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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  “Why don’t we just let things go along for a while,” I remember him saying, “and we’ll see how things work out.” I gathered from that I was neither on the team nor off it. I was on probation. As would be expected, there were some adjustments to make.

  Under President Clinton, I was a Cabinet member—a legacy of John Deutch’s requirement when he took the job as DCI—but my contacts with the president, while always interesting, were sporadic. I could see him as often as I wanted but was not on a regular schedule. Under President Bush, the DCI post lost its Cabinet-level status. But I soon found out that I was to have extraordinary access nonetheless.

  The transition team made it clear to us that they wanted the president to receive a regular in-person intelligence briefing six days a week, just as his father had. We selected one of my former executive assistants, Mike Morell, to be the president’s personal briefer. I sat in on the first post-inauguration briefing but fully expected to let Morell be our sole daily point of contact. After a couple of briefings without me present, the president pulled Morell aside and asked, “Does George understand that I would like to see him here with you every day?” I hadn’t wanted to show up every day for fear that it would look like I was campaigning to keep my job. Making an appearance every now and then would suffice, I figured. But now I got the message loud and clear. My schedule and my life were never the same. That was the downside. My work hours stretched out even longer. My home time shrank again. But the upside was undeniable. Being in regular, direct contact with the president is an incredible boon to a CIA director’s ability to do his job.

  There were lots of other differences to adjust to. Gore versus Cheney? Both brought very different perspectives to the vice president’s office. Gore had served on the House Intelligence Committee many years before. True to his interests, he had a fascination for wonkish issues. He asked lots of questions about the impact on national security of water shortages, disease, and environmental concerns. “Bugs and bunnies,” some people called it. But I learned a lot from him on these matters. And he was right. Those kinds of issues can have a profound effect on population flow, migration, civil wars, ethnic strife, and the like. Cheney had a more traditional view and knew a hell of a lot about our business. Both were avid consumers of intelligence and provided considerable assistance to us.

  Back in 1999, one of the many times I was scrambling for more resources for CIA, I sent Gore a handwritten note briefly arguing our case and citing what I thought was a necessary supplemental appropriation. “We could use your help here,” I concluded. He replied in short order, “You’ve sold me. Is this enough?” That was music to my ears. Cheney, too, was often extraordinarily helpful. He was always willing to use his personal clout on our behalf—calling world leaders, for example, and leaning on them to give us information or access or whatever we needed. I never failed to get his aid when I asked for it.

  The one big difference between the two was that Gore had his national security advisor, Leon Fuerth, represent him at Principals’ meetings, while Cheney generally sat in on them himself. That was his privilege, obviously, but having one of the ultimate decision makers actually participating in the debate made it more difficult for Condi Rice, the president’s national security advisor, who chaired the meetings. The vice president’s presence may also have had an unintended chilling effect on the free flow of views as important policy matters were debated.

  For a DCI, the most important relationship with any administration official is generally with the national security advisor—the person who digests everything the intelligence community and State and Defense departments have to say, carries it to the president, and renders counsel. Sandy Berger had performed that job with obvious zeal, although his street-tough manner occasionally rubbed against the more delicate sensibilities in government. His successor, Condoleezza Rice, had served in the Bush 41 NSC under Brent Scowcroft, a man who had twice performed that job and who did it as well as anyone ever had. From the outset, it was obvious that Condi was very disciplined, tough, and smart, but she brought a much different approach to the job than her predecessor. Sandy not only didn’t mind rolling up his sleeves and wading into the thick of things; he seemed to relish it. Condi, by contrast, was more remote. She knew the president’s mind well but tended to stay out of policy fights that Sandy would have come brawling into.

  All of the above falls generally under the category of atmospherics. Administrations change. People are different. You have to get along with a new group, with new ideas. Every new administration wants to evaluate things once they get the offices for which they have been campaigning. And every administration starts out slowly—feeling their way along. The Bush crowd had an especially late start anyway because of the electoral stalemate, and they carried a heavy load of aversion to any policy the Clinton administration had favored. Doing things differently from their predecessors seemed almost an imperative with them.

  The slow-motion changeover and the full agenda, domestically and internationally, that the new administration brought with it had the greatest impact, in my estimation, on the war on terror. It wasn’t that they didn’t care about Usama bin Ladin or al-Qa’ida, or that they got rid of people who did. Below the top level of the new government virtually the entire counterterrorism team stayed in place. But at the top tier, there was a loss of urgency. Unless you have experienced terrorism on your watch—unless you have been on the receiving end of a 4:00 A.M. phone call telling you that one of your embassies or one of your ships has just been attacked, it is hard to fully fathom the impact of such a loss. I know that you should be able to understand intellectually the significance of the threat, but there is nothing like being there when the bomb goes off to get your undivided attention.

  The simple fact is that the terrorism challenge was not an easy one to tackle. It wasn’t just a matter of going out and getting the bad guys. Policy had to be decided. Diplomacy had to be factored in. These things require time for an administration to wrap its mind around. Take one of the toughest terrorism issues of all—what we thought of as the Pakistan problem.

  For years, it had been obvious that without the cooperation of the Pakistanis, it would be almost impossible to root out al-Qa’ida from behind its Taliban protectors. The Pakistanis always knew more than they were telling us, and they had been singularly uncooperative in helping us run these guys down. My own belief, one shared widely within CIA, was that what the Pakistanis really feared was a two-front conflict, with the Indians seeking to reclaim Pakistan and the Taliban mullahs trying to export their radical brand of Islam across the border from Afghanistan. A war with India also posed the grim specter of a nuclear confrontation, but from the ruling generals’ point of view, the best way to avoid having their nation Taliban-ized was to keep their enemy close. That meant not cooperating with us in hunting down Bin Ladin and his organization.

  The relationship was complicated further by mistrust and resentment. The dominant thinking within the Pakistani officer corps was that the United States had unstated ulterior motives in Afghanistan, specifically the desire to keep the nation unstable and chaotic to discourage construction of oil and gas pipelines through both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The goodwill we had won in Pakistan by helping to drive the Russians out of neighboring Afghanistan had also evaporated over the last dozen years. The Pakistani leadership for the most part felt that the United States had abandoned them, especially when we imposed economic sanctions on both Pakistan and India in the wake of their nuclear tests. Simultaneously, the military-to-military relationship that had once been so strong between our two nations had been allowed to wane over the years. Once, senior Pakistani officers had been trained almost exclusively in the United States. That wasn’t true with the younger generation. From an intelligence perspective, we had precious few leverage points on which to build.

  Until 9/11, the Bush administration found itself in the same box with regard to Pakistan that had plagued the Clinton years. Even though thousands
of terrorists had been trained in al-Qa’ida camps in Afghanistan, policy makers had become consumed with Pakistan’s internal stability, the command and control of their nuclear weapons, and the likelihood of a nuclear conflict with India. Obviously, these were legitimate concerns, but terrorism was a serious issue, too. Yet, because of this policy tension, we were never able to get a green light from our government to aid in any serious way Ahmed Shah Masood and his Northern Alliance in their efforts to reclaim Afghanistan from the Taliban.

  Even within CIA there was debate over how to proceed with Pakistan, the Taliban, and al-Qa’ida. If you sat in the Counterterrorism Center with Cofer Black and his team, the choice was clear: immediate action was required to support the Northern Alliance. Policy makers who were fixated on whether we could produce enough actionable intelligence to spin up a missile to take out Bin Ladin and his top lieutenants had totally missed the point. Getting only Bin Ladin was never going to solve the problem. To do that, you had to destroy al-Qa’ida’s sanctuary and disrupt the infrastructure that guided and funded operations around the world. That meant action on the ground.

  If you sat in Islamabad, however, the world looked very different. For starters, the Northern Alliance had been nurtured for years by Pakistan’s mortal enemies, the Indians and the Russians. Aligning ourselves with Masood and his fighters would put us in league with the devil, for potentially little or no gain. Absent significant U.S. military involvement, the Northern Alliance would never defeat the Taliban. If we just made the Alliance a greater threat to the Taliban, we would end up reinforcing the Taliban’s need for al-Qa’ida support and thereby strengthen rather than weaken Bin Ladin’s position in Afghanistan.

  Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, the Pakistani intelligence chief who was in Washington when the 9/11 attacks went down, was emblematic of the problem. I’d met with him over lunch on September 9, 2001, and tried to press him about Mullah Omar, Bin Ladin’s most ardent protector within the Taliban regime. Mahmood assured us that Omar was a man who wanted only the best for the Afghan people. Fine, we told him, but he’s also harboring a guy who has created a sanctuary for training terrorists who murder American embassy workers and sailors. In fact, his defense of Mullah Omar was typical of Mahmood. As gracious as he could be over the lunch table, the guy was immovable when it came to the Taliban and al-Qa’ida. And bloodless, too. After the USS Cole was attacked by Bin Ladin’s suicide bombers, Mahmood sent our senior officer in Islamabad a very precisely worded message that managed to convey his condolences for the loss of life without offering a single word of support for our going after al-Qa’ida in its Afghan lair.

  What’s more, we had to assume that he was an accurate proxy for his boss, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. We knew that Mahmood had been instrumental in rallying critical elements of the Pakistani army to support Musharraf during the 1999 coup against President Nawaz Sharif. In effect, Mahmood had ensured that Musharraf would succeed. Some thought the best we could hope from either of them was that the Pakistani intelligence service might turn a blind eye to whatever actions we undertook in Afghanistan to go after the Arab presence there. Failing that, there was always the chance that the Afghans and perhaps even some Taliban officials might mount a jihad against the predominantly Arab al-Qa’ida, but that, too, seemed a long shot. The Arabs and Bin Ladin had become institutionalized in Afghanistan through their property acquisitions and their largesse to the Taliban leadership. Mahmood’s sole suggestion in the first days of his Washington visit was that we try bribing key Taliban officials to get them to turn over Bin Ladin, but even then he made it clear that neither he nor his service would have anything to do with the effort, not even to the extent of advising us whom we might approach.

  The events of 9/11 changed that calculus entirely. Until then, the new Bush team had to sort through this incredibly complicated and delicate set of issues, and decide where they stood on the questions and what actions to take and postures to assume. And in truth, for all that they wanted to put daylight between themselves and the Clinton administration, they weren’t any more successful at resolving difficult and competing issues in their opening months than their predecessors had been.

  At CIA we obviously had a more acute sense of urgency. Lt. Gen. John “Soup” Campbell, the senior active-duty military officer on my staff and one of the finest officers I’ve ever worked with, was running a series of tabletop exercises regarding Predator operations. Soup wanted to be prepared for the day when the UAV would be able to carry a warhead. Who would operate the aircraft? Who would make the decision as to if and when to fire? How would the U.S. government explain it, if Arab terrorists in Afghanistan suddenly started being blown up? I raised some of these same questions in my first weekly meeting with the new national security advisor, on January 29, 2001, and I kept raising them again and again.

  Like me, Dick Clarke had been retained at the start of the administration in his old job and was equally anxious to restore attention to the war on terror. To that end, he took our Blue Sky memo and crafted his own recommendations for jump-starting U.S. efforts against al-Qa’ida. Clarke’s memo was called “Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from Jihadist Networks of al Qida: Status and Prospects.” He proposed “rolling back” al-Qa’ida over a period of three to five years, talked about using military action to attack al-Qa’ida command-and-control targets and Taliban infrastructure, and even expressed concern that there might be al-Qa’ida operatives in the United States.

  I later learned that on January 25, 2001, Clarke sent this memo to Condi Rice saying there was an urgent need for an NSC principals meeting to review his proposed strategy against al-Qa’ida. But this meeting was never held.

  One thing was glaringly apparent. If we were going to proceed with anything like what we had in mind—that is, if we were going to switch from a defensive to an offensive posture against the terrorists—we needed new covert-action authorities. Again, let me stress one very important fact: CIA is a policy implementer, not a policy maker. Those entrusted with making policy, beginning with the president, decide what we are allowed to do in pursuit of ends they deem important.

  Early in March, I went by to see Stephen J. Hadley, Condi’s deputy at the National Security Council, and handed him the list of the expanded authorities we were seeking to go after Bin Ladin. These authorities would place us much more on the offensive, rather than have us reacting defensively to the terrorist threat. I thought they were critical, but I also knew they required a discussion among policy makers that was long overdue. My hope was that the authorities we were seeking would kick off that discussion.

  “I’m giving you this draft now,” I told Steve, “but first, you guys need to figure out what your policy is.”

  The authorities in the draft were very broad and would have explicitly authorized CIA or its partners to plan and carry out operations to kill UBL without first trying to capture him. We believe these authorities were unprecedented in scope.

  The next day, Mary McCarthy, a CIA officer then serving as NSC senior director, called John Moseman, my chief of staff, and said basically, “We need you to take back the draft covert-action finding back. If you formally transmit these to the NSC, the clock will be ticking, and we don’t want the clock to tick just now.”

  In other words, the new administration needed more time to figure out what their new policies were, and thus didn’t want to be in a position someday to be criticized for not moving quickly enough on a critical intelligence community proposal.

  If the new administration had embraced our Blue Sky concept wholeheartedly and granted us all the authorities we sought that day in March, would we have been able to prevent 9/11? I don’t know. After all, the plot was already well under way, and the terrorism threat was growing daily.

  In my first public testimony during the new administration, in February 2001, I told the Senate that “The threat from terrorism is real, it is immediate, and it is evolving…. [A]s we have increased security around government and military facil
ities, terrorists are seeking out ‘softer’ targets that provide opportunities for mass casualties…. Usama Bin Ladin and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious threat…. He is capable of planning multiple attacks with little or no warning.”

  In other testimony later that spring, I told Congress that “We will generally not have specific time and place warning of terrorist attacks…. The result…is that I consider it likely that over the next year or so that there will be an attempted terrorist attack against U.S. interests.” My sense was that something was coming—something big—but to my great frustration we could not determine exactly what, where, when, or how.

  We delivered the same message through classified briefings and analysts’ reports. A March paper stressed the critical role that Afghanistan played in providing sanctuary for terrorism. A paper the next month talked about the growing belief among jihadists that there was some U.S.-led conspiracy against Islam.

  During the spring of 2001, at one of the innumerable Deputies’ meetings, John McLaughlin expressed frustration at the lack of action. “I think we should deliver an ultimatum to the Taliban,” he said. “They either hand Bin Ladin over or we rain hell on them.” An odd silence followed. No one seemed to like the idea. Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, called John after the meeting and offered a friendly word of advice: “You are going to get your suspenders snapped if you keep making policy recommendations. That is not your role.”