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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  Despite the constraints on air travel into the United States, the British came over on September 12: Sir Richard Dearlove, the chief of MI-6; Eliza Manningham-Buller, the deputy chief of MI-5; and David Manning, Prime Minister Blair’s foreign policy advisor. I still don’t know how they got flight clearance into the country, but they came on a private plane, just for the night, to express their condolences and to be with us. We had dinner that night at Langley, an affirmation of the special relationship between our two nations and as touching an event as I experienced during my seven years as DCI.

  Signs of support kept pouring in. King Abdullah and Queen Rania of Jordan called to express their condolences. Gen. Mohammed Mediene, the Algerian intelligence chief, was in Washington when al-Qa’ida struck. Like Avi Dichter, he knew up close the pain and challenge of terrorism, and he, too, could not have conducted himself in a more dignified manner or been more sympathetic to our suffering.

  All of these people knew how much 9/11 had struck at the core of each of us at CIA. They’d been there; they’d shared our same fears; they knew that each of the thousands of dead was a personal defeat for us. And I’m sure they would have understood as well as anyone outside CIA the reaction so many of us—at the leadership level and in the ranks—had in the hours and days immediately after the attack. We’re going to run these bastards down no matter where they are, we told ourselves. We’re going to lead, and everybody else is going to follow. And that’s what we set out to do.

  CHAPTER 10

  “We’re at War”

  On September 12, the president chaired an NSC meeting and stressed in stronger terms what he had said on television the evening before: he wanted not just to punish those behind the previous day’s attacks but to go after terrorists and those around the globe who harbored them.

  The next day, in the White House Situation Room, I briefed the president and War Cabinet for the first time on our war plan. “We’re prepared to launch in short order an aggressive covert-action program that will carry the fight to the enemy, particularly al-Qa’ida and its Taliban protectors,” I said. “To do that, we will deploy a CIA paramilitary team inside Afghanistan to work with opposition forces, most notably the Northern Alliance, and to prepare the way for the introduction of U.S. Special Forces.” There were challenges, I told the Cabinet. Ahmed Masood’s assassination on September 9 had left the Northern Alliance without a powerful and widely respected central figure, but we had technology on our side and an extensive network of sources already in country, and we would succeed.

  Cofer Black followed me with a PowerPoint presentation that detailed our covert action capability, projected deployments, and the like. As I had, Cofer made it clear that we would be taking on not just al-Qa’ida but the Taliban as well. The two were inseparable unless the Taliban chose to make the separation itself, and that seemed unlikely, despite our best efforts to drive a wedge between them. We would be undertaking war, in short, not just a search-and-destroy mission for Bin Ladin and his lieutenants—war against an enemy that for the most part would rather blow itself up than be captured. That meant casualties on their side and on ours. Cofer made no effort to predict how many Americans might be killed, but he did make certain the president understood that the mission wouldn’t be bloodless. Bush assured him that he did.

  “How quickly could we deploy the CIA teams?” the president asked.

  “In short order,” Cofer answered.

  “How quickly, then, could we defeat the Taliban and al-Qa’ida?”

  “A matter of weeks,” Cofer told him.

  I didn’t think that was possible; and in fact it wasn’t. The president had been disappointed to learn that the Pentagon had no contingency plan in place for going after al-Qa’ida and the Taliban. George Bush was going a hundred miles an hour by then, completely engaged. If you couldn’t keep up, he wasn’t interested in you.

  The point Cofer and I both wanted to make was that this war would be driven by intelligence, not the pure projection of power. The challenge wasn’t to defeat the enemy militarily. The challenge was to find the enemy. Once that was done, defeating him would be easy.

  On Friday, September 14, we refined our plan further so that Afghanistan was only the opening act of a comprehensive strategy for combating international terrorism. Then we did a dry run in preparation for my presenting the plan the next day at Camp David. That evening, the NSC sent us stacks of papers to review before we arrived at Camp David, input from what must have been every stakeholder in the intelligence and military sectors of government. I remember thinking as I waded through them that hundreds of trees had been killed for no good reason. The papers were irrelevant, as near as I could tell, to anything I was going to say, and by then I was so confident in the rightness of our approach that I had little use for the half measures and unformed strategies that other agencies were beginning to trot out.

  Saturday, September 15, accompanied by John McLaughlin and Cofer Black, I briefed the War Cabinet at Camp David. The president was sitting directly opposite me across the big square table in the rustic Camp David conference room, with the vice president and Colin Powell on either side of him. Others present included Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, sitting side by side, Condi Rice, Steve Hadley, Rich Armitage, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and the new FBI director, Robert Mueller.

  The title of the briefing was “Destroying International Terrorism.” The heading on the first page read: “The ‘Initial Hook’: Destroying al-Qa’ida and Closing the Safe Haven.” Cofer Black and I launched into the distinct pieces of the plan.

  We had to close off Afghanistan by providing immediate assistance to the Northern Alliance and their remaining leaders, and accelerate our contacts with southern Pashtun leaders, including six senior Taliban military commanders, who appeared willing to remove Mullah Omar from power. This built on work we had begun in early 2001 to engineer a split between the Taliban leadership and Bin Ladin and his Arab fighters. We had to seal off Afghanistan’s borders by directly engaging the Iranians, Turks, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Pakistanis.

  We told the president that our only real ally on the Afghan border thus far had been Uzbekistan, where we had established important intelligence-collection capabilities and had trained a special team to launch operations inside Afghanistan. We knew that Uzbekistan would be our most important jumping-off point in aiding the Northern Alliance.

  We raised the importance of being able to detain unilaterally al-Qa’ida operatives around the world. We understood that to succeed both inside and outside Afghanistan we would have to use the large infusion of money coming our way to take the activities of our foreign partners to new levels in operating against al-Qa’ida.

  Some of our most important regional allies could create a cadre of officers who could blend seamlessly into environments where it would be difficult for us to operate on our own. We told the president that we would be relentless in maximizing the number of human agents reporting on terrorist organizations. We also proposed immediate engagement with the Libyans and Syrians to target Islamic extremists.

  We suggested using armed Predator UAVs to kill Bin Ladin’s key lieutenants, and using our contacts around the world to pursue al-Qa’ida’s sources of funding, through identifying nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and individuals who funded terrorist operations.

  We were going to strangle their safe haven in Afghanistan, seal the borders, go after the leadership, shut off their money, and pursue al-Qa’ida terrorists in ninety-two countries around the world. We were ready to carry out all these actions immediately, because we had been preparing for this moment for years. We were ready because our plan allowed us to be. With the right authorities, policy determination, and great officers, we were confident we could get it done. Others may have seen it as a roll of the dice. But we were ready, and the president was going to take the chance.

  Sure, it was a risky proposition when you looked at it from a policy maker’s point of view. We were asking for and we wo
uld be given as many authorities as CIA had ever had. Things could blow up. People, me among them, could end up spending some of the worst days of our lives justifying before congressional overseers our new freedom to act. But everything we asked for that day at Camp David and in subsequent days was based on the solid knowledge of what we needed. Nobody knew this target like we knew it. Others hadn’t been paying attention to this for years as we had been doing. And nobody else had a coordinated plan for expanding out of Afghanistan to combat terrorism across the globe. Operationally, as far as we were concerned, the risk was acceptable. That didn’t mean we weren’t going to lose people—Cofer had made that crystal clear—but this was the right way to go, and we were the right people to do it.

  The morning session at Camp David was freewheeling, all over the place. Sometime around noon, the president suggested we take a break. When we reassembled that afternoon, the discussion was much more directed, and the president was in full agreement with just about everything we had said during the day. “That’s great,” he said about our war plan. The whole mood was one of growing optimism.

  The next day, September 16, I fired off a memo titled “We’re at War” to top officials at my own shop and throughout the intelligence community, which said in part:

  There can be no bureaucratic impediments to success. All the rules have changed. There must be an absolute and full sharing of information, ideas, and capabilities. We do not have time to hold meetings to fix problems—fix them—quickly and smartly. Each person must assume an unprecedented degree of personal responsibility.

  Four days later, on September 20, in an address to the nation before a joint session of Congress, the president said, “Our war on terror begins with al-Qa’ida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” By then, as I remember, the president had already granted us the broad operational authority I had asked for.

  Now that we had been thrown on to a war footing, issues that had seemed intractable just days earlier suddenly seemed far less set in concrete. The Pakistan problem is one such example. On September 13, Rich Armitage invited Pakistani ambassador Maleeha Lodhi and Mahmood Ahmed, the Pakistan intelligence chief, who was still in Washington, over to the State Department and dropped the hammer on them. The time for fence-sitting was over. There would be no more games. George Bush had said in his 9/11 address to the nation that the United States would make no distinction between terrorists and the nations that protected them.

  Pakistan was either with us or against us. Specifically, Armitage demanded that Pakistan begin stopping al-Qa’ida agents at its border, grant the United States blanket overflight and landing rights for all necessary military and intelligence operations, provide territorial access to American and allied intelligence agencies, and cut off all fuel shipments to the Taliban. Armitage is a bull of a man. Mahmood must have felt like he had been run over by a stampede by the time he left Rich’s office. I seriously doubt, however, that Rich actually threatened to “bomb Pakistan back to the stone age,” as General Mahmood reportedly later told President Musharraf. Meanwhile, I was playing the good cop—or at least a better one—in my meetings with Mahmood. Couldn’t he at least meet with Mullah Omar and make it crystal clear to him that the Taliban was going to pay a terrible price if it insisted on continuing to protect al-Qa’ida and Bin Ladin?

  The president, too, became engaged in the matter in a way he had never been before the attacks. At the September 13 morning briefing, he asked me for a country-by-country review of the fight against Islamic extremism and Bin Ladin. What had their liaison services done in the past year to help us? What more could we ask of them? Would a call from the president or some other senior government official be useful? As always, Pakistan was at or near the top of the list.

  All those factors played a role in edging Mahmood toward our position, but the simple fact that he was in Washington when the attacks occurred probably had the greatest influence. He saw the plume of smoke rising from the Pentagon. He watched the reaction all around him, and he understood as he never could have if he had been following events from Islamabad how deep and viscerally Americans felt the attacks. “It was like a wounded animal,” is how he put it to us. That didn’t stop him from continuing to throw up lots of cautions—even after the attacks, Mahmood was still trying to save the Taliban—but now he knew that if we did not get satisfaction, we were still coming after al-Qa’ida no matter who objected or who tried to stand in the way.

  That, I’m sure, is why Mahmood finally did agree to meet with Mullah Omar after he returned home. As a result, Omar called a two-day ulama—a kind of national religious council—to decide what to do about al-Qa’ida and our demand that the Taliban stop sheltering terrorists. Ultimately, of course, that availed us nothing, despite some initial optimism on our part. Bin Ladin wasn’t handed over, which assured that the full might of the U.S. military would come crashing down on the Taliban’s head. But across the border in Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf clearly got the message we were sending him and, I can only assume, the message Mahmood sent back to Pakistan immediately after the attacks. Within hours of Armitage’s delivering his ultimatums, and despite some violent internal opposition, Musharraf agreed to them. In this period, Pakistan had done a complete about-face and become one of our most valuable allies in the war on terrorism. On October 8, as a final measure of his determination to aid America in rooting out al-Qa’ida, Musharraf replaced Mahmood Ahmed as head of the ISI, even though he had been instrumental in Musharraf’s rise to power. Like us, Musharraf must have concluded that in the new global reality, his intel chief was just too close to the enemy. Whatever the reason, I’ve always considered Musharraf’s reversal to be the most important post-9/11 strategic development after the takedown of the Afghan sanctuary itself.

  Hard on the heels of 9/11, we also ramped up our own intelligence collection procedures. In normal times, principal agents gather information via runners who have penetrated into or near the heart of an organization of interest. Episodically, runners and the agents who control them meet, information gets exchanged, and whatever qualifies even marginally as “intelligence” is passed up the chain, either directly to the analysts back at Langley or via the remote chain of command that the principal agents report to. Like all bureaucratic models, this one has its drawbacks, principally of time—working even fast channels creates enough friction to sometimes turn fresh news stale—but it does provide maximum security for all involved.

  If 9/11 had taught us anything, however, it was that we couldn’t let the people who were dedicated to our destruction sit comfortably in their safe havens while we followed the usual routines and employed the normal safeguards. We needed real-time reporting from the field, and to get it we threw out the book.

  We were beefing up our contingent in Pakistan by the hour. Carpenters hammered and sawed through the middle of the night to create new offices, including one room where we had phones lined up to receive calls, each one marked with an index card so the duty officer would know who was checking in and what language—Farsi, Dari, whatever it was—would be needed to take the message.

  We made our own pass at coopting the Taliban. As Mahmood was preparing for his meeting with Mullah Omar, Bob Grenier, a senior CIA officer in the region, traveled to a hotel in the mountains of Baluchistan, in Pakistan, to meet with Mullah Osmani, the commander of the Taliban’s Khandahar Corps, a man then widely acknowledged to be the second-most powerful figure in the movement, next to Mullah Omar. The general and his small entourage had traveled overland from Khandahar. Surrounded by the luxuries of a five-star hotel, and with one of the general’s aides taking painstaking notes so that the proceedings could be carried back to Omar, Grenier first explained the obvious: al-Qa’ida was going to pay dearly for what had been done to the United States, and if the Taliban stood in the way, it would suffer equally. Then he proposed multiple solutions. The Taliban could turn Bin Ladin over to th
e United States for prosecution. If that violated their religious obligation to be good hosts, they could administer justice themselves, in a way that clearly took him off the table. Or if they wanted to save face altogether, they could stand aside and let the Americans find Bin Ladin and extricate him on their own. That night, Bob slept fitfully in a hotel room directly across the hall from Osmani—“a stone-cold killer,” as he describes him—and the next morning he departed and filed a report that reads like a chapter from a spy novel.

  When I carried it to the White House, President Bush read the report with rapt attention.

  Not surprisingly, Omar spurned our suggestions, so in a subsequent October 2 meeting with Osmani at a villa in Baluchistan, Grenier proposed an alternative solution: overthrowing Omar. Osmani could secure Khandahar with his corps, seize the radio station there, and put out a message that the al-Qa’ida Arabs were no friends of the Afghans and had brought nothing but harm to the country and that Bin Ladin must be seized and turned over immediately. That, too, came to nothing, but just to make the proposal to a killer such as Osmani took considerable guts on Grenier’s part.