At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA

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At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA Page 13

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow


  I said, “Your Royal Highness, what do you think it will look like if someday I have to tell the Washington Post that you held out data that might have helped us track down al-Qa’ida murderers, perhaps even plotters who want to assassinate our vice president?”

  I don’t remember the response of the crowd in general, although Brennan tells me that you could practically feel the air being sucked out of the room as the Saudis simultaneously gasped for breath at the sight of my touching such a powerful royal patella, but I do remember Naif’s reaction—what looked to be a prolonged state of shock, with his eyes continuously shifting back and forth between my face and my hand on his knee.

  I let him go at last, but I assured him that I would be back the next week, and every week after that if necessary, to ensure that the flow of terrorism-related information between U.S. and Saudi officials was timely and unencumbered.

  Crown Prince Abdullah was decisive in breaking the log jam. Within a week of my visit, Brennan was given a comprehensive written report on the entire Sagger missile episode.

  During the latter part of 1998, I was aggressively seeking additional resources from our government to fight terrorism. Twice, on November 5, 1998, and October 15, 1999, I wrote personal letters to President Clinton seeking a major increase in our funding. For the most part I succeeded in annoying the administration for which I worked but did not loosen any significant purse strings. In the aftermath of 9/11, politicians from both parties claimed heroism after the fact, saying they had encouraged the DCI to spend more money on terrorism. No, they didn’t—at least not in any consistent or coherent way. Neither they nor the 9/11 Commission ever understood that you do not simply snap your fingers and throw resources at one problem while your overall capabilities are in such bad shape.

  You can’t toss spies at al-Qa’ida when you don’t have them, especially when you lack the recruiting and training infrastructure to get them and grow them. You don’t simply tell NSA to give you more signals intelligence when their capabilities are crumbling and they are “going deaf”—unable to monitor critical voice communications. Nor could you ignore the need to replace costly, aging imagery satellites without which the country would lose much of its reconnaissance capability, essentially “going blind.”

  The fact is that by the mid-to late 1990s American intelligence was in Chapter 11, and neither Congress nor the executive branch did much about it. Their attitude was that we could surge ahead when necessary to deal with challenges like terrorism. They provided neither the sustained funding required to deal with terrorism nor the resources needed to enable the recovery of U.S. intelligence with the speed required. Nevertheless, while having to do more with less, we made a conscious decision to invest in future capabilities—not to go deaf, dumb, or blind—that allowed us to stay steps ahead of our adversaries. When money flowed to us after 9/11, we were ready to accelerate our efforts. While our budget declined by 10 percent over the decade, we quadrupled the resources devoted to counterterrorism while investments in other national priorities either remained flat or declined. We did this for the most part by robbing Peter to pay Paul. Still, we never had enough people.

  While we were trying to restore our capabilities, the world did not stand still. Nobody relieved us of the burdens of dealing with two wars in the Balkans, tensions in South Asia, China’s military buildup, the threat to Taiwan, or the threats posed by North Korea, Iran, or Iraq. The strain was enormous.

  The challenge was not just resources but attitude. The policy of the U.S. government at the time was to treat terrorism as a law-enforcement problem. The Justice Department devoted considerable effort to gathering evidence that could be used in court to bring Islamic militants to trial on charges of conspiracy to commit murder if—and it was a big if—we could even capture them. At the Agency, we believed that the terrorists sitting around campfires in Afghanistan were probably not losing much sleep over the doings of some U.S. district court—unless, that is, they were planning how to bomb the courthouse itself.

  Case in point: Bin Ladin was indicted in June 1998 on charges of plotting to murder U.S. soldiers in Yemen six years earlier. Five months later, he was indicted again, this time in the East African embassy bombings. I can’t imagine this fazed him in the least since he was living comfortably in his Afghan sanctuary.

  Beyond legal action, there are two other tracks that a country can follow to go after a threat like Bin Ladin. It can attempt to use overt military force or the clandestine capabilities of its intelligence services in a “covert action.” The Clinton administration tried both methods. The requirements to make each of these methods successful and the rules under which they are conducted are very different.

  If we had been able to provide timely and reliable information about where UBL was at a given moment, and precisely where he was going to be a number of hours hence, while simultaneously assuring policy makers that an attack could be conducted without endangering many innocent women and children, the administration would have ordered the use of military force.

  Although there were a number of opportunities, we could never get over the critical hurdle of being able to corroborate Bin Ladin’s whereabouts, beyond the single thread of data provided by Afghan tribal sources. Policy makers wanted more. I understood their dilemma. As much as we all wanted Bin Ladin dead, the use of force by a superpower requires information, discipline, and time. We rarely had the information in sufficient quantities or the time to evaluate and act on it.

  The use of covert action is quite different from the use of overt military power. Almost all of the “authorities” President Clinton provided to us with regard to Bin Ladin were predicated on the planning of a capture operation. It was understood that in the context of such an operation, Bin Ladin would resist and might be killed in the ensuing battle. But the context was almost always to attempt to capture him first. This was the way people up and down the CIA chain of command understood the president’s orders. My own understanding of that constraint was deepened in a meeting I had with Attorney General Janet Reno. She made it clear to me and to Geoff O’Connell, the then head of CTC, that she would view an attempt simply to kill Bin Ladin as illegal. Legal guidance by the attorney general matters.

  The review of covert-action proposals was very carefully handled. Each time these authorities were updated they showed a deep concern for proportionality and the minimization of loss of life. There was even greater sensitivity shown when the use of surrogates to carry out our will was contemplated.

  After 9/11, some policy makers asked rhetorically why I wouldn’t have wanted to kill Usama bin Ladin with covert action when I had tried to do so with cruise missiles. This was a completely misleading argument. Our country has appropriately always viewed the secret activities of CIA far differently from the overt use of military force. Despite what they might have said subsequently, everyone understood the differences at the time. Almost every authority granted to CIA prior to 9/11 made it clear that just going out and assassinating UBL would not have been permissible or acceptable.

  In the aftermath of 9/11, everyone has become fixated on the word “kill,” as if anything but the most vigorous pursuit of the term prior to 9/11 represented some form of risk aversion. It is easy to adopt such a stance after a tragedy like 9/11, but it was simply not the legal or political reality that we operated under prior to that day.

  From my perspective, this is a largely pointless debate. Policy makers can sign some covert authorities and lull themselves into thinking that they have done their jobs. But in the absence of hard intelligence—in this case regarding Bin Ladin and the al-Qa’ida leadership structure operating inside Afghanistan—covert action is a fool’s game, an illusory silver bullet. With numerous fleeting opportunities to act militarily, and additional authorities being provided, I came to understand that we were putting the cart before the horse. While in the aftermath of 9/11 some would reflect on this period and say that CIA was either risk averse or incompetent to execute th
e authorities provided by the president, I understood something else: we had to increase our odds by engaging in old-fashioned espionage inside the Afghan sanctuary. We needed more intelligence, not just about Bin Ladin but about his entire leadership structure inside Afghanistan. That is precisely what we would set out to do. There is one other thing I learned: Ultimately, no matter how hard we worked inside Afghanistan, real increases in the quality of the data acquired there would ultimately occur only when we finally disrupted al-Qa’ida’s environment through direct action, forcing them up out of their comfort zone, putting them on the run, and causing them to make mistakes. Action begets intelligence. As one Special Operations commander told the 9/11 Commission, “You give me the action and I will give you the intelligence.”

  Over time, the covert-action authorities granted to us by the Clinton administration were modified—for example, to give us the ability to work with groups such as the Northern Alliance to collect intelligence, but not to use the Alliance to take lethal action against Bin Ladin and al-Qa’ida.

  We could press ahead on collecting information about Bin Ladin and other terrorists. We could work with foreign intelligence services to disrupt their efforts and throw them off their stride, in the same way a beat cop might keep vagrants moving along. Our Counterterrorism Center worked hard to develop better human sources in Afghanistan so that we would have improved windows into what UBL was planning and where he was. But we were not in the freelance assassination business—that’s for the movies, not the complicated real world that CIA operates in.

  There were a number of opportunities to use military action against Bin Ladin, but these opportunities were fleeting, and tough decisions would have to have been made in narrow windows of time. My job was to assess objectively whether the data we had, often only from a single source, could ever get policy makers above a 50 or 60 percent confidence level so they could launch cruise missiles in the next thirty minutes. It never did.

  Was this good enough for them? It was not. It was understandable, in the aftermath of 9/11, when everyone’s risk calculus had changed, that people became more aggressive with regard to taking action. I know my officers wanted to be more aggressive, but my job was to lay down what we knew, accurately and objectively. I tried to do so, without a trace of advocacy. My own frustration was that, as much as we all wanted Bin Ladin dead, we didn’t have enough information to give policy makers the confidence they required to pull the trigger.

  Hindsight is perfect, of course, and it is easy to say now that launching a major covert action against the Taliban sooner might have made a difference before 9/11. But policy makers across two administrations had reasons to be cautious. They had legitimate concerns about the impact such a plan might have on the stability of the neighboring Pakistani government. Actions in the region could have had unintended consequences regarding the tenuous Indian-Pakistani situation. It may also have been impossible to launch a major assault against the Taliban without Pakistani concurrence. Two administrations may have waited too long to act. The Taliban and their Afghan surrogates were allowed to remain too comfortable in their sanctuary. Had we been authorized to shake them from their complacency, we might have produced the intelligence that could have averted the coming disaster. I just do not know.

  One step we did take in light of our expanded authorities was to work with members of an Afghan tribe that had helped us in 1997 in our search for the murderer Aimal Kasi. The tribe provided some very good tracking data on Bin Ladin. On a number of occasions they were able to relay to us information on where UBL had recently been. Prudently, he moved around a lot, most often between Khandahar and a walled compound outside of town called Tarnak Farms.

  During the spring of 1998, the first of what would become several plans to try to capture Bin Ladin emerged. The idea was for our surrogates to snatch him in Afghanistan and allow us to bring him back to the United States, if possible, to face trial. Counterterrorist Center officers developed a plan where members of the tribe would be used to break into the Tarnak Farm compound, breaching its ten-foot walls. UBL had several wives there, so exactly where he would be found was mostly a matter of guessing which wife he had decided to grace with his company on any given evening, but we had a pretty good idea which houses inside the compound those wives were most likely to be found.

  If the tribe had been able to find UBL and spirit him away, they were going to literally roll him up in a rug, take him to the desert, and hide him away, perhaps for a lengthy period, until the United States could stealthily get an aircraft in to “exfiltrate” him (remove him from Afghanistan clandestinely) so that he could face justice in the United States.

  Clearly, this was a plan with a lot of “ifs” and “maybes,” including the questions of whether UBL would even be there at the time and, if so, whether tribal forces could get past his protection and locate the house he was in before he fled. Several practice runs seemed to convince the plan’s proponents that it had, at best, a 40 percent chance of succeeding. Others thought the odds considerably worse. From our point of view, trying to effect a capture and having UBL die in a shoot-out was perfectly acceptable, but we couldn’t simply have our surrogates burst in, guns blazing, and hope for the best. That sort of “kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out” approach might have had a lot of appeal after the massacres of 9/11, but 1998 was a different environment, legally and otherwise. Naturally the tribal leaders thought we were crazy when we tried to explain to them the concepts of restraint and rule of law. Such legal niceties are foreign to Afghans.

  Mike Scheuer, the head of Alec Station, was strongly in favor of going ahead with the operation. I took his recommendation very seriously, but six senior CIA officers stood in the chain of command between Mike and me. Most of them were seasoned operations officers, while Mike was an analyst not trained in conducting paramilitary operations. Every one of the senior operations officers above Mike recommended against undertaking the operation. They believed the chances of success were too low and the chances of killing innocent women and children were too high. Geoff O’Connell told me that it was the “best plan we had” but that “it simply wasn’t good enough.” Revisionist historians will tell you that the U.S. Special Operations Command evaluated the plan and pronounced it a good one. If the plan had been carried out by the Special Operations Command, it might have worked. But no one in the U.S. government authorized us to use elite American troops. Instead we had to rely on a largely untested group of tribal Afghans to conduct the mission.

  I had only limited confidence in the tribals. They were good at passing information regarding Bin Ladin’s alleged location, but frankly, there were serious concerns about their operational capability. In the end, I made the decision not to go ahead with the plan. I believed it would have been irresponsible of me, knowing of the opposition the plan engendered among my most senior operations officers, to have passed it on to the president’s desk. It didn’t take long, though, for that decision to be thrown back in my face.

  On Friday, August 7, 1998, about two months after I pulled the plug on the Tarnak Farms operations, the phone at my bedside started ringing sometime before 5:00 A.M. These late-night and early-morning calls were a normal occurrence by then, but there was nothing regular about this one. The senior duty officer in the Agency’s Operation Center was on the line. “Bombs have just gone off at our embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania,” he said. “The damage is massive; the death toll will be high.” High turned out to be an understatement, at least by pre-9/11 terms. There were 240 people killed and some 4,000 wounded in the two attacks. As I dressed and headed to the office, the status of U.S. officials at both sites was still uncertain. It quickly became clear that the embassy bombings were indeed the work of al-Qa’ida.

  A day or so later, I paid a visit to Alec Station, which by this time had been moved back into CIA headquarters. That’s where one of Scheuer’s subordinates, quivering with emotion, confronted me about my Tarnak Farms dec
ision. “If you had allowed us to go ahead with our operation,” she said, “those people might still be alive!”

  It was a tough moment. Of course I had some self-doubt. But the fact is that al-Qa’ida operations are planned years in advance. We later learned that they first cased the Nairobi embassy more than four years earlier. A Bin Ladin snatch in June would not have stopped either bombing. But given the emotion of the moment, I let the analyst vent and just walked away.

  This act demanded some sort of retaliation. Working with the Pentagon, we assembled a list of al-Qa’ida–related targets that might be struck. One of the difficulties of fighting a terrorist opponent is the paucity of targets susceptible to the application of military force. I recall no discussion of sending in the 82nd Airborne or the like to put U.S. boots on the ground in Afghanistan, but in mid-August, as we were searching for ways to respond, we received a godsend: signals intelligence revealed that a meeting would be held by Bin Ladin. We were accustomed to getting intelligence about where UBL had been. This was a rarity: intelligence predicting where he was going to be.

  In tightly held discussions within the NSC, we determined not only to go after Bin Ladin in Afghanistan but also to demonstrate that we were prepared to go after his organization worldwide. On our list of potential targets were businesses in Sudan and elsewhere in which he had been involved. These businesses not only were part of the terrorist financial network but also had possible connections with al-Qa’ida attempts to obtain chemical and biological weapons. But while attacking the terrorist summit meeting in Khost was a “no brainer,” the other targets were a matter of considerable debate.

  The phone at my bedside rang again early on the morning of August 20. This time it was President Clinton calling from Martha’s Vineyard, where he was vacationing and trying to ride out the Monica Lewinsky storm. I never saw any evidence that Clinton’s personal problems distracted him from focusing on his official duties. Perhaps they circumscribed the range of actions he could take—he was, after all, losing political capital by the hour—but they certainly didn’t seem to do so in this case. The president wanted to talk about the potential targets, especially a tannery that Bin Ladin owned in Sudan and the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum with which he was involved and which we believed was somehow implicated in the production of chemical agents. A spoonful of clandestinely acquired soil collected from outside the factory gate had shown trace amounts of O-ethyl methylphosphonothioic acid, or EMPTA, a chemical precursor for the deadly VX chemical agent. In the end, the president decided to drop the tannery from the target list. There were too many chances for collateral damage with too small a payoff. But the factory at al-Shifa and the camp at Khost were to be struck by cruise missiles.

 

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