The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  To admit that al-Qaeda was the number-one threat to American security would then make it difficult, if not impossible, to argue that missile defense ought to be, as it was for the pre-9/11 Bush administration, a key national security imperative. Antiballistic missile systems, of course, do nothing to stop terrorists. To admit that nonstate terrorists were the primary danger to the nation, it then became impossible to argue, as many in the administration did, that a rogue state, Iraq, was the number-one danger. In a nutshell, bin Laden and al-Qaeda were politically and ideologically inconvenient to square with the Bush worldview.

  The inattention of the Bush administration to the al-Qaeda threat had results: Bush stood down the force of submarines and ships stationed in the Arabian Sea that were capable of launching cruise missile strikes into Afghanistan and had been put in place by Clinton. And shortly before 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft turned down FBI requests for some four hundred additional counterterrorism personnel. Ashcroft also released a statement about the Justice Department’s top ten priorities in May 2001. Terrorism wasn’t one of them. Neither Rice nor her deputy Hadley got the squabbling Pentagon and CIA to fly Predator drones equipped with Hellfire missiles over Afghanistan. An unarmed Predator had filmed bin Laden at his farm near Kandahar late in the Clinton administration. The issue between the Agency and the Pentagon was, in part, cost: Predator drones cost $3 million each.

  Ambassador for Counterterrorism Michael Sheehan recalls that Richard Clarke “was pounding on the [CIA and Department of Defense] to more quickly develop—and use—the armed Predator, which was being tested, in Nevada, at the time. And both of them were dragging their feet in terms of money, and they also were uncomfortable with the use of the armed Predator. Can you imagine that now? Back then they were very slow to develop the capability, very slow in testing, they had lawyers wrapping them up in knots, and Clarke was apoplectic over it, because he wanted to introduce this asset into the Afghan theater.”

  In Nevada in June 2001 the CIA had built a replica of bin Laden’s four-room villa at Tarnak Farms where he was living outside of Kandahar. A Predator drone equipped with a missile obliterated the replica house in tests that the Agency conducted with the Air Force. National Security Council official Roger Cressey recalls that even this wasn’t enough to get the CIA and Pentagon to move forward with the armed Predator. “I was at the meeting at the Agency afterwards, the data they got they said was inconclusive as to whether or not there was enough lethality in the explosion or the shrapnel to ensure that everybody inside would have been killed. Now, I’m looking at the video, this big fucking explosion packed in there, and I’m like, ‘I can’t believe anybody would have survived that.’ … And that played into the Agency’s real fear of—There’s only one thing worse than not being allowed to do it; it’s doing it and fucking it up. And then it becomes exposed, they get the shit kicked out of them on the Hill, and then they get the shit kicked out of them in the international community.”

  The armed Predator would fly only after 9/11.

  The Bush administration’s handling of the October 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole in the Yemeni port city of Aden by al-Qaeda suicide bombers, an operation that killed seventeen American sailors and threatened to sink the billion-dollar destroyer, was especially puzzling. Following the Cole attack, the Clinton administration, in office for only three more months, sat on its hands. This was despite the fact that according to Ali Soufan, the lead FBI agent on the Cole case, within three weeks, “We knew one hundred percent that it was bin Laden.” On December 21 the CIA made a presentation to the key national security officials in the Clinton cabinet that there was a “preliminary judgment” that al-Qaeda aided the Cole attack. In not responding to the Cole bombing in the waning days of his presidency, Clinton may not have wanted to complicate his legacy-building attempt to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians with an attack on a Muslim country. And the inaction on the Cole may have also reflected simple exhaustion at the end of the second term of the lame-duck Clinton administration.

  Bin Laden certainly expected some retaliation for the attack on the Cole, after having only narrowly escaped the U.S. cruise missile strikes that had rained down on his training camps in eastern Afghanistan in August 1998. On September 27, 2000, two weeks before the Cole attack, bin Laden told a group of al-Qaeda members about the “possibility of a missile attack by the infidels” on their training camps. Around the time of the Cole bombing, the al-Qaeda leader evacuated everyone from his compound at Kandahar airport and split up from his senior advisers Mohammed Atef and Ayman al-Zawahiri so that all three would not be killed together in the event of a retaliatory American strike. But bin Laden’s precautions were unnecessary; the United States never retaliated for the Cole attack.

  By the time the Bush administration was sworn into office in January 2001, it was obvious that al-Qaeda was responsible for the Cole bombing. On February 9, Vice President Cheney was briefed that the attack was the work of bin Laden’s men. At the end of March, Clarke’s deputy Roger Cressey wrote the deputy national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, an email saying, “We know all we need to about who did the attack to make a policy decision.” Cressey recalls that by the spring of 2001 “there was no disagreement about who was culpable. And yet there was no enthusiasm, no interest in doing anything about it, because it didn’t happen on their watch.”

  In June 2001, al-Qaeda released a propaganda videotape strongly implying its responsibility for the Cole operation and calling for more anti-American attacks, something that Clarke pointed out to Rice in an email. If the Bush administration needed a casus belli, here it was broadcast around the world. The attack on the Cole was an act of war, plain and simple, and it merited an American military response. As we have seen, Michael Sheehan, the ambassador for counterterrorism under Clinton, had told Taliban leaders in early 2000 that they would be held responsible for future attacks against American targets because they were harboring al-Qaeda. Responding to the Cole attack by launching cruise missile strikes at key Taliban government buildings and military installations would have been relatively easy to do and might have put some pressure on the Taliban to expel bin Laden. Instead, the Bush administration did nothing.

  Stephen Hadley says the lack of response to the Cole was largely due to the fact that the Clinton administration’s cruise missile strikes against al-Qaeda’s Afghan camps in 1998 were “inadequate, ineffective responses” and the Bush team “wanted a much more robust response to al-Qaeda generally, rather than just a response to the Cole. And that’s what we set about trying to develop, in the first 6–9 months up to 9/11.”

  Ali Soufan, the FBI agent leading the Cole investigation, later interrogated a number of detainees held at Guantánamo, including Salim Hamdan, bin Laden’s driver. Soufan says the lack of American response to the Cole bombing came up often during his interrogations: “Not only Hamdan—a lot of other people said the same thing: ‘You want to know who is responsible for 9/11, you’re responsible for 9/11, you didn’t retaliate after the Cole and it emboldened bin Laden so he felt that we are untouchables.’”

  The feckless response to the Cole attack was a bipartisan failure, but one that reflects especially poorly on the Bush administration. When members of the 9/11 Commission asked Bush about the lack of response to the Cole bombing, he said that he wasn’t aware of the Clinton administration’s warnings to the Taliban, warnings that his own ambassador to Pakistan, William B. Milam, had renewed in June 2001 when he told his Taliban counterpart that his government would be held responsible for attacks against American targets by al-Qaeda.

  During the summer of 2001, CIA director George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission that the American intelligence “system was blinking red” because of a series of credible intelligence reports about al-Qaeda’s plans for attacks on American targets. Below is a representative sampling of the threat reporting that was distributed to Bush officials, which gathered intensity during the spring and reached a crescendo
during that summer.

  CIA, “Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations,” April 20

  CIA, “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent,” June 23

  CIA, “Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays,” July 2

  CIA, “Threat of Impending al-Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely,” August 3

  Warren Bass, a historian in his mid-thirties, was one of the 9/11 Commission staffers who reviewed National Security Council documents going to and from Rice during the commission’s investigation. Bass found that Clarke repeatedly warned her and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, of the volume of alarming information about possible al-Qaeda plots during the summer of 2001.

  On July 10, Tenet took the unusual step of calling Rice and asking her with some urgency for a meeting that same day to discuss the al-Qaeda threats. Barely fifteen minutes later, Tenet and two of his deputies were in Rice’s White House office. One of Tenet’s staff members got everyone’s attention when he predicted, “There will be a significant terrorist attack in the next weeks or months. … Multiple and simultaneous attacks are possible and they will occur with little or no warning.” Rice asked her counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke if he shared this assessment and he gave an exasperated “Yes.” Tenet and his staff thought he had finally gotten Rice’s attention, but she did nothing following the meeting. This was especially surprising because Rice would later publicly testify before the 9/11 Commission that the Bush administration was at “battle stations” during this period. The historical record does not reflect this.

  During August, Bush was at his vacation ranch in Crawford, Texas, clearing brush, doing some competitive bicycling, and attending to some of the business of government. On August 6 he was given an intelligence briefing titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.” The brief had been prepared in part by the veteran CIA analyst “Barbara S.,” an Agency official who had tracked al-Qaeda for years. Bush later said the contents of the brief were only “historical” and told him nothing new about the danger from al-Qaeda.

  Barbara S., now revealed to be Barbara Sude, says the president did not understand the intention of the briefing, which was to warn of a possible attack in America, not to rehash history: “Was the piece historical? No … So did the analysts think that something would happen in the United States? We did assess there was a major attack coming. We couldn’t say definitively where. We had threats all year about various locations.” Sude says that the CIA briefing was particularly influenced by the fact that just two month earlier, Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian on the fringes of al-Qaeda, had pleaded guilty to charges that he had planned to detonate a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport in the middle of the Christmas season of 1999. According to the briefing, there were seventy ongoing investigations by the FBI into supposed al-Qaeda cells inside the United States during the summer of 2001 and the Bureau had also come across information indicating “preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.” The number of FBI investigations was, in fact, exaggerated, but the briefing to Bush clearly made the point that there were several ongoing inquiries into possible al-Qaeda activities inside the United States.

  Following the August 6 briefing, President Bush never publicly discussed the threat posed by al-Qaeda until after 9/11, and chose not to interrupt the longest presidential vacation in more than three decades, only returning to Washington from Texas as planned after Labor Day. The 9/11 Commission also found no evidence that he had any further discussion with his advisers about possible al-Qaeda attacks on the United States until after they had happened.

  Despite Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission that the Bush administration was at battle stations during the summer of 2001, in a wide-ranging and emblematic interview with Fox News the night of August 6—the same day that President Bush had been briefed that there were dozens of investigations into possible al-Qaeda cells in the United States—Rice chose to discuss the troubled situation in Israel, the administration’s missile defense plans, and its relations with Russia. The threat from al-Qaeda, bin Laden, and terrorism went unmentioned.

  There is also no evidence that Rice did anything to “pulse” the national security system for additional information about the presence of jihadist militants in the United States. Might that have caused the information about Zacarias Moussaoui, a jihadist militant then in FBI custody in Minnesota who was keen on practicing flying a 747, to have been more widely distributed? Might that have caused the wider dissemination of the names of the al-Qaeda soon-to be-hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who were known to be in the United States? It is worth contrasting Rice’s lackadaisical approach with that of Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger, who held almost daily meetings of the National Security Council from mid-December 1999 as the new millennium approached and similar fears of a terrorist attack gripped the national security establishment.

  For Donald Rumsfeld the most pressing threat in the summer of 2001 was not al-Qaeda but the Department of Defense itself, which he felt was blocking his efforts at “transformation” of the military into a lighter, more nimble force. During a speech on September 10, Rumsfeld described the Pentagon bureaucracy as “an adversary that poses a serious threat to the security of the United States.” A day later Rumsfeld would be helping the victims of al-Qaeda’s attack on the Pentagon.

  The fact that al-Qaeda and its allies intended to attack the United States, and indeed had already done so before 9/11, was hardly a secret. The CIA briefing to President Bush headlined “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.” was simply stating the blindingly obvious. Al-Qaeda’s leader had repeatedly said he was going to attack the United States, starting in 1997 in an interview with CNN, and he reiterated this threat over the next two years in interviews with ABC News and Time.

  Rarely have the enemies of the United States publicly warned so often of their plans. Imagine for a moment that starting in 1937, Japanese government officials had repeatedly told American radio and newspaper correspondents that they were planning to strike the United States. Might not the events of Pearl Harbor have played out rather differently than they did on the morning of December 7, 1941?

  The problem, then, was not a lack of information about al-Qaeda’s intentions and capabilities, but the Bush administration’s inability to comprehend that an attack by al-Qaeda on the United States was a real possibility, much more so than attacks by traditional state antagonists such as China or Iraq. Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 assaults seemed especially surprising to senior Bush officials because the world’s only superpower was bloodied by an organization, not a state. It should have been less surprising than it was; after all, bin Laden had declared war on the United States years earlier and he had followed through on that promise with the attacks on the two American embassies in Africa and the bombing of the Cole.

  The 9/11 attacks were not the beginning of al-Qaeda’s campaign against the United States. They were its climax.

  Chapter 4

  Kicking Ass

  This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while. And the American people must be patient.

  —President Bush to reporters on September 16, 2001

  On the morning of September 11, Bush was visiting a kindergarten class in Sarasota, Florida, when he was informed that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. A little later Andrew Card, his chief of staff, whispered in the president’s right ear: “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.” An hour later, Bush, by now flying on Air Force One, spoke with Dick Cheney in the White House, telling the vice president, “We’re going to find out who did this and we’re going to kick their asses.” Exactly whose asses to kick and how would consume much of the rest of Bush’s presidency.

  At eight-thirty that night Bush addressed tens of millions of Americans from the Oval Office in a speech that laid out a key doctrine of his administration’s future foreign policy: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and tho
se who harbor them.” While this was a reasonable rationale for the coming war against the Taliban, it also helped set the stage for the subsequent war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which the administration would repeatedly say was allied with al-Qaeda, although the evidence for that assertion was nonexistent.

  Over the course of the coming weeks and months the Bush administration would set the course of policies that would have unforeseen consequences for many years into the future: a “light footprint” operation in Afghanistan, which would succeed brilliantly at toppling the Taliban but leave many of the top leaders of al-Qaeda at liberty following the failure to capture or kill them at the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, and would also fail to secure Afghanistan for the long term. Bush also launched the nation on an ambiguous and open-ended conflict against a tactic, termed the “war on terror,” which would warp U.S. foreign policy and distort key American ideals about the rule of law, while his administration’s obsession with Iraq would lead the United States into fighting two wars in the Muslim world simultaneously, seeming to confirm one of bin Laden’s key claims—that the West, led by America, was at war with Islam.

  The idea that Iraq was behind 9/11 gripped senior members of the Bush administration within hours of the attacks. At 2:40 that afternoon Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld considered whether “to hit S. H. [Saddam Hussein] same time—not only UBL [bin Laden],” according to contemporaneous notes made by one of his top deputies. Douglas Feith, the number-three official at the Pentagon and a longtime neoconservative advocate of overthrowing the Iraqi dictator, was flying back from Europe the day of the attacks with a group of senior Pentagon officials. On the flight Feith broached the idea of overthrowing Saddam. General John Abizaid, the Arabic-speaking four-star general who two years later would assume responsibility for U.S. military operations in the Middle East, interrupted him, saying, “Not Iraq. There is not a connection with al-Qaeda.”