I was able to make some headway in persuading Condoleezza Rice of the merits of reestablishing the “core divisions” of the Iraqi Army. But she was in no position to overcome DoD opposition, particularly when their opposition was seldom stated forthrightly. The Defense seniors found it much more convenient to obfuscate and throw up roadblocks. But if they were coy, their underlings often reflected their thinking more openly. I recall a lower-level Defense Department official putting it succinctly: “If we ever bring back the Iraqi Army,” he said, “it will be to shoot them.”
When Ayad Allawi, the secular nationalist politician and longtime exile oppositionist, became Iraq’s interim prime minister on June 1, 2004, a DoD delegation led by Paul Wolfowitz journeyed to Baghdad to ensure the new Iraqi leader understood the limits within which he would be working. Allawi made the case for reconstituting elements of the army. Wolfowitz conceded that it was an interesting idea; but just how did the prime minister propose to pay for it?
In December 2004, Dr. Rice called a meeting of the Principals’ Committee specifically to discuss a pair of papers authored by Charlie Allen, the assistant director of Central Intelligence for Collection, and me. Allen was a legend, having begun his career as an analyst in 1958 and having dealt with many of the most difficult and controversial intelligence issues in the decades since. He had just returned from a visit to Iraq. He described his shock at the deterioration in the situation over the previous few months. In my analysis, I predicted—correctly, as it turned out—that the upcoming January 2005 national elections, which the Sunnis were boycotting, would lead to a worsening of the civil war. I still thought the elections should go ahead, but argued again that Allawi should be allowed to take the forceful measures necessary both to deal with the insurgency and to encourage national reconciliation. Again, the suggested course corrections were dismissed by Defense.
Back before the invasion, colleagues at CIA Headquarters had sometimes stopped me in the hall: How was planning going for after the invasion? “They don’t have a clue,” was my stock response. “But they’ll learn.” I had gotten it half right.
My despair over Iraq was further compounded by what I was able to gather about our policy in Afghanistan. For reasons I could not fathom, economic reconstruction there had been very slow to start. Early on, the United States pledged itself to rebuild the section of the “ring road,” Afghanistan’s great circular highway, between Kabul and Kandahar, but the project suffered from inattention and lack of funding. It became a symbol of the U.S. government’s lack of commitment. There seemed little interest in Washington in expending resources in Afghanistan, and what resources were available were indifferently administered. Yes, there was a lack of command attention from Washington, distracted as it was by the conflict in Iraq; but surely, I thought, a global power should be able to do two things at once? Afghanistan was being left to drift.
Meanwhile, seeds of future instability were being sown. The Afghan Constitution was drafted largely in secret in 2003 by a thirty-five-member panel of Afghans and foreign constitutional experts, all appointed by interim President Hamid Karzai. Unsurprisingly, the product of their work, approved by a Loya Jirga (Grand National Assembly) in January 2004, provided for a great concentration of power in Kabul, and specifically in the hands of the president. Not only were cabinet ministers and other national-level officials appointed by the chief executive, but all provincial, and district governors were as well, along with police chiefs and even customs inspectors. The ability to appoint local officials from Kabul was not unique to the Karzai regime—it had been the rule going back to the days of King Zahir Shah. But with foreign reconstruction money beginning to flow into the country, along with the ability to steer lucrative contracts to favored parties, centrally approved local government appointments were becoming licenses to steal, the ill-gotten gains shared back up the line with those whose influence had facilitated them. With little or no local accountability, good governance at the provincial and district levels was seldom a priority for those in power.
Worse, the Pashtun areas were beset by a lack of security. In my analysis for Tenet, I had assumed that local security would be provided for locally, as had been traditionally the case, and that the challenge for a new Afghan government and its foreign benefactors would be to encourage local accountability for militias and police forces organized by traditional tribal leaders, to ensure against their being misused by the powerful against the weak. I hadn’t thought U.S. and Afghan government policy would be to try to do away with such locally raised forces altogether. But that was precisely the attitude of the U.S. military. To them, local militias equated to warlordism, responsible for the rise of the Taliban in the first place, and were to be discouraged and avoided at all cost. Their views were reinforced by the Karzai government, which did not want to see local rivals for power.
The two things the Taliban had been able to dispense effectively were security and justice. Their notions of justice may not have been pretty by our lights, involving amputations and summary executions, but when administered by them it was swift, sure, generally impartial, and welcomed by a population beset by crime and violent disputes. The Taliban had established a relative monopoly of armed force by disarming the tribes. When they withdrew, there was little to replace them. With a nascent, ill-led, ill-trained, and ill-equipped national army and police force, and virtually no system in place to resolve disputes impartially or to dispense justice, there was a glaring vacuum of power, particularly in rural areas, that was begging to be filled. The Taliban was waiting in the wings.
By the end of 2004, with the situation in Iraq growing worse by the day and no reason to believe I could be even remotely helpful, I was more than ready to leave that account. With the CIA leadership in chaos, I had my chance. George Tenet had resigned the previous summer and been replaced some weeks later by Porter Goss, the longtime Republican congressman from Florida and former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. As a young man in the 1960s, he had been a case officer in CIA’s Clandestine Service. On paper, he might have seemed an ideal choice. He wasn’t.
Though a decent and unassuming fellow, Goss had brought with him from the Hill a number of abrasive, hyperpartisan young Republican staffers whose past relations with the agency had been adversarial. It was hard for them to put old habits aside. A number of senior agency staffers who worked directly for George Tenet and were closely associated with him expected to be replaced, and were. Jami Miscik, the deputy director for Intelligence (Analysis), was both closely associated with Tenet and publicly identified with the flawed analysis on Iraqi WMD that had occurred on her watch. She negotiated a smooth departure.
Steve Kappes, the new deputy director for operations, and an old friend with whom I’d worked overseas, had expected he might be asked to leave as well. If he had been, as he told me at the time, he would have accepted his fate gracefully and tried to assure a smooth transition. I’m certain that’s true. But no axes fell on the DO, at least not immediately. Instead, a sort of subterranean warfare broke out between the DO front office and Goss’s people, quickly dubbed the “Gosslings.” There were apparently a number of midlevel DO officers, mostly disaffected types not held in high esteem by their peers, with whom Goss’s staffers had cultivated relationships over the years, and whose careers they now sought to champion. The Gosslings were told that the DO’s promotion panel system, a source of considerable organizational pride, was not going to be subverted. There followed a series of petty disputes and misunderstandings which ought to have been easily avoided, and in other circumstances would have been, but in the atmosphere of distrust and animosity prevailing on the seventh floor quickly spiraled out of control. When Steve Kappes’s deputy, Mike Sulick, clashed with Pat Murray, Goss’s chief of staff, calling him a “Hill puke,” Murray reacted by demanding that Kappes fire him. His order was met with incredulity: from time immemorial, the director’s chief of staff had worked for the director alone; he was not
in the chain of command, and could not issue orders. Except that Murray was in the chain of command. Goss had simply failed to tell anyone other than Murray. Informed that this was not the way things were done, Goss quickly agreed to rescind Murray’s executive authority. But that would be from then on; the former order would stand.
There was a larger context to these disputes. In the latter half of 2004, the atmosphere between CIA and the White House was toxic. With Iraq threatening to go up in flames, and CIA seen as a dissenter from current policy, the vice president’s office, in particular, suspected that CIA was behind a series of damaging press leaks that appeared designed to embarrass the administration during the president’s reelection campaign. I never believed that to be true, but one could understand the White House’s suspicion. By fall, it was getting to the point where senior analysts had to assume that the next piece of finished intelligence on Iraq would end up in the press, and that they would be blamed for trying to show up the administration. I never saw an instance where they pulled their punches or softened their analysis as a result, but it was not a healthy situation.
I vividly remember a post-election op-ed by David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist reputed to have close connections to the Bush White House. “Now that he’s been returned to office,” the column began, “President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies. His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency.” Brooks went on to charge that the agency was waging “an unabashed effort to undermine the current administration,” citing the serial leaking of “gloomy” reports on Iraq, “. . . . designed to discredit the President’s Iraq policy,” which amounted to “brazen insubordination.” Now, he said, “C.I.A. officials are . . . busy trying to undermine their new boss, Porter Goss.” In another time, said Brooks, “the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes.” He advocated harsh but presumably updated measures to remind CIA employees “that the person the President sends to run their agency is going to run their agency. . . .”
It didn’t take much imagination to suppose Brooks had been fed complaints from the White House, and that this was a pointed, if indirect, message from the administration to CIA “rebels.” The director’s excuse for allowing Murray to exert ex-post facto authority over Kappes, repeated many times, was that “I don’t do personnel.” Was Goss seizing the opportunity that had fallen into his lap to demonstrate to the president that he could bring a recalcitrant CIA to heel? I certainly don’t know. But one would have difficulty convincing me otherwise.
As it was, Kappes, the former Marine, was faced with the unappealing choice between refusing to obey a direct order or being seen by his DO colleagues as a toady willing to sacrifice Sulick to save himself. His choice was no choice at all: he resigned instead. In days, both he and Mike Sulick were gone. The Directorate of Operations was thrown into turmoil, and it seemed outright mutiny might ensue.
By this time, Goss had named Kyle “Dusty” Foggo as CIA’s executive director. I had had a passing acquaintance with Dusty for years, and rather liked him. He had a high-living, larger-than-life persona and was reputed to be a bit of a rogue, but he knew how to get things done. Still, like others, I was dumbfounded when he was plucked from the relative obscurity of a midlevel logistics position in Europe and given the third-ranking job in CIA. With the Clandestine Service threatening revolt, Foggo made a panicky 10:00 PM call to Jose Rodriguez, the director of CTC, summoning him back to the office and offering him Kappes’s job. The offer didn’t seem to have involved a lot of deliberation. A couple of days later, when the dust had settled, Rodriguez accepted. In just over two years, Foggo would be indicted, and ultimately convicted, on federal corruption charges. This was not our finest hour.
The sudden departure of the two top DO leaders triggered a quick reshuffling of the chairs. With wholesale leadership changes at the top of the Clandestine Service under way, I expressed interest in becoming chief of the Near East and South Asia Division, but doubted I’d get it. I hardly knew Rodriguez, who had made his career in Latin America, and I had publicly crossed swords two years before with his newly named deputy, ultimately prevailing in a nasty Iraq-related dispute. Now that seemed like a Pyrrhic victory.
Around the same time, Condoleezza Rice, about to become secretary of state, approached Deputy Director John McLaughlin about my taking over the top counterterrorism job at the White House. McLaughlin demurred, saying CIA had other plans for me. I had mixed feelings when he told me, but I’m sure he did me a great favor. It would have been far too political a job for me; I wouldn’t have survived long.
Suspecting there might be nothing for me in the DO at the end of the day, I approached the leadership of the National Intelligence Council. With the incumbent about to leave, they offered to make me National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for the Near East and South Asia. It was a job I had coveted for years.
But to my surprise, the new DO leadership did offer me a job—director of CTC. There was more than a little irony in that, given the tenor of my past relations with the organization, but my disputes had been with a handful of leaders, never the organization as a whole. I had always recognized the Counterterrorist Center as a vital institution, indispensable if we were going to attack global terrorism on a global basis. If CTC hadn’t existed, it would have had to be invented. It was by far the largest organization within CIA, combining the largest offices in the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence. Its budget ran into the billions. There was simply no more important job in CIA. I also felt that CTC needed change, both structural and cultural, and that I could lead it. It was an offer I could hardly refuse. Still, I asked for a bit of time to think it over.
“Tell me if I’ve got this straight,” my wife Paula said. She could always cut to the heart of things. “Your job will be to make sure there are no terrorist attacks against the United States, anywhere. If you succeed, and there are no attacks, no one will notice. But if an attack happens, in spite of your best efforts, you’ll be the one to take the blame.”
“That’s about it,” I said. I accepted the following day.
Realistic as I thought I was, within weeks I realized that the challenges of running the Counterterrorist Center—which I would soon rename the “CIA Counter-Terrorism Center”—would be even greater than I had imagined. I had inherited an organization which undeniably was doing terrific work, supporting and coordinating a highly successful effort to capture or kill terrorists all around the world. It had done much to keep the country safe since 9/11. But its people had been going all-out for three years, and were paying a high price, personally and professionally. Many were exhausted and dispirited. With al-Qa’ida metastasizing around the globe and Iraq becoming a terrorist hub, the center’s burdens would only increase, and markedly. Far from receiving the thanks of a grateful nation, it was beset on all sides. As public fear of al-Qa’ida waned, support for the counterterrorism methods mandated by the Bush administration was beginning to erode. Congress, in its wisdom, had created a rival organization in the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which did no operations but was inexorably bleeding CTC of vital resources. The center had grown rapidly and chaotically, and was having difficulty managing itself. Its relations with the geographic divisions were still tense. Now, the problems, some of which I had complained of bitterly in the past, were all mine to solve.
As I stood in my new office in December 2004, I could see trouble everywhere, and precious few allies. I had never fully realized just how much I’d depended on Tenet, McLaughlin, and Pavitt for support, and sometimes protection, until now, when all of them were gone.
My senior lieutenants in CTC were all understandably preoccupied with their own parochial interests, and they all had them. Some were concerned with the lack of promotion or training opportunities for their people. The analysts were obsessed with their feud with t
he new National Counterterrorism Center. Targeters were concerned that cutting-edge technical tools being developed in our center were not being shared equitably. Operators were frustrated that we were not getting the support we needed from the military. Still others were worried that movement of priorities and resources was not keeping up with the evolution of the terrorist threat. By ensuring that everyone’s needs were considered and addressed, I was able to get their buy-in and commitment for a strategic planning process designed to address all the center’s problems comprehensively.
At the same time, I engaged a cleared outside contractor to conduct a thorough, impartial review of the organization, which I thought long overdue. The contractor staff conducted interviews in every office throughout the center. They visited field stations, and questioned our customers in the policy community. They polled attitudes in the workforce. Over the next few months, they issued a series of reports and provided several briefings to the management team. The results were fascinating, and extremely useful. We found our structure was working against us. Our customers in the field were confused, and often didn’t know which office in the center they should look to for support. Some requests would languish without response; others would elicit two or more conflicting responses from competing offices.
The major culprit was Alec Station, sometimes referred to as the “Bin Laden Unit.” That was a misnomer. Alec, named for the son of its founder and former chief, Mike Scheuer, was actually the al-Qa’ida unit, with a fascinating history dating back to the beginning of our preoccupation with bin Laden and his minions in Sudan in the early 1990s. But now, as al-Qa’ida members fled from the Pak-Afghan theater and associated groups began to crop up around the Muslim world, it was often difficult to determine who was al-Qa’ida and who was not. Alec was deciding that question for itself, its geographically based sub-units cherry-picking the most interesting and promising operations, and feuding with other geographically organized offices charged with pursuing non-al-Qa’ida Sunni extremists. Everyone agreed that we couldn’t go on this way. Alec had become an anachronism in this new world; we had no choice, it was agreed, but to reorganize it out of existence. A couple of years later, after I had left government, charges appeared in the press that CIA had “abolished” the Bin Laden Unit, speculating that we had given up on capturing the leader of al-Qa’ida. That was nonsense. After our reorganization, the same people, in the same numbers, continued to pursue the same targets, very much to include bin Laden, but in a more rational structure.
88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary Page 41