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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  The benefits of capturing someone like KSM went far beyond simply taking a killer off the street. Through hard work, each success cascaded into others. It was amazing to watch. For example, the same day that KSM was captured, a senior al-Qa’ida financial operator by the name of Majid Khan was also taken into custody.

  In interrogation, KSM told us that Majid Khan had recently provided fifty thousand dollars to operatives working for a major al-Qa’ida figure in Southeast Asia known as “Hambali.” When confronted with this allegation, Khan confirmed it and said he gave the money to someone named Zubair, and he provided the man’s phone number. Before long, Zubair was in custody and provided fragmentary information that led us to capture another senior Hambali associate named Bashir bin Lap, aka “Lilie.” That person provided information that led to the capture of Hambali, in Thailand.

  The importance of Hambali’s capture cannot be overestimated. He was the leader of the Jemaah Islamiya, a Sunni extremist organization that has established an operational infrastructure in Southeast Asia. Hambali swore allegiance to Bin Ladin in the late 1990s, offering him a critical operational advantage: a non-Arab face to attack the United States and our allies. While moderate Islam thrives in Southeast Asia, its geographic expanse offers the opportunity to create dispersed sanctuaries throughout the continent.

  What Hambali’s arrest demonstrated is that our campaign was targeted not just against al-Qa’ida but also against Sunni extremism around the world. What we are fighting today is bigger than the al-Qa’ida central management structure and more diverse than Arab males between the ages of eighteen and forty. What we have to contend with has an Arab, Asian, European, African, and perhaps even a homegrown American face.

  After Hambali was arrested, we went back to KSM and asked him to speculate on who might fill Hambali’s shoes. KSM suggested that the likely candidate would be Hambali’s brother, Rusman “Gun Gun” Gunawan. So we went back to Hambali, and while being debriefed, he inadvertently provided information that led to the detention of his brother, in Karachi, in September 2003.

  In custody, “Gun Gun” identified a cell of Jemaah Islamiya members hidden in Karachi that his brother planned to use for future al-Qa’ida operations. Hambali confirmed that the non-Arab men were being groomed for future attacks in the United States, at the behest of KSM, and were probably intended to conduct a future airborne attack on America’s West Coast.

  I believe none of these successes would have happened if we had had to treat KSM like a white-collar criminal—read him his Miranda rights and get him a lawyer who surely would have insisted that his client simply shut up. In his initial interrogation by CIA officers, KSM was defiant. “I’ll talk to you guys,” he said, “after I get to New York and see my lawyer.” Apparently he thought he would be immediately shipped to the United States and indicted in the Southern District of New York. Had that happened, I am confident that we would have obtained none of the information he had in his head about imminent threats against the American people.

  From our interrogation of KSM and other senior al-Qa’ida members, and our examination of documents found on them, we learned many things—not just tactical information leading to the next capture. For example, more than twenty plots had been put in motion by al-Qa’ida against U.S. infrastructure targets, including communications nodes, nuclear power plants, dams, bridges, and tunnels. All these plots were in various stages of planning when we captured or killed the pre-9/11 al-Qa’ida leaders behind them.

  In my view, it wasn’t one single thing that hindered a major follow-on attack, but rather a combination of three things. We were successful with information gained from NSA’s terrorist surveillance program, CIA’s interrogation of a handful of high-value detainees, and leads provided by another highly classified program that tracked terrorist financial transactions. Each of these programs informed and enabled the others. And each was carefully monitored to ensure that it was appropriately conducted.

  As much as some things change, many things remain the same. Al-Qa’ida’s fixation on the use of airplanes as weapons did not end on 9/11. In the ensuing years, plots to use airliners as weapons were broken in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. What started in 1995 as the Manila air conspiracy was taken forward to London in April 2006, when British intelligence broke the back of a plot to use liquid explosives on aircraft transiting the Atlantic in the same way that was attempted in 1995. In the years in between, airline plots were directed against Heathrow airport, and there were four separate operations to target both coasts of the United States.

  During the Millennium threat, actions in Amman by the Jordanians uncovered the intent to use hydrogen cyanide in a movie theater. Today al-Qa’ida disseminates instructions on how to acquire simple materials that can be purchased in hardware stores to disperse lethal gasses in enclosed facilities, using a simple but effective device they called the “mobtaker.” What this tells you about al-Qa’ida is that history matters. They will return to plots previously attempted whether they succeeded or failed.

  What the detainees gave us was insight into people, strategy, thinking, individuals, and how they would all be used against us. What they gave us was worth more than CIA, NSA, the FBI, and our military operations had achieved collectively. We were able to corroborate what they told us with other data we had collected. What we now have is an exhaustive menu and knowledge about how al-Qa’ida thinks, operates, and trains its members to conduct operations against us. What we have in our possession is a road map to put in place a systematic program of protection, to deny al-Qa’ida the operational latitude it once enjoyed. The questions are: How effective will we be in relentlessly closing the seams of our vulnerability? How urgently will we pursue the sacrifices required to avert the next attack?

  One thing is certain: the United States remains the crown jewel in al-Qa’ida’s planning. Its desire to pull off multiple spectacular attacks in the United States that inflict economic and psychological damage is undiminished.

  We have learned that al-Qa’ida is a very adaptive organization. Prior to 9/11 they understood the security weaknesses of the United States. They understood our laws, our banking regulations, and the large gaps in our domestic security preparations. They also recognize that we are prone to “fighting the last war.” So after the 9/11 attacks, while the United States and our allies have focused on a threat posed by certain young Arab males, al-Qa’ida has shifted its recruitment to bring in jihadists with different backgrounds. I am convinced the next major attack against the United States may well be conducted by people with Asian or African faces, not the ones that many Americans are alert to.

  It would be easy for al-Qa’ida or another terrorist group to send suicide bombers to cause chaos in a half-dozen American shopping malls on any given day. Why haven’t they? The real answer is that we do not know. (It would be easy to do and would spread the kind of fear and economic damage they desire.) I believe it is because they have set for themselves a bigger goal. They want to hurt us in a measure commensurate with our status as a superpower. To date, the techniques the terrorists gladly employ in places like Iraq and Israel have not been used in the United States.

  Our successes against al-Qa’ida have not come without a price. As time passes since 9/11, I fear that Americans will once again begin to think of terrorism as something that happens “over there.” That is exactly the mind-set our enemy wants us to have. The lessons of the past and the attacks in England, Spain, Morocco, Bali, Turkey, and elsewhere tell us how they are going to attack, the targets they are interested in attacking, and, most important, that they are intent on coming here again. We will rarely know the “when,” but there is no longer any excuse for not understanding the “how” and not doing our best to protect against it. History matters.

  CHAPTER 14

  They Want to Change History

  Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do
so.

  — Usama bin Ladin quoted in Time magazine, December 24, 1998, when asked if al-Qa’ida had nuclear and chemical weapons

  There was not a shred of doubt that Bin Ladin meant what he said, nor any doubt that he would go to any length to fulfill his “religious duty.” Long before 9/11, in public testimony and in secret counsel to two administrations, I raised the alarm about al-Qa’ida. Now, in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, I asked my staff, “What’s next?”

  Although we had his own statements to give us great concern, the consensus inside and outside our own government could be boiled down to this: “Guys in caves can’t get WMD.” But this was an issue about which we could not afford to be wrong. So soon after 9/11, I directed CIA’s CTC to establish a new capability to focus exclusively on terrorist WMD. Even the people I put in charge of that effort were skeptical, hopeful that they would simply be proving a negative. We began to review the historical record. We combed our files and sent teams around the world to share our leads and ask foreign intelligence services about information in their possession. We interrogated al-Qa’ida prisoners and pored over documents found in safe houses and on computers captured in Afghanistan. What we discovered stunned us all.

  The threats were real. Our intelligence confirmed that the most senior leaders of al-Qa’ida are still singularly focused on acquiring WMD. Bin Ladin may have provided the spiritual guidance to develop WMD, but the program was personally managed at the top by his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Moreover, we established beyond any reasonable doubt that al-Qa’ida had clear intent to acquire chemical, biological, and radiological/nuclear (CBRN) weapons, to possess not as a deterrent but to cause mass casualties in the United States. The assessment prior to 9/11 that terrorists were not working to develop strategic weapons of mass destruction was simply wrong. They were determined to have, and to use, these weapons.

  Over time, we were able to link the top echelon of al-Qa’ida’s leadership to the group’s highly compartmentalized chemical, biological, and nuclear networks. This group included al-Qa’ida’s operational chief, Sayf al-Adl; the group’s logistics chief, Abu Hafs; Jemaah Islamiya chief Ruidin Isomuddin (Hambali); 9/11 planners Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh; Egyptian CBRN expert Abu Khabab al-Masri; self-described “CEO of anthrax,” Yazid Sufaat; and explosives expert and “nuclear CEO,” Abdel al-Aziz al-Masri.

  As we researched the information we were slowly gathering from myriad sources, we unlocked a disturbing secret: the group’s interest in WMD was not new. They had been searching for these weapons long before we had been looking for them. As far as we know, al-Qa’ida’s fascination with chemical weapons goes back to the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in March 1995 by a group of religious fanatics called the Aum Shinrikyo. Twelve people died in that attack, but had the dispersal devices worked as planned, the death toll would have been higher. Al-Qa’ida leaders were impressed and saw the attack as a model for achieving their own ambitions. (In retrospect, the Tokyo attack also foreshadowed al-Qa’ida’s interest in subway and railway systems, which later manifested itself in attacks in Madrid on March 11, 2004; in London on July 7, 2005; and a planned attack against the New York City subway in fall 2003 that was called off by Ayman al-Zawahiri in the last stages of preparation—“for something better.”)

  In February 2001, in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, Usama bin Ladin was tried in absentia and others were tried in person for their involvement in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It was here that al-Qa’ida’s pursuit of WMD became clear: one of the key witnesses in that trial, Jamal Ahmad al-Fadl, described how, as far back as 1993, he helped Bin Ladin try to obtain uranium in Sudan, to be used in some type of a nuclear device. Al-Qa’ida, al-Fadl testified, was willing to pay $1.5 million to acquire an unknown quantity of uranium. His testimony ended without resolution. Perhaps this was the first of many experiences for al-Qa’ida in which the group was scammed by opportunists, or perhaps the offer was real. We may never know. The important point is that the group was actively attempting to acquire nuclear material in the early 1990s. They were willing to do what needed to be done, and pay whatever it would cost, to get their hands on fissile material. In the face of such steely resolve, the only responsible course of action would be to do whatever was necessary to rule out any possibility that terrorists could get their hands on fissile material.

  Bin Ladin’s statements in 1998 regarding his religious obligation to obtain WMD were not made in a vacuum, either. That was the same year that Pakistan first tested a nuclear weapon. The expertise and material for fulfilling UBL’s dream lay across the border from his Afghan sanctuary. We received fragmentary information from an intelligence service that, also in 1998, UBL had sent emissaries to establish contact with the nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan’s network. Over decades, A.Q. had built an international network of suppliers of nuclear capability for sale to rogue states. According to the intel, A. Q. Khan had rebuffed several of UBL’s entreaties, although it was not clear why. However, this new reality of the potential collaboration between a well-organized proliferation network and a terrorist group would ultimately reshape our understanding of the WMD threat, and the nature of our response to it.

  Shortly before 9/11, a friendly intelligence service chanced across information that a Pakistani nongovernmental organization (NGO) called Umma Tameer-e-Nau (UTN) had been formed to establish social-welfare projects in Afghanistan. However, the information suggested that UTN had another purpose: they hoped to lend their expertise and access to the scientific establishment in order to help build chemical, biological, and nuclear programs for al-Qa’ida. (NGOs can be a convenient vehicle for providing cover for terrorist organizations, as they have legitimate reasons to traffic in expertise, material, and money.) The leadership of UTN was made up of retired Pakistani nuclear scientists, military officers, engineers, and technicians. Its founder and chairman, Sultan Bashirrudan Mahmood, was the former director for nuclear power at Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission. Mahmood was thought of as something of a madman by many of his former colleagues in the Pakistan nuclear establishment. In 1987 he published a book called Doomsday and Life After Death: The Ultimate Faith of the Universe as Seen by the Holy Quran. It was a disturbing tribute to his skewed view of the role of science in jihad. The book’s basic message—from the leader of a group that had offered WMD capabilities to al-Qa’ida—was that the world would end one day soon in the fire of nuclear holocaust that would usher in judgment day and thus fulfill the prophecies of the Quran.

  Mahmood’s associates in UTN may not have embraced his apocalyptic vision, but they shared his extremist tendencies. Chaudiri Andul Majeed, a prominent nuclear engineer who retired from the Pakistani Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology in 2000, agreed to play a key role in assisting Mahmood in his plans to share WMD with the Taliban and UBL. We also knew that UTN enjoyed some measure of support from Pakistani military officers opposed to President Musharraf, notably the former director of the Pakistani intelligence service, Gen. Hamid Gul. It appeared that UTN’s contacts with the Taliban and al-Qa’ida may have been supported, if not facilitated, by elements within the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment.

  I instructed the Directorate of Operations to press all of our contacts worldwide to find out anything we could about the people and organizations with WMD that might be willing to share expertise with al-Qa’ida and other terrorist groups. We did not limit our inquiries to friends. We also spoke to the Libyans, who confirmed that they had rejected overtures from UTN peddling nuclear expertise. Ben Bonk, the deputy chief of CTC, held a clandestine meeting with Musa Kusa, the head of the Libyan intelligence service, to try to elicit what he could about Tripoli’s familiarity with al-Qa’ida. During their conversation, Bonk asked if Kusa had ever heard of UTN. “Yes,” the Libyan replied, “they tried to sell us a nuclear weapon. Of course, we turned them down.” This
information confirmed separate reporting from another intelligence service that UTN had approached the Libyans with an offer to provide chemical, biological, and nuclear expertise. Kusa’s words rang true because, unbeknownst to him, we knew Libya did not need UTN since they had already secured the services of an upscale supplier of WMD services—the A. Q. Khan proliferation network.

  CIA passed our information on UTN to our Pakistani colleagues, who quickly hauled in seven board members for questioning. The investigation was ill-fated from the get-go. The UTN officials all denied wrongdoing and were not properly isolated and questioned. In fact, they were allowed to return home after questioning each day. Pakistani intelligence interrogators treated the UTN officials deferentially, with respect befitting their status in Pakistani society. They were seen as men of science, men who had made significant contributions to Pakistan. Our officers read the question etched in the faces of their Pakistani liaison contacts: Surely, such men cannot be terrorists? It was a problem we would encounter time and time again as we began tracing WMD networks and leads that emerged in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Australia, and in North and South America. There was no question al-Qa’ida sought scientific expertise on a global scale. The question I needed an answer to urgently was whether they had already succeeded.