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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  Eight days later, Mike Spann was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Shannon impressed us all with her grace, dignity, and strength. The family asked me to make remarks at the graveside, and I was honored to do so. In going to Afghanistan, to “that place of danger and terror, he sought to bring justice and freedom,” I said. I told his family, friends, colleagues, and the nation that Mike Spann was a “patriot who knew that information saves lives, and that its collection is a risk worth taking.”

  The bureaucracy had initially balked at burying Mike in Arlington, since he had been neither retired military nor on active duty at the time of his death. John McLaughlin called Paul Wolfowitz, who quickly said he would support Mike’s being given the honor of an Arlington interment. John then called Andy Card, who, based on McLaughlin and Wolfowitz’s recommendation, cut through the red tape and made it happen.

  Mike’s is one of many remarkable stories of heroism by CIA officers in the opening months of the Afghan campaign. Although they are accustomed to working without much support or infrastructure, Afghanistan took that to new heights. Agency officers participated in cavalry charges and called in air strikes while on horseback. One CIA medic attempted to save an Afghan’s life by performing an emergency amputation of the soldier’s leg using the only device available to him—a large Leatherman pocketknife.

  The definitive moment of the CIA’s entire campaign may have been saving the life of the country’s future leader. By the very early days of December, Hamid Karzai had proved himself not only a fearless fighter but also the indispensable man in the Afghan equation. As a result, CIA and U.S. Special Forces units began to worry about not just supporting him but also ensuring his survival. That, though, became increasingly difficult.

  On December 5, Karzai was leading his troops in an assault on Khandahar, one of the last Taliban strongholds. U.S. military personnel were calling in air strikes in support of the assault using Global Positioning System devices. As they were doing so, one soldier replaced the batteries in his GPS unit, forgetting that doing so caused the unit to erase previously entered data and to reset itself at its own location. As a result, an air strike from a B-52 was called in on the soldier’s own position. Three Americans and five Afghans died in the mishap. Karzai might have, too, if Greg V. hadn’t thrown himself on him, knocking him to the ground just as the bombs struck. It turned out to be an eventful Wednesday for Karzai. That same day, he was selected to be the interim prime minister of Afghanistan.

  The routing of the Taliban and al-Qa’ida from Afghanistan in a matter of weeks was accomplished by 110 CIA officers, 316 Special Forces personnel, and scores of Joint Special Operations Command raiders creating havoc behind enemy lines—a band of brothers with the support of U.S. airpower, following a CIA plan, that has to rank as one of the great successes in Agency history.

  As we forced out al-Qa’ida and the Taliban leaders from the sanctuary, we continued our focus on capturing or killing Usama bin Ladin. We believed he was in the mountains of southern Nangarhar province, only miles from the Pakistani border. This area had long been an al-Qa’ida stronghold, particularly south of Jalalabad in the Tora Bora Mountains.

  By early November, our intelligence reporting was indicating that UBL had fled to the Tora Bora region. When Kabul fell, on November 14, we figured that Bin Ladin and his cohorts would be even more likely to try to flee Afghanistan, perhaps for the ungoverned regions of Pakistan. CIA rushed to set up counterterrorist pursuit teams, made up of Northern Alliance fighters with U.S. advisors, but the vast reaches of the territory made this a difficult mission. Bin Ladin had chosen a good place to hide. The rugged hills of Tora Bora contain dozens of tunnels and caves. As one CIA officer put it, “He had mountains to his back, clear fields of fire in front of him, and a local population unwilling to confront or eject him.”

  Agency and military officers tried to motivate Afghan forces with the usual combination of exhortations and a liberal allocation of cash to press the attack against suspected al-Qa’ida strongholds. A joint CIA/JSOC team of five men infiltrated into the heart of enemy territory and, for more than seventy-two hours, directed air strikes. At one point, the team requested B-52s to deliver bombs to within twelve hundred yards of their position. In all, about seven hundred thousand pounds of ordnance was dropped between the fourth and seventh of December alone. Hundreds of al-Qa’ida operatives were killed. But CIA officers on the scene began to doubt whether they could rely on the Afghan ground force for this critical push of the campaign. Worse, there were concerns that some of the Afghan units might be actively cooperating with al-Qa’ida elements, helping them to escape.

  We had sensitive intelligence that strongly suggested Bin Ladin was in the Tora Bora area and likely was plotting a quick escape through soon-to-be-completed tunnels. U.S. air power was brought to bear on this very difficult terrain.

  Aerial bombardment, though, can do only so much. Truly confronting an enemy entrenched in a network of caves requires getting into the caves yourself, and the Afghan troops we were working with were distinctly reluctant to undertake that risk. It was also the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, and Afghan troops were not much interested in conducting attacks. Agency officers in the field and at headquarters started lobbying hard for the insertion of U.S. troops to try to complete the job. Hank Crumpton called Tommy Franks to discuss the situation. Tommy said that if he were to deploy a large contingent of U.S. military to the region it would take weeks to get them in place during that period, and UBL might slip away. He made the call that it was better to press ahead with the units in place at the moment than to wait for reinforcements. We urged the Pakistanis to do the best they could to place troops along the Pakistani-Afghan border. We plotted all available escape routes that Bin Ladin might choose.

  I remember the president asking Hank one morning if the Pakistanis could seal the border. “No sir,” he said. “No one has enough troops to prevent any possibility of escape in a region like that.” The Pakistani military did manage to capture hundreds of al-Qa’ida members slipping across the border, but not the one we wanted most.

  CHAPTER 13

  Threat Matrix

  The attacks of 9/11 were not the end of anything. They were the beginning. That was the message I was getting from my Counterterrorism Center. As far as al-Qa’ida was concerned, 9/11 was just the opening shot.

  As traumatic as the attacks were, however, we knew what actions we could take. We knew what needed to be done, and there was a tremendous sense of urgency about it. Over the next several years we were able to achieve remarkable success against the terrorist threat for three strategic reasons.

  First was the loss of al-Qa’ida’s safe haven in Afghanistan. Because we were able to get into the sanctuary, we suddenly had access to people and documents that laid bare the future plans and intentions of al-Qa’ida. The key to success was rapidly to collect, fuse, and analyze the data in real time and to use it to drive operations.

  The second strategic reason for success was Pakistani president Musharraf’s decision to join the fight on our side. Pakistan switched sides—from aiding the Taliban to fighting al-Qa’ida. Pakistani intelligence chief Ehsan Ulhaq became a pivotal figure. With the arrest of well over five hundred al-Qa’ida operatives, Pakistan, in concert with U.S. intelligence, denied al-Qa’ida the luxury of a safe haven within the country’s settled areas. (For his efforts, al-Qa’ida twice tried to assassinate President Musharraf.)

  The third reason was the decisive action on the part of the Saudi leadership following the Riyadh bombings in May 2003. Saudi authorities have detained or killed many of the top known al-Qa’ida cell leaders in the kingdom and hundreds of foot soldiers. They have captured thousands of pounds of explosives. They have also reduced the financial resources at al-Qa’ida’s disposal.

  Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia were just part of the puzzle. With the new authorities, money, and confidence that the U.S. president gave to us, we were able to leverage t
he rest of the world’s counterterrorism efforts.

  There were a few countries that “got it” long before 9/11. The Jordanians, Egyptians, Uzbeks, Moroccans, and Algerians always understood what we were talking about. It was ironic that, pre-9/11, we had more success in getting help within the Islamic world than elsewhere. The British and French were also always helpful. Both had lived through their own terrorist threats. But until September 11, it was hard to convince most of the world of the legitimacy of our concerns.

  In addition to the strategic reasons for our success, there were several tactical steps that were important. One of the most significant keys to our accomplishments against the terrorists came from something that sounds quite mundane: a daily meeting. This meeting would be repeated at 5:00 P.M. every weekday for the three years after 9/11. At these sessions we would try to get a handle on the flood of information about terrorism pouring in from around the world. Virtually every day you would hear something about a possible impending threat that would scare you to death. But you would also hear about opportunities to work with allies, new and old, against this threat. These sessions grew out of biweekly terrorism update meetings I started when I was deputy DCI in 1996. In 1998, after the embassy bombings, the meetings became weekly. Initially we called it “the small group.” That title quickly became a joke, because the number of participants expanded until they packed the large wood-paneled conference room down the hall from my office.

  The point of the meeting was to pull together in one place everyone who needed to take action in the next twenty-four hours in both our war in Afghanistan and the broader war on terrorism. My intent was to cut short the time it took for information to flow from the people in the field to me and to slash the time between orders being issued in Washington and executed half a world away.

  This wasn’t CIA talking to itself; we had FBI, NSA, and military officers there as well. The windowless room features a long, highly polished wooden conference table with about twenty chairs around it. The conference room needed its long table because briefers would occasionally roll out charts the size of bedsheets showing analysis that connected terrorists around the world through family, phone, and/or financial contacts. Just before the session started, any maps, charts, or documents to be used in the presentations would be passed out, and at the end they would be just as efficiently collected to keep control of the information. Always there was a palpable fear in the room that the United States was about to be hit again—either here or our interests abroad. No one present thought there was a minute to waste.

  Five or six Agency components would lead off the meeting every afternoon. The first briefer was usually from the Office of Terrorism Analysis, initially Pattie Kindsvater, Phil Mudd, and other analysts. Later it was Mark Rosini from the FBI, whom we affectionately called “The Voice,” because his deep baritone imparted a special sense of urgency. These briefers would run down the latest threat information. The terrorist acts of 9/11 unleashed a torrent of information from around the world. Suddenly friend and foe alike started reporting information that a day or two earlier they might have withheld or ignored. Some of it would later prove to be questionable, but at the time, we could not afford to dismiss any potential threat—and there were thousands of them.

  To help senior administration officials visualize the range of possible plots we were tracking, we developed, in coordination with the FBI, what we called the “threat matrix.” A multipage document, the matrix was given to the president each morning as part of his PDB session. Copies of it were also provided to other top officials. In it were the newest threats that had emerged over the past twenty-four hours.

  The matrix soon became an important part of the five o’clock meeting. At each session, we went over the next day’s matrix, recognizing that many, perhaps most, of the threats contained in it were bogus. We just didn’t know which ones. In a typical matrix you might see tales of impending doom picked up from people walking into U.S. embassies overseas, cryptic comments gathered through intercepted foreign communications, anonymous correspondence received by major media outlets, and leads given to us by human assets.

  We recognized that the matrix was a blunt instrument. You could drive yourself crazy believing all or even half of what was in it. It was exceptionally useful, however, and an unprecedented mechanism for systematically organizing, tracking, validating, cross-checking, and debunking the voluminous amount of threat data flowing into the intelligence community. The very massiveness of it prompted officials to think through vulnerabilities. Have we done enough to secure major landmarks, theme parks, or water supplies? Are our watchlists tight enough? Sometimes the threats mentioned would strike you as absurd, and then al-Qa’ida would do something to convince you that nothing was out of the range of possibility. Who, for example, would have thought that exploding footwear could be a major air travel problem—until, that is, December 21, 2001, when Richard Reid was subdued on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami trying to light explosives hidden in his shoes?

  After the discussion of the threat matrix, Hank Crumpton, chief of the CTC Special Operations Group, would come next. He’d be followed by the chief of Alec Station’s Bin Ladin Unit, initially Hendrik V., and later Marty M.; then Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, head of CTC’s WMD branch, would brief. On occasion we would hear from Phil R., who was in charge of CTC’s efforts involving international financial operations. Charlie Allen would carefully listen to our operational requirements and translate them into information requirements, which our intelligence communities, both foreign and domestic, would have to pursue. This was both to meet imminent operational needs and to position us to stay one step ahead of the terrorists.

  Also at my side at the five o’clock meetings were John McLaughlin; the heads of the Directorates of Operations, Intelligence, and Science and Technology; the senior leadership of CTC; and others whose goal was to help clear obstacles for those who were on the front lines. Attendance at the five o’clock meetings became a critical part of each person’s day. If, for some reason, you missed a meeting, you’d have to struggle the next day to follow the plot lines—so much interconnected information flowed each time.

  November 6, 2001, was a typical five o’clock session. On that day I was briefed on a wide variety of freshly collected intelligence: A report had been collected about an Arab, of Persian Gulf origin, who reportedly knew of a planned second strike against the United States that was imminent and who claimed that the operatives were already in place. Additionally, he claimed to know of a third and final attack after which he would be free to come home. Similarly there was information on someone apparently in Jordan who had posted on a website a prediction that another attack on the United States was imminent. You might ask, so what? Until you learned that this same person had posted a note saying they were close to “zero hour” on September 10, 2001.

  Another snippet of intelligence that day told us that a known al-Qa’ida associate who had been in the United States from 1999 to the fall of 2001 was aware of big events expected on November 5 and 6. We also learned that an Egyptian who worked for the embassy in Saudi Arabia had suddenly, without explanation, faxed in his resignation. Subsequent investigation showed that the man had ties to al-Qa’ida’s partner, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and was wanted by authorities in his home country. Could his disappearance presage some new attack? We had to try to find him fast.

  That same evening, I heard about intelligence gleaned from a senior UBL operative that provided the name of an al-Qa’ida associate determined to conduct a suicide operation. We had the name, biographical data, but no idea where the man was.

  Nearly two months after the attacks of 9/11 there was still great skepticism in Saudi Arabia that any of their countrymen had been involved. My staff came to me that night with a proposal that we share the chilling cockpit audio recordings made from United Airlines Flight 93 before it crashed in Pennsylvania. The Saudi-accented voices heard on the tape might remove any doubts.

&nb
sp; We had intelligence of three al-Qa’ida–associated people, possibly connected to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, traveling for unknown reasons; we passed along the intelligence to three countries, all mentioned as possible transit points.

  We heard from Russian intelligence about increased concerns over terrorist actions in Chechnya.

  A Middle Eastern country captured a terrorist wanted in a third country. Could we help get him there? We could.

  The FBI had conducted a polygraph on a source of the U.S. Customs Service who said he knew of a possible nuclear threat to the United States; that source flunked the test, which showed “deception indicated.”

  The intelligence we heard that night, and every night, were just tiny threads. They had to be woven into a tapestry before we could make sense of what we were seeing. And this was just one day; it is difficult to put in words the number of reports, and the intensity of those reports, that came in every day. As one officer said to me, “I never want to live that again. The pace was furious. The constant refrain was: It must be done tonight, it must be done tomorrow. We have to have that for the president tomorrow. That pace wasn’t kept up for days or weeks; it was years.”

  The five o’clock meetings were decision-making sessions, not briefings. If someone told me he was having trouble getting needed information out of an allied government, I’d often grab the phone right after leaving the meeting, call the head of the intelligence service involved, and light a fire under him. Other times I would order up talking points to be in my hands by six the next morning.

  Other governments weren’t the only concern. Sometimes we would hear of potential threats that weren’t being internalized quickly enough within our own government. Countless times someone in the room was directed to get up that second, find a phone, and call the Pentagon, the FBI, the State Department, or some other entity, to make absolutely sure that the right people knew everything we knew and that they were going to get on top of that particular threat. The key was imparting information and context quickly; we had no time for more briefings.