43*

by Jeff Greenfield

  The applause that greeted this statement was loud but compulsory, reflecting the belief of the audience that the president was offering up a platitude with all the heft of cotton candy. But in the packed House chamber, barely half a dozen knew that this was one promise President Gore fully intended to keep.

  * * *

  It was an imposing office suite, eight floors up in the Executive Office Building, the wedding-cake structure across from the White House that had once housed the entire executive branch of the federal government; it featured twenty-two-foot ceilings, marble fireplaces, and an imposing view of the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument. As he walked in, shortly before 8 a.m., Richard Clarke headed for the long conference table covered with newspapers and folders, offering perfunctory greetings as his staff came in with their coffee cups from the White House mess and joined him as he began looking for needles in a haystack. Somewhere in the mass of data—in the intel reports that had come in overnight from the NSA, the CIA, the State Department, and the Defense Department, from embassies and listening posts around the world, in a paragraph buried in an obscure, casual report of an informal chat from a friendly ally—might well be a hint of a coming attack on an American company or embassy—or on the United States itself. And in his mind, there was no question that just such an attack was coming. Finding it, preventing it, was his job. It also had become an obsession. And on this day, that obsession was about to bear fruit with the singular triumph of his life.

  For eight years, Clarke had been chairman of the Counterterrorism Security Group—President Bush had named him to the post, and President Clinton had kept him on, adding to his portfolio the lofty title of national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection, and counterterrorism. The post came with a seat on the National Security Council, and as his tenure grew, so did his conviction that the United States, now the world’s only superpower, faced a threat unlike any in its history, one that few if any of his colleagues grasped. That conviction had made Clarke a sure loser in the Miss Congeniality contest within the national security universe; he was a constant thorn in the side of the CIA, the FBI, Defense, and State, pushing for more focus on an outfit many had never heard of or had never taken with even a minimal amount of seriousness, demanding more resources, more focus, more pressure on America’s alleged allies.

  Contrary to the core assumptions of the Bush officials who had left office before Al Qaeda had emerged, the organization had been a threat that loomed larger with each passing year of the Clinton-Gore administration. (When Clarke had finished briefing George W. Bush foreign-policy advisor Condoleezza Rice after Bush’s nomination, he had remarked to an aide, “I got the distinct impression she had never heard the name before.”) Gore’s chief national security advisor, Leon Fuerth, was a regular participant at the “principals meetings” with key cabinet officers and agency leaders, where Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were almost always front and center. And, contrary to his public image as a risk-averse pedant, Gore had distinctly hawkish impulses. He had strongly backed the 1991 Gulf War, and as vice president he had relentlessly pressured Clinton to use force to stop the Serbian slaughter in the Balkans. Gore had been kept abreast of the endless debates about how to confront bin Laden and the struggles among the CIA, the Defense Department, the White House National Security team, and the lawyers about what could and couldn’t be done.

  Could bin Laden be killed? Yes, according to a presidential finding, but only if it were done in the course of attempting to capture him. Could the United States insert Special Forces or CIA operatives into Afghanistan to go after bin Laden on the ground? Not without raising serious questions about international law and subjecting the CIA to the same kind of second-guessing on Capitol Hill that had all but crippled the agency in 1975. Could he be taken out with a cruise missile? Yes, but only if we had near absolute certainty as to his location and near absolute certainty that he would be there for the six hours it would take for that missile to be launched and to reach its target—and only if there were little risk of “collateral damage,” meaning civilian casualties.

  Now, in the spring of 2001, two new factors had been added to the mix: first, an all but forgotten piece of machinery that, properly retrofitted, could deliver a deadly blow against a figure who had declared war on the United States; and second, a new president who had become convinced that it was time to deliver that blow.

  * * *

  It began out of a growing sense of frustration: how to find out precisely where Osama bin Laden was. In January 2000, the National Security Council had directed the CIA to pinpoint his whereabouts, in order to attack and neutralize him. But how? The Defense Department wanted no part of a military presence; nor would it permit the CIA to put its counterterrorism personnel into the region. Finally, after abandoning option after option, a CIA team hit on the idea of an unmanned aerial vehicle—a pilotless drone. And what they found was a machine, an airframe, that had been very effective in the Balkans but had been banished to a hangar at an Air Force base.

  The weapon was known as the Predator—described by a CIA operations officer as “a simple machine, sort of like a big glider with two snowmobile engines powering a single propeller.” It wasn’t particularly big—twenty-seven feet long. It wasn’t terribly fast—top speed, 138 miles an hour. But it could fly for forty hours at 25,000 feet, making it effectively invisible, and ideal for hovering over an area while sending back crystal-clear images via satellite to locations thousands of miles away.

  By the summer of 2000 a CIA team had built a command center, filled with banks of computer terminals and video screens high on the walls. The resolution was so powerful that it was possible to calculate the make and model of vehicles, and the height of a person on the ground. As it turned out, this feature of the Predator provided jaw-dropping intelligence to those gathered at the command center one day that summer: As the Predator aimed its optics at Tarnak Farms, near Kandahar, Afghanistan—a known Al Qaeda outpost—it spotted an exceptionally tall man leaving a vehicle, surrounded by acolytes, unaccompanied by any women or children. It was bin Laden.

  But that only solved half the problem; there was still no way to strike at Al Qaeda’s leader except with cruise missiles, which were based on Navy ships in the Indian Ocean; and it would take six hours for those missiles to reach their target. Well, the White House asked the analysts watching the live video feed, can you assure us that bin Laden will be there for six hours? No? Then forget it. Once again, the brick wall of logistics had saved Osama bin Laden—at least in the short run. It quickly became obvious to Clarke, CIA director George Tenet, his deputy, Cofer Black, and others that the only way to attack bin Laden was to use the same device that had found him in the first place: the Predator. And that idea triggered yet another bureaucratic tug of war:

  Who should have control over an armed Predator? The CIA? No, said the Defense Department, that’s our turf. No, said one high-ranking CIA official, that would subject us to potential political disaster if a hit went awry. Who would bear the financial cost? The White House finally gave the CIA the authority, and then the technicians took over and found a weapon that fit the Predator to perfection: the Hellfire, a one-hundred-pound missile, armed with a twenty-pound warhead, that could fit under each of the Predator’s wings. It had a fifteen-year record of success against armored vehicles. Within a month of President Gore’s inauguration, the Predator had twice launched Hellfires with impressive accuracy at mock-ups of a known bin Laden encampment that had been constructed at a secret U.S. Air Force base somewhere in the Southwest. Now the United States had the means to locate Osama bin Laden with absolute certainty, and the means to strike him within minutes of finding him.

  The question now was one of political will. With the Defense Department insisting it must control this new weapon, with elements within the CIA shunning the power to deploy such a weapon, it would be up to the new president to decide whether to deploy it, when to deploy it, and
who should deploy it.

  And on this spring morning, as Richard Clarke sat with his colleagues at that conference table in Room 302 of the Executive Office Building, he could barely repress his sense of impending triumph. Later that morning, he would convene a principals meeting, and that meeting would feature a surprise guest with a very specific agenda.

  * * *

  It was a small room in a sublevel floor of the White House West Wing, with only twenty-two seats: twelve of them around a table for the principals, ten more along the wood-paneled walls for the staff. At the head of the table was a “Big Daddy” chair where Richard Clarke usually sat, with the presidential seal directly behind him, a not-so-subtle way of reminding the participants that this was the real deal, that the president himself was right upstairs. The mood in the Situation Room reflected the world outside; when times were calm, the conversations would begin with casual chats and jocular remarks. (On one Saturday, when Clarke showed up in shorts and a T-shirt, Attorney General Janet Reno commented, “You have really muscular legs.”) Other times, as in December 1999, when fears of an Al Qaeda Millennium plot were high, then–national security advisor Sandy Berger had braced the gathering, saying in effect, “This is serious business—everybody pay attention, work your sources, put every scrap of information out where everyone else can see it.”

  Now, on this day, Clarke took a seat just to the left of the big chair.

  “Are we expecting a special guest?” asked CIA director Tenet.

  “Very special,” Clarke said.

  Just then, President Gore walked into the room.

  Once before, Al Gore had cut a Gordian knot that had tied up feuding government agencies. In 1996, as vice president, he had been tasked with the job of coordinating security policy for the Atlanta Olympics. With federal agencies in the midst of a typical bureaucratic food fight, Gore had instructed the FBI director to bring the feuding parties to a briefing room at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Unbeknownst to the director—or to anyone else except Clarke—Gore had come with a choreographed agenda, spelling out bluntly what each department would do and what share of the costs each department would bear.

  “And Dick,” Gore had said to Clarke, “I want a report on this every week from you.”

  Now it was happening again, but on a matter of far greater significance. As President Gore began to speak, it was clear to everyone in the Situation Room that the president, National Security Advisor Fuerth, his deputy, Susan Rice, and Clarke had worked out not just the policy but the details of how the Predator was to be deployed against Osama bin Laden.

  The principals listened with varying degrees of satisfaction, concern, and anger as Gore began to speak.

  “You all heard Dick at that transition meeting tell us that bin Laden and Al Qaeda would be the biggest threat to our security in the years ahead. Have I got that right?”

  Clarke nodded. “By far the biggest threat.”

  “And I remember all those times we thought we had him in our sights, but between the time we needed to get those cruise missiles targeted, and the flight time between launch and hit, there was no way to be sure bin Laden would be where we thought he was.”

  “Yes,” Clarke said with some asperity, “and the lack of certainty that we had in fact found him, and the fear of collateral damage—we took incredible crap from the Pakistanis when we hit a bunch of their intelligence people in Afghanistan—”

  “Which,” Sam Nunn interjected, “raises the question of what they were doing in an Al Qaeda encampment in the first place … ”

  “Well,” the president continued, “I’ve spent a good part of the last week looking at some fascinating visuals.” He reached down, opened a leather packet, and began setting out photos on the table like a Las Vegas card dealer.

  “Like this one,” Gore said. “It’s Osama bin Laden at Tarnak Farms. You can almost check out his bicuspids.

  “And this one, from that Hellfire test on—when did we test the Hellfire-equipped Predator?”

  “February sixteenth,” Clarke said.

  “Now,” Gore went on, “I gather there’s been some turf fighting going on between CIA and the Air Force: who’s going to pay, who will take responsibility if something goes wrong, some talk about arming the Predators ‘over my dead body.’ So here’s the policy: CIA and Air Force will split the cost; if necessary, we’ll find some money in a supplemental fund. Lord knows the surplus is big enough. And I will take responsibility.”

  “With respect, Mr. President,” Secretary of State Holbrooke interrupted. “We have no idea how many civilians—women, children—may be around bin Laden at any time. And we’re still getting grief from the Chinese for hitting their embassy in Belgrade back in ’99.”

  “Yes, Dick, I remember. I also remember what Deputy CIA Director James Pavitt said at that transition briefing: ‘Bin Laden is one of the gravest threats to the country.’ ”

  “He also said taking him out wouldn’t stop the threat,” Tenet said.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Clarke interjected, “but he also said it would have an impact. Osama loves to say that people ‘back a strong horse over the weak horse.’ He points to everything from Vietnam to Reagan pulling troops out of Beirut in ’83 to leaving Somalia after Black Hawk Down in ’93 to the fact that we did nothing after the Cole bombing last year, proving to him that the West is weak. I think a Hellfire missile down his throat would be a powerful educational tool.”

  “Well,” Gore said, “as George Bush once said, ‘I aspire to be the education president.’ So … ”

  Three weeks later, in the Nevada desert, a missile fired from a Predator hit and leveled a brick structure; few of those involved knew that it was a duplicate of bin Laden’s home in Kandahar. Just two weeks later, on April 15, a Predator located bin Laden and a group of Al Qaeda operatives at the same Tarnak Farms complex where another Predator had located him seven months earlier. But this drone was armed, and the Hellfire it launched from four miles away hit its target in little more than a minute.

  The kill was confirmed: Osama bin Laden was dead.

  Summer 2001

  Now that a Predator drone had removed bin Laden for good, there was a sense among some in the counterterrorism world that Al Qaeda’s morale had been crippled, that with the head of the snake cut off, the body would soon die.

  But Richard Clarke, for one, was far less optimistic. That same toxic stew of bureaucratic inertia, turf wars, risk-averse indecision, and pure ignorance that had delayed the strike against bin Laden for so long was a constant factor in the broader terrorism arena. The CIA held its information in an iron grip, rarely sharing what it knew with the FBI, Customs, or Immigration and Naturalization. For its part, the bureau, hobbled by a misunderstood Justice Department edict, operated with a “wall” that barred intelligence-gathering agents from sharing what they knew with criminal investigators. Moreover, their computers were years, perhaps decades, behind the times, incapable of even performing a simple Internet search. With such handicaps, it was a matter of blind luck—and the intuition of a customs official at a border crossing in Washington State—that had stopped Al Qaeda’s Millennium attack on LAX. When Ahmed Ressam was captured, Clarke and his team had reached an inescapable, unsettling conclusion: Foreign terrorist sleeper cells are present in the United States, and attacks on the U.S. are likely.

  What Clarke could not have known—what no one could have known—was that a decision by President Gore to make life a little more comfortable for Americans would make a coming strike immeasurably worse than it might have otherwise been.

  * * *

  “The only thing less reliable than an alarm clock that never rings,” one of Richard Clarke’s aides snapped, “is an alarm clock that always rings.” And in the spring and summer of 2001, the clock was never silent. Al Qaeda was preparing to strike Israel, Bahrain, and Kuwait; they were aiming at the G8 summit of world leaders in Genoa; there were re
ports of a massive strike on U.S. soil planned for the Fourth of July holiday, and the FAA was also warning of possible “airline hijackings to free terrorists incarcerated in the United Sates,” but the assumption was that those attacks would take place overseas, and the agency specifically added that there was “no indication that any group is currently thinking” of suicide hijackings.

  Far more significant, however, was a mind-set across the bureaucratic universe that ensured that, for all of President Gore’s urgent entreaties to take the terrorism threat seriously, such pleas would make little difference. The inherent nature of bureaucracy is that it is self-protective, risk-averse, governed by a powerful set of rules: protect your turf, cover your ass, resist all pressures to deviate from below or above. To reveal what you know is to risk the loss of authority, manpower, and funding.

  For example, beginning in President Clinton’s second term, the FBI and the CIA had mistakenly interpreted a Justice Department ruling to mean that a “wall” had been created between intelligence gathering and criminal investigation. The CIA could not share what it had learned about the suspicious activities of a potential terrorist with an FBI agent pursuing criminal leads; in fact, even within the bureau itself, that nonexistent wall governed behavior. (One agency official warned FBI agents that breaching the wall would be “a career-ender.”)

  That wall had permitted two Al Qaeda operatives to escape the attention of the INS when they applied for visas to enter the United States. It meant that Tom Wilshire, the CIA’s representative to the FBI’s International Terrorism Operations Center, was specifically not allowed to tell his FBI counterparts that a known Al Qaeda operative was in the United States. And why was this operative allowed to travel to and remain in America? Because the CIA never gave his name to the State Department or the INS—nor did it let the FBI know that he frequently called a pay phone in Yemen that was a central switching station for Al Qaeda. It was the kind of information that would have allowed the FBI or the immigration authorities to find the links that might have led them to uncover what these men and their colleagues were up to.