Finally, the freshly typed letter, sealed in an envelope, appeared at the door and was handed to John Brennan. I didn’t trust Arafat’s typist and kept trying to make eye contact with Brennan to silently signal him to open the letter and read it.
He was as exhausted as I and wasn’t getting my message. So I finally blurted out, “John, open the damn letter and read it!” He did and found it to be what we were expecting, except that my name was misspelled. Arafat wanted to have the letter retyped, shouting at his staff about the error and insisting that the next version include the salutation “My dear beloved Director Tenet.”
That was the last thing I wanted to take back to Washington, especially after we had been whispering sweet nothings on the floor a short while before, so I insisted that we take the letter as it was and head back to our hotel. As we jumped into our vehicles I called Steve Hadley at the NSC to report what we had done and then called Stephanie to let her know that after an arduous eight days, I’d soon be heading home.
En route to Tel Aviv, we also learned that a Greek Orthodox monk had been killed on the West Bank that evening. Sadly, people get killed all the time in the Middle East, but my conspiratorial mind caused me to wonder if this was intended as a message to me.
The next day we hosted a trilateral meeting not far from the Dolphinarium disco itself. Unaware of the excess drama, President Bush called me the next day from Air Force One to offer congratulations. But as so often happened with the Palestinians and Israelis, the political side of the equation didn’t keep pace. A little more than a week later, the whole deal came apart, another roadside ruin on the bumpy path to peace.
I was among the last senior American officials to see Arafat alive, in Ramallah in 2002. He was a disheveled figure by that point, isolated from his people, indeed virtually imprisoned in his headquarters by Israeli tanks. By title, though, he was still the leader of Palestine, so I went over to urge him to reform his security services—put them in a unitary chain of command, appoint a minister in charge, and so on. Again, he didn’t greet me at the door. This time, he didn’t dare. This was a much more somber man, a much sadder occasion. Looking at him, I couldn’t escape the feeling that all this—the tanks, the sandbags—was such a waste. There was so much talent among the Palestinians. There were so many similarities between them and the Israelis. And for a very special moment in time, everybody in government—the Palestinian government, the Israeli one, and our own—trusted CIA enough on security issues that we really might have been able to make a difference.
That time had passed, though. The window had closed. Sad as it was, we were just going through the motions. Arafat, I’m sure, knew it. He would never lead his people to the Promised Land; he couldn’t even walk out the front door. In fact, he was neither Moses nor Ben Gurion.
PART II
CHAPTER 7
Gathering Storm
The attacks of 9/11 so dominate the national consciousness that it can be hard to recall that there was a time, not that long ago, when terrorism in general and the war on terror in particular seemed remote from our lives. For most Americans prior to 9/11, terrorism was something that happened “over there.” Yes, it would periodically leap into the headlines—for example, when the Marine barracks and U.S. embassy in Lebanon were bombed in the early 1980s—but almost as quickly the issue would recede.
For me, terrorism was a dominant theme not just during my seven years as DCI but also during my tenure as Deputy CIA Director before that. I don’t claim any special prescience. But you simply could not sit where I did and read what passed across my desk on a daily basis and be anything other than scared to death about what it portended.
Beneath the surface of the Islamic fundamentalist world, hatred for the West kept building and building for countless reasons. We could see it approaching. We could see those who were trying to harness this mindless animosity and bend it to their own purposes. And we struggled mightily every day to find ways to defuse or deflect the coming explosion.
The struggle didn’t begin with me. Looking for new techniques to force our own bureaucracy to focus on specific looming intelligence threats, in 1996 then DCI John Deutch drew down from the limited funds in our tight intelligence budget and, as an experiment, set up what we called “virtual stations.” The idea was to create stateside units that would act as if they were an overseas operation. They would be housed separately, away from our headquarters compound, and staffed with a small number of people, both analysts and operations officers, who would focus on a single issue.
As it turns out, only one such station was ever established. The issue we selected for our test case was called “Terrorist Financial Links.” The unit kept the acronym TFL for a short while, but before long it morphed into something even more focused.
The then-obscure name “Usama bin Ladin” kept cropping up in the intelligence traffic. Bin Ladin was the only son of the tenth wife of a wealthy Saudi construction magnate. The Agency spotted Bin Ladin’s tracks in the early 1990s in connection with funding other terrorist movements. They didn’t know exactly what this Saudi exile living in Sudan was up to, but they knew it was not good. As early as 1993, two years before I came over to CIA, the Agency had declared Bin Ladin to be a significant financial backer of Islamic terrorist movements. We knew he was funding paramilitary training of Arab religious militants in such far-flung places as Bosnia, Egypt, Kashmir, Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, and Yemen.
UBL, as we came to call him, was just one of many examples of the disturbing trend in terror. Longtime threat Hezbollah, Hamas, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and dozens of other disaffected groups competed with him for attention, but by the middle of the decade, UBL was front and center on the Agency’s radar screen. In March of 1995, for example, Pakistani investigators reported that Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, who had just been captured in Islamabad, had spent a great deal of time in recent years at a Bin Ladin–funded guest house in Peshawar.
Before long, the TFL virtual station became the “Bin Ladin issue station.” It also soon carried the code name “Alec Station.” The unit’s first leader, Mike Scheuer, named it after his son.
The plan from the beginning was that this “virtual station” would run for two years, after which time the experiment would be evaluated and its functions folded into the larger Counterter rorist Center under which it fell. As it turned out, the unit operated for almost a decade.
It was in Afghanistan in the late eighties, during the war to expel the Soviets, that UBL first made contacts with many of the Islamic extremists who would later form the foundation of what was to become al-Qa’ida—Arabic for “the base.” In a media interview in 1988, UBL told of a Soviet mortar shell that had once landed at his feet. When it failed to explode, he said, he knew he had a sign from God that he should battle all foes of Islam. Not long afterward he began using his personal fortune to train and equip militant “Afghan Arabs” for a holy war, or jihad, that would go beyond Afghanistan and eventually reach around the world. (Internet-based conspiracy theorists keep alive the rumor that Bin Ladin had somehow worked for the CIA during the Afghan-Soviet war or had more informal contacts with American officials during that time. Let me state categorically that CIA had no contact with Bin Ladin during the Soviet’s Afghan misadventure.)
UBL returned to Saudi Arabia after the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan in 1989, but the Saudis already had enough trouble with fundamentalist extremists, and Bin Ladin soon ran afoul of his own government despite the prominence of his family. Saudi Arabia’s close cooperation with the United States during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, particularly the fact that American troops were allowed on Saudi soil, fueled Bin Ladin’s hatred of the West and further estranged him from the Saudi rulers. In 1991 the Saudis were thrilled to see him decamp for Sudan.
In Khartoum, UBL found a much warmer reception and began to occupy more and more of our attention. The country’s leader, Hassan al-Turabi, invited
him to help organize resistance to Christian separatists in southern Sudan and to build a network of companies that would later serve as fronts for Bin Ladin’s worldwide terrorist network. Simultaneously UBL was providing financial help for militant organizations around the Middle East as well as setting up outposts where paramilitary training was provided to jihadists from all over the Muslim world.
Initially, we believed Bin Ladin was principally a financier, and in January 1996 we described him as such, but Alec Station was quickly putting together a picture of someone who was more than a Saudi dilettante with deep pockets and a hatred for the West. UBL, we were learning, was an engine of evil.
Unfortunately, the U.S. embassy in Khartoum was shuttered in early 1996 due to a deteriorating security environment and threats to U.S. officials. In retrospect, that was a mistake—we lost a valuable window into the burgeoning terrorist environment there as a result. But if the intelligence gathering got harder, it nonetheless went on.
In Sudan, Bin Ladin opened several businesses in which he employed veterans of the Afghan war against the Soviets. Many of these men would later become al-Qa’ida operatives. The businesses were quite successful and served to multiply Bin Ladin’s already considerable wealth. More worrisome, though, was the increasing evidence that UBL had begun to plan and direct operations himself.
By 1996 we knew that Bin Ladin was more than a financier. An al-Qa’ida defector told us that UBL was the head of a worldwide terrorist organization with a board of directors that would include the likes of Ayman al-Zawahiri and that he wanted to strike the United States on our soil. We learned that al-Qa’ida had attempted to acquire material that could be used to develop chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons capability. He had gone so far as to hire an Egyptian physicist to work on nuclear and chemical projects in Sudan. At al-Qa’ida camps there, his operatives experimented on methods for delivering poisonous gases that could be fired at U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.
The defector also told us that Bin Ladin had sent some of his people to Somalia three years earlier to advise the Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aideed, who at the time was attacking American forces working in support of Operation Restore Hope, a 1992–1993 U.S. humanitarian aid effort to deal with famine and chaos in Somalia. In fact, the Somalia experience played a significant role in Bin Ladin’s perception of the United States. He has said publicly that the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia demonstrated that Americans were soft and that the United States was a paper tiger that could be defeated more easily than the Soviets had been in Afghanistan. (That perception contributed to his surprise five years later, when CIA, operating with U.S. Special Forces, arrived on the ground in Afghanistan so swiftly after 9/11 and, with the help of Afghan surrogates, so effectively destroyed his sanctuary.)
When the United States started putting pressure on the Sudanese to expel Bin Ladin, he became a burden to his hosts. But the question of where he might go was a problem. The Saudis had stripped him of his citizenship in 1994 and certainly didn’t want him coming back to the kingdom. Press reports and the Internet rumor mill continue to contend that the Sudanese had offered to extradite UBL to the United States, but I am unaware of anything to substantiate that.
What we do know for certain is that on May 19, 1996, UBL left Sudan, apparently of his own accord, and relocated to Afghanistan. In many ways this was the worst-case scenario for us. Afghanistan at the time was in the midst of extraordinarily chaotic fighting—even by Afghan standards—that would soon leave the country in the hands of the Taliban, a brutal, backward band of fanatics. Inevitably, UBL was quick to form an alliance with Mullah Omar and the Taliban rulers who had seized control of the country, and arguably, for the first time in history, we had something that was not “state-sponsored terrorism” but rather a state sponsored by a terrorist group.
Very soon, dark warning signs were spilling out of Afghanistan. The British newspaper the Independent published an article in July 1996 quoting UBL as saying that the killing of Americans at Khobar Towers the previous month was the beginning of a war between Muslims and the United States. The next month, August, UBL joined other radical Muslims in promulgating a “fatwa,” or religious edict, announcing a “Declaration of War” and blessing attacks against Western military targets on the Arab Peninsula.
After 9/11 some senior government officials contended that they were surprised at the size and nature of the attacks. Perhaps so, but they shouldn’t have been. We had been warning about the threat at every opportunity. As the red flags multiplied on the horizon in the years before, we tried our best to call attention to them. In 1995 we published a National Intelligence Estimate called “The Foreign Terrorist Threat in the United States.” It warned of the threat from radical Islamists and their enhanced ability “to operate in the United States.” The Estimate judged that the most likely targets of a terrorist attack would be “national symbols such as the White House and the Capitol and symbols of U.S. capitalism such as Wall Street.” The report said that U.S. civil aviation was an especially vulnerable and attractive target.
In 1997 another National Intelligence Estimate, the coordinated judgments of the entire intelligence community, stressed that “Civil aviation remains a particularly attractive target for terrorist attacks.” We know that the message was received. The White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, chaired by Vice President Al Gore, said in its report that “the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence sources have been warning that the threat of terrorism is changing.” The report went on to stress that the danger was “no longer just an overseas threat from foreign terrorists. People and places in the United States have joined the list of targets.”
In open public testimony in February 1997, I told Congress, “Even as our counterterrorism efforts are improving, international groups are expanding their networks, improving their skills and sophistication, and working to stage more spectacular attacks.” In January 1998, at another open hearing, I stressed that “the threat to U.S. interests and citizens worldwide remains high…moreover, there has been a trend toward increasing lethality of attacks, especially against civilian targets…. A confluence of recent developments increases the risk that individuals or groups will attack U.S. interests.”
As if to reemphasize my point, a month later Bin Ladin issued another fatwa, this one stating that all Muslims had the religious duty to “kill Americans and their allies, both civilians and military,” worldwide. UBL followed up that pronouncement with a media interview in which he explained that all Americans were legitimate targets because they paid taxes to the U.S. government.
A PDB briefing prepared for President Clinton on December 4, 1998, was titled, “Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” Between April 1, 2001, and September 11, 2001, as many as 105 daily intelligence summaries were produced by the FAA for airline industry leaders. These reports were based on information received from the intelligence community. Almost half of these mentioned al-Qa’ida, Usama bin Ladin, or both.
Unfortunately, even when our warnings were heard, little was done domestically to protect the United States against the threat. To cite two obvious and tragic failures, only after 9/11 were cockpit doors hardened and passengers forbidden from carrying box cutters aboard U.S. commercial airliners.
In combating terror it was necessary to work closely with foreign allies. None would ultimately have to step up more than the Saudis.
I had many memorable meetings with the Saudis over the years. In the spring of 1998 the Saudis foiled a plot by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri—head of al-Qa’ida operations in the Arabian Peninsula and the mastermind of the attack against the USS Cole—to smuggle four Sagger antitank missiles from Yemen into Saudi Arabia.
Vice President Gore was scheduled to visit Saudi Arabia a week or so after the seizure. We would have expected the Saudis to pass this information to us immediately.
John Brennan, at the time ou
r senior liaison to the Saudis, confronted the Saudi head of intelligence, Prince Turki, about the lapse, but Turki professed ignorance. Brennan suggested I make a quick trip to Saudi Arabia to underscore the importance of sharing such information.
I went to see the crown prince’s brother, the interior minister, Prince Naif, who oversaw the Mabahith, the Saudi internal intelligence service.
My “audience” with him took place in a grand receiving room in one of Naif’s opulent Riyadh palaces, with scores of Saudi officials observing from chairs lining the perimeter of the hall.
Naif opened, as I recall, with an interminable soliloquy recounting the history of the U.S.-Saudi “special” relationship, including how the Saudis would never, ever keep security-related information from their U.S. allies, despite American unwillingness to share important information with Riyadh. After a while, I had had enough.
John McLaughlin and Brennan were by my side. I was struggling to be diplomatic, but they could see the frustration building.
There was a joke around the office calling me “the subliminal man.” It was based on a Saturday Night Live skit in which one of the comedians, Kevin Nealon, would say normal things like “How are you, madam?” and then quickly and quietly mutter something different under his breath, such as “You miserable twit.” The staff knew that when I was being oh so polite, I was probably thinking something else. McLaughlin wrote a note and passed it to Brennan. “The DCI is about to go ‘subliminal.’” He was right.
I scooted my chair forward toward Naif and, without thinking and with no intention of being disrespectful, put my hand on his knee, something you are never supposed to do with royalty.
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA Page 12