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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  Kappes and his British colleague flew to a European city in mid-April. Initially, the plan was for them to meet the Libyan intelligence chief Musa Kusa and Libyan diplomat Fouad Siltni in their hotel over breakfast. Steve and his colleague selected a table that allowed them to keep an eye on the entire hotel restaurant. Just before the appointed meeting time, two young men of Middle Eastern extraction walked in. Kappes noted that they had the air of security professionals about them. Moments later, Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, walked into the restaurant. Clearly, this was not a discreet enough environment for sensitive discussions. While Kappes kept an eye on the Israelis, the Brit intercepted the Libyans and took them up to a meeting room on the hotel’s top floor. Kappes soon joined them.

  Once settled in, Musa Kusa, a tall, well-dressed man, launched into a lengthy canned speech about Libya’s position. We had decided not to give the Libyans any written material from the United States in that first meeting, but Kappes conveyed the president’s desire that Libya take the necessary steps to return to “the family of nations.”

  That first meeting lasted more than two hours. After some discussion, Musa Kusa essentially admitted that his country had violated just about every international arms control treaty it had ever signed. Then he said that they wanted to relinquish their weapons programs, that we should trust them to do so, and he asked for a sign of good faith from us.

  Steve and his British colleague explained the “trust but verify” concept made famous by President Reagan and said that there would be no signs of good faith from either of our two countries until we could get experts on the ground in Libya and verify the extent of the Libyan holdings, and assure ourselves that the programs were being dismantled.

  When Steve returned from the trip, I took him to the Oval Office one morning to brief the president on what had transpired. Although nothing definitive had been accomplished, we had the prospect of making a real breakthrough. We and the Brits started assembling teams of WMD experts who might go to Libya to inspect their programs.

  But the Libyans started dragging their feet. They weren’t ready for foreigners to go poking around their weapons programs, it seemed. I flew to London in mid-May to meet with my counterparts. One of the topics of discussion was how to jump-start the process. Later that month, Kappes and a senior British officer invited the Libyans to a meeting in a European capital. Gadhafi’s son Saif al-Islam attended along with Musa Kusa.

  Saif started to play the role of tough-guy negotiator, telling Steve and his British colleague what the Libyans expected from us before anything would happen on their end. Steve and the Brit allowed the leader’s son to go on for a while and then cut him off. “Look,” Steve said, “you need to understand that none of that is going to happen. We aren’t going to make any concessions until we get our people on the ground and confirm that everything you are telling us about your stockpiles and your intentions is true. Please go back and tell your father that.”

  Several more months passed without progress on the Libyan side. Another meeting was held in August, this time without Gadhafi’s son. Musa Kusa invited Steve and his British colleague to come to Libya and meet with Gadhafi himself. President Bush instructed us to make no promises until we saw solid proof of Libyan intentions and evidence that their decision was irreversible.

  Steve and his British colleague flew into Tripoli in early September. As is typical in the Middle East, the promised meeting was delayed several times while they waited at a hotel on the edge of the Mediterranean. Musa Kusa warned them that the first few minutes of the meeting with Gadhafi might be “a little rough.”

  Finally, in the early evening, they were summoned. Musa Kusa himself drove them to Gadhafi’s office. Along the way, he found time to work into the conversation that this was the same location that the U.S. had bombed in 1986, allegedly killing one of Gadhafi’s adopted daughters.

  They were ushered into Gadhafi’s large office. Two huge globes sat astride either end of a large desk that featured a modern personal computer. (Steve would learn that Gadhafi spent hours surfing the Web, to keep up with developments in the outside world.) The leader was wearing expensive Italian loafers and a gaudy shirt with a map of Africa emblazoned on it. After brief introductions, the visitors took seats and Musa Kusa put his head down, as if he knew what was coming, and the interpreter pulled out his pad. Gadhafi immediately launched into a loud and colorful diatribe, slamming the West, and the United States in particular, for every misdeed imaginable. The interpreter had great difficulty keeping up with the Arabic words as they flew off Gadhafi’s tongue.

  Then, at about the seventeen-minute mark in the tirade, Musa Kusa’s head came up as if he could tell that the rant was about to end. Sure enough, Gadhafi ran out of steam, took a breath for the first time, and smiled. “Nice to see you. Thanks for coming,” he said. And then he got down to business.

  We want to “clean the file,” he kept saying. Everything is on the table. At one point there was mention of Libya’s WMD programs, and that set off Gadhafi, who claimed that he did not have WMD programs. A discussion followed of exactly what a “weapon of mass destruction” was, and then they moved on. At another point, someone mentioned that the United States and Britain would want to conduct “inspections” of Libyan weapons facilities. Again Gadhafi was outraged, but eventually it became clear that if our side called them “visits” instead of “inspections,” there might not be such a big problem.

  The meeting lasted for about two and a half hours. It ended without any conclusion other than Gadhafi saying, “Work things out with Musa Kusa.” On the way out of the office, however, the visitors were informed that Gadhafi’s son Saif, who had not been present in his father’s office, wanted to meet with them right away. They were driven to Saif’s beach house, where the staff had apparently taken the living room furniture and placed it outside on the Mediterranean sand. By now it was around midnight, and they enjoyed a very late dinner and informed the Libyan leader’s son about the state of play.

  On returning to the United States, I took Kappes down to brief the president once again. I knew Steve would neither oversell nor undersell the situation. He gave the president his assessment that the Libyans had multiple reasons for wanting to do a deal now. Their fear of Islamic extremists is as large as ours, he explained. If they can find a way to get back into the good graces of the West, the Libyans could send their brightest kids to American colleges, and they could attract major oil companies to help foster the economic prosperity that was eluding them. Still, he said, the Libyan’s track record was such that they would likely get cold feet before the deal was done.

  The matter was still extraordinarily closely held. I briefed Colin Powell about what we were up to, and we told Rich Armitage and Bill Burns, the State Department’s chief official working on Middle Eastern affairs. If this effort ultimately succeeded, it would be their job to work on normalizing relations with Libya.

  Then, in the fall of 2003, elements of our two success stories—A. Q. Khan and Libya—merged. Through our operations against the Khan network, we learned that a ship of German registry, called the BBC China, was carrying centrifuge parts bound for Libya. After it passed through the Suez Canal, we worked to have the ship diverted to the Italian port of Taranto, where it arrived on October 4. There inspectors found precisely manufactured centrifuge parts in forty-foot containers listed on the ship’s manifest as simply “used machine parts.”

  While we were delighted that we had intercepted the shipment, we were reluctant to make too big a deal of it at the time, hoping that we could use the incident to drive home to the Libyans that we knew all about their plans and to give them greater incentive to renounce all their WMD.

  The Brits dispatched their senior officer to inform Gadhafi before the seizure hit the press. The Libyans claimed that the shipment had been arranged long before the current secret negotiations began and that the people responsible for monitoring it didn’t know about an impending de
cision to renounce WMD.

  Few U.S. government officials were aware of the “backchannel” negotiations taking place with the Libyans. Some prominent people who were not aware of the secret talks wanted to trumpet the seizure. We learned that then undersecretary of state for arms control, John Bolton, planned to hold a press conference to cite the incident as a great success for the president’s “Proliferation Security Initiative,” a two-year-old program to foster international cooperation on limiting illicit arms shipments. In truth, catching the BBC China had almost nothing to do with that program. We were concerned that if U.S. officials launched into the typical and well-deserved Libya-bashing language, Gadhafi might cancel the whole deal out of embarrassment.

  We called Rich Armitage, one of the few State Department officials aware of our ongoing efforts, and got him to direct Bolton to stand down. The order was understandably mystifying to Bolton and resulted in his calling Kappes and chewing him out for not coming directly to him.

  After the Libyans finally gave us the blessing for inspection teams to visit their country, a handful of CIA weapons experts flew from the United States to the United Kingdom to pick up their British counterparts. On October 19 they traveled to Tripoli in an unmarked airplane. The sight of a jet labeled “United States of America” landing there was something neither the Libyans nor we were ready to explain. Just before touching down, the aircrew told Steve Kappes that Tripoli was refusing to grant landing rights. No one knew whether this was a bureaucratic screwup or if the Libyans had once again gotten cold feet, so Steve told the crew to tell the tower to call Musa Kusa if they had any questions about their arrival. Within minutes, landing approval was granted. Steve thought it was a good thing that the Libyans were keeping the team’s arrival under wraps. But, as the plane taxied toward the terminal, Steve looked out the aircraft window and saw a marching band taking up positions. It turned out that there was no reason to worry—the band was present to greet some other arriving dignitary—and the CIA plane parked at a remote location.

  Just as we had kept the Libyan initiative a closely held secret in the United States, it was an especially big secret in Gadhafi’s country, too. Kappes, his British counterpart, and their teams were taken to a compound where a large gathering of local officials had been assembled. Kappes could tell that the Libyans had no guidance on what to say to the visitors. They appeared frightened and may have thought that the whole exercise was a loyalty test by the Great Leader to see who could keep the tightest jaw. Slowly, over a period of days, the Libyans finally figured out that they were supposed to reveal what they knew, and that this was not some kind of trick.

  On October 21, after two days of limited progress, Gadhafi asked that Kappes meet him alone. Back in his big office, the colonel proceeded to launch into another signature rant. After a while he stopped and asked if the United States would really fulfill its commitments if he renounced his WMD programs. “Yes sir, the president is a man of his word,” Steve told him. “But if he feels his word has been dishonored…well, he is a very serious-minded man.” Gadhafi just kept repeating that he wanted to “clean the file, clean the file.”

  After a few days, things bogged down again. So Steve and his British colleague used the tried-and-true “pack our bags” routine. They ordered the weapons inspectors to pack up and called for their aircraft to come collect them. Musa Kusa sighed. “You guys are such a pain,” he said, but then ordered increased openness, and the bags were unpacked.

  Progress was slowly being made, with the Libyans showing the U.S. and British inspectors how far along they had been on various weapons programs. In many cases, the Libyans tried to conceal parts of their programs, not knowing how much we already knew. They’d show us their Scud B missiles, and we would say, “Fine, now where are your Scud Cs?”

  When our inspectors were shown a storage facility for highly toxic chemicals, they were stunned. The surprise was not that the Libyans possessed the deadly chemicals, but that they were stowed in large plastic jugs and the Libyans’ sole safety precaution was to hold their noses when they entered the facility. The Americans quickly backed out and donned complete body-covering chemical defense suits before reentering the storehouse.

  The process of inventorying the various programs took several months. The Libyans were most uncooperative on the nuclear account, however. They had no idea how much we already knew about their program.

  In late November 2003, Steve and his British colleague invited Musa Kusa to a meeting. “Look,” they said, “we know you guys purchased a centrifuge facility.” About this time the Libyans realized that there was no turning back. Having started to tell us about their programs, they had to complete the effort, given what we already knew.

  In fact, we knew virtually all there was to know about their program due to our operation against the Khan network. It was like playing high-stakes poker and knowing your opponent’s cards. In this case, the stakes were the complete and peaceful disarmament of a nuclear weapons project that would eventually have given the colonel a nuclear weapons capability.

  Sometimes we knew more than the Libyans themselves did. At one point we told them, “Hey, we know you guys paid a hundred million dollars for all that stuff from A. Q. Khan.” There was a puzzled silence on the other side. “A hundred million? We thought the price was two hundred million!” Apparently, someone had made a heck of a profit on the side.

  By mid-December enough progress had been made that the deal would soon become public. Even that was a carefully orchestrated dance; Gadhafi would first announce to his own people that he had decided to renounce his WMD programs. Then Prime Minister Blair was to make public comments welcoming the news, to be followed by remarks from President Bush. The timing was tightly negotiated for December 19. And then, at the last minute, word came from Libya that the colonel wanted to delay. Uh oh, we thought. He is about to pull the rug out from under this deal. But the explanation turned out to be a simple one. The Libyan national soccer team was playing on television that night, and Gadhafi didn’t want to annoy the fans by breaking into the coverage of an important game with an announcement about something most Libyans didn’t care about, weapons of mass destruction.

  PART III

  CHAPTER 16

  Casus Belli

  One of the great mysteries to me is exactly when the war in Iraq became inevitable. In the period after 9/11, just as in the months before it, I was singularly obsessed with the war on terrorism. My many sleepless nights back then didn’t center on Saddam Hussein. Al-Qa’ida occupied my nightmares—not if but how they would strike again. I was wracking my brain for things we could do to delay, disrupt, or—God willing—prevent an attack. Looking back, I wish I could have devoted equal energy and attention to Iraq. Given all the mistakes that would eventually be made, Iraq deserved more of my time. But the simple fact is that I didn’t see that freight train coming as early as I should have.

  Not that there weren’t rumblings from the very beginning of the Bush administration. Many of the incoming senior officials had been heavily involved with Iraq when they were last in government. Not long before the inauguration, Dick Cheney had asked departing defense secretary William Cohen to give the incoming president a full and complete briefing on Iraq and the options involved. To me, it was both natural and appropriate to want to bring the new president up to speed on what continued to be a thorny issue for the United States. Our air crews were patrolling Iraq’s no-fly zones at considerable risk. Meanwhile, the UN sanctions against Saddam were steadily eroding.

  From the beginning, too, it was evident that the vice president intended to take an active interest in the workings of CIA and in the intelligence we turned out. Many media accounts, and indeed some of the court filings in the Libby case (in which the vice president’s former chief of staff was found guilty of perjuring himself regarding the Valerie Plame Wilson leak matter), have contended that there was some kind of war between CIA and the Office of the Vice President. If there was a war, it
was one-sided and we were noncombatants. At the time, I viewed the vice president as enormously supportive of intelligence, helping us get the resources we needed. Because of his past service in government, he knew a lot about our business and was never shy about asking tough questions. I welcomed them. Tough questions should never be a problem—so long as you don’t change the answer from what you believe to what you think the inquisitor wants to hear. And we never did.

  Sure, some of our analysts, junior and senior, chafed at the constant drumbeat of repetitive queries on Iraq and al-Qa’ida. Jami Miscik, our senior analyst, came to me one day in mid-2002 complaining that several policy makers, notably Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz, never seemed satisfied with our answers regarding allegations of Iraqi complicity with al-Qa’ida. I told her to tell her analysts to “quit killing trees.” If the answer was the same as the last time we got the question, just say “we stand by what we previously wrote.” But if there was any evidence of collaboration between Saddam and terrorist organizations, it was important to know, just as it was important to know if there was a nexus between terrorism and WMD, another of the vice president’s deep concerns.

  The focus on Iraq by senior Bush officials predated the administration. Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Richard Perle were among eighteen people who had signed a public letter from a group they named “The Project for the New American Century” calling for Saddam’s ouster. It is often forgotten, but regime change in Iraq was also the explicitly stated policy of the Clinton administration, and was the goal of the Iraq Liberation Act, passed by Congress in 1998. One hundred million dollars was appropriated to the State Department for the express purpose of seeking an end to Saddam’s regime. This policy emerged in the aftermath of a failed 1996 covert-action program and was announced to the world. Most important, the U.S. government’s intention to bring about regime change in Baghdad was proclaimed to the long-suffering people of Iraq. America’s promise to topple Saddam remained the law of this land from halfway through Bill Clinton’s second term right up until U.S. troops invaded in March 2003.