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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  At one of my daily briefings, I found out from the Palestinians about a plan to attack the American embassy in Beirut. Turkish police, I learned, had responded to my calls and begun conducting operations to identify as many Bin Ladin targets in Istanbul as possible. Meanwhile, explosives had been smuggled from Yemen to Saudi Arabia on July 6 for use against U.S. military targets. The Saudis had finally responded to intelligence we had provided them in January, undoubtedly the fruit of the call the vice president had made to Crown Prince Abdullah urging cooperation. In response, we told the Saudis we needed to keep working with them, we needed to keep engaging them, and we needed to keep pushing them toward more timely interaction with us—the same message I would deliver myself to the crown prince two years later, after the al-Qa’ida attacks inside the kingdom.

  In mid-July we learned senior al-Qa’ida operatives might be returning to Pakistan contingent on where and when a certain event occurred. Our information told us that some were wondering whether unidentified pressure had halted plans for terrorist attacks. This gave us some hope that our disruption efforts might be having some effect.

  The Egyptian service told us that a senior operative from Jemaah Islamiya, a Southeast Asian terrorist organization allied with al-Qa’ida, was planning an attack on U.S. and Israeli interests in order to help win the release of the Blind Sheikh. Four trucks filled with C-4 explosives had been brought to Kampala, in Uganda, and operatives there had begun casing the American embassy. We immediately contacted the Ugandans and also brought in the Tanzanians and Kenyans. Al-Qa’ida had already proved how effective it could be at striking U.S. interests in Africa.

  A European intelligence service warned us about a “concrete and serious” threat emanating from a diffuse Mujahideen network in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Al-Qa’ida operatives were traveling to Europe, they said, but the target and timing of the attack were unknown. The next day, that same service provided specific information about the activities of a foreign operative well known to us. That same day, July 17, sources within the Zawahiri network told us of an attack that was to take place inside Saudi Arabia within days. We immediately informed the Saudis. Yemenis arrested a key Bin Ladin passport forger who was involved in a threat against the U.S. embassy in Sanaa, and we provided them with debriefing requirements. A few days later we received six separate reports that an Afghanistan-based narco-trafficker was facilitating the shipment of explosives and bomb-making kits to al-Qa’ida operatives in Yemen, to be used against U.S. and British interests there. Five members of the group had met with Bin Ladin in Khandahar. From Afghanistan came word that the Taliban intelligence chief, Kari Amadullah, was interested in establishing secret contact, outside the country and without Mullah Omar’s knowledge, “to save Afghanistan.” From the Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Masood told us that Bin Ladin was sending twenty-five operatives to Europe for terrorist activities. The operatives, he said, would be traveling through Iran and Bosnia.

  The whole world seemed on the edge of eruption.

  In a briefing I received on July 24, I learned that Jordan’s King Abdullah had sent word that, in his view, Bin Ladin and his command structure in Afghanistan must be dealt with in a decisive and military fashion. To that end, he offered to send two battalions of Jordanian Special Forces to go door to door in Afghanistan, if necessary, to deal with al-Qa’ida. The offer was a wonderful gesture but would have to have been part of a larger overall strategy in order to succeed. To King Abdullah, Bin Ladin was the greatest threat in the world to his nation’s security, and he wanted us to know that Jordan was ready to act as the pointy end of the spear. Like father, like son, I thought. That apple had fallen right next to the tree. How could anyone help but respect the king of Jordan and his family after something like that?

  A CTC update on the terrorist threat situation brought word from another intelligence source that they had detained an associate of Zarqawi. Interestingly, this person linked Zarqawi with Abu Zubaydah, expanded our knowledge about Zubaydah’s network in the Gulf and Europe, and provided leads to other operatives in Sudan, the United Kingdom, and the Balkans. In running down the data, we concluded that Zarqawi’s network was larger and better connected than we had anticipated. The operative was moved to Jordan for further questioning.

  Also on the agenda from CTC that day: two Egyptian extremists had been identified in Indonesia, where the government was quickly moving to disrupt the pair, arrest them, and send them to a country in which they were wanted. The UAE had arrested Djamel Beghal, who had been planning to bomb the U.S. embassy in Paris.

  The operative who was behind the threat to bomb the embassy had arrived in the United Kingdom. We had so informed the Brits and had alerted the Swedes of the operative’s onward travel home after he left the UK. The Bolivians had arrested six Pakistanis who were planning an airline hijacking. One of those arrested appeared to be related to Kasi, the man who had killed two CIA officers at the Agency’s front gate in 1994. It was likely that the six would be deported to Pakistan, where authorities would question them at our urging.

  That same day, we had reporting that Zawahiri was in Yemen and we were pursuing confirmation and a plan to exfiltrate him to the United States. Although we doubted this information, it was our intention to play this hand out. I was also briefed on a major breakthrough in our ongoing effort to technically penetrate al-Qa’ida and Taliban leadership in Afghanistan. Tremendous teamwork with the British service made this possible and was now providing a quantum leap in our coverage of Arabs in Khandahar and of the Taliban leadership.

  We were also working on the resumption of a long-stagnant counterterrorist relationship with the Russians. We thought it essential to make the attempt in light of Chechen linkages to al-Qa’ida. To date, the track record of data provision by the Russians had been poor, but we hoped to be able to exploit the unique access we believed they continued to have in Afghanistan.

  If you are getting confused, frustrated, or exhausted reading this litany, imagine how we felt at the time living through it. And imagine how I and everyone else in the room reacted during one of my updates in late July when, as we speculated about the kind of attacks we could face, Rich B. suddenly said, with complete conviction, “They’re coming here.” I’ll never forget the silence that followed.

  Just about this same time, the National Security Council authorized us to begin deploying the Predator by September 1, in either an armed or unarmed reconnaissance mode. According to the order, we were to work out cost-sharing details with the Defense Department. Our belief was that deploying the Predator in unarmed reconnaissance mode was ill advised and unnecessarily exposed the capability. We preferred that the next time it was over Afghanistan that it be equipped to take immediate action if we spotted UBL. But the testing to date on the Predator’s Hellfire warhead had shown mixed results.

  I took the NSC action as a positive sign that the policy makers were beginning to engage the difficult issues of the war on terror, but we still needed a Principals’ meeting to thrash out once and for all the administration’s policy regarding our use of an armed Predator. I wanted to have the meeting as soon as possible, but given the technical difficulties with arming the Predator, the NSC decided to put it off until after Labor Day.

  That summer, whenever a PDB contained information about possible al-Qa’ida attacks, the president would ask his PDB briefer, Mike Morell, what information we had that might indicate an attack could come inside the United States. With the president heading off to Crawford for much of August, Mike asked our analysts to prepare a piece that would try to address that question. That was the origin of the now-famous August 6 PDB titled “BinLadin Determined to Strike in the US.” Nearly the full text of the item appears in The 9/11 Commission Report. The report makes clear that nothing would have pleased UBL more than to attack in our homeland. But although clear about his desire and intent, we did not have and therefore did not convey information about any specific ongoing plot.

  A few weeks
after the August 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the president stayed current on events. That was my first visit to the ranch. I remember the president graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup and my trying to make small talk about the flora and fauna, none of which were native to Queens. By then, an eerie quiet had settled over our threat reporting—the lull before the storm. We learned much later that Bin Ladin was waiting for the president and Congress to return to Washington, after Labor Day. He knew our customs and habits well.

  In August, I directed a thorough review of our files to identify potential threats. I didn’t want to leave any stone unturned, even if that meant replowing old ground. Temporary calm or not, the threat attack was too real for us to sit back and wait. I later learned that CTC officials had begun a similar review even before I asked them to do so. It was during this period that they discovered cables from the year before that suggested that possible al-Qa’ida operatives might have entered the United States. The issue involved two men, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who later boarded American Airlines Flight 77 on the morning of September 11 and helped fly it into the Pentagon. (So much has been written and so much misunderstood about this “watchlisting” issue—and it became such a cornerstone of the 9/11 Commission’s critique of the Agency—that I will deal with it in a chapter all its own.) It was also during this time when I first heard the name Zacarias Moussaoui. (This, too, requires a detailed discussion to be handled in a chapter ahead.)

  By early September, CIA had a group of assets from a Middle Eastern service working on our behalf. None of the more than twenty individuals knew they were working for us. They were targeted against a range of terrorism issues. One third of them worked against al-Qa’ida. By September 2001, we had two unilateral agents successfully penetrate terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.

  On September 4, the principals—Condi, Don Rumsfeld, others, and I—finally reconvened in the White House Situation Room. This was Tuesday, the day after Labor Day. Washington was coming back to life after surviving another sultry August. Under other circumstances, the Principals’ meeting might have had the feel of a reunion. This one didn’t. The meeting was dominated by the same subject that had been lingering unresolved all summer long: whether the president should approve our request to fly the Predator in a weaponized mode. Unfortunately, the Predator still wasn’t ready to do that, although the Hellfire missile system was slowly edging toward being ready for deployment.

  We also needed to debate the question of when the armed Predator was functional, who should operate it? There was a legitimate question about whether aircraft firing missiles at enemies of the United States should be the function of the military or CIA. It was an important issue, or so it seemed at the time, and I was skeptical about whether a military weapon should be fired outside of the military chain of command. But that was before 9/11.

  Six days later, on September 10, a source we were jointly running with a Middle Eastern country went to see his foreign handler and basically told him that something big was about to go down. The handler dismissed him. Had we known it at the time, however, it would have sounded very much like all the other warnings we received in June, July, August, and early September—frightening but without specificity.

  Less than twenty-four hours later, the unthinkable happened. But to us, it wasn’t unthinkable at all. We had been thinking about nothing else.

  CHAPTER 9

  9/11

  On the morning of September 11, the day that changed everything, I met former senator David Boren for breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel, at 16th and K Streets in Washington at eight thirty. The president was out of town, traveling in Florida, which meant there was no Presidential Daily Briefing. David had plucked me from obscurity in 1987 to serve as chief of staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which he chaired. I looked forward, as I always do, to getting together with him that morning.

  We were just starting to catch up when Tim Ward, who was leading my security detail that day, walked over with a worried look on his face. As befits his position, Tim is a calm, unflappable fellow, but his manner was so urgent when he interrupted us that there was no doubt that something important was on his mind. I stepped away from the table, and he told me that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. Most people, I understand, assumed that the first crash was a tragic accident. It took the second plane hitting the second tower to show them that something far worse was going on. That wasn’t the case for me. We had been living too intimately with the possibility of a terrorist attack on the United States. I instantly thought that this had to be al-Qa’ida.

  I told Senator Boren the news. He recalls my mentioning Bin Ladin and wondering aloud if this is what Moussaoui had been involved with. It was obvious to us both that I had to leave immediately. With Tim Ward, I climbed back into my car and, with lights flashing, began racing back to headquarters.

  All the random dots we had been looking at started to fit into a pattern. As I remember it, in those first minutes my head was exploding with connections. I immediately thought about the “Bojinka” plot to blow up twelve U.S. airliners over the Pacific and a subsequent plan to fly a small airplane into CIA headquarters, which was broken up in 1994.

  Our safe American world had been turned upside down. The war on terror had come to our shores.

  En route, I called my chief of staff, John Moseman, and told him to assemble the senior staff in the conference room next to my office, along with key people from the Counterterrorism Center. With all hell breaking loose, it was hard to get calls through on the secure phone. Essentially, I was in a communications blackout between the St. Regis and Langley, the longest twelve minutes of my life. It wasn’t until I arrived at headquarters that I learned that as we were tearing up the George Washington Parkway at something like eighty miles an hour, a second plane had hit the North Tower.

  As the first reports came in of the planes hitting the World Trade Center, Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, head of Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency (or ISI), and among the people who could have done the most to help us track down Usama bin Ladin pre-9/11, was meeting on Capitol Hill with Congressman Lindsay Graham, Representative Porter Goss, who would eventually replace me as DCI, and others. A half hour later, Mahmood was being chauffeured along Constitution Avenue when someone pointed out a plume of smoke rising from across the Potomac—the first sign that the Pentagon had been struck. Simultaneously, Shafiq bin Ladin, UBL’s estranged brother, was attending the annual investor conference of the Carlyle Group at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, around the corner from me and just blocks from the White House. Three senior CIA officers—Charlie Allen, Don Kerr, and John Russack—were having a long-planned breakfast at the Agency with Navy Commander Kirk Lippold, who had been commanding officer of the USS Cole when the ship was attacked in Yemen. Much of the discussion, naturally, focused on terrorism. The Agency participants later told me that Lippold was distressed that the American people still didn’t recognize the threat. It will take some “seminal event,” he said, to awaken the public. After the breakfast, Lippold went to CTC for some briefings. When the World Trade Center was struck minutes later, Charlie Allen reached the commander and told him, “The seminal event just happened.” Amazingly, Lippold rushed back to work, arriving just in time to see American Airlines Flight 77 plow into the Pentagon.

  Even now, five years later, I find it hard to describe the mood in the conference room when I finally arrived. The time, I would guess, was about 9:15 A.M. Both World Trade Center towers had been hit, and I don’t think there was a person in the room who had the least doubt that we were in the middle of a full-scale assault orchestrated by al-Qa’ida.

  CTC head Cofer Black recalls speaking with Dale Watson, the head of counterterrorism for the FBI, in a kind of cryptic code all that day. I think that was probably true of most of us, to a greater or lesser degree. Sentences didn’t need to be completed; half-expressed thoughts
were fully understood. We had been at this so long, planning for it in so many ways.

  But anticipating an attack and having it happen—seeing the collapse of the World Trade Center—are not the same things. The first is intellectual. The second quickly becomes visceral, and the anxiety level in the conference room in that first hour was extraordinary. Only minutes after the South Tower was hit, the Counterterrorism Center received a report that at least one other commercial passenger jet was unaccounted for. At 9:40, John McLaughlin and Cofer Black took part in a secure video conference with Dick Clarke, from the White House. By then, the Pentagon had just been hit, and we knew more planes were loose. On the heels of the Pentagon strike, phone calls started rolling in—not intelligence, just friends and colleagues relaying the rumors that were gripping Washington and expressing hope that we would know what was true and what was false: a bomb had gone off in the West Wing of the White House; the Capitol and the State Department were in flames. The fact was, we had no idea what was real and what wasn’t, but everyone was wondering, what next? Reports came in of several airplanes that were not responding to communications from the ground and perhaps heading toward Washington. Several CTC officers reminded us that al-Qa’ida members had once discussed flying an airplane into CIA headquarters, the top floor of which we were presently occupying.

  I can remember asking Mike Hohlfelder, the chief of my security detail, what he recommended. “Let’s get out of here,” he answered. “Let’s evacuate.” I was reluctant. We didn’t want our own workforce or the world to think that we were abandoning ship. But I also didn’t want to risk the lives of our own people unnecessarily, and as someone in the conference room pointed out, in case the building had been targeted, we needed to have our leadership intact and able to make decisions.