At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA
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I understood why the administration favored cruise missiles. They didn’t require putting pilots at risk, and they carried none of the burden or baggage of inserting combat troops. But in hindsight, I’m not certain at the time we fully comprehended the missiles’ limitations. The slow-flying missiles are a good choice for taking out fixed targets such as pharmaceutical factories but are far less ideally suited to targeting individuals who wander around during the several hours between the time the missile is launched and when it lands at its preprogrammed spot.
In all, scores of cruise missiles were launched at the Khost terrorist facility right around nightfall on August 20. The sea-launched Tomahawks had to fly hundreds of miles to reach their targets, including navigating the airspace of Pakistan to get to landlocked Afghanistan. To make sure the Pakistanis didn’t think they were under missile attack from India, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joe Ralston, was dispatched there to alert officials just before the missiles crossed into their airspace that this was a U.S. operation.
We believe that a dozen or more terrorists were killed in the ensuing cruise missile strike, but apparently UBL chose to leave the camp sometime before the missiles arrived, once again dodging a fate he richly deserved. We never were able to determine if his departure was happenstance or if he was somehow tipped off.
Predictably, the plant at al-Shifa was flattened. Later, though, questions arose about how closely it might have been associated with UBL and whether there might be some alternative explanation for the EMPTA trace that had placed the plant on the target list. You can still get a debate within the intelligence community on how good a target al-Shifa was. What’s beyond debate is that Bin Ladin’s lucky escape only emboldened him for future operations.
Less than two months after the cruise missile attacks, on November 5, 1998, I wrote President Clinton a letter saying that I needed a massive infusion of funds to position the intelligence community where it needed to be in the fight of our lifetime. The signs were everywhere that al-Qa’ida had plans for bigger, more spectacular attacks on U.S. interests. To combat our enemies and to protect American interests, I said, we needed “roughly $2 billion more per year for the intelligence budget above the existing FY-2000–2005 budget.” As happened with earlier requests, we received only a small portion of what we asked for. At the same time, I directed Cofer Black, who had become head of the Counterterrorism Center, to put together a new strategy to attack al-Qa’ida. We called it simply “The Plan.” But there was nothing simple about it.
The Plan recognized that our first priority was to acquire intelligence about Bin Ladin by penetrating his organization. Without this effort, the United States could not mount a successful covert action program to stop him or his operations. To that end, The Plan laid out a strong, focused effort, using our own sources, our foreign partners, and enhanced technology, to gather the intelligence that would let us track and act against Bin Ladin and his associates in terrorist sanctuaries, including Sudan, Lebanon, Yemen, and, most important, Afghanistan.
To execute The Plan, the Counterterrorist Center developed a program to select and train officers and put them where the terrorists were located. The Center launched a nationwide recruitment program using CIA’s Career Training Program resources to identify, vet, and hire qualified personnel for counterterrorist assignments in hostile environments. We sought native fluency in Arabic and other terrorist-associated languages, as well as police and military experience, and appropriate ethnic background. In addition, the Center established an eight-week advanced Counterterrorist Operations Course to teach CIA’s hard-won lessons learned and counterterrorism operational methodology.
In reviewing our record against al-Qa’ida, Cofer concluded that our efforts had stopped several planned attacks against U.S. embassies. We had significantly damaged UBL’s infrastructure and put some doubt in his mind about the security of his operations. But all this had only set him back. It had not stopped him. Unless we changed our tactics, we would find it harder in the future to achieve operational success against al-Qa’ida. They were learning about us as we were learning about them.
My frustration with the quality and depth of our intelligence regarding al-Qa’ida and Bin Ladin continued to grow. I was tired of relying on one tribal group without much corroborating data to make decisions as to whether we should launch capture operations, or cruise missiles, within narrow windows of time. Our entire intelligence community and our foreign partners needed to be challenged to do better in gathering data from where it mattered most—inside Afghanistan. We needed to get over the threshold of confidence that policy makers needed and wanted. So, on December 3, 1998, I sat at home and furiously drafted in longhand the memo I titled, “We Are at War.” In it I told my staff that I wanted no resources or people spared in the effort to go after al-Qa’ida. The 9/11 Commission later said that I declared war but that no one showed up. They were wrong.
While many people were focused exclusively on one man, al-Qa’ida had a leadership structure, with training facilities, all residing in Afghanistan. Our strategic objective was to get more intelligence—human, signals, and imagery—not just to target Usama bin Ladin but also to deal with a movement that was operating in sixty countries. The hub of the enterprise was Afghanistan, and from that hub spoked sanctuaries and, farther afield, other countries where significant operational capability existed.
By the fall of 1999 several things came together. First was CTC’s operational plan, and second, the work of forty-year veteran Charlie Allen, the associate deputy director of central intelligence for collection. The most important paragraph in my December 1998 memo was not about holding more meetings and killing more trees, but rather my direction to Charlie Allen to immediately push the rest of the intelligence community to make Bin Ladin and his infrastructure a top priority:
I want Charlie Allen to immediately chair a meeting with NSA, NIMA [our imagery agency], CITO [our clandestine information technology operation] and others to ensure we are doing everything we can to meet CTC’s requirements.
Allen wrote me back a week later:
Senior collection managers assess that overall the Community’s capabilities against UBL and his infrastructure are sharply focused. Collectors have not only taken an extraordinary range of steps since the East African Embassy bombing to enhance the capacities but they continue to develop additional measures where all elements of the community were involved.
Through 2000, Allen would provide formal detailed updates five more times—we would also have almost daily interaction. Once Cofer Black had finalized his operational plan in the fall of 1999 to go after al-Qa’ida, Allen created a dedicated al-Qa’ida cell with officers from across the intelligence community. This cell met daily, brought focus to penetrating the Afghan sanctuary, and ensured that collection initiatives were synchronized with operational plans. Allen met with me on a weekly basis to review initiatives under way. His efforts were enabling operations and pursuing longer-range, innovative initiatives around the world against al-Qa’ida. In terrorism, the tactical and strategic blur—operational success on the tactical level yields strategic results, new leads, more data, and better analysis.
You had to destroy terror cells that were trying to kill you, disrupt them, render them to justice, take the data generated, and drive on. The amount of data we collected exploded—CTC’s walls were covered with the faces of known terrorists and their connections, their linkages to people on the other side of the world. Cofer understood the imperative. He knew we had disrupted attacks, “that we had damaged UBL’s infrastructure, and created doubt inside al-Qa’ida about the security of his operations and operatives.” But he intuitively understood something else as well—that we were fighting a worthy opponent and we had no on-the-ground presence in Afghanistan. He knew that without penetrations of Usama bin Ladin’s organization, without access to Afghanistan, we were fighting a losing battle.
Allen and Black sat side by side at sco
res of briefings with me and other senior CIA and FBI officers in the run-up to 9/11. As a result of the intelligence community’s efforts, in concert with our foreign partners, by September 11, Afghanistan was covered in human and technical operations.
We were working with eight separate Afghan tribal networks, and by September 11 we had more than one hundred recruited sources inside Afghanistan. Satellites were repositioned. The imagery community had systematically mapped al-Qa’ida camps. We engaged the Special Operations Command and used conventional and innovative collection methods to penetrate al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan and the rest of the world. We expanded our open source coverage (spy-speak for reviewing open media, such as newspapers and radio) of al-Qa’ida. Leadership of the FBI was given full transparency into our efforts.
Some countries allowed their soil to be used to train capture teams and deploy major collection facilities on their borders with Afghanistan. In other sanctuaries and around the world where al-Qa’ida had significant capability, operations and collection initiatives were pursued that allowed us to stop attacks and generate more data. Allen implemented other significant long-term technical enhancements that had nothing to do with day-to-day operations, involving multiple countries and services to target al-Qa’ida leaders and infrastructure. There was nothing tactical or ad hoc about any of this. It was opportunistic and strategic in the same breath.
We identified foreign strategic relationships that would extend our operational reach, services that could infiltrate their own officers into terrorist sanctuaries. Prior to 9/11, we identified nine worldwide hubs where we provided technical assistance, and analytic training—the ability to fuse data essential to rapid operational turnaround. These were places where we knew we would get a huge bang for our buck against al-Qa’ida, strategic investments that would dramatically grow around the world after 9/11.
To scores of other intelligence services, we provided as much assistance as possible, so that when I or my senior colleagues made calls to seek assistance, we had willing partners. In this way we had capital in the bank at the other end when we wanted to make a withdrawal. Amazingly, the 9/11 Commission would later say that my idea of a management strategy for a war on terrorism was simply to rebuild CIA. The commission failed to recognize the sustained comprehensive efforts conducted by the intelligence community prior to 9/11 to penetrate the al-Qa’ida organization. How could a community without a strategic plan tell the president of the United States just four days after 9/11 how to attack the Afghan sanctuary and operate against al-Qa’ida in ninety-two countries around the world?
It was during this same period that I decided that the usual intelligence reporting in the form of Presidential Briefs, finished intelligence reports, National Intelligence Estimates, and the like was insufficient for conveying the seriousness of the threat. So I began sending personal letters to the president and virtually the entire national security community, explicitly laying out why I was concerned about the looming terrorist attacks. I knew that all senior officials had full in-boxes—only something out of the ordinary would get their attention.
Even one such letter would have been an unusual step. During my tenure, I wrote eight of them. My intention was not to cry wolf, and certainly not to scare the recipients out of their wits, although a careful reading of the letters would certainly have accomplished that. I believed the only way to get their attention was to tell them what I knew and what concerned me, and to do so over and over and over again. I am confident that officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations understood the seriousness of the threat.
In the first letter, dated December 18, 1998, I wrote:
I am greatly concerned by recent intelligence reporting indicating that Usama Bin Ladin is planning to conduct another attack against US personnel or facilities soon…possibly over the next few days. One of Bin Ladin’s deputies has used code words we associated with terrorist operations to order colleagues in East Africa to complete their work.
In the letter, I noted that Bin Ladin’s organization had a presence in more than sixty countries and had forged ties with Sunni extremists around the world. The letter went on to say that UBL was interested in conducting attacks inside the United States or within the territory of allies such as the United Kingdom, France, and Israel.
Ten days later I wrote again, updating the previous letter and quoting a Middle Eastern service as saying that they agreed with our assessment that UBL sought to strike in the near term against at least one U.S. target. I reported that Bin Ladin had purchased ten surface-to-air missiles from Afghan warlords to defend his terrorist camps but noted that the same missiles could be used to attack aircraft on U.S. territory. I wrote again on December 30 and then on January 14, 1999, with additional details picked up from a variety of sources.
My public warnings continued, too. In my annual worldwide threat testimony on February 2, 1999, I told the Senate that “there is not the slightest doubt that Usama Bin Ladin, his worldwide allies, and his sympathizers are planning further attacks against us…despite progress against his networks, Bin Ladin’s organization has contacts virtually worldwide, including in the United States…. He has stated unequivocally that all Americans are targets…. I must tell you we are concerned that one or more of Bin Ladin’s attacks could occur at any time.”
A few days later we received intelligence that told us Bin Ladin was at a hunting camp in southern Afghanistan in the company of a number of sheikhs from the United Arab Emirates. Once again there were those, including some in Alec Station, who were anxious for the United States to obliterate the place in the hopes of getting UBL. If a bunch of Arab princes were killed, too—well, that would be the price they paid for the company they kept. Before a decision could be made as to whether to launch a strike, we got word UBL had moved on.
In hindsight, these on-again, off-again attacks should have been leading policy makers to a serious discussion over the use of force against the al-Qa’ida leader. Instead of considering alternative approaches to the less-than-ideal cruise missile attacks, policy makers seemed to want to have things both ways: they wanted to hit Bin Ladin but without endangering U.S. troops or putting at significant risk our diplomatic relations. As a result, we were constantly ginning up attack plans and making last-minute decisions about whether some snippet of information we had just obtained was good enough to launch missiles and whether UBL might stay put for a few hours so we could get him. I remember one weekend when I was summoned away from my son’s lacrosse game to the security vehicle accompanying me so I could take a call. UBL might have been spotted again, and I had to make a recommendation on the spot—do we launch or not? That’s no way to do business.
Throughout the fall of 1999, the threat situation was bad. And then it got worse. A steady drumbeat of reports leading up to the millennium told us that al-Qa’ida had entered into the execution phase of numerous planned attacks, although we couldn’t say with certainty where or when.
It wasn’t just al-Qa’ida and Bin Ladin’s millennial ambitions we were worried about. We ran a quiet but effective sweep in East Asia, leading to the arrest or detention of forty-five members of the Hizbollah terrorist network.
We also mounted a disruption campaign against Hezbollah’s chief backer, MOIS, the Iranian intelligence service. (The acronym stands for Ministry of Intelligence and Security.) Agency officers approached MOIS officers on the street or wherever we could get close to them and asked them if they would like to come to work for us or sell us information.
In one memorable example, John Brennan, our liaison to the Saudis, handled the local MOIS head himself. John walked up to his car, knocked on the window, and said, “Hello, I’m from the U.S. embassy, and I’ve got something to tell you.” As John tells the story, the guy got out of the car, claimed that Iran was a peace-loving country, then jumped back in the car and sped away. Just being seen with some of our people might cause MOIS officers to fall under suspicion by their own agency. The cold pitches undoubted
ly ruined some careers, and maybe even lives, but also occasionally paid off in actual intelligence dividends. It couldn’t happen to a nastier bunch of people.
There were scores of operations going on around the world simultaneously. One of them, the surveillance of a suspicious meeting in Kuala Lumpur, ended up being much more significant than we knew at the time. (That meeting, which involved some future 9/11 hijackers, is described in chapter 11.)
On December 6, 1999, Jordanian authorities arrested a sixteen-man team of terrorists who planned New Year’s Eve attacks on pilgrims at John the Baptist’s shrine on the Jordan River, and on tourists at the SAS Radisson hotel in Amman. The terrorists planned to use poisons and improvised devices to maximize Jordanian, Israeli, and U.S. casualties. We later learned they intended to disperse hydrogen cyanide in a downtown Amman movie theater. The Jordanian intelligence service, through its able chief, Samih Battikhi, told us that individuals on the team had direct links to Usama bin Ladin.