The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  On the morning of September 11, 2001, Bennett was doing “something very typical, vomiting with morning sickness.” She was three months pregnant with her fourth child, something that she had yet to tell her coworkers about, and was at her desk at the Counterterrorist Center (CTC) at the CIA. As something close to panic set in, Agency managers told everyone to evacuate—everyone, that is, but those in the CTC who would remain in the building doing their jobs; after all, there was no one group in the government who knew more about the source of the 9/11 threat.

  Bennett and her colleagues tracking al-Qaeda were well aware that the CIA was a potential target. During the mid-1990s, Abdul Hakim Murad, an al-Qaeda associate, had developed a plan to fly a plane into CIA headquarters. The CTC officials also knew that one of the hijacked jets was heading toward Washington, D.C. (it was the plane that would eventually crash into the Pentagon). One of Bennett’s most valued colleagues, Barbara Sude, a precise, careful analyst with a doctorate from Princeton in medieval Arabic thought, was at her desk. Only a month earlier the memo that Sude had coauthored warning “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.” had been briefed to President Bush at his ranch in Texas.

  Sude knew that the CIA was a likely target but remained in the CTC offices on the ground floor of the Agency, preparing to write the avalanche of reports about al-Qaeda she knew were likely to fill her coming days. Chuckling, she remembers, “I told my boss, well, let me go to the restroom first before I have to write in case I get trapped in the rubble. I didn’t want to not have gone to the bathroom beforehand.” Sude recalls the moment the World Trade Center towers started collapsing: “I will never forget when my colleague comes up, his face ashen.” But there wasn’t much time to focus on anything but the task at hand: “Policy-maker appetite became insatiable for everything about al-Qaeda. … They didn’t know as much as they realized they needed to know.”

  Like Gina Bennett, FBI Special Agent Daniel Coleman had also been tracking Islamist terrorists since the 1993 bombing of the Trade Center. And three years later he became the first official from the Bureau to be attached to a small, new CIA unit dedicated to tracking bin Laden. Walking around the streets of lower Manhattan near his FBI office, Coleman, a portly gentleman in his early fifties, wearing glasses and a tan raincoat, might have been mistaken for an auditor at one of the big banks. But Coleman, who comes from a long line of New York City cops going back to his great-grandfather, knew more about al-Qaeda from the inside than anyone else in government. “I’m the kind of guy who gets into the back room of everything, reads everything, and tries to remember everything,” Coleman explained. As a result of a highly retentive memory and the fact that he had spent many, many hours debriefing the first defectors from al-Qaeda—Jamal al-Fadl, L’Houssaine Kherchtou, and Ali Mohamed—Coleman had an encyclopedic understanding of the terrorist organization. In December 1995, Coleman had even opened the first counterterrorism case against an obscure Saudi financier of terrorism named Osama bin Laden.

  On the morning of September 11, 2001, Coleman was at his office at 26 Federal Plaza, a block away from the Trade Center. When the first plane crashed, Coleman hoped it was an accident, “but after the second building got hit I thought, ‘Oh God almighty!’ I was pretty certain who had done it.” Coleman rushed down Broadway toward the Trade Center, looking to interview witnesses, when “all of a sudden this cyclone comes up the street and I hear this noise and it was the loudest noise I have ever heard in my life, and I’m like, okay, what was that? It was incomprehensible. I didn’t know what it was, all these papers. This cloud was coming.” This was the debris cloud from the South Tower imploding and collapsing, the first building to do so, at 9:59 A.M.

  Almost immediately an important clue was found near the Trade Center. Someone picked up a passport that had fallen to the street shortly after the first hijacked plane, American Airlines Flight 11, had crashed into the twin towers. It was turned in to the FBI that day. The passport belonged to Satam al-Suqami, a Saudi law student, who had entered the United States a few months earlier and who would turn out to be one of the hijackers. Coleman remembers that Suqami’s passport was only partially burnt and smelled strongly of kerosene.

  Analysts at the CIA quickly realized with something close to horror that two men they had previously tagged as al-Qaeda associates, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, were on American Airlines Flight 77, which had crashed into the Pentagon shortly after 9:30 A.M. Barbara Sude recalls that Mihdhar’s name “came up right away.”

  Bennett, Coleman, and Sude, who had put themselves into harm’s way on September 11, were three of perhaps a few dozen U.S. government officials who understood the true scope of the al-Qaeda threat before it materialized so spectacularly in New York and Washington. Most of those officials were concentrated at the CIA or at the New York field office of the FBI, which had been investigating Islamist extremists since the early 1990s, or were part of the small counterterrorism group at the National Security Council. Otherwise, much of the rest of the government, including almost all of the top national security officials in the Bush administration, had no idea about the true scale of the al-Qaeda threat until they were evacuating their offices on the morning of 9/11.

  After the 9/11 attacks no Bush administration official took responsibility, apologized, resigned, or was fired for what was the gravest national security failure in American history. The first and only official to offer an apology was counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, who, when he appeared as a private citizen in 2004 before the 9/11 Commission, opened his remarks by addressing the families of victims sitting in the audience, saying, “Your government failed you. … And I failed you.”

  In contrast, following Pearl Harbor, to which 9/11 has often been compared, Admiral Husband Kimmel, the commander of the Pacific Fleet, who had been warned of a possible Japanese attack, was immediately relieved of his command and demoted; a year later he retired. The Roosevelt administration also quickly investigated what had happened at Pearl Harbor. Within seven weeks of the attacks, the Roberts Commission, which had been appointed by President Roosevelt, issued its first congressional report. It was one of nine official inquiries into Pearl Harbor convened in the middle of World War II. By contrast, the Bush administration thwarted congressional efforts to investigate 9/11, and only reluctantly acceded to an investigative commission more than a year after the attacks, following intense public pressure from the victims’ families. Vice President Dick Cheney claimed improbably in May 2002 that he wanted to avoid the “circus atmosphere” that would come with establishing a separate investigatory body.

  Once it was set up, the 9/11 Commission largely focused on the structural failures of agencies within the U.S. government. The commission was a bipartisan panel, and by examining the very real problems of particular government institutions it was able largely to skirt the wider policy failures of the Clinton and Bush administrations’ handling of the al-Qaeda threat, subjects that were politically too hot to handle.

  What does the historical record tell us about the culpability of the two American administrations sitting in the White House in the years before 9/11 in failing to counter the gathering al-Qaeda threat? In the winter of 2001, Richard Shultz, an American historian of Special Forces, was tasked by the Pentagon to find out why elite counterterrorism units, such as Delta Force, were not deployed to hit al-Qaeda before 9/11; after all, that was supposed to be their main mission. In a public version of his report, published under the apt title “Showstoppers,” Shultz found that the “great reluctance in the Pentagon”—as General Peter Schoomaker, their commanding officer put it—to deploy Special Operations Forces arose from several factors. First, terrorism was generally seen as a crime until 9/11, and so the Pentagon saw terrorism as something that fell under the purview of the CIA and found it convenient to assume (wrongly) that the military did not have the statutory authority to engage in fighting terrorism.

  A second key “showstopper” was the tendency by the Depart
ment of Defense to recommend “big footprint” operations involving as many as several hundred soldiers to take on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. That made those operations nonstarters for President Clinton, who was looking for small-unit insertions, not mini-invasions of Afghanistan. Michael Scheuer, then the head of the bin Laden unit at the CIA, recalls that “Clinton wanted a rapier and they brought him a battle axe.”

  Finally, the Pentagon demanded high-quality “actionable intelligence” before launching an operation, which simply didn’t exist in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Special Operations boss Schoomaker recalled: “Special Operations were never given the mission. It was very, very frustrating. It was like having a brand-new Ferrari in the garage and nobody wants to race it because you might dent the fender.”

  Given the reluctance of the Pentagon to send in Special Operations Forces, and the generally imperfect intelligence about bin Laden’s location, what other options were available to policy makers? One option was to tighten the diplomatic noose around the Taliban and so increase their costs for sheltering al-Qaeda. After the embassy bombings in Africa in 1998, Michael Sheehan, the U.S. ambassador for counterterrorism, an intense, wiry former Special Forces officer given wide latitude by his boss Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, put the Taliban on notice that they would be held responsible for future al-Qaeda attacks. And in 1999 the Clinton administration slapped sanctions on the Taliban and the United Nations followed suit.

  As concerns about a possible terrorist attack during the turn of the millennium were gripping Clinton’s national security team, Sheehan dispatched a strongly worded cable to Taliban leaders that said they would “be held fully accountable” for another attack by al-Qaeda. Sometime in January 2000, Sheehan followed that up with a forty-five-minute phone call with the Taliban foreign minister Wakil Muttawakil in which he read him an unambiguous statement from Clinton: “We will hold the Taliban leadership responsible for any attacks against US interests by al-Qaeda or any of its affiliated groups.” Muttawakil, who was privately one of bin Laden’s most bitter critics inside the Taliban movement, stuck to his talking points that the al-Qaeda leader was under the control of the Taliban and there was no proof that he was involved in terrorism.

  The international community’s pressure and sanctions on the Taliban did ratchet up the pressure on them, according to al-Qaeda insider Abu Walid al-Masri, who later wrote that a “nucleus of opposition” to bin Laden developed among senior leaders of the Taliban who urged that bin Laden be expelled. Taliban officials also told bin Laden to cease his international terrorist plotting in early 1999. Obviously, the al-Qaeda leader did not pay much heed to any of this.

  The deeper problem the United States had in attacking al-Qaeda in Afghanistan before 9/11 was not simply the result of imperfect intelligence about the country, the reluctance of the military to take action, and the lack of political will to go to war against terrorists that had characterized American administrations for decades; rather, it was that policy makers in the Clinton and Bush administrations didn’t have any overarching strategy for Afghanistan. This was the legacy of many years of American neglect of the festering problems in the country. After the brilliant success of the covert U.S. operation to arm the Afghan mujahideen that had helped to destroy the Soviet Union, the George H. W. Bush administration closed the U.S. embassy in Kabul in 1989. This turned out to be a grave error, as from that day forward the United States was largely flying blind in Afghanistan (the embassy only reopened after the fall of the Taliban). And as the Cold War receded into history, aid to Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries on the planet, was effectively zeroed out, dropping to only $2 million a year in Clinton’s first term.

  Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush failed to see bin Laden as a political challenge. They both had hoped to end the al-Qaeda problem by decapitating its leader through cruise missile strikes or by using CIA assets on the ground. Of course, that would have left the training camps and al-Qaeda’s organization in place even if the decapitation effort had succeeded. And instead of using the leader of the Northern Alliance, Ahmad Shah Massoud, as a strategic partner to defeat both al-Qaeda and the Taliban, he was seen only as someone who might be helpful in eliminating bin Laden.

  There were some American officials who did see the larger strategic picture. Five days into the new Bush administration, on January 25, 2001, Richard Clarke wrote National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that a cabinet-level review of al-Qaeda policy was “urgently” needed. Attached to the memo was a paper titled “Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al Qida.” In the memo Clarke suggested arming Predator drones with Hellfire missiles to take out the group’s leaders, giving “massive” support to Massoud’s Northern Alliance, destroying terrorist training camps and Taliban command-and-control facilities using U.S. Special Forces, and expanding a deal with Afghanistan’s northern neighbor, Uzbekistan, to allow U.S. assets like the Predator drones to be based there. But Rice seemed content to let her deputy Stephen Hadley move ahead at a businesslike but not urgent pace with an al-Qaeda policy review and otherwise do nothing. (The strategy that Clarke had outlined in the memo to Rice was essentially the same one that President Bush finally adopted after 9/11.)

  With the exception of Clarke and CIA director George Tenet and the latter’s deputy John McLaughlin, senior Bush administration officials consistently underestimated the urgent threat posed by bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who simply did not fit their worldview of what constituted a serious threat. A Nexis database search of all the newspapers, magazines, and TV transcripts of Rice’s statements and writings from the mid-1990s until 9/11 shows that she never mentioned al-Qaeda publicly, and only referred to the threat from bin Laden during a 2000 interview with a Detroit radio station. Perhaps sensitive to this fact, when Rice testified before the 9/11 Commission in 2004, she said, “I, myself, had written for an introduction to a volume on bioterrorism done at Stanford that I thought that we wanted not to wake up one day and find that Osama bin Laden had succeeded on our soil.”

  The book that Rice referred to her in her testimony, The New Terror: Facing the Threat of Biological and Chemical Weapons, was published by Stanford in 1999. The New Terror has no mention of al-Qaeda or bin Laden either by Rice or any of its other contributors. It’s no wonder that when Clarke first briefed Rice on al-Qaeda, “her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before.”

  For other key members of Bush’s national security team, the al-Qaeda threat also barely registered. A Nexis database search of all of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s pre-9/11 statements and writings shows he never mentioned al-Qaeda, and referred to bin Laden only once, in the context of the Saudi exile’s supposed links to Saddam Hussein, testifying before a congressional committee in 1998 that there were “suspect connections between the Iraqis and this Osama bin Laden fellow.” Indeed, during the summer of 2001, Wolfowitz enraged CIA officials, some of whom were frantic with worry, by pooh-poohing the flood of warnings pouring in by asking whether bin Laden was simply “trying to study U.S. reactions.”

  A Nexis search for anything that President Bush or Vice President Cheney might have written or said about the threat posed by al-Qaeda and bin Laden similarly comes up empty before 9/11. Of the thirty-three “principals” meetings of cabinet members held by the Bush administration before the attacks on Washington and New York, only one was about terrorism, although almost immediately after assuming office Bush convened his cabinet on February 5, 2001, to discuss the supposedly pressing issue of Iraq. The first cabinet-level meeting about the threat posed by al-Qaeda took place on September 4, 2001.

  The fact that the Bush administration was strangely somnambulant about the al-Qaeda threat is puzzling. It was not as if they did not have enough information or warning about the threat posed by al-Qaeda; quite the opposite; President Bush was being regularly briefed about the terrorist group. Bush administration officials, of course, deny that they didn�
�t take the threat urgently enough, but there is no debating that in their public utterances, private meetings, and actions, the al-Qaeda threat barely registered. The real question then, in the face of all this information about the threat, is why did the most experienced national security team in memory underestimate the problem?

  The short answer: They just didn’t get it. Key members of the Bush team had cut their teeth during the Cold War. Rice was a Soviet specialist at the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush. Wolfowitz had worked on the “Team B” efforts at the Pentagon in the 1970s which concluded, wrongly, that the Soviet military threat was much larger than supposed. And Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had served as White House chief of staff and secretary of defense during the Ford administration. Their views about the importance of state-based threats remained frozen in a Cold War mind-set. The quip that after the French Revolution the restored Bourbon monarchs came back to power having “learned nothing and forgotten nothing” applied equally well to the Bush national security team, who assumed office as if the 1990s and the gathering threat from al-Qaeda simply hadn’t happened.

  This was compounded by a self-confidence bordering on arrogance typified by the nickname Bush’s foreign policy advisers accorded themselves during the 2000 election campaign. They dubbed themselves “the Vulcans,” after the Roman god of fire and metal. Initially this was something of a joke, but as the campaign went on the Bush national security team became known in all seriousness as the Vulcans. The Vulcans, who prided themselves on their hard-nosed appreciation of the harsh realities of the national security realm, would go on to preside over the most devastating national security failure in American history.