20.For a fine and comprehensive analysis of the Afghan and international milieus in which all of this took place see Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004).
21.The remarks regarding John Jay are quoted in McDougall, Promised Land, 29.
22.Statement of Secretary Madeleine Albright, http://secretary.state.gov, March 3, 1998.
23.The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright has written a book that I believe to be one of the very best on the events preceding 9/11. I spoke to Mr. Wright on several occasions as he was writing and am satisfied that he quoted me accurately. My only criticism of the book is that it leans too far toward describing the FBI as a competent counterterrorist organization and toward making the FBI’s John O’Neill a hero. To the contrary, on the basis of my own dealings, and those of my colleagues, with Mr. O’Neill and all senior FBI officers, I am forced to say that, in my opinion, they did more to ensure that 9/11 occurred than almost any other individuals in the U.S. government. In particular, Mr. O’Neill’s actions poisoned relations between the FBI and the CIA; he withheld information from the FBI’s partners in the Intelligence Community; he misled the congressional intelligence committees; and he disrupted anti–al-Qaeda intelligence operations overseas in Yemen, the Balkans, and Azerbaijan. Mr. O’Neill’s death on 9/11 was a rare instance of almost biblical justice. See Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), viii.
The incompetence of the FBI is perhaps best shown in its attempt to convict a Pakistani and his son—respectively, an ice-cream vendor and a sixth-grade dropout—in Lodi, California. FBI claims that the men were part of an al-Qaeda terrorist cell fell apart in court when the lies of the Bureau’s main witness came to light. See Dan Thompson, “Trial of Father and Son Revealed no Evidence of Terrorist Cell,” Associated Press, April 15, 2006; “Information from FBI Spy Questioned,” www.recononet.com, March 30, 2006; Rone Tempest, “Al Qaeda in Lodi ‘Unlikely,’” Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2006; and Andrew Maykuth, “California Terror Case Weakens in Court,” State.com, April 5, 2006.
24.Abu-Ubayd al-Qurayshi, “The Fourth Generation of War,” Al-Ansar (Internet), January 29, 2002.
25.For a good and detailed discussion of the Bojinka plot, see Simon Reeve, The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama Bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 77–91.
26.The exasperation of the senior FBI officer in this instance is attributable to several factors, but one of the most important is the simple and seldom-acknowledged fact that the FBI and CIA have very separate missions in terms of geographic responsibilities and the statutes that authorize their respective operations. The FBI works in the United States and is bound by U.S. law; overseas it generally works with local legal regimes and abides by local law; and its mission is to arrest, try, and convict criminals. The CIA, on the other hand, is authorized by statute to do very little in the United States, while overseas it is authorized to break any and every law to accomplish its mission of collecting foreign intelligence and of conducting, as authorized by the president, lethal and nonlethal covert-action operations. Overseas the CIA works harmoniously and legally with its liaison partners as much as possible, but legalities never stand in the way of suborning foreign nationals to commit treason or of breaking laws to steal information. These statutory missions are exceedingly different from one another, and perfect cooperation between the two agencies is simply not in the cards. This is a hard, commonsense fact, and Congress, through its calls throughout the 1990s and since 9/11 for “seamless cooperation” and “complete sharing of information” among all Intelligence Community components, has misled Americans into believing such things are possible, indeed that they have already been put in place.
This much said, I must add that there is ample room at the margins for effective CIA-FBI-DoJ cooperation, especially against the transnational threats of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, narcotics trafficking, and organized crime. Between 1996 and 1999, for example, the CIA’s bin Laden unit worked side by side with attorneys from the Southern District of New York—Mary Jo White, Patrick Fitzgerald, and Ken Karras—and FBI/New York special agent Daniel Coleman. Messrs. Fitzgerald, Karras, and Coleman worked routinely and regularly in the spaces housing the bin Laden unit and had access to every document acquired by CIA. The net result of the cooperation was that the first U.S. indictment of Osama bin Laden was based almost entirely on CIA-acquired information, which the Southern District’s attorneys carefully and legally maneuvered through the legal “wall of separation.” The same sort of cooperation helped yield other indictments and convictions of captured al-Qaeda fighters. If I may say as a parenthetical, the 9/11 Commission overemphasized the role of the “wall” in preventing effective CIA-FBI-DoJ cooperation. The “wall” was annoying but penetrable given good faith on all sides. What the commission should have told Americans was that when the wall was impenetrable, it was mostly because senior FBI officers like John O’Neill, Dale Watson, and Michael Rolenz wanted it to be—protecting bureaucratic turf, not Americans, was their goal.
27.Clarke, Against All Enemies, 81.
28.Machiavelli’s discussion of the concept of “cruelty well-used” is in Prince, 29–32.
29.I do not want to make too much of the possibility of weakening Saddam by slaughtering a good part of his Baghdad-based intelligence service, but it would have been worth the effort and may have led to good things beyond the corpses of hundreds of Saddam’s thugs. An intelligence headquarters in any country is a far more lucrative target than, say, the headquarters of an infantry or armored division. At the most basic level, nation-states have far more soldiers than they have intelligence officers. In striking a military target, therefore, the personnel killed are pretty easily replaced, as armies are usually overloaded with the generals, staff officers, and other categories of soldiers who man a division-level headquarters. In attacking an intelligence headquarters, however, you are likely to kill individuals who are more difficult to replace because of their analytic skills, linguistic talents, technical capabilities, overseas operational experience, and a range of other abilities that are unique to a clandestine service. In addition, intelligence service headquarters hold the vital records and databases on which operations, analysis, and (in dictatorships and police states) internal security and dissident-suppression are based.
30.One of the sad-but-true realities of intelligence collection in wartime or insurgency situations is that the steady application of military violence stimulates the collection of useful intelligence. People who are being bombed, strafed, shelled, or otherwise violently harassed have a strong sense of motivation to keep moving, and because of our array of observation tools, enemy fighters are in great danger of being detected when they are moving. In addition, people under military attack tend to become excited and make communication mistakes, speaking on unencrypted telephones or talking in the clear on radios, giving our SIGINT-interception capabilities the chance to locate the speakers for elimination. One of the reasons Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are alive today is because it is so difficult to use military power as a means of stimulating intelligence collection. Why is this the case? Because the U.S. government’s rules of engagement for military and intelligence personnel are so restrictive—including, at times, the submission of a written memo to validate a target and ask permission to engage it—that by the time approval to fire is received by the officers assigned to find and kill bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, or their lieutenants, the target has often disappeared.
31.“I was initially disappointed that the retaliation had been so small,” Clarke wrote. “My disappointment faded with time because it seemed that Saddam had gotten the message. Subsequent to that June 1993 retaliation, the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities never developed any evidence to further Iraqi support for terrorism against Ame
ricans.” Clarke, Against All Enemies, 84.
32.On this point, one wonders if, in the years since 1914, any Great Power has deployed two armies abroad—as has the United States today—without having complete control over the oil supplies that make them viable.
33.See John Adams to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798, quoted in James H. Hutson, The Founders on Religion: A Book of Quotations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 76. It always has seemed odd to me that any educated American citizen can question the basic reality that America was founded as a Protestant Christian nation and that its founding documents were written to mirror, validate, and build on that reality. Long before the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, American colonists had established that their goal in coming to America was to build a Christian community. The signers of the Mayflower Compact (November 11, 1620), for example, declared that they had come to America “for the glory of God, and the advancement of the Christian faith,” while the representatives of the colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts and New Haven, Connecticut, in drawing articles of confederation in 1643, maintained that the colonists “all came into these parts of America with one and the same end and aim, namely, to advance the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ and to enjoy the liberties of the Gospel in purity with peace.” It is ahistorical, therefore, to deny the Christian roots of American society and government, and an exercise in willful ignorance to refuse to acknowledge the pervasive role Christian beliefs continue to play in the workings of the contemporary American polity. While some Americans are zealously eager to prove John Adams wrong and show that the Constitution will serve an atheist America, the outcome of that test is still undecided. What is pertinent in regard to our war with the Islamists, and the argument that radical Islam can be defanged by the installation of secular democracy in the Muslim world, is to keep historical facts front and center: America was founded as a Christian nation, and its founding documents and machinery of government are to this day derived from and influenced by Christian scripture. To the extent that we forget or ignore this historical reality, we will tend to overestimate the chances of successfully transferring America’s constitutional and democratic machinery to such non-Christian societies as Iraq and Afghanistan. For the 1620 and 1643 documents noted above, see Donald S. Lutz, ed., Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1998), 31–32, 365–66. I also want to acknowledge my debt to Daniel Robinson for helping me to understand the importance of Christianity in America’s founding and in the drafting of the documents Americans live by. For a riveting and exciting introduction to the thought and beliefs of America’s founders see Daniel Robinson, American Ideals: Founding a Republic of Virtue, 12 lectures (Chantilly, Va.: Teaching Company, 2004).
Chapter 2. Fighting Islamists with a Blinding Cold War Hangover, 1996–2001
1.Armstrong Williams, “Missing the Mark…Amid Self-Delusion,” Washington Times, October 19, 2000, A-19.
2.Each administration I worked for also demonstrated exactly the same mind-permanently-made-up attitude toward Saudi Arabia. Although intelligence is collected on Saudi Arabia, senior IC and administration officials tend to shrug off any negative intelligence about the Saudis, whether it regards Riyadh’s assistance to anti-U.S. Islamists around the world, involvement in corruption or other criminal activities, or other nefarious matters. In addition, both Israel and Saudi Arabia can head off any effort to get negative intelligence to senior policymakers because each country’s ambassador in Washington has easy and immediate access to the White House.
3.Two instances of such protectiveness toward Moscow, although minor in the overall scheme of things, show how deeply ingrained this tendency was in the parts of the Intelligence Community that were focused on the USSR. The Afghan-Soviet war was a matter of intense interest to both houses of Congress, and so CIA officers were regularly called on to brief the members and staff of the two intelligence committees. On such an occasion one of the CIA’s Soviet experts was asked by a congressman why the CIA had not told the committee about a recent massacre of Afghan civilians by the Red Army. The officer responded that the murders were relatively small in number and we did not want to make too much out of a “minor atrocity.” The congressman was livid over the term “minor atrocity” and warned the officer to stop protecting the Soviets.
On another occasion preparations for a congressional briefing were marked by an argument over trees. At the time the commander of a Soviet unit in northeastern Afghanistan was ordered to move a large portion of his command south along a road that was heavily forested on each side right up to the edge of the road. Before moving, therefore, the commander wisely sent his engineers to cut down a wide swath of trees on each side of the road to lessen the ability of the mujahedin to ambush the column from point-blank range. The briefing team’s Soviet experts objected to describing the commander’s action because they believed the “politicians” in Congress would use the information to defame the Soviets as destroyers of the Afghan environment. As ludicrous as this argument was, senior CIA managers agreed, and the information was deleted from the briefing.
This, as I said, was low-level nonsense, but it increases the admiration one must have for President Reagan’s tenacity in overcoming the much greater protectiveness toward the USSR displayed by senior Intelligence Community managers who had spent their careers as Soviet hands. It also, I think, explains much of the 1980s venom that was directed toward DCI William J. Casey and Deputy Director for Intelligence Robert Gates as they worked with Mr. Reagan to break the Bolsheviks and their apologists in the U.S. government.
4.Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: America’s Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 152.
5.The subject of terrorist groups acquiring WMD was always met with deep skepticism at the CIA and in the Intelligence Community generally. This primarily is due the nation-state orientation of intelligence officers and managers and their view that only nation-states had the money, expertise, and safety capabilities necessary to handle WMD materials safely. This was fair enough during the Cold War, but the rise of transnational threats thereafter changed things drastically. In al-Qaeda’s case, for example, the CIA had solid information by late 1996 that bin Laden had several years previously formed a unit to build, steal, or purchase WMD—preferably a nuclear device—and staffed it with hard scientists, technicians, and engineers. He had told the unit that money was no object, and of course personal health and safety were not issues for those willing and even eager to die as martyrs. This information was contained in a fifteen-to-twenty-paragraph intelligence report, which detailed what we had learned in excruciating detail. CIA senior managers, however, still did not believe that al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group was serious about getting and using WMD and so edited the report down to two short paragraphs. The full report was not released until a year later, after repeated appeals from the officers who had collected the information.
6.In all the post-9/11 investigations, analysis, and media commentary, no one seems to have posed the question that is most important in regard to how good the intelligence had to be before Washington could act to destroy an entity—al-Qaeda—that we believed was determined to detonate a mass-destruction weapon in the United States. Senior Clinton NSC officers Richard Clarke, Daniel Benjamin, Steven Simon, and unnamed senior CIA officers have said that (a) by 2000 the CIA had been reporting “for years” that al-Qaeda was seeking nuclear and chemical weapons; (b) President Clinton was fixated on the WMD issue since at least 1995; (c) the White House believed that al-Qaeda had been trying to acquire WMD “[b]y early 1994, if not earlier”; and (d) the Cabinet was advised by the CIA in early 1998 that “[s]ooner or later bin Laden will attack U.S. interests, perhaps using WMD.” Note that all the reporting about al-Qaeda’s WMD intentions was available before the ten chances to capture or kill were presented
to President Clinton between May 1998 and May 1999. It is inexplicable, at least to me, how all the investigations, pundits, and journalists have let Clinton officials have it both ways; that is, the al-Qaeda WMD threat was clear, but the intelligence was never good enough to try to destroy al-Qaeda. Question: How definitive must the intelligence be before the U.S. government acts to prevent a nuclear explosion in a U.S. city? See Clarke, Against All Enemies, 162–63, 177; Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002), 128–29; and Kean et al., 9/11 Commission Report, 112.
7.Many of the opportunities to capture or kill bin Laden are listed in 9/11 Commission Report, 108–43. To the best of my memory, the chances were as follows:
May 1998: Capture opportunity at bin Laden’s compound south of Khandahar City
September 1998: Capture opportunity north of Khandahar City
December 1998: Military attack opportunity, governor’s palace, Khandahar City
February 1999: Military attack opportunity, governor’s residence, Heart City
March-April 1999: Multiple military attack opportunities, hunting camp, near Khandahar
May 1999: Military attack opportunities on five consecutive nights, Khandahar City
8.For a stunningly misleading account of the number of occasions bin Laden’s location was fixed by the CIA’s clandestine service, and equally deceptive comments on the quality of the information available to President Clinton on opportunities that arose to eliminate bin Laden, see Clarke, Against All Enemies, 196–204.
In the binder of documents I prepared for working with post-9/11 panels, there are memoranda from the seniormost officers of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, as well as cables from the CIA’s senior officer in Pakistan, that document that DCI Tenet was repeatedly told by his top advisers that the intelligence was not going to get better. In addition, DCI Tenet repeatedly told those of us involved in the ten opportunities to eliminate bin Laden that he had on each occasion informed Messrs. Clarke, Berger, and Clinton of this fact.
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