The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  He raised the Saudi issue repeatedly with Andy Card. “I used to go over to see Andy, and I met with Rumsfeld three or four times, mainly to say, ‘What are you guys doing? This stonewalling is so counterproductive.’ ”

  Of the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Lehman said, “Everybody knows that they’ve got a pact with the devil.” The Saudi royal family held on to power through its alliance with leaders of the extremist, anti-Western Wahhabi branch of Islam, and for years, Wahhabi imams had been “telling Saudis that it’s their duty to go and kill Americans,” Lehman said.

  So was it surprising, he wondered, if a low-level Saudi diplomat and others connected to the Saudi government had agreed to help out two men tied to al-Qaeda after they landed in California? Lehman was not necessarily alleging that Saudi officials, either in Riyadh or San Diego, knew the details of the 9/11 plot. But he believed they did know that Hazmi and Mihdhar were “bad guys” who intended to harm the United States. “The bad guys knew who to go to to get help,” he said.

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  K STREET OFFICES OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION

  Washington, D.C.

  DECEMBER 11, 2003

  Mike Scheuer wanted to be under oath. So many people were lying, were spinning—even former colleagues at the CIA, the institution he loved no matter how often and enthusiastically it had tried to humiliate him. He did not want there to be any question about his truthfulness. So bring out a Bible and swear me in, send me to jail if I’m lying, he challenged them.

  Scheuer made the request to be sworn in almost as soon as he took a seat in the conference room in the commission’s K Street offices on Thursday, December 11. It would be the first of three long, private interviews with the commission. He sat across the table from Alexis Albion, the commission’s investigator who had spent weeks reviewing Scheuer’s files at the CIA. Scheuer had been the first director of the agency’s Osama bin Laden unit—“Alec Station,” it was called—after it was created in 1996.

  “I’d prefer to testify under oath,” he explained to Albion and the others, tugging at thick glasses that gave him the look of a bookish scholar—albeit a scholar, they all knew, whose mission was to kill the person who was the focus of all his research. “I’m not going to tell you anything I can’t document.”

  In case his memory failed him, Scheuer had brought documents, too. He clutched a loose-leaf notebook with about five hundred pages of the most important e-mails, cables, and memos from his years in the search for bin Laden.

  He tried to hand over the notebook to Philip Zelikow, who was at the session; but Zelikow declined, saying it needed to pass through the CIA’s declassification process before it could be accepted by the commission.

  “All right, sir,” said Scheuer, whose father was a marine and who spoke with an almost rigid politeness, full of “sirs” and “ma’ams.”

  Albion and the others were surprised by Scheuer’s request to be sworn in. Zelikow had asked to be sworn in for his awkward interview several weeks earlier. Other than Zelikow, no other witness during the investigation had requested an oath—no surprise, since it opened a witness to a possible perjury charge. Scheuer did not realize it, but with or without an oath, he had had plenty of credibility with Albion and the others long before he walked through the doors on K Street.

  Among some of the commission’s staffers, Scheuer had a nickname: “the Prophet.” More than anybody else in the CIA, and much earlier, Michael Scheuer had understood the danger that Osama bin Laden posed to the United States. For four of his twenty-two years at the CIA, until he was ousted from the bin Laden unit and banished to a small cubicle in the agency’s library in 1999, he had done little but think of ways to capture or, preferably, kill bin Laden.

  George Tenet could point to the creation of the unit in 1996 as early evidence of the CIA’s commitment to dealing with the threat of bin Laden. It was a “virtual station,” which meant it functioned like an overseas CIA post, with a specific foreign target, but was physically located inside the United States. In part to inspire out-of-the-box thinking, its offices were away from the agency’s headquarters in Langley. They were put in a nearby office complex in northern Virginia, close to the sprawling Tysons Corner shopping center. Scheuer liked the location. “It was a good idea because it kept us away from the crap” back at Langley, he said.

  Within a year, the unit had determined that bin Laden was much more than a terrorist financier; he was organizing military-style terrorist attacks against the Untied States and its allies.

  “By 1997, we had more information on al-Qaeda than we had on terrorist groups we had been collecting against for twenty years,” he said. “And it’s not because we were great at it. We did some very good operations, but we had a couple of walk-ins that were just golden, because they not only corroborated what we had collected, they added to it.”

  He was referring, specifically, to the most important of the “walk-in” al-Qaeda defectors—Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a Sudanese-born Arab who had been a trusted lieutenant of bin Laden’s in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital. Bin Laden had lived in Sudan from 1991 to 1996. Fadl defected to the United States in late 1996 with a wealth of information about al-Qaeda, its organization and its plans.

  If Scheuer had a message for the 9/11 commission in his interviews, it was this: He believed the CIA had done an extraordinary job tracking bin Laden since the mid-1990s, and there had been real, if missed, opportunities to capture or kill him during the Clinton administration. What had been lacking for so many years was the bravery, both at the White House and within the CIA, needed to get bin Laden, said Scheuer.

  “I think what’s going to come out eventually is that there’s never been a lack of intelligence,” he said. “The intelligence has been good on this issue.”

  The CIA’s files were full of evidence of Scheuer’s personal obsession with al-Qaeda. The sign-in sheets from Alec Station showed he often entered his offices at 4:30 in the morning and left long after his children—including his son, Alec, whose name was given to the unit—had gone to bed.

  Scheuer explained that he first came to realize that bin Laden was a “truly dangerous, dangerous man” after reading his fatwa—his declaration of war—against the United States in August 1996. The fatwa condemned the Saudi royal family for having allowed American troops to be stationed in the kingdom, home to Islam’s holiest sites, and called for a Muslim war to drive out the Americans.

  Scheuer remembered very clearly sitting at his desk at Alec Station one morning in September 1996, reading through the twelve-page translation of the fatwa and thinking, My God, it sounds like Thomas Jefferson. This was not a “rant” by some crazed religious fanatic. Instead, the fatwa read like “our Declaration of Independence—it had that tone. It was a frighteningly reasoned argument.” It contained none of the usual Islamic extremist rhetoric about the dangers of “women in the workplace or X-rated movies.”

  Instead, it was a clear statement of how a generation of Muslims was outraged at the Western exploitation of Arab oil, at American support for Israel, and, most important, at the presence of infidel American troops in the land of the prophet Muhammad. “There was no ranting in it,” Scheuer said of the fatwa. “These were substantive, tangible issues.”

  Early on, it was tough for Scheuer and his colleagues to convince senior officials in the Clinton administration that bin Laden posed a threat that was worth much of their time. “They could not believe that this tall Saudi with a beard, squatting around a campfire, could be a threat to the United States of America,” Scheuer recalled.

  It was a tough argument to make even among some of his superiors at the CIA. In December 1996, Alec Station prepared a fifty-paragraph memo, based on information from Fadl, about bin Laden’s efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, including a nuclear device. Fadl described in alarming detail how bin Laden had sought out scientists and engineers to help him obtain enriched uranium and then convert it into a weapon.

  Scheuer sent the memo to Langley
, urging that it be distributed widely throughout the agency. Terrorists with nuclear weapons? It was too terrifying to contemplate. “We’d never seen anything like this,” Scheuer said.

  But his superiors at CIA headquarters refused, saying the report was alarmist and wouldn’t be taken seriously; they agreed to circulate only two paragraphs from the report and only if they were buried in a larger memo. “They thought it was impossible for a terrorist group to have weapons of mass destruction,” Scheuer said. It took almost a year for Alec Station to have the full report distributed within the agency. After 9/11, Fadl’s information about bin Laden’s nuclear plans was confirmed by documents seized from al-Qaeda’s former hideouts in Afghanistan.

  But if the files of Alec Station were a tribute to Scheuer’s commitment to the mission, Albion and the others knew that they were also evidence of failure. It may have been an impossible job to begin with, but Scheuer had failed to convince his superiors at the CIA and further up the chain of command—at the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House—of the bin Laden threat.

  Scheuer’s passion may have been part of the problem. His father was a marine, he was educated by Jesuits, and it showed. He was committed to his mission to the point of what some of his colleagues saw as zealotry. It could be offputting. His eyes almost glowed with passion; it had made many of his colleagues at the CIA uncomfortable.

  They caustically dismissed Scheuer and his team of about twenty analysts, most of them women, as the “Manson family,” a description that infuriated Scheuer, who knew how much his colleagues, especially the women, had sacrificed for their work. “We had marriages break up, we had people who delayed operations they needed,” he said. “People were working sixteen, seventeen hours a day, some of them seven days a week for years.”

  Scheuer explained to Albion and the others that he was eager to cooperate with the investigation because he expected the commission to demand accountability of government officials who had failed to do their jobs before 9/11, who had ignored the clear warnings of catastrophe. Alec Station had done its work. Others had not.

  “You need to look to see what people did or did not do to protect America,’’ he said, looking at Albion for some recognition that she agreed with him. He wanted these people fired, maybe prosecuted.

  “I am big on personal accountability. I’m not sure we could have stopped this attack, but I know for a fact that we didn’t do everything we could. I do think that if we had killed bin Laden in the desert, this never would have happened,” he said of 9/11. “If you find something wrong that I did, then tell me, accuse me or fire me, but I’m not the only guy around who deserves that kind of scrutiny.”

  At the top of the list of culprits, he said, was Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism czar. Scheuer insisted that Clarke had repeatedly foiled the CIA’s plans during the Clinton administration to kill bin Laden and his henchmen in their sanctuary in Afghanistan.

  He believed Clinton himself had been eager to kill bin Laden. Scheuer disdained Bill Clinton for his personal conduct—“the nightmare of the kind of guy you don’t want your daughter to bring home’’—but he admired Clinton’s cold-bloodedness on the question of al-Qaeda. Scheuer was certain that Clinton would have been overjoyed if someone had brought the news that bits and pieces of bin Laden’s flesh had been found strewn across the desert after a missile attack. “Clinton was ruthless, and that was fine by me,” Scheuer said.

  But the man who filtered the information that had gone to the Oval Office, Clarke, had suppressed it, or so Scheuer believed.

  “Clarke scared people at the upper levels of the agency,” Scheuer said, describing how Clarke would try to intimidate CIA officials who brought plans to the White House for missile attacks on bin Laden and his compound. Clarke, he said, would sneer at them as thinly veiled and possibly illegal assassination plans.

  To Scheuer, Clarke “talked a big game” about killing bin Laden, but he would not take the risk of supporting a plan to carry it out that might fail and tarnish Clarke’s golden career.

  Scheuer had believed that several of the capture plans developed by his unit would have worked if someone had shown the guts to act on them.

  The best of the plans, which Scheuer described as “the perfect operation,” was drawn up in 1997 and 1998 and called for Afghanistan tribal leaders working with the CIA to snatch or kill bin Laden in a nighttime raid on Tarnak Farms, his training camp near Kandahar. If bin Laden had been captured, the plan was for the tribes to turn him over—days or weeks later—to the United States. Through satellite surveillance and other intelligence sources, the CIA had managed to map out Tarnak Farms; Scheuer and his colleagues had a good idea where bin Laden and his wives slept at night in the camp. The operation was reviewed by the Pentagon, which found the plan remarkably well crafted. Scheuer said that one of the CIA top field officers working in Afghanistan gave the plan a 50 percent chance of success—about as good as it gets for a covert operation. And it was remarkable in its “plausible deniability” for the United States.

  “It was the perfect capture operation because even if it went completely wrong and people got killed, there was no evidence of a U.S. hand,” Scheuer said.

  But for reasons that Scheuer did not understand at the time, the operation was called off and eventually abandoned. He had been convinced that it was Clarke’s doing. “The reason we didn’t go after him had nothing to do with whether the operation would work; it had much more to do with the agency being frightened by Clarke,” he said. (To his dismay, Scheuer learned later from the commission that it was someone else, not Clarke, who called off the mission.)

  There was another clear shot at bin Laden in February 1999. That month, bin Laden was located in the southern deserts of Afghanistan as he paid nightly visits to royal visitors from the United Arab Emirates, a Persian Gulf nation that was supposed to be a close ally of the United States. The UAE entourage was in Afghanistan to hunt a prized migratory bird known as the bustard. This was no ordinary “Huck and Tom” hunting party, Scheuer said. It was led by a prince who had traveled to Afghanistan aboard a C-130 cargo plane that was part of the UAE royal family’s fleet. The hunting party had “huge fancy tents, with tractor trailers with generators on them to run the air-conditioning.”

  “And so once the camp was up and running, we established over the course of a week the pattern of bin Laden’s visits—he would come for evening prayers or he would come for dinner and stay for evening prayers,” Scheuer said.

  But even though Scheuer believed the CIA had another clear shot at bin Laden and urged a quick missile attack—“the collateral damage was basically just a prince and his entourage”—the missiles were never launched. The commission would later determine that the idea was considered but abandoned because the White House (Scheuer assumed again it was Clarke) worried that the prince’s death would destroy American relations with the UAE and damage its ties elsewhere in the Persian Gulf. In hindsight, that was not an unreasonable fear.

  Like others, Clarke saw Scheuer as “dysfunctional” and a “tantrum thrower” whose difficult personality undermined his effectiveness. There was no little irony that the two men in the federal government who best understood the al-Qaeda threat hated each other.

  “Fine that you came to the same conclusion that we all came to, fine that you’re all worked up about it, and you’re having difficulty getting your agency, the rest of your agency, to fall in line, but not fine that you’re so dysfunctional within your agency that you’re making it harder to get something done,” Clarke said of Scheuer in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine.

  Scheuer had no way of knowing it as he spoke to the 9/11 commission, but the truth about the decision to call off his plans to kill bin Laden was much more complicated than he knew.

  Scheuer thought that George Tenet—his boss and, he believed, friend—had supported the capture-or-kill plans. He thought Tenet had been their strongest champion when he got in front of Clinton.
In fact, as Scheuer later understood it, Tenet had “betrayed” him. The commission was learning that it was Tenet who, more than anyone else, had canceled some of Scheuer’s daring plans. Not Clarke.

  It was a startling discovery for Scheuer, who had always thought of Tenet as a patron in his years at the agency. “He’s the hardest man in the world to dislike,” Scheuer said. “I remember the day my dad died, and he came down to my office to offer his condolences. He just came in and sat down and said, ‘I’m sorry to hear about your father. If you want to take the day off, go ahead and do it.’ ”

  But Scheuer later came to see that Tenet had been a disaster as director of central intelligence. He believed that Tenet had genuinely understood the al-Qaeda danger but, like Clarke, was never brave enough to stake his reputation on a plan to kill bin Laden. Tenet would not take the risk that the operation would go badly and he would be left to explain what had gone wrong. Tenet would not fight. Fighting meant that he would make enemies, and George Tenet never wanted to make an enemy.

  “You didn’t hear one bad thing about Tenet from anybody,” Scheuer said. “And if there’s a definition of a bad DCI, that’s it.”

  Scheuer was outraged that so many good opportunities to capture or kill bin Laden had been missed, and his frustration boiled over later in 1999. He committed what amounted to professional suicide: He went outside his usual chain of command and sent an e-mail directly to Tenet and most of Tenet’s deputies on the seventh floor at CIA headquarters that listed the ten things that needed to change at the CIA if it was ever to succeed in ending the threat from al-Qaeda.

  Within days, Scheuer found himself called into the offices of Tenet’s deputy, Jack Downing, and fired from Alec Station. Downing, he said, made no reference to the e-mail, but it was clearly responsible for what was happening. Scheuer’s e-mail was seen as outrageous insubordination.