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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  While we were accelerating intelligence-gathering and doing our best to turn the screws on al-Qa’ida and the Taliban, we were also loosening constraints on our own people and their imaginations. In less than a century, warfare had evolved from massed armies and trench-to-trench battles to guerrilla confrontations and mutually assured destruction to the jihadist-terrorist model that dominates our own time. To keep up, we had to toss out old systems and shake loose from outdated stereotypes.

  We had worked hard prior to 9/11 to break down the old protocols, to make ourselves less of a top-down organization. CIA has one of the deepest and most varied pools of talent in the world; our field officers have done things that you will not read about in spy novels. To me, it made no sense to bring a deputy director or associate director to a meeting with, say, the president, just because rank seemed to demand it. I wanted to take the person closest to the action, the one with hands-on experience, to tell the commander in chief what was really happening. Sometimes I had to drag them along, especially if they had just flown in from some hot spot on the far side of the world and wanted a good shower and a day to sleep, but for the most part, I think, they took it as a sign of respect for what they had done and sacrificed, and for the knowledge they had gained as a result.

  Post-9/11, we redoubled that effort. I’d show up at the White House or at Camp David with people with dirt under their nails and in rumpled clothes, their having just gotten off an airplane returning from the war zone. No government bureaucracy can ever be entirely flat, but those of us in the top positions at CIA worked hard to make our bureaucracy as horizontal as it could be.

  We did essentially the same thing with our officers in the field—we gave them the go-ahead to make calls on their own at the point of contact with the enemy. Flattening the authority pyramid gave us real-time decision making. In part, we had no choice. Terrorism wasn’t just al-Qa’ida. If there was to be war—and that seemed inevitable—it wouldn’t be fought only in Afghanistan. We were facing a worldwide threat matrix, and we had to respond globally with a labor pool that was already stretched perilously thin.

  As the fall of 2001 went on, we would meet daily at headquarters to review the threat reporting—what we’d heard about over the last day, whether we’d notified those who were threatened, what we were doing about the threats. It was amazing how often we would pick up a lead in, say, South America about someone in Yemen we wanted to take off the street. Terrorists are as interconnected as the rest of us in the borderless cyber world. If the operation was high risk, John McLaughlin or I would have to make the call to go ahead. Far more often than not, though, the call would be made at a lower level or out in the field. We gave our people plenty of running room because they needed it, because we made sure they were fully briefed about what the Agency was trying to achieve and because they were, in the overwhelming majority, incredibly competent. The war in Afghanistan only accelerated that trend. If we had tried to micromanage that roll across the desert from the seventh floor of headquarters, we would still be on the road to Kabul today.

  Around midnight on September 12, after a late dinner with the British intelligence chiefs who’d flown over to express their condolences, I was sitting in my office kicking ideas around with Jami Miscik, our second-most senior analyst at the time. I told her that I wanted to create a group within CIA whose sole purpose in life would be to think contrarian thoughts. The cliché in Washington is to “think outside the box,” but I didn’t want us to get just beyond the edge of the ordinary. I wanted people so far out of the box they would be in a different zip code. Jami loved the idea, and within fifteen minutes or so, we had dubbed the group the “Red Cell.”

  We picked out participants as we sat there, called them that night despite the late hour, and told them to be in Jami’s office at eight the next morning. One of the leaders was Paul Frandano, a Harvard-trained senior analyst with a goatee and a liking for colorful bow ties. Not your typical academic, Paul has a mischievous sense of humor and delights in contrarian thinking. Our goal was to free some of our best people from purely objective considerations. These were men and women steeped in analysis. Their intellectual foundation was built solidly on fact, or as close to “fact” as intelligence work often gets. Now we asked them to take an imaginative leap from that, to try to get inside the mind and imagination of our enemy. Over the months ahead, we gave them a variety of specific topics to write about. Among them: “How Usama Might Try to Sink the U.S. Economy,” “Deconstructing the Plots—An Approach to Stopping the Next Attack,” and everyone’s favorite, “The View from Usama’s Cave.” The latter—issued on October 27 and number twenty-two in the series—gave Red Cell participants a chance to speculate on what was going through Usama bin Ladin’s mind and what he might be saying to his key lieutenants three weeks into the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan. Among the quotes it imagined for UBL were these: “I see no need to rush out with new strikes against America” and “I will give more operational scope to my lieutenants. I will instruct them to hold to my standards, but they will make their own decisions about when to strike.”

  Every Red Cell report was accompanied by a statement on the left-hand side of the front page: “In response to the events of 11 September, the Director of Central Intelligence commissioned CIA’s Deputy Director for Intelligence to create a ‘red cell’ that would think unconventionally about the full range of relevant analytic issues. The DCI Red Cell is thus charged with taking a pronounced ‘out-of-the-box’ approach and will periodically produce memoranda and reports intended to provoke thought rather than to provide authoritative assessment.” For all I know the other government agencies who received the reports thought we’d gone round the bend, but I believe the reports worked extraordinarily well, in terms of both their imaginative content and the insight they offered into the real world. The events of September 11 weren’t business as usual; we couldn’t begin to shape our response in the usual way. To my mind, at least, that spirit had a domino effect throughout CIA in the days and weeks after 9/11.

  Our December 2000 Blue Sky memo was the template for the war plan against al-Qa’ida that we would set out to follow within hours of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. Ever since that template had first been laid out, a group of specialists from our Counterterrorism Center had been massaging and refining the plan, and by 9/11 they had it as right as anything can be in an undefined and constantly changing war theater. I’ll never forget what one of our top Afghan strategists, a much-decorated veteran of the Agency, told me after the war there had been fought and won, because it encapsulates everything I feel about the campaign and the great pride I take in having the opportunity to serve with such people: “What I thought was really remarkable about the Bin Ladin program,” he said, “wasn’t just the hard work, the people going around the clock, but their intellectual development. They were able to coordinate all these different pieces and work with liaisons and send teams out. It was remarkably complex, and I think they paved the way for the successes we’re having today. No one else in the U.S. government had ever done that—this is really the beginning of the evolving global battlefield—and a little team down in CTC basically figured this out and set the course for how we wage counter CIA-centric focus terrorism war on the global battlefield.”

  I couldn’t agree more. Maybe it’s my own obsession, but I can’t stress this enough. We—CIA, the intelligence community, investigative bodies, the government at large—missed the exact “when and where” of 9/11. We didn’t have enough dots to connect, and we’ll always have to live with that. But at CIA we knew al-Qa’ida was coming, and afterward we took the fight to them in a way that I feel certain Usama bin Ladin and his lieutenants and protectors never expected in their worst-case scenarios.

  On September 27, sixteen days after the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been hit, we inserted our first covert teams into Afghanistan. Less than two and a half months later, a core group of ninety CIA paramilitary officers, along wit
h a small number of Special Forces units, in combination with Afghan militias and supported by a massive aerial bombardment by the U.S. military, had defeated the Taliban and killed or captured one quarter of Usama bin Ladin’s top lieutenants, including his military commander, Mohammed Atef, a key player in the 9/11 attacks. Kabul had been liberated, and Hamid Karzai named president by a national council. Afghanistan would be CIA’s finest hour.

  For years I had been trying to convince two administrations that the terrorist threat was seamless—that what had happened overseas to our East African embassies and the USS Cole could happen here. Now the seamlessness could no longer be ignored. “There” and “here” had become the same place. The world was one single war theater.

  John McLaughlin remembers my calling him from the White House sometime shortly after the attacks and saying, “We have to put down on paper what we think al-Qa’ida’s targets are. I know we don’t know—but place your bets.” We got all our top people around the table, ran through all the possibilities, and came up with a potential hit list. High on it were symbols of American culture such as movie studios, amusement parks, and sports stadiums, and transportation hubs such as airports, harbors, and bridges. Corporate headquarters and other elements of the economic system were also listed along with military sites; the energy infrastructure, especially targets that would make a visible statement about energy dependence; icons of our national identity (the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty, even Mount Rushmore); and the nodes of the global telecommunications central nervous system, including the Internet and electronic bank transactions. We also noted that Bin Ladin often took years to plan his attacks and liked to return to the same targets, as witnessed by the World Trade Center. It would be reckless to provide more details—the last thing I want is to do the terrorists’ work for them—but the effect of seeing so many prime targets in one four-or five-page report was galvanizing.

  Based on our assessment, I called Jack Valenti, then head of the Motion Picture Association of America, and told him to make sure his industry was buttoned down. I also met with people such as Michael Eisner from Disney; Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the National Hockey League; and National Basketball Association commissioner David Stern; to urge them to step up security at their venues.

  Our stark assessment, I believe, played a large part in the president’s conclusion that somebody needed to be paying attention full time to protecting Americans inside our own borders, and in the subsequent decision to establish a Department of Homeland Security. For years, we at CIA had been playing offense against the terrorists overseas, but no one had been playing defense against them at home. It’s an old axiom among football coaches: offense alone never wins.

  The president asked John McLaughlin in late September, “Why do you think nothing else has happened?” To me, there’s no mystery. We’d done what the president had asked: we all were up on our toes. It’s hard to prove a proposition by the absence, in this case, of follow-up attacks on American soil, but I can’t help but think that somewhere along the way in those first weeks after 9/11, someone who was supposed to do something crucial—buy forged passports, say, for a second team of terrorists, or sneak some kind of weapon or explosive over the border—was discouraged or disrupted or otherwise thwarted by what we and the FBI and the border patrol and city police forces and lots of other newly alert Americans were doing. In the battle against terrorism, I truly believe that heroes are everywhere.

  CHAPTER 11

  Missed Opportunities

  Could anything have prevented 9/11? Despite a vast amount of fact-finding by the 9/11 Commission, journalists, authors, and many others, that question continues to haunt all of us involved in U.S. counterterrorism. Both the 9/11 Commission and the Congressional Joint Inquiry said that stopping the attacks would have been unlikely, but that doesn’t prevent all of us from asking—what if? I certainly don’t pretend to offer definitive answers here, but I will try to strip away some of the confusion and bluster surrounding two complex and frequently misunderstood missed opportunities: the oddly intersecting matters of “watchlisting” (placing suspected terrorists on lists to prevent their entry into the United States) and the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui.

  These two issues illustrate how Washington operates under its own laws of physics. One rule inside the Beltway is that for every action there is an unequal and opposite overreaction. Here is an example. The cover of the June 3, 2002, edition of Time magazine read “The Bombshell Memo.” Inside was an article titled “How the FBI Blew the Case.” The lengthy piece recounted how an unknown FBI agent, Coleen Rowley, had just sent a thirteen-page letter to FBI director Bob Mueller, copying members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. In the letter Rowley criticized the Bureau for failing to act on requests from her Minneapolis field office for permission to obtain a warrant to search the belongings of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-born al-Qa’ida operative who had been arrested on August 17, 2001. The article also tied in complaints from FBI special agents in Phoenix who had sent a memo to their headquarters on July 10, 2001, trying and failing to draw attention to potential Islamic terrorists attending flight schools in the United States.

  As news magazine stories go, this one was pretty devastating. A proud organization such as the FBI never likes to hear that it has blown any case, much less the biggest terrorism assault in our history. No organization, though, is better at defending itself than the FBI, and it had no intention of taking this rap lying down. The Bureau knows that when you get slugged in Time, you punch back in Newsweek, and that’s just what it did.

  The very next week the cover of Newsweek screamed, “The 9/11 Terrorists the CIA Should Have Caught.” The story inside, titled “The Hijackers We Let Escape,” described how CIA picked up the trail of two men, later to become 9/11 hijackers, when they attended a meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000. The article said, somewhat incorrectly, that CIA “tracked one of the terrorists, Nawaf al-Hazmi, as he flew from the meeting to Los Angeles.” Newsweek went on to say that “astonishingly, the CIA did nothing with this information,” and that CIA did not notify the FBI, “which could have covertly tracked [the terrorists] to find out their mission.” An unnamed FBI official was quoted as saying that CIA’s not sharing the information about the two men was “unforgivable.” Bureau sources told the news magazine that if they had known of the two men, they could have connected them to all the other hijackers—an argument Newsweek found “compelling.” The article set off a firestorm and became a pillar of the conventional wisdom that CIA had intentionally withheld information from the Bureau.

  A few days later, on June 8, Newsweek senior writer Evan Thomas was discussing the article on Inside Washington, a syndicated talk show, when host Gordon Peterson asked, “How is Newsweek’s relationship with the FBI these days?” Thomas answered, “Well, it was pretty good since we did their bidding.” Thomas, who is a very knowledgeable reporter steeped in the intricacies of national security and intelligence reporting, later called CIA’s press office to claim that he had misspoken and didn’t really know what he was talking about in this instance. Whether he did or not, a very complex story had been reduced to a bumper sticker—“CIA Intentionally Withheld Information”—and despite our best efforts, the 9/11 Commission, the Congressional Joint Inquiry, and the mass media largely bought into it.

  To me, what’s important to realize is that the watchlisting problem was not, as is so often claimed, an example of CIA and FBI not working with each other. Throughout this pre-9/11 period both agencies were coordinating closely. Louis Freeh and I worked very hard to overcome historical animosities and misunderstandings and to get both organizations to recognize that they were on the same team. Through two administrations, I had no closer relationships in Washington than with Louis Freeh, Bob Mueller, and their senior officers. While our cultures and missions may have been different, there was no difference in the heartfelt way CIA officers and FBI special agents tried to protect the countr
y. We frequently held high-level coordination meetings, committed to assigning some of our best people to each others’ headquarters (jokingly referred to as the “hostage exchange program”), and tried to help each other in every way possible.

  Six FBI officers were assigned to CIA headquarters at the time of 9/11; their role was to ensure that the Bureau’s interests were always considered and that information valuable to the Bureau was passed back to the home office through official and unofficial channels. A similar group of CIA officers worked out of the FBI offices to help translate CIA’s needs and capabilities to our law enforcement partners. Of course, there were coordination problems—agencies are bound to have different perspectives over their equally important missions. (The post-9/11 Patriot Act went a long way toward fixing some of these issues.) What’s critical—and what the 9/11 Commission and others missed—is that the so-called wall preventing a free flow of intelligence to FBI criminal investigators was not really the heart of the matter. The main problems were old-fashioned ones: too few people on both sides working on too many issues. We needed more people, better communications, and, particularly on the FBI side, better information technology support. After 9/11, Bob Mueller and I sought even more ways to drive our organizations closer together. In the aftermath of such a tragedy it was perhaps inevitable that people would try to drive wedges between us.

  The watchlisting story begins as part of the investigation into the August 1998 bombing of the two U.S. embassies in Africa. FBI agents pursuing that case came up with a telephone number of a suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East believed to be associated with al-Qa’ida or Egyptian Islamic Jihad terrorists. That suspicious phone number was shared with CIA, NSA, DIA, the State and Treasury departments, and others. About a year later, in December 1999, intelligence collected from that phone indicated that several men would be traveling to Kuala Lumpur for a meeting to be held in Malaysia early the next month. The information about the meeting was distributed to a number of agencies, including the FBI, at the same time.