Intel Wars

by Matthew M. Aid

  The Hasan and Abdulmutallab incidents proved to be huge embarrassments for the U.S. intelligence community because they showed that the terrorists had adapted their tactics and found new chinks in the armor of America’s homeland security defenses. For years before the incidents, a number of NCTC analysts had tried to get their superiors to pay greater heed to the growing terror threats to the homeland, but failed. The leadership of the U.S. intelligence community and the White House were focused on al Qaeda in Pakistan and the growing threat posed by al Qaeda in Yemen and, according to the analysts, did not take the domestic terrorism problem very seriously, placing the problem way down on their counterterrorism priority lists.

  Both incidents also confirmed that there were still serious systemic problems in the U.S. intelligence community’s counterterrorism effort. In both cases the U.S. intelligence community possessed information that, if properly analyzed and correlated, would have allowed the United States to prevent the attack from happening. But the intelligence analysts overlooked key pieces of intelligence, and for the information they did have, they failed to “connect the dots.”

  In the case of Major Hasan, three postmortem reviews found that the intelligence community “collectively had sufficient information to have detected Hasan’s radicalization to violent Islamic extremism but failed to understand and to act on it.” Months before the shooting rampage, Major Hasan had exchanged more than a dozen e-mails with the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was then hiding in southern Yemen. The e-mails were intercepted by NSA and examined by FBI counterterrorism analysts, who concluded that there was nothing in them which warranted further action. This should not have been the end of the matter, though. At the very least someone at the FBI should have told Hasan’s army superiors that the major was communicating with an individual on the U.S. intelligence community’s terrorism watch list. As a congressional investigation later revealed, the FBI committed the unpardonable sin of failing “to inform Hasan’s military chain of command and Army security officials of the fact that he was communicating with a suspected violent Islamist extremist.”

  Insofar as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was concerned, three separate internal reviews of the incident found that exactly the same glaring mistakes were made as in the case of Major Hasan. Four months before Abdulmutallab had been allowed to board Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in Amsterdam, NSA had intercepted al Qaeda cell phone calls in Yemen indicating that an unidentified Nigerian was being trained for a terrorist attack. In and of itself, this was not enough to cause anyone to do anything. But the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington failed to link the intercepts with information obtained from Adulmutallab’s father, who on November 20, 2009, told officials at the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, that he had received text messages revealing that his son was in Yemen and “had become a fervent radical.” For reasons nobody seems to be able to explain, nobody at NCTC connected the dots between these two disparate pieces of information.

  President Obama was understandably furious. Even before he was inaugurated, he had been assured in briefings by President Bush’s DNI, Admiral Mike McConnell, that the most serious systemic deficiencies identified by the 9/11 Commission in its 2004 report had been fixed. He had received the same assurances from his own DNI, Denny Blair. Seeking to assuage the president’s anger, Blair told Obama that he should not rush to a premature judgment before all the facts were in.

  The Abdulmutallab affair marked the beginning of the end of Blair’s tenure as DNI. President Obama, rightly or wrongly, blamed Blair for Abdulmutallab being allowed to get onto the Northwest airliner, not the analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center for failing to connect the dots. It did not help that Blair’s enemies inside the intelligence community joined in the barrage of criticism aimed at him. John O. Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism adviser, and Blair’s nemesis within the intelligence community, CIA director Leon Panetta, both blamed Blair for the Christmas Day intelligence failure.

  According to one of Blair’s former deputies, the criticism from Panetta was particularly hard for Blair to bear. He and Panetta had known each other for years, and Blair thought that he would not have any problems working with the easygoing Californian when he was named DNI in January 2009.

  But relations between the two men quickly soured as the hard-nosed Panetta furiously resisted all attempts by Blair to assert his office’s authority over the CIA. Underestimating Panetta’s bureaucratic infighting skills was to prove to be Blair’s undoing. For instance, on May 19, 2009, Blair sent out a memo announcing that his office would hereafter appoint all CIA chiefs of station, not Langley. Within hours of Blair’s memo going out, Panetta sent out his own message to his staff telling them, in essence, to ignore Blair’s memo. Blair refused to back down and demanded that the White House confirm his statutory authority over the CIA. The fighting between the two escalated to the point that in the fall of 2009 the White House felt that it had to intervene and settle the dispute once and for all. In early December, Obama’s national security adviser, General James L. Jones, issued an order that came down firmly on the side of the CIA, finding that Panetta alone had the authority not only to appoint the agency’s station chiefs but also to direct the CIA’s covert action operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the CIA’s Predator drone strikes in northern Pakistan.

  The Abdulmutallab affair was the final straw. On May 20, 2010, President Obama fired Denny Blair after only sixteen months on the job as DNI. Blair had learned earlier in the day what the president intended to do and had tried repeatedly to make an appointment to see him. Blair knew that his time was up when Obama, who was at the time hosting a state visit by President Felipe Calderón of Mexico, did not answer his phone calls. When the two men finally spoke later that day, the president told Blair that he intended to replace him as DNI. Blair told the president that he would have his letter of resignation by the end of business. Word quickly leaked to the White House press corps that Blair was on his way out.

  In retrospect, Blair was a tragic figure. Unlike his predecessors, he had tried to assert the authority of his office over the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, and lost his job for his troubles. He had not committed any egregious mistakes that warranted his dismissal, although he clearly failed to establish anything approaching an intimate relationship with his top client, President Obama. In his short time in office he could point to some significant successes. For instance, he had largely fixed the relationships with America’s foreign intelligence partners that had been damaged during the Bush administration. Full intelligence-sharing relations were restored with New Zealand in August 2009; they had been broken off in 1985 after New Zealand refused to allow U.S. Navy warships armed with nuclear weapons to dock in its ports. Also in 2009, Canada, France, and Germany once again became full-fledged partners of the U.S. intelligence community, ending nearly seven years spent without access to high-level American intelligence because their governments had refused to back the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The only problem area was the U.S. intelligence community’s relationship with the Mossad and the other Israeli intelligence services, which continued to slowly deteriorate because of differences between the two countries over whether Iran intended to build a nuclear weapon. Blair had also increased the number of intelligence resources in Afghanistan, ramped up the number of unmanned drone attacks on al Qaeda in northern Pakistan, and responded quickly to the growing narco-violence in Mexico, to name a few of his successes. Those mistakes that had been made on his watch, such as failure to “connect the dots” in the cases of Major Nidal Malik Hasan and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, were not in any way directly attributable to his actions.

  Reflecting on these events a year later, one of Blair’s former deputies said, “It just proved that the laws of physics were wrong. Shit does roll uphill.”

  On Saturday, May 1, 2010, at 9:30 P.M., the senior duty officer in the White House Situation Room called the National Security C
ouncil duty officer upstairs in the West Wing to tell him that three hours earlier the New York Police Department had found a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder parked at the crowded intersection of 45th Street and Broadway in the heart of Times Square containing a large homemade car bomb made from gasoline, propane, fireworks, and 250 pounds of the fertilizer ammonium nitrate, which was the same explosive used by Timothy McVeigh when he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people.

  According to the first reports from the New York Police Department, the bomb had failed to detonate but had started a fire inside the vehicle. Two street vendors, Duane Jackson and Lance Orton, noticed a plume of smoke coming from the backseat of the vehicle and alerted a nearby mounted police officer. The bomb squad was called in, and the device was disarmed without any difficulty.

  The Sit Room senior watch officer immediately called John O. Brennan, the president’s special assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, and briefed him over the secure telephone on what was known so far. It took a little more than an hour for Brennan to drive to the White House and read through the rapidly accumulating stack of reporting from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the New York Police Department’s command center in downtown Manhattan. At 10:44 P.M., Brennan spoke briefly on the phone with David Cohen, the deputy commissioner for intelligence of the NYPD, to get the latest update, then called President Obama in the White House residence to give him a brief rundown on what was known at that point. It was the beginning of a long and arduous three days.

  It took the FBI less than forty-eight hours to trace the ownership of the Nissan Pathfinder to a thirty-year-old naturalized American citizen from Pakistan named Faisal Shahzad, who was living in suburban Connecticut in the town of Shelton. Shahzad was immediately put under surveillance by the FBI and his name placed on the “Do Not Fly” watch list maintained by the Transportation Security Agency (TSA).

  On Monday, May 3, Shahzad slipped his surveillance and drove to New York City on the first leg of a trip to get himself out of the country. Somehow, he managed to buy a ticket on the Emirates Airlines midnight flight to Dubai with a connection to Pakistan at the ticket counter at John F. Kennedy International Airport and board the aircraft without triggering any alert. But just as the plane was due to depart, the names of all the passengers on the flight were checked again against the TSA “Do Not Fly” watch list, and this time Shahzad’s name triggered alarm bells. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents raced to the gate and boarded the Emirates Air airliner and arrested Shahzad without a struggle. Twenty minutes later Shahzad was booked and formally charged with being the culprit behind the abortive Times Square bombing.

  A memorandum on the case sent to President Obama and his homeland security policy team noted with concern that Shahzad had not had any problem getting his hands on either a handgun or the explosives for his bomb, highlighting the fact that ten years after 9/11 there are still virtually no controls in place to ensure that people like Shahzad can’t get hold of these materials. In 1953, there were an estimated 10 million handguns in the United States. Today, there are an estimated 65–66 million guns in private hands in the United States, with 2.5 million new handguns being sold every year.

  Shahzad had no problem buying 250 pounds of the fertilizer ammonium nitrate for his crude but potentially deadly bomb. If Shahzad’s car bomb had detonated, the carnage would have been unimaginable. The only reason that dozens if not hundreds of people were not killed on the crowded sidewalks of Times Square that Saturday evening was Shahzad’s crass ineptitude as a bomb maker.

  Shahzad was a blank page as far as the U.S. intelligence community and state and law enforcement agencies were concerned. No one in the U.S. intelligence community or law enforcement had ever heard of Faisal Shahzad before May 1, 2010. According to a senior White House counterterrorism official, “Shahzad wasn’t on our radar screen … NSA was not intercepting his phone calls or monitoring his e-mails. The CIA didn’t know he was in Pakistan training to be a suicide bomber. Treasury did not take any note of the money being wired to him from Pakistan. And the FBI, state and local law enforcement had no file on him because he had never done anything wrong … He was the perfect terrorist recruit.”

  The FBI only learned later from Shahzad that he had returned to his native Pakistan in October 2009 for what he told friends was a family visit that lasted five months. In December 2009, he slipped away for five days to undergo an intensive course in explosives at a Pakistani Taliban training facility outside the town of Miram Shah in North Waziristan. After his training was completed, he went back to his family home to spend the holidays with his father and the rest of his family. Two months later Shahzad flew back to the United States, not telling anyone in his family that he was now a full-fledged terrorist. On February 25, 2010, a week after he had returned from Pakistan, Shahzad received $5,000 in cash that had been wired to him by a Pakistani Taliban operative in Pakistan. Six weeks later, on April 10, Shahzad got another $7,000 in cash that had been wired to him from Pakistan. Neither of these cash transfers was detected by the U.S. intelligence community because the amounts were so small.

  Coming only four months after Abdulmutallab’s abortive attempt to detonate a bomb on a Northwest Airlines plane over Detroit, Shahzad’s admission that he was working for the Pakistani Taliban came as a major shock for the U.S. intelligence community. In early April 2009, four months before he was killed in Pakistan by a Hellfire missile fired by a CIA unmanned drone, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, had issued a warning that his group was planning to strike targets in Washington, D.C., itself. Mehsud’s threat was dismissed at the time by senior U.S. intelligence officials, with one official telling the Senate intelligence committee behind closed doors in executive session that the threat was “blather.” When Shahzad admitted that he was a Pakistani Taliban operative, the officials at the National Counterterrorism Center who had dismissed Mehsud’s claims a year earlier were not forthcoming with an apology for having dismissed the threat so casually. Such is the way government bureaucracies work, where accountability for mistakes is often a fungible concept.

  After his arrest, Shahzad made no effort to defend himself and cooperated fully with his FBI interrogators, telling them that he had nothing to hide. Shahzad admitted that his attempt at terrorism was a simple act of revenge, born of raw hatred that was not meant to right a wrong or to achieve anything tangible other than killing as many people as he could. He admitted that the bombing was planned specifically to generate as much carnage as possible. When asked later about whether he had any moral doubts about the killing of innocent civilians, such as women and children, Shahzad told his interrogators that not only was it justified, it was necessary.

  At his arraignment in U.S. District Court in New York City, Shahzad freely admitted that he was the Times Square bomber, telling the presiding judge that he did what he did because he was convinced that his adopted country was trying to destroy Islam. When it came time to face judgment, Shahzad pleaded guilty to all the charges against him, and on October 5, 2010, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. His parting words to the court were a warning, stating that he would not be the last man to try to exact some measure of revenge for what he thought the United States was doing in the Muslim world.

  Seen in retrospect, Faisal Shahzad was simply giving voice to what an entire generation of Muslims, not just the young and disenfranchised, now take as gospel. Tens of millions of Muslims, regardless of their age, social status, educational level, tribal affiliation, or country of origin, honestly believe that America is trying to destroy their religion. By failing to mount any form of an effective, sustained public diplomacy program to counter this perception, the U.S. government conceded defeat without even bothering to fight for the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. In short, the United States has now replaced Israel as the symbol of all that is evil throughout the Muslim world,
giving al Qaeda, the Taliban, and every other like-minded terrorist group a virtually limitless supply of recruits and financial backers for the foreseeable future.

  Even many of America’s allies in the Arab world implicitly believe that there is something insidious about the U.S. government’s policies in the region. One Pakistani intelligence official interviewed in 2009 made no secret of his view that “America will not be satisfied until we are all dead.” A government minister in Yemen felt the same way, stating, “You [the United States] did not invade France or Germany when they disagreed with you,” referring to the failure of these two countries to support the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. “You do not bomb Tel Aviv when the Israelis kill innocent Palestinians … So why are we different?”

  Most alarmingly, this view of the U.S. role in the Arab world is beginning to permeate the thinking of young Arab Americans here at home. This sentiment reared its ugly head at a 2009 book signing in Washington, D.C., when an American-born student of Egyptian extraction attending Georgetown University asked me a question one frequently hears across the length and breadth of the Arab world, “Why does America hate Islam?”

  Since 9/11, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials have returned over and over again to one particularly troublesome question: Do the more than 3 million Muslims living in the United States (some estimates of the number of Muslim Americans run as high as 6 million people) constitute a potential terrorist fifth column in our midst? In the corridors of power in Washington, it is a vitally important and at the same time an enormously politically sensitive issue because it has to some degree driven the U.S. intelligence community’s and our nation’s law enforcement efforts to protect America from terrorist attacks over the past decade.