The field of expectation had changed, too, and we were perhaps slow to catch up with it. Back in the days when our adversary was the Soviet Union, we were not expected to predict or prevent weapons tests. In almost every case, the only way we ever knew about the location of a new Soviet test site was by detecting a test after the fact. If the intelligence community subsequently could tell policy makers how big a test was, this was considered a success. Now we were expected to predict and prevent tests in non-superpower nations. Adding to the challenge in this instance was the fact that our limited overhead satellite collection capability was stretched thin, in large part because some of it had been diverted from the Indian subcontinent to focus on Iraq and the protection of U.S. airmen patrolling the no-fly zones around Baghdad.
One major conclusion of the Jeremiah report was that both the U.S. intelligence and policy communities had an underlying mind-set that Indian government officials would behave as ours behaved. We did not sufficiently accept that Indian politicians might do what they had openly promised—conduct a nuclear test, as the incoming ruling party had said it would. The lesson learned is that sometimes intentions do not reside in secret—they are out there for all to see and hear. What we believe to be implausible often has nothing to do with how a foreign culture might act. We would learn this in a different way years later with regard to Iraq. We thought it implausible that someone like Saddam would risk the destruction of his regime over noncompliance with UN resolutions. What we did not account for was the mind-set never to show weakness in a very dangerous neighborhood—particularly in regard to a growing Iranian military capability. Relying on secrets by themselves, divorced from deep knowledge of cultural mind-sets and history, will take you only so far.
A year later, my job was at risk again, this time maybe for better reasons. In early May of 1999, on the eve of leaving for London for one of our regular conferences with our British Commonwealth counterparts, my then executive assistant, Michael Morell, called me in the middle of the night. Mike had just been contacted by CIA’s operations center after it had received a call from Gen. Wesley Clark, the commander of U.S. forces in the Balkans. Clark’s question: “Why did the CIA tell me to bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade?” In retrospect I should have fired back a note asking why the “no strike” databases for which General Clark’s command was responsible weren’t up to date as required. If they had been, the tragedy might have been avoided. That doesn’t excuse our mistake, however.
A check of the newswires showed that the Chinese government was indeed saying that its embassy in Belgrade had just been bombed by U.S. aircraft. For a few hours we thought that it was simply a matter of an errant bomb or a missile veering from its intended target. Tragic, but these things happen in war. I was airborne, en route to London, when we started getting word that air force bombers had hit precisely what they were aiming at and that they had indeed used targeting data supplied by CIA. Three people had been killed in the strike, which did substantial damage to the building, and more than twenty were injured. I still had no idea why the targeting data had been so faulty, but because it was obvious this was going to become an international incident, I asked my deputy at the time, Air Force Gen. John Gordon, to get to the bottom of the situation as soon as possible. Unnamed Pentagon officials were already rushing to the phones to absolve their department of any blame, while telling the media that the mistake rested with the Agency’s use of faulty maps. But that was only part of the story.
During the course of the brief air war in the Balkans, CIA had provided intelligence on scores of military-selected targets. Soon, though, the Pentagon started to run out of militarily significant sites to hit and asked the Agency to suggest targets that we wanted to see destroyed. The very first one offered up was what we believed to be the Yugoslav Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement (FDSP), a military warehouse involved in shipping missile parts to rogue nations such as Libya and Iraq. Unfortunately, the warehouse had been mis-plotted on maps not intended for the creation of strike packages. In fact, we had given the Pentagon the coordinates of the Chinese embassy. The warehouse was about three hundred meters away. After the bum information was passed to the Pentagon, several fail-safe mechanisms collapsed at their end. The military was supposed to keep up-to-date “no strike” databases that warned aircraft away from hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, and places like embassies. But that database had been neglected.
One of our officers, not involved in nominating targets, happened to notice in passing the warehouse plotting and raised questions about it. He remembered seeing information a few years earlier that the supply building was located a block away from the location identified. Showing great initiative, this officer telephoned the Department of Defense Task Force in Naples three days before the bombing to say that he thought the FDSP headquarters building was a block away from the identified location. Nonetheless, on May 7, the officer found to his surprise that the building was on the target list for bombing that night; he again phoned Naples. The aircraft was already en route to the target. Later, military officials in Europe would say that they believed the CIA officer was trying to convey that while the building might not be the supply headquarters, it was still a legitimate target. Recollections differ of exactly what was said, but the one certainty is that no one up or down the line knew that the facility in question was the Chinese embassy.
Not long after my plane touched down in the United Kingdom on the day after the bombing, I got a phone call from President Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger. “You better get back here right away,” Sandy said. “I’m trying to save your job.” With that, I turned around and headed home to face the music. As I soon found out, the “bad map” story was already the butt of many jokes on late-night television and in editorial cartoons. We found no humor in it since three Chinese intelligence officers had died as a result of our and the Pentagon’s combined mistake.
Inevitably, great pressure was being brought to bear on the White House for heads to roll over the issue, and mine seemed a likely candidate. If someone was going to plead my case, I was glad to have Sandy Berger doing it. I had worked closely with Sandy at the NSC before becoming deputy director. Sandy had one overriding concern always: to protect the president. An embarrassing screwup like this one—one based on a lack of focus and inattention to detail—was exactly the kind of thing he hated to see. But the two of us also spoke the same language. Sandy was very direct; he would have fit in well in the Queens neighborhood where I grew up. Most important, you always knew where you stood with Sandy. If he was hopping mad at you, you were going to hear it directly from him, not learn about it through blind quotes in some newspaper column.
When I got to the White House on my return from London, Sandy was true to form. He let me know directly just how displeased he was with CIA’s performance on the embassy targeting, but he saved my job. To my relief, President Clinton rejected the calls for me to be held personally accountable for the incident.
Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre and I were hauled before Congress to try to explain how such an egregious error could have occurred. Hamre was candid and faced up to his share of the responsibility. The general view from the Pentagon, however, was that “stuff” happens in war, and they weren’t going to hold anyone in DOD responsible for their share of the blame.
Nearly a year after the bombing incident, our CIA Accountability Board determined that several Agency officers involved in identifying the proposed bombing target had failed to take necessary and prudent steps to ensure that the appropriate site was struck. Several people received written or oral reprimands. One retired military officer who was working for the Agency as a contractor, the person most responsible for the misplaced targeting, had his contract terminated and was essentially fired. I supported the dismissal, but I regret it today. Yes, his performance was flawed, but there were others up the chain of command who should have borne more responsibility, and the complete absence of accountab
ility from the Pentagon for its part in the incident meant that this man was the single recipient of censure. That wasn’t right, and unfortunately, it wasn’t the last time on my watch that CIA would take sole responsibility for errors in which other agencies shared the blame.
The Accountability Board wasn’t the last that we would hear about the incident. In the days just before the war in Iraq started, in March of 2003, one of my senior officers from the Directorate of Operations came up to me with a smile and said, “Hey, boss, you aren’t going to believe this. We just got an urgent backchannel message from the Chinese intelligence service.” He paused for effect, having gotten my attention.
“So, what did they say?” I asked.
“They sent us the geographic coordinates for their embassy in Baghdad and said they hoped it was accurately listed in all the Pentagon’s databases.”
The Chinese embassy bombing was not my worst day as DCI before 9/11. That sad distinction goes to April 20, 2001. I was working late that Friday evening when reports started dribbling in about an incident that had happened earlier that day in a remote region of Peru. We had been involved there in a highly classified program helping the Peruvian air force interdict flights suspected of carrying illicit drugs bound for the United States. The “Airbridge Denial Program,” as it was known, used civilian aircraft under contract to CIA to pass on actionable intelligence to the Peruvians. Americans weren’t firing on suspected drug planes; Peruvians were.
As far as I was concerned, this was an important mission and a good example of just how widely our resources were spread across the globe. In the mid-nineties the United States had detected more than 400 narcotics flights leaving Peru annually carrying an estimated 310 metric tons of semi-refined cocaine. Over the previous five years, we had put a big dent in that. With our help, the Peruvians had forced down or shot down thirty-eight suspected drug flights and had probably discouraged many more. On this day, though, the program went horribly wrong.
James Bowers and his wife, Veronica, were evangelical Baptists who had been carrying out missionary work in the Peruvian Amazon region for several years. They worked to bring educational, medical, and other assistance to a remote area—truly “God’s work.” The Bowers had recently adopted a baby girl in the United States, whom they had named Charity. They needed a residence visa from the Peruvian government for the baby to remain in Peru. Kevin Donaldson, a fellow member of their missionary group, agreed to fly them in a single-engine floatplane to Islandia, a Peruvian town near the tri-border area of Peru, Colombia, and Brazil. From there, the Bowers family traveled to a nearby town, where the necessary paperwork could be completed.
On the return flight, the missionaries’ floatplane flew a course following the Amazon River, and in keeping with local practice, the pilot tried to remain within sight of the waterway in case he needed to make an emergency landing. The problem was that their flight path also made them appear to be “an aircraft of interest” to the U.S. and Peruvian planes looking for drug traffickers, although the aircraft took no evasive action. After finding no flight plan on file for the aircraft, observers upgraded the small floatplane to “suspect” status. From there, the tragedy built upon itself. The Peruvian aircrew didn’t follow agreed-upon procedures. The Americans lacked adequate Spanish skills to communicate with their counterparts. When the private aircraft did not respond to radio calls, a Peruvian fighter fired on it. Veronica Bowers, thirty-five, and seven-month-old Charity were killed in the incident.
We quickly obtained audio recordings of the cockpit-to-cockpit communications (and miscommunications) and subsequently got some video of the downed floatplane’s surviving passengers trying to save themselves in the Amazon. The sounds and images of the incident haunt me to this day. On the audio recording you could hear the contract Agency aircrew question their Peruvian counterparts before the jet opened fire. The American crew working under contract for CIA kept asking their counterparts if they were “sure” that those in the plane in question were “bad guys” or “banditos.” They tried to restrain the Peruvians, with no effect. It was clear, from listening to the tapes, that Americans and Peruvians were talking past one another, unable to understand what they were hearing. Toward the end of the tape, pilot Kevin Donaldson can be heard screaming, “They’re killing us, they’re killing us!” In broken Spanish, the Agency contractor aircrew shouted for the Peruvians to stop. “No mas, no mas!” But it was too late for Veronica and her baby. I’ll never forget the end of the tape, with the Agency aircrew simply sighing and saying, “God!”
CHAPTER 4
Waging Peace
CIA Director George J. Tenet told President Clinton last month that he would find it difficult to remain as director were convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Jay Pollard released as part of a Middle East peace agreement, according to sources.
—Washington Post, November 11, 1998
Difficult” is the wrong word. “Impossible” is closer, but even that doesn’t do the situation justice. Here is what happened in mid-October 1998 at the Wye Plantation Conference Center, a beautiful 1,100-acre estate along the Wye River, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The story itself, though, begins three years earlier, with a brutal murder.
The November 1995 assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin—by an Israeli opposed to the peace process, less than two years after Rabin had shared the Nobel Peace Prize with his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, and Yasser Arafat—had a profound effect not only on Rabin’s countrymen but on the Palestinians. The Israelis were accustomed to Palestinians cheering on the rooftops whenever disaster struck across the border. Not this time. Rabin’s murder sparked an outpouring of genuine emotion among the Palestinians, and with it, the entire Israeli perception of their neighbors began to change. Peres had been handed Rabin’s job, his legacy, and his momentum, and for a few months, peace seemed not just conceivable between the Israelis and the Palestinians but genuinely possible.
Then, beginning in late February 1996, came a wave of suicide bombings—four in nine days that left more than sixty dead—engineered by the militant Islamic group Hamas. Arafat, who had been elected to the presidency of the Palestinian Authority that January, reacted with surprising speed, arresting scores of militants, including the man suspected of recruiting the suicide bombers, and raiding more than two dozen Islamic organizations and institutions thought to lend financial and other support to Hamas.
To us at CIA, it was evident that Arafat had been surprised by the violence. Hamas was stronger than he realized, strong enough to threaten his power. The bombings had done more than derail the peace process—that was an old story in the Middle East. This time they had called into question the whole structure of the process and the premises on which it was built.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of Middle East peace. The issue transcends humanitarian concerns to stop the violence and suffering. And it is even more important than the desire to eliminate a root cause for much of the global terrorism that plagues our world. The best hopes and the worst fears of the planet are invested in that relatively small patch of earth.
In March 1996, desperate to restart negotiations, a high-level U.S. delegation flew out to the Middle East to meet with leaders there. Aboard were Bill Clinton, still finishing up his first term in office and with a reelection campaign in the offing; Dennis Ross, Clinton’s special envoy to the region, with ambassadorial status; my then boss, John Deutch; and others. In flight, Dennis would later tell me, Clinton asked a very simple question: What do we have to do to save this? And out of that was born the Summit of the Peacemakers, held that spring at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. The idea of the summit was to demonstrate unmistakably to the Israelis what had been so evident before Hamas went on its killing spree—that they were not alone. The Palestinians were threatened by the same things Israelis were; they, too, condemned these kinds of violent acts.
Clinton and the others didn’t stop there. On that same flight, a
second realization was born: that without simultaneous progress on security issues, the political process alone was never going to bring peace to the Middle East. Every deal in the world could be struck with all the goodwill imaginable, but unless the Palestinian and Israeli security forces were in constant communication and working to achieve mutually beneficial goals, Hamas, or some similar group, would always be able to destroy what the politicians had created. The Israelis wanted to know that terrorists would not be given safe harbor by the Palestinians. The Palestinians, in return, wanted to know that their people would not be crushed by an oppressive Israeli security apparatus.
Clinton and Ross agreed on the principle but said that someone would have to be in charge of making the security arrangements, and Deutch apparently said, “I know just the guy for the job.” It turns out that I was the guy. Security was the key. You can talk about sovereignty, borders, elections, territory, and the rest all day long, but unless the two sides feel safe, then nothing else matters.
To be honest, I wasn’t enamored of suddenly finding myself in the middle of all this. At one level, it was a natural fit. CIA already had significant ties to the security forces in both Palestine and Israel, and we had aided and abetted plenty of negotiations. But our job in those instances was to provide behind-the-scenes input and insight to the actual negotiators, not to sit at the table ourselves. This new plan called for taking on a quasi-diplomatic role in what was largely a political process, and initially that struck me as inappropriate for someone in my position.
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA Page 7