponsored by Osama bin Laden and returned him to New York, where he was tried and convicted not only of the earlier World Trade Center bombing but also of a plot to destroy eleven U.S. airliners in flight over the Pacific. A year later, in 1996, our agents and the CIA narrowly missed grabbing Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as he was about to travel from the Qatari capital of Doha to the United Arab Emirates. We believe he was tipped off, but however he got away, it was a slipup with tragic consequences. Almost seven more years would pass before KSM, as he’s known in the business, was run to ground, during which time he is believed to have masterminded the 9/11 attacks. But it wasn’t for want of trying that we failed to get him.
In June 1997, FBI agent Brad Garrett seized Mir Aimal Kasi in a hotel in Pakistan and brought him back to the United States for trial. Four and a half years earlier, on January 25, 1993, Kasi had stood outside the entrance to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and murdered in cold blood two employees while wounding three others. At Kasi’s request, Garrett stood by his side as he was executed at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia in November 2002.
The rapid expansion of our overseas FBI legat offices, from seventeen to forty-four during my eight years as director, gave us unprecedented access to resources that had previously been denied to us. When forensic evidence suggested that the USS Cole had been attacked with an explosive manufactured in Russia, I called the director of the FSB, the internal security force carved out of the old KGB, and with his cooperation and that of his explosives experts, we were quickly able to pin down the source, an immense help in that case and a large step forward generally in the global effort to combat terrorism.
We shared freely from our end as well. FBI agents in New York procured and relayed to Egyptian authorities intelligence that resulted in the October 19, 2000, arrest of Alaa Abdul Raziq Atia, who was wanted for the 1997 massacre of fifty-eight foreign tourists and four Egyptian nationals at the popular Luxor pyramid site. Atia is also believed to have been plotting to assassinate Bill Clinton during the president’s visit later that month to the summit on Middle East violence at Sharm el-Sheikh, the posh tourist center on the Sinai Peninsula, beside the Red Sea.
To open up lines of communications that would keep us in contact with intelligence and security agencies around the globe, I visited sixty-eight countries during my eight years as director and met with 2,100 foreign leaders: presidents, prime ministers, kings, emirs, my coequals, George Tenet’s coequals, anyone who would see me who might be able to shed light on where the terrorists were hiding and what they were planning. I sometimes caught flak for those trips, just as I caught flak for rushing to Dhahran and East Africa and Aden. One critic suggested that having once been an agent myself, I was obsessed with the “culture of the field.” But having once been an agent, I also knew that there’s no substitute for looking someone in the eye—a thug, a world leader, it doesn’t matter—if you want to take his or her measure and establish the sort of connections that can grow and spread. Washington headquarters are full of desk jockeys. I never hoped to be one of them.
Again, budget restraints hurt us. For fiscal year 2000, for example, we requested funding for 864 new counterterrorism positions within the Bureau at a cost of nearly $381 million. Congress approved five positions, funded to the tune of $7.4 million. Over the three fiscal years 2000–2002, we asked for a total of nearly 1,900 special agents, analysts, and linguists to enhance our counterterrorism program. In all, we got seventy-six people to fill those critical gaps, during a time when terrorist activity against the United States, both here and abroad, was clearly in the ascendancy. We desperately needed Arabic and Farsi speakers for our New York City office, where the bulk of the counterterrorism work was handled, but except for one brief exemption granted and later withdrawn by Congress, we couldn’t pay higher than the mandated government salary for that position, an almost laughable figure given the competition in New York for such skills.
Officially, we were the lead government agency in fighting terrorism; in reality, we were allotted 3.5 percent of the total counterterrorism budget. Officially, too, there wasn’t a man or woman in Congress who wasn’t four-square against the bad guys, but this was pre-9/11. Partisanship, not partnership, was the order of the day on Capitol Hill. To his great credit, Bill Clinton introduced the 1996 AntiTerrorism Bill HR 2703. To its discredit, the House stripped the bill of just about every meaningful provision, then passed it overwhelmingly. Even today, post-9/11 and despite endless testimony from me, Congress refuses to grant law-enforcement agencies the authority and the resources to break down encrypted messages.
We were in a constant process of reallocating the Bureau’s resources and reconfiguring its infrastructure to help us combat terrorism. We established a CounterTerrorism Center at FBI headquarters and made certain it could work in tandem with the similar center at CIA headquarters. In 1999, we were finally able to move into our new Strategic Information and Operations Center so that, when the next crisis arrived, agents wouldn’t be tripping all over each other and having to make sensitive calls on open lines.
In the 1980s, the FBI formed its first Joint Terrorism Task Force, bringing together expertise from multiple agencies to identify the roots of radical-fundamentalist terrorism in the United States. As the foreign terrorist threat mounted in the ’90s, we tripled the number of such task forces so that we could better share intelligence and related information and operations with other federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies. Simultaneously, we were setting up a National Defense Preparedness Office and organizing and carrying out countrywide, regional, and local training exercises to help prepare for terrorist attacks.
We poured vast amounts of resources, human and otherwise, into preventing violence at the sort of target-rich, high-profile venues terrorists crave: U.N. gatherings, World Cup matches, the national political conventions, Super Bowls, the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, and so many more. In 2001, in my final months as FBI director, I recommended setting up an FBI training facility in Central Asia, similar to the one we had established in Budapest in 1995 and a second academy we were then launching in Dubai. The reasoning was the same as it had been six years earlier. We need the liaison and the critical points of contact that the training academies foster. Without them, we risk being blind and deaf.
As for Osama bin Ladin and al Qaeda, from at least the mid-1990s on, they were constantly on our radar screen, and at the highest level of concern. Working side by side with the CIA, we secured a June 1998 indictment charging bin Laden with plotting to murder American soldiers in Yemen in 1992. A year earlier, a clandestine CIA-FBI team operating quietly out of an unmarked building in Alexandria, Virginia, under the code name Alex Station had begun tracking the al Qaeda leader around the globe. In 1998, the group came up with a plan to sna
tch bin Laden out of a compound in Kandahar, Afghanistan, using U.S. Special Forces, FBI agents, and Afghani local forces. The scheme worked its way up the chain of command until it was finally killed by the military, which owned the assets that were to have been used. (George Tenet and I happened to agree that the chances of success were extaordinarily low, especially without Pakistan’s cooperation.)
On August 7, 1998, al Qaeda forces attacked the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. By November, we had secured a second indictment against bin Laden, charging him, his military commander, Muhammad Atef, and others with murder in those bombings. Five months later, in April 1999, we placed bin Laden on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted List, where he remains as of this writing. Simultaneously, we created a bin Laden Unit at FBI headquarters. Arrest warrants were flying around the globe for him. Like us, Interpol was on the highest alert. Our own investigations jump-started similar ones all across Europe and in countries around the world, and every one of them filled in pieces of the puzzle.
Nor did we delude ourselves as to what Osama bin Laden and his organization might be capable of within our own borders. During the course of several major trials of al Qaeda members at the U.S. District Courthouse in lower Manhattan—my old court—we closed streets, brought in cement trucks as barricades, set up checkpoints, and employed hundreds of heavily armed New York City police officers and FBI agents to protect the courthouse and surrounding areas. The trials went off as planned, and the defendants, charged in the bombings of the East African embassies, were found guilty as we knew they would be.
In the early spring of 2000, I flew to Pakistan, and on April 6, the U.S. chargé d’affaires (we had no ambassador then) and I met with Pervez Musharraf. The meeting had originally been set for Islamabad, but we were diverted to the military headquarters at Lahore for security. It was, in a way, an odd setting. Although he also served as commander in chief of the army, having recently consolidated power, Musharraf was dressed in a business suit, yet the compound was martial in the extreme, decorated with military awards and trophies, and photographs of fighting units and their leaders.
I’d arrived with two goals. The first was to secure Musharraf’s approval for a Pakistani intelligence officer to come to New York and testify against one of the suspects in the attacks on the East African embassies. The man in question had fled to Karachi after the bombings. There he had been detained by a border-patrol officer and subsequently turned over to the intelligence officer. Under interrogation, the suspect had made an incriminating statement, and that’s what we wanted the officer to testify about. The Pakistani intelligence chief, who was also at the meeting, wanted to know if his officer’s identity would be protected. No, I told him, we couldn’t do that. Nonetheless, Musharraf agreed, and the suspect was later convicted for his part in the attacks.
The larger goal, by far, was to ask for Musharraf’s personal assistance in helping us capture Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice for his role in the mass deaths at Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Afghanistan was a no-man’s-land. The Taliban had closed ranks around the al Qaeda leader. Musharraf and his intelligence chief had the sway to break that cycle and open the door for us if Musharraf so chose.
“I have some arrest warrants for bin Laden,” I told the Pakistani leader. “You’re probably the only person on earth who could serve these warrants right now.”
Musharraf laughed and asked me to tell him more. I used the time to lay out what I felt was compelling evidence that proved al Qaeda’s and bin Laden’s involvement in the East Africa attacks. Musharraf was extremely engaged, very charming, and very knowledgeable about our interests. He resisted my suggestion that we permanently base FBI agents in his country—even the moderate political parties would be upset by that, he told me—but Musharraf readily agreed to let us send a second team, including additional FBI agents and an assistant U.S. attorney from New York, back to Pakistan to brief his staff in greater detail so they would know that our case was very factually based. Those briefings did take place, but in the end Musharraf refused to help. Taliban leader Mullah Omar, he said, had given his personal assurances that Osama bin Laden was innocent of the East African bombings and had abandoned terrorism. It was nonsense, but without Pakistan’s assistance, Osama bin Laden was snug as a bug in a rug. The point, though, is that we never, ever stopped going after him.
And yet, of course, none of our efforts averted what was to come. None of what we did stopped nineteen terrorists from hijacking four commercial airliners on September 11, 2001, and flying two of the planes into the World Trade Center towers, a third into the Pentagon, and a fourth—but for the bravery of the passengers aboard—into the heart of the nation’s capital. We had rolled up an astounding array of terrorists, thwarted dozens of plots, increased our knowledge of terrorist networks exponentially. Thousands of men and women, our agents and others, had spent tens of thousands of hours in the hunt. Some had risked their lives time and again. But nothing we tried, nothing we did, prevented Osama bin Ladin from funding 9/11 or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed from planning it or Mohammed Atta and his coconspirators from carrying it out.
The question is, why?
If you had been able to look hard into President Bush’s eyes on September 11th, in those first few minutes after he learned of the second hit on the World Trade Center towers, I believe you would have clearly seen a president coming to understand under the worst of circumstances that an entirely new paradigm is at play: that we are at war and that we had been at war without acknowledging as much to ourselves for half a decade; that the towers then being destroyed were not the opening salvo of a new global conflict but the culmination of a series of steadily escalating acts of a preexisting one.
I’m proud of the way I ran the FBI from September 1993 to June of 2001 and immensely proud of the people who served with me in the Bureau. But I still fault myself for many shortcomings during my tenure as director. Anyone who runs an organization as complex as the FBI and so much in the public eye and doesn’t find fault with his performance is living in a fool’s paradise as far as I’m concerned. You can always do the job better in hindsight, and if nothing else, 9/11 gave us all cause for that.
I regret that I was never able to convince Congress to fully fund our technological initiatives. I’m embarrassed that on the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2001, FBI agents had to send photos of the suspected terrorists via express mail service because they still lacked the computing power to scan and send images. I was no longer there, but I should have done better on my watch. In hindsight, the Bureau might have been more responsive to the July 2001 memo sent by one of our agents in Arizona, raising a red flag about the number of Middle Eastern men enrolled in U.S. flight schools and suggesting the Bureau query civil aviation schools around the country about their Arab or other Muslim students.
But there were roadblocks to the latter suggestion. Given existing federal privacy rules, we probably would have had to secure subpoenas to get the schools to open up their rolls. Even then, the task wouldn’t have been easy. Most of the pilots in the world are trained in the United States because English is the most common language of air-traffic controllers and the Internet. Among those being trained were plenty of Arabs and people of Arab origin who were doing nothing more than paying good money in the hope of a better job.
But in theory—and I stress theory—if we had been able to do that, and if we had connected that information with the arrest the next month in Minnesota of Zacarias Moussaoui, the French-Moroccan who aroused a flight instructor’s suspicions when he asked to learn how to fly a commercial airliner, and then tied that to the two al Qaeda cell members living in San Diego and to the earlier warnings that terrorists were plotting to use commercial flights as kamikaze planes, and used all that to get our North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, forces pointing inward inside of looking outward for foreign-launched air attacks, then perhaps 9/11 never would have happened, or would have happened at a lesser scale.
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Believe me, I’ve asked myself plenty of times what I could have done to better prepare the Bureau to connect those dots. We had proved time and again—with the failed “Day of Terror,” with the never-realized plan to blow up nearly a dozen commercial jets in flight over the Pacific—that good investigation leads to prevention. Maybe this time, it would have done so again. But the hard reality is that we simply did not have the operational and tactical intelligence in hand to make a 100 percent convincing case, and we lacked the political will and determination to close down our air-traffic system for even a single day with anything less.
The realization that we were at war altered the equation entirely. Until that moment, we dealt with terrorist attacks against U.S. targets as if the assaults were a law-enforcement issue like organized crime or white-collar crime. We were sifting through bomb sites, looking for the forensics that would help us secure indictments, then arming ourselves with arrest warrants. I don’t know an agent who thought that was sufficient to the cause, or anyone who believed that a criminal investigation was a reasonable alternative to military or diplomatic action, but those are the tools we had available to us, the ones our legal system and our political system outfitted us with to wage the war on terrorism.
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