Enemies

by Tim Weiner

  From that day forward, Watson tried to underscore the urgency of Clarke’s counterterrorism campaign throughout the FBI. He ordered every one of the Bureau’s fifty-six field offices to develop an understanding of the threat. But many if not most remained unaware. He summoned agents from across the country to meet with Clarke. They got the full treatment: Clarke’s portfolio was filled with portents of attacks; his standard briefing covered bacteria, viruses, and cyber warfare on top of more traditional acts of terrorism.

  The meeting went down in the annals of the FBI as the “Terrorism for Dummies” seminar.

  “There is a problem convincing people that there is a threat,” Clarke said. “There is disbelief and resistance. Most people don’t understand. C.E.O.’s of big corporations don’t even know what I’m talking about. They think I’m talking about a fourteen-year-old hacking into their Web sites. I’m talking about people shutting down a city’s electricity, shutting down 911 systems, shutting down telephone networks and transportation systems. You black out a city, people die. Black out lots of cities, lots of people die.” He now envisioned the deaths of hundreds or thousands of Americans at the hands of Islamic terrorists.

  Clarke despaired of the FBI’s ability to defend the nation. He nonetheless trusted Dale Watson, the only constant connection between the FBI and the president’s closest aides. They shared reports on every conceivably credible terrorist threat.

  The warnings became an alarm that rang throughout the days and nights of 1999. One said al-Qaeda had clandestine cells inside the United States. A second said terrorists were going to assassinate the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the director of Central Intelligence. A third said bin Laden was trying to obtain nuclear weapons. They came in a scalding and unceasing stream. No one knew which might be true.

  Freeh decided in April 1999 that the best thing to do was to put Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. The Bureau offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest.

  Throughout the year, America’s counterterrorism chiefs worked with their allies among intelligence services across the world on the extraordinary rendition of suspected members of al-Qaeda and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Elaborate plans to kidnap bin Laden in Afghanistan were disrupted by a military coup in Pakistan. Eighty-seven accused terrorists were secretly detained in places like Albania, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, and the United Arab Emirates. All were sent to prison in Cairo. At the end of November, the Jordanian intelligence service arrested sixteen men and accused them of being al-Qaeda members plotting to attack Americans. They found two American citizens among the suspects, a fact that riveted the FBI and the CIA. Both men had roots in California. One was a computer engineer in Los Angeles who had worked at a charity organization that was starting to look like an al-Qaeda front.

  Then, on December 14, 1999, an alert United States Customs agent in Port Angeles, Washington, stopped a nervous twenty-three-year-old Algerian named Ahmed Ressam who was crossing over from Canada on the last ferry of the evening. He had explosives in his trunk and plans to blow them up at the Los Angeles International Airport. The case galvanized the government into an all-out millennium alert. Watson and the White House counterterrorism group met around the clock. They sought an extraordinary number of FISA wiretaps; Janet Reno authorized at least one warrantless search on her own authority.

  Clarke convened two emergency cabinet meetings. At the second one, on December 22, Louis Freeh made a rare appearance at the White House. Among the group gathered in the subterranean Situation Room were the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The record reflects that Freeh talked about an array of wiretaps and investigations. The FBI was looking at people in Brooklyn who might have known Ahmed Ressam. It was working with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to check out suspects in Montreal. It was running down an uncorroborated report from a foreign intelligence service about threatened attacks in seven American cities. His rambling presentation was the high point of his cooperation with the White House in the 1990s.

  On New Year’s Eve, the leaders of American counterterrorism filled the FBI’s new Strategic Information and Operations Center, a $20 million, forty-thousand-square-foot, thirty-five-room command post at headquarters that served as the bureau’s own situation room. Freeh and Watson stood watch through the night. Three A.M. came on the East Coast as midnight struck in California on New Year’s Day. The counterterrorism chiefs exhaled and had a drink.

  But for the rest of Freeh’s days in office, the FBI suffered a series of wounds, many self-inflicted, that would scar the United States and American intelligence for years. “We had neither the will nor the resources to keep up the alert,” Freeh wrote. “That’s what really worried me: not December 31, 1999, but January 1, 2000, and beyond.”

  “ACTION REQUIRED: NONE”

  On January 15, a twenty-four-year-old Saudi, Khalid al-Mihdhar, caught a United Airlines flight from Bangkok to Los Angeles. The CIA had tracked al-Mihdhar for ten days before the flight. The Agency had identified him as an al-Qaeda member, by tracing the telephone number in Yemen that the FBI had obtained from Nairobi, the phone that served as a global switchboard for jihad.

  He had left Yemen and checked into a hotel in Dubai, where an intelligence officer copied his Saudi passport and its multiple-entry visa to the United States. He had flown to Malaysia and met a chemist known to the CIA. Remarkably, the Agency had photos of the meeting, a conclave of terrorists who had worked from the Mediterranean to the Pacific.

  But the CIA did not tell the FBI that al-Mihdhar had a ticket to Los Angeles. Nor did the CIA report that his traveling companion was a known terrorist named Nawaf al-Hazmi. The internal CIA cable on them was stamped ACTION REQUIRED: NONE.

  Their trail was lost before they cleared the airport immigration desk. The two men settled in San Diego. They used their true names on a rental agreement, their driver’s licenses, and their telephone numbers, listed in public directories. They spent many hours in the company of a gregarious fellow Saudi who was a longtime FBI counterterrorism informant. They soon started taking flying lessons. The informant never notified the FBI.

  Throughout January and February, Richard Clarke worked with Dale Watson and his counterparts on twenty-nine proposals to expand the counterterrorism capabilities of the United States. The White House approved every one and asked Congress for $9 billion to support them. The big ideas for the FBI included setting up joint terrorism task forces at every one of the fifty-six field offices, increasing the number of Arabic-speakers, and reporting on wiretaps in real time instead of leaving thousands of hours of tapes unheard.

  Watson took these ambitions and expanded them into an enormous initiative he called MAXCAP 2005. The FBI was going to become an intelligence service. Every field office would be staffed, trained, and equipped “to prevent and effectively respond to acts of terrorism.” The Bureau would collect, analyze, and report strategic, operational, and tactical intelligence. It would finally get online and create a computer system to connect its agents to the world and one another. Thus armed, the FBI would establish sound relationships with the American intelligence community, foreign spy services, state and local law enforcers, military and technology contractors, the Justice Department, and the White House in the war on terror.

  Watson asked Congress for $381 million in new funds to hire and train roughly 1,900 new counterterrorism agents, analysts, and linguists. He got enough money for 76 people. He presented his strategy to all the FBI’s special agents in charge in the field. Almost all of them thought it was a pipe dream. He went to the Training Division, where three days of the sixteen-week course for new agents were devoted to national security, counter-terrorism, and counterintelligence. It would take time to change the traditional curriculum, the trainers told him.

  In March and April, as the last year of the Clinton administration began to run out, Attorney General Reno ordered Freeh to fulfill his pr
omises on counterterrorism and counterintelligence in a matter of months. “Implement a system to ensure the linkage and sharing of intelligence,” she commanded. “Share it internally and then share it securely with other agencies.” She implored him to “utilize intelligence information currently collected and contained in FBI files,” and to use that knowledge “to identify and protect against emerging national security threats.” Reno said she insisted upon these goals because “I kept finding evidence that we didn’t know we had. And I would talk to somebody, and they’d say, ‘Well, just wait till we get automated.’ ” At a minimum, she wanted some assurance that the FBI knew what it had in its own files.

  The director swallowed his pride and hired IBM’s network operations chief, Bob Dies, to fix the FBI’s computers. The expert took a long look at the state of the Bureau’s technologies. The average American teenager had more computer power than most FBI agents. The field offices worked with the digital infrastructures of the 1970s. They could not perform a Google search or send e-mails outside their offices. “You guys aren’t on life support,” Dies told Freeh. “You’re dead.”

  The Bureau’s information technology systems had to be overhauled. Freeh and Dies convinced Congress to let the FBI spend $380 million over the next three years to create Trilogy: new computers, servers, and software to let agents read documents, analyze evidence, and communicate with one another and the outside world. Five years, ten project directors, and fifteen IT managers later, the Trilogy program had to be reworked, redesigned, and rebuilt, and the software had to be scrapped. Roughly half the money had been wasted.

  As Trilogy was conceived during the spring and summer of 2000, an entire sector of the Bureau began collapsing. Freeh had created a new Investigative Services Division, once known as the Office of Intelligence, to work alongside the Counterterrorism Division at the FBI. It was supposed to be devoted to strategic analysis. An internal audit soon showed that two-thirds of its personnel were unqualified. The new division was rejected and shunned; it worked in isolation and silence. It would last two years before it was disbanded at the nearly unanimous demand of the FBI’s assistant directors.

  The director’s power and authority were fading in Washington and around the world. He was proud of the fact that he had traveled to sixty-eight countries and met, by his account, with more than two thousand foreign leaders in the name of the FBI. But he saw that he was losing face among the world’s security ministers, princes, and secret-police chiefs, a fact that he figured was a consequence of the international ridicule over the president’s sexual peccadilloes.

  On the evening of April 6, 2000, Freeh flew to Pakistan to meet its military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf. That morning, a man had walked into the FBI’s Newark office with a warning of an al-Qaeda plot to hijack a 747. He said he was supposed to meet half a dozen men who were part of the plan, launched in Pakistan, and that a trained pilot was on the hijacking team. Though he took a lie detector test, the FBI was never sure if he was telling the truth. The next day, in a Lahore military cantonment built by the British officers of the Raj, Freeh presented General Musharraf with an ultimatum. He had a warrant for the arrest of Osama bin Laden, and he wanted the general to execute it immediately.

  “Musharraf laughed,” Freeh reported. He refused to help.

  That same week, about five hundred miles to the west in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda’s leaders were videotaping a highly threatening verbal assault on the United States. Bin Laden swore once again to take vengeance for the imprisonment of the Blind Sheikh and the embassy bombers. He wore a Yemeni dagger on his belt. That clue went unseen until the tape was broadcast five months later, when his plans were ripe.

  In those months of silence from the world’s most wanted terrorist, some of the Bureau’s leaders thought the danger was subsiding. “FBI investigation and analysis indicates that the threat of terrorism in the United States is low,” the deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, Terry Turchie, testified to a House national security panel on July 26. He talked about the arrests of fringe groups who had sabotaged veal-processing plants in the name of animal rights, right-wing militiamen who were stockpiling explosives, and a cigarette-smuggling gang that sent money to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Bin Laden went unmentioned.

  The Bureau had opened close to two hundred terrorism cases since the East Africa attacks two years before, the majority aimed at suspected members of al-Qaeda and their allies. Dozens went awry after Justice Department attorneys saw a pattern of mistakes and misrepresentations in the cases. At least one hundred applications for national security wiretaps filed by the FBI with the FISA court were legally defective. The cause, as the FBI’s inspector general later determined, was the Bureau’s continuing inability to grasp the rules of law that governed American intelligence. The judges issued new edicts intended to keep criminal cases against terrorists from being dismissed due to government misconduct.

  Mary Jo White was doing everything in her power to keep those cases alive. She was the United States attorney in Manhattan, and she had worked on secret intelligence investigations with the FBI for two decades. White had overseen all of the nation’s major terrorism prosecutions for seven years, from the Blind Sheikh to the embassy bombings trial. She saw Nairobi as a harbinger.

  She began her remarks in a public speech on September 27, 2000, by noting the previous night’s black-tie gala marking the twentieth anniversary of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, at the Windows on the World restaurant: “The celebration was held, very appropriately, at the World Trade Center.”

  She said it was imperative for the FBI and the Justice Department to preserve the rule of law in the investigations, indictments, and trials of terrorists. “Even the least of these defendants—in terms of role and evidence—is capable of walking out of a courtroom and committing new terrorist acts,” she said. “They would likely do so with enhanced zeal and ruthlessness, and they would enjoy greater status in the terrorist world for having beaten the American system of justice.”

  The United States would have to depend on the work of the FBI, she said. But she feared that nothing might stop the next assault on America. She warned that “we must and we do expect similar attacks in the future.”

  44

  ALL OUR WEAPONS

  A STEADY ROAR OF rage at the FBI reverberated after the shock of the September 11, 2001, attacks. The anger culminated in a debate at the highest levels of the government over dismantling the Bureau and building a new intelligence service in its place.

  “We can’t continue in this country with an intelligence agency with the record the FBI has,” said Thomas Kean, the Republican chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, known as the 9/11 Commission. “You have a record of an agency that’s failed, and it’s failed again and again and again.”

  The collapse of the counterterrorism and counterintelligence divisions of the FBI had been a long time coming. The anguish and frustration of the Bureau’s best agents had grown unbearable during Louis Freeh’s last months in office. Computers and information systems failed. Leadership in Washington failed. Communications between Freeh, two attorneys general, and two presidents failed almost completely. FBI agents who served the cause of national security had fought against their superiors and the system they served. They almost won.

  “Some connected the dots,” said the FBI’s Gabrielle Burger, who worked counterterrorism and counterintelligence for a decade. “Their voices were a whisper.”

  One of those voices belonged to Catherine Kiser, a secret intelligence stalwart who had devoted a quarter of a century of her life to the FBI. She was one of its great successes, and she witnessed two of its greatest disasters. Born in 1950, raised in the Bronx, the daughter of a New York City police officer, she went to work teaching second-graders at a public school, only to be laid off when the city almost went bankrupt in 1975. Wondering what to do with her life, she met a second cousin at a family funeral. He was a feder
al narcotics agent, and he told her that the FBI was hiring women. It took two years, but in 1978, she became the seventy-eighth female special agent in the history of the Bureau.

  Six years into her career, in 1984, after struggles with skeptical and sexist superiors, she started working spy cases. The FBI had been a man’s world—usually men of Irish or Italian heritage schooled by Jesuits and raised in a closed culture of police and priests. Kiser had the background but more foresight; her mind was open. She would become one of the more influential women at the FBI.

  She was among the first FBI agents stationed at the new National Counterintelligence Center at the CIA in 1996. Over the next four years, she led scores of seminars about spying; she was in high demand at the FBI’s Training Academy, where she schooled new agents on the laws governing counterintelligence and counterterrorism.

  Kiser was the sole FBI liaison agent stationed at the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2002. The NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, was the center of America’s electronic-eavesdropping and data-mining powers, tapping into the world’s telephones and computers, circling the earth with spy satellites, and monitoring secret portals at telecommunications companies. Kiser knew the rules when agents wanted national security warrants from the FISA court to spy on foreign enemies. She served as a human switchboard, one of the only people in America who could connect FBI agents with Fort Meade. On her desk sat an array of computers, including her kludge of an FBI laptop, a frail connection to headquarters, and telephones that never seemed to stop ringing.

  After working counterintelligence for sixteen years, she had developed a finely honed sixth sense: suspicion. It served her well one morning in January 2001 when she received a call from FBI headquarters. The man on the phone was a stranger to her.