An intelligence failure in Abbottabad would have had major diplomatic repercussions and might have endangered Pakistani support for the fight against the terrorists, a potential outcome we were all aware of and dreaded—I suspect no one more than the president. But on May 1, 2011, the intelligence had been right and the raid a success. After more than a decade of searching, we’d found the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and had removed him from the battlefield. But there was no immediate celebration, no shouting, no fist pumping, no high-fiving. We only breathed a collective sigh and glanced around at one another before smiling—not in jubilation, but in relief.
Of course, the mission wasn’t over, and we didn’t leave the breakout room until the team had gathered up all the hard drives, cell phones, thumb drives, books, and anything else they thought might have intelligence value, and left the compound, and no one left the Situation Room until the team was safely in Afghan airspace. Admiral Mike Mullen drew the short straw to place a phone call to Pakistani Army Chief of Staff General Kayani to inform him of the raid, before President Obama announced bin Laden’s death to the American public. Based on the surprised reaction he got, Mike was confident that the Pakistanis hadn’t realized that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. I visited Pakistan a month and a half later, after accompanying Hillary on a trip to India, and the hostility with which I was treated confirmed in my mind that they had indeed been unaware of bin Laden’s whereabouts and considered our raid an egregious affront to their national sovereignty.
I was still at the White House at 11:35 P.M. when President Obama strode to the microphone and announced, “Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world, the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaida and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.” By the time he spoke, people had already heard rumors that the CIA and SEAL Team Six were involved in the raid. That, of course, was an oversimplification of both the intelligence and special operations efforts. The incredible contributions from NSA and NGA never really made it into public awareness, but that night, our Intelligence Community got a public win.
I will never forget hearing the crowd that had gathered across the street in Lafayette Park, chanting “USA, USA!” (Leon later claimed they were chanting “CIA, CIA!”). For days and weeks after the raid, the CIA public phone lines rang with callers who just wanted to offer their gratitude. It gave long-awaited closure to the nation, to the Intelligence Community—especially the CIA—and, for that matter, to me personally. I had been DNI for just nine months, and I wondered if I’d just realized what would be the high point of my tenure.
CHAPTER SIX
Benghazi
Four and a half months before the raid at Abbottabad, a fruit vendor in the small town of Sidi Bouzid, located near the center of Tunisia, reached the end of his fuse. Something close to one third of the locals were unemployed, and Mohamed Bouazizi had tried for years to get a job—any job. The only way he could support his family was by selling fruit from a cart, while dealing with regular harassment from police and government officials who couldn’t cite any actual laws he was violating. On December 17, a local bureaucrat, accompanied by a few other officials, approached him and announced she was confiscating his fruit, his scale, and his cart. He resisted, and in front of the crowd that had grown to watch the drama, she slapped him, or perhaps she asked for a bribe before the confrontation got physical. Witness accounts vary on the details. Afterward, Bouazizi, perhaps injured, walked to the local governor’s office and demanded compensation for his loss, or demanded return of his scale, or just demanded to be heard. When the governor refused to see him, Bouazizi procured a can of gasoline, or maybe paint thinner, walked back to the middle of the street in front of the governor’s office, poured the liquid over himself, and set himself on fire. Witnesses agree that less than an hour passed from the time of the initial confrontation to his self-immolation. Bouazizi lived another eighteen days before slipping away on January 4. He never regained consciousness and never learned what his action had triggered.
The Intelligence Community had been warning about potential instability in Northern Africa and Southwest Asia for many years. Factors like food and water shortages and poor living conditions—increasingly driven by climate change—oppression of political freedoms, corruption by autocratic governments and rulers who had been in place for decades, massive unemployment leading to a breakdown in social structure, and a large population bubble of young, single, disaffected men in those parts of the world made them extremely unstable—and a fertile recruiting ground for al-Qaida. By 2010, the group had three major “franchises” in Africa and the Middle East: al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, operating in Northern Africa, primarily Algeria; al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, operating in Yemen and Saudi Arabia; and al-Qaida in Iraq, which had rebranded itself as the “Islamic State in Iraq” in 2006 after a falling-out with al-Qaida in Afghanistan, partly over the Iraqi group’s use of brutal terrorist tactics against fellow Muslims. Of course, the other factor leading to the formation of al-Qaida in Iraq was the US invasion in 2003 and the resulting anti-US insurgency, in which the organization took a lead role. But in December 2010, the same destabilizing factors that led to terrorists gaining a hold in its neighbors had dramatically different results in Tunisia.
Tunisia is much smaller than its neighbors—Algeria and Morocco to its west, and Libya and Egypt to its east—but it has a long coastline on the Mediterranean Sea, including Africa’s northernmost point, less than a hundred miles from Sicily. Algeria is about the size of the entire US South, from Texas and Oklahoma all the way to Delaware. Libya is about the same size if you take out two thirds of Texas. Tunisia is a little smaller than Florida, but because of its long, more densely populated coastline, its population tops 11 million people—almost twice that of Libya. Still, Western society hasn’t thought of Tunisia as a major power in the civilized world since Carthage was destroyed by Rome in 146 BC. Two millennia later, a fruit vendor in a small, central-Tunisian city sparked a fire that would engulf North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.
Just a few hours after Mohamed Bouazizi’s dramatic action, protests began in Sidi Bouzid. Demonstrators shared pictures and video on Facebook and Twitter, and the unrest soon spread to other cities. Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had been in power since 1987, twenty-three years of quickly quelling disturbances with violence. However, even as police cracked down, injuring and killing demonstrators, the strife continued, with riots erupting nationwide. On January 14, 2011, Ben Ali fled Tunisia for Saudi Arabia, resigning the presidency en route. Protests continued until March 9, when Ben Ali’s political party was dissolved and all its members removed from power. Tunisia would struggle for another three and a half years to establish an accepted, functioning, elected government, but the people eventually took control of their destiny.
This “Arab Spring,” which did not actually start on the Arabian Peninsula, spread across North Africa and into the Middle East. By February 10, when I testified in my first televised congressional hearing as DNI, presenting the Intelligence Community’s annual worldwide threat assessment, protests were under way in Egypt, Algeria, Sudan, Djibouti, Oman, Yemen, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, with the situation in Egypt the most tense and violent. In the previous few weeks, my schedule had been shuffled repeatedly to attend Principals Committee and National Security Council meetings. At each, I was required to give an intelligence update, which mostly consisted of noting the new protests and military crackdowns, along with briefing any intercepted communications that gave us insight into how specific leaders planned to respond to what was happening in their respective countries.
I always cautioned the president and secretaries that intelligence work was about acquiring and assessing foreign secrets, not predicting events or reading minds. In the case of Egypt, for example, unless and until Hosni Mubarak decide
d for himself and then informed someone of his intentions, we didn’t have much insight on when he might step down as president of Egypt or whether he would order troops to fire on the protesters in Tahrir Square. My role was to offer the Intelligence Community’s assessment, for instance, that President Mubarak was unlikely to hold power for long, and that when he stepped aside, the Egyptian military would likely take control of the government, at least in the short term. If Egypt held elections within the next few months, we assessed that the Muslim Brotherhood was the only political party well enough organized to win a majority of seats in the country’s parliament. While in 2011 the Brotherhood in Egypt was mostly focused on secular concerns of Egyptians, as opposed to Muslim Brotherhood groups in other nations that were encouraging terrorist acts, the Egyptian Brotherhood did have its roots in jihadism, and its hardline and moderate factions were fighting for control. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was unlikely to be friendly to American interests, but we could probably work with them if they came to power.
There were other scenarios, both better and worse. If there was a significant delay before Egyptian elections, other political parties could get organized and have a better chance of holding or sharing power, although there was a chance that the Egyptian military could maintain control indefinitely, a situation no one wanted. With those assessments on the table, I left the discussion to Secretaries Gates and Clinton, and Vice President Biden, who typically led the debate on what to do. After a meeting on February 1, President Obama had reached out to President Mubarak, asking him to step down peacefully, “now.”
In getting ready for the February 10 threat assessment hearing with the House Intelligence Committee, I hadn’t participated in any specific preparatory sessions on what was happening with the Arab Spring, partly because I was reading a lot about it for White House meetings, and partly because the situation was changing so quickly that studying a week in advance would mean absorbing facts that would have changed by the hearing. But the Arab Spring wasn’t the only “worldwide threat” concern, and so, between January 25 and February 8, I specifically brought experts in to help me study the specifics regarding North Korea, China, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Africa as a whole, Afghanistan and Pakistan, counterterrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, cyberspace, Latin America, Guantanamo Bay, WikiLeaks and counterintelligence, intelligence information sharing, and transnational threats. I also went through three “murder boards,” at which my senior staff played the roles of senators and representatives and tried to stump the chump. I quickly learned that I wasn’t easily tripped up by trivia or “clever” questions; instead, I had more trouble with questions that seemed to be about intelligence matters but were really about partisan or personal politics to which I wasn’t attuned.
In my opening statement on February 10, I cited international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as the threats of most concern to the IC. Of the Arab Spring, I said that we’d consistently reported on tensions and instability in the Middle East and Africa, but when it came to predicting the specific triggers that could lead to regime collapse, “We are not clairvoyant.”
During the hearing, Representative Sue Myrick asked me about the threat that the Muslim Brotherhood posed to the United States. I tried to explain that there really was no transnational “Muslim Brotherhood” organization, and, at the moment, the political party by that name in Egypt was more concerned about the day-to-day concerns of Egyptians than threatening America, but unfortunately that came out as “The term Muslim Brotherhood is an umbrella term for a variety of movements. In the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaida as a perversion of Islam.” I believe rather than “secular,” the word I’d meant to use was “pragmatic.” Regardless, I was skewered in the press as being out of touch with reality—how could the Brotherhood be considered secular when the word “Muslim” was right there in their name? For two hours we’d discussed serious threats to the nation and to US interests around the world, but the media coverage focused on my “gaffe,” which I found both irritating and distracting.
The following day Vice President Omar Suleiman announced Mubarak’s resignation as president of Egypt, and the Supreme Council of the Egyptian armed forces took control of the government. On Saturday, February 13, Arab Spring–related protests began in Iraq, where the United States was negotiating with the Iraqi government over the expiring status-of-forces agreement that governed the 47,000 troops still in the country. On February 14, protests started in Bahrain, home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet and another 7,000 US troops. On February 15, protests in Benghazi, Libya, were put down by military force. On February 16, I testified at the Senate Intelligence Committee’s televised threat hearing—for once not saying anything that prompted Congress to call for my resignation. In late February and March 2011, with the military Supreme Council in stable control of Egypt, our focus on the Arab Spring uprisings shifted to Libya.
As a quick geospatial and historic orientation—which becomes very important shortly—looking eastward from the northernmost point of Tunisia, the African coastline falls sharply to the south to the border with Libya, where it curves eastward. The capital city of Tripoli is about halfway along the two hundred miles or so of Libyan shoreline running to the east before it dips southward again at the western shore of the Gulf of Sirte. On the eastern shore is the port of Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city. Benghazi and Tripoli are about four hundred miles apart. About 85 percent of Libya’s population lives near the coastline, which has been the case stretching back for millennia. “Libya” didn’t really exist as a nation until 1951. Before that, the three regions of Libya—Cyrenaica and the city of Benghazi to the east, Tripolitania and Tripoli to the northwest, and Fezzan to the southwest—had for centuries mostly been sequentially governed as separate colonies of various empires. Then, in 1951, eight years after seizing the colonies from Italy in 1943, the Allies put King Idris I on the Libyan throne. In 1969 Colonel Muammar Gaddafi led a military coup to overthrow the only Libyan king to ever exist, and Gaddafi officially took control as the “brother leader” in 1977, ruling Libya as an “Islamist socialist” state.
Gaddafi governed with particular animosity toward the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel. He sponsored terrorist organizations in Syria and Palestine and was responsible for both the 1986 West Berlin nightclub bombing that targeted US service members and for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, the in-flight destruction of Pan Am Flight 103. Since the 1970s he had also sought to make Libya a nuclear power by attempting to buy weapons or production equipment—sequentially from China, the Soviets, Pakistan, and India. He hadn’t succeeded in doing so, but Libya did launch a large chemical weapons program. After 9/11, President Bush purportedly warned Gaddafi to either abandon his chemical weapons and his nuclear program, or the United States would destroy them. After the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, whether from fear of a similar incursion or as an effort to mend his diplomatic relationship with the West, Gaddafi did give up his nuclear program and asked for international assistance in ridding Libya of chemical weapons. By 2011 much of his stockpile had been removed, but large amounts of mustard gas and the chemicals to make sarin were still under Libyan military control, along with bombshells configured to deliver chemical weapons. We didn’t know if Gaddafi would use those remaining weapons to quell protests in his country.
On February 17, 2011, groups opposed to Gaddafi’s government in Tripoli declared a “day of rage,” quickly seizing Benghazi. Libyan army and police forces either stood aside or joined the cause. Gaddafi’s country had effectively split: He maintained control of Tripoli, its population of more than 1 million, and territory to the west, while the opposition—a mix of civilians, police, armed forces, and Islamist militias who’d found a common cause—held Benghazi, its population of seven hundred thousand, and the territory to the east. As the opposition pushed we
st as far as the port of Misrata, it looked to many observers like another North African strongman would fall, one the United States government truly despised. But Gaddafi had no intention of going quietly. His loyal military units fired into public demonstrations in the capital city, and other military units pushed eastward to retake territory. Along with most other nations, the United States closed its embassy in Tripoli and evacuated as many of its citizens as it could. The international team working on destroying the country’s chemical weapons also left the embattled country.
In Washington, we continued to hold contentious National Security Council meetings with the president. The intelligence I presented pointed to Gaddafi’s having all the military advantages, including control of the Libyan air defense structure, which was the second largest (after Egypt’s) in the Middle East. The Libyan government had thirty-one major surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites, a radar complex focused on protecting the coastline, and a large number of portable SAM systems. Its air force had a few hundred aircraft, and although not very many were operational, they’d used both fighters and helicopters to attack opposition forces and protesters. Further, the 32nd Libyan army brigade and the 9th regiment were robustly equipped with Russian equipment: air defense, artillery, tanks, and mechanized equipment. They were disciplined and loyal to Gaddafi, and I gave the US intelligence assessment that, without outside intervention, they would regain ground and eventually prevail.
Facts and Fears Page 21