Hard Measures

by Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr.

  “Let’s get him,” I said. The cautious thing would have been to consult with Washington. But doing so would have been the equivalent of saying “no.” Washington never responds instantly—especially in a situation such as this where they would have wanted to have some meetings, develop position papers, do some contingency planning, and consult the British. But in my mind, this opportunity demanded an instant decision.

  Scrapping the plan for dinner, our two sides, the CIA and the ISI, set up command centers to listen to live feed from our forces in Bahawalpur providing a blow-by-blow account of the takedown of Rashid Rauf. The capture, carried out by Pakistani troops with CIA officers providing high-tech assistance nearby, was almost uneventful. If only I could say that about the aftermath.

  Once I was assured that Rauf was in Pakistani control, I called CIA headquarters in Virginia and told my chief of staff what had happened. I asked her to go down the hall and brief the deputy CIA director, Steve Kappes. She called back minutes later: “Steve is livid. He wants to know why you let the Pakistanis conduct the takedown.”

  “Because I agreed with them” was my simple answer.

  She said that the Brits were insistent on following leads on this case a while longer to see who or what else might be implicated. “President Bush apparently told Prime Minister Blair a few hours earlier that we would move slowly on this plot,” she said. My unilateral decision apparently had caused a diplomatic incident. Because of it, they were scrambling to arrest all the known cell members in Britain that very night.

  I was sorry for any inconvenience to President Bush and Prime Minister Blair—although no one had bothered to tell me about their conversation beforehand. But I am convinced that the decision to capture Rauf was the right one. If you are operating in a place like Great Britain you can confidently expect that Scotland Yard can track a criminal subject clandestinely for weeks on end. But in a country like Pakistan, if a chance suddenly presents itself to capture someone known to be in the final stage of planning multiple, simultaneous terrorist attacks, you better take them down. You act immediately because the opportunity may not come again—and you may not get another chance before attacks are launched. If, in the wake of a second successful terrorist attack of 9/11 proportions, it were to be revealed that the head of the U.S. clandestine service passed up a chance to capture one of the plot’s masterminds, the second-guessers outside, and especially inside, government would have been merciless, and rightly so.

  As it turned out, the Brits were able to swiftly arrest twenty-five suspects. They eventually brought to trial seventeen on charges of plotting to commit murder. Three received life sentences. While the trials themselves may not be memorable to most Americans, the impact of the case behind them certainly is. It is because of this group that since 2006 you are unable to fly with more than three ounces of liquids in your carry-on luggage. Rauf’s plotters’ plan to mix commonly available chemicals in soda bottles would easily have killed thousands of innocent people in transatlantic flight.

  The Pakistanis held Rauf in custody while the Brits rolled up the terror cells in England. Since Pakistan does not have an extradition treaty with the U.K., they refused to hand him over to the Brits and insisted that any questions we or the British had for Rauf be funneled through the ISI. Happy as we were to have Rauf off the streets, he was not under our control.

  Three months after his capture, Pakistan moved to drop the terrorism charges against Rauf, allegedly for lack of evidence. They continued to hold him on explosives and false-identity counts, but in late 2007 he mysteriously “escaped” from Pakistani custody. He had been held at the high-security Adiala prison when his guards reportedly decided to allow him to go to a local mosque for prayers. Not surprisingly, Rauf did not return. Given the uncertain loyalties of some inside the Pakistani security system, it is foolish to take for granted our ability to follow, detain, or interrogate terrorists using Pakistani surrogates.

  Two years later, it was reported in the media that Rauf was killed in a U.S. drone strike. His supporters deny this fact to this day.

  In the immediate aftermath of the arrest of the plotters in the U.K. there was a lot of finger-pointing. Unnamed British sources told the media that the U.S. had overreacted and brought down Rauf prematurely. My relations with British intelligence took a decidedly chilly turn. A bogus theory from American writer Ron Suskind received great play in the media, suggesting that President Bush and Vice President Cheney had ordered the arrest of Rauf and the establishment of the draconian “no liquids on planes” rules to somehow influence the upcoming U.S. midterm elections. This was a patently ludicrous assertion.

  And in general, the media widely denigrated the takedown of the terror cell in the U.K., saying that some of the British plotters had not yet gotten passports or plane tickets and therefore there was no urgency, as if stopping a terrorist attack doesn’t count unless the burning fuse is snuffed out seconds before an explosion. The pundits forget that if we had been so fortunate as to interdict any of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers months before the attacks they might have been dismissed as a laughable bunch of losers who didn’t inspire fear or confidence.

  The liquids plot saga turned out to be emblematic of my CIA career. If there was a common thread during my lengthy time at the Agency, it was that no good deed went unpunished. The liquid plot incident further drove home to me the importance of swift action, of nimble decision making, and of being able to hold and interrogate key terrorist suspects ourselves without relying on surrogates who have a different and uncertain agenda.

  Throughout my career, controversy followed me around like a hungry dog. I wish all my decisions and all my actions were universally supported and applauded. But I am comfortable with who I am and what I have done.

  I have been extraordinarily privileged to play a role in some historic events and believe I am uniquely positioned to explode some myths and clarify some mysteries that have heretofore gone unexplained.

  As memories of 9/11 faded, political correctness and timidity grew. The unanimity of support that the intelligence community enjoyed eroded, and one by one the tools needed to fight those who wish to destroy our country have been taken away. Worse, those men and women who volunteered to carry out our nation’s orders in combating al-Qa’ida found themselves second-guessed, investigated, and shunned.

  It is doubtful whether the takedown of Rashid Rauf, which happened less than six years ago, could happen today. Certainly, the unilateral U.S. action that brought about Usama bin Ladin’s greatly deserved demise, for all the good it did, also served to highlight the gulf that exists between U.S. goals and intentions and those of many in powerful positions in Pakistan.

  General Kayani, who in 2006 was chief of the ISI, is now even more influential as chief of the Army Staff, one of the most powerful men in Pakistan. Given the embarrassment of UBL’s being caught so close to the Pakistani capital, Kayani and his colleagues almost certainly would be less willing to join the U.S. in capturing a major terrorist on their soil. Knowing this, and also knowing that the United States has no strong options for interrogating and holding prisoners itself, if the U.S. could find another terror mastermind like Rauf, or even a successor to bin Ladin, we might simply be forced to eliminate him with a Hellfire missile rather than running the risks of attempting to capture him. The risks are not just to the lives of our forces but also to the fragile cooperation between our two nations. When terrorists are taken out by blunt force, our ability to exploit their phones, computers, and minds dies with them. The United States has chosen to unilaterally disarm itself in the war on terror; in writing this book, there is no more urgent message I want to convey.

  Chapter 2

  LATIN AMERICA DIVISION

  Although I found myself deeply involved in the U.S. war against terrorists from 2001 until late 2007, my path to that position was an unusual one, to say the least. What follows is a very short synopsis of my first fifty years of life. I share this not because I think reade
rs are anxious to know about every twist and turn in my formative years, but because the events of my first half century had a tremendous influence in shaping what happened during my tenure at the seniormost levels of the CIA.

  My road to involvement in combating Middle Eastern and South Asian terrorism began in Latin America. No one would have pegged me as a future top U.S. intelligence officer when I was growing up. I am the Puerto Rican–born son of two teachers. Not long after my birth in the city of Mayaguez, my father, an agronomist, moved our family to Buga, Colombia, where he helped open an agricultural vocational school. Colombia was an unsettled place at the time; there was an insurgency going on that resulted in the massacre of tens of thousands of people across the country. One of my earliest memories was of our milkman allowing me to sit for a moment on the horse he used to make his deliveries. Years later my parents learned that the milkman was also a guerrilla and used his horse for things other than delivering milk, such as participating in the armed conflict.

  After about five years, my parents took our small family (a brother and sister were born in Colombia) back to Puerto Rico. But a few years later my father took a job with the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and we returned to Colombia. Later he joined the Alliance for Progress, started during the Kennedy administration. After another brief stop in Puerto Rico we moved to Bolivia, where my father worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID). While there, my father bought a horse and I was thrilled to take riding lessons after school from a young army captain by the name of Luis Garcia Meza. Nearly two decades later I would deal with him again. During my boyhood stay in Bolivia there was a coup d’état. The country’s then-president was overthrown and I remember watching jet aircraft strafe La Paz. The Rodriguez family seemed to gravitate to where the action was.

  In 1965 a revolution broke out in the Dominican Republic. President Johnson decided to send the Marines and the 82nd Airborne there to prevent the country from becoming a “second Cuba.” But the American involvement was not all military. USAID directed my father to move there, along with his family, to help administer economic aid for the impoverished country. When we arrived in Santo Domingo the rebels were holed up downtown and the city was divided in two, separated by barbed wire with American troops manning checkpoints. There was a lot of fighting going on, particularly at night, and we got used to going to sleep with the sound of gunfire in the distance. I spent my high school years in Santo Domingo and established some lifelong friendships there. The people in the “DR” are among the most laid-back and fun-loving folks I have ever met. So I was shocked to learn that some of my high school friends’ parents had been involved in the ambush that killed Dominican strongman General Rafael Trujillo just a few years before.

  Although it may sound like a disorderly upbringing, I thoroughly enjoyed my youth. To me it was all about seeing new places, learning about different cultures, and experiencing the adventures that life in a foreign country offers. To my friends and neighbors growing up in Colombia, Bolivia, and the Dominican Republic, the Rodriguez family represented the United States. But we were emissaries from a country I barely knew. I had only infrequently been to the mainland U.S., mostly to visit an aunt who lived in Hollywood, Florida.

  When it was time to go to college I decided to go to the University of Florida as an undergraduate with the idea of readying myself for a career in foreign relations. After completing my bachelor’s degree with honors, I elected to stay in Gainesville and attend law school, not with the thought of practicing law, but with the notion that a law degree would enhance my chances of getting a job in national security or perhaps with an international aid organization such as the ones that employed my father.

  Law school was tough. About a third of my classmates flunked out. Not without considerable effort, I graduated in 1974. A few months after graduation, I became intrigued by the idea of applying to the CIA. It sounded like the perfect answer to my dreams of world travel, adventure, and involvement in important matters. Shortly thereafter I received a cryptic phone call from a recruiter who had been advised of my interest. Without specifically saying where he was calling from, he told me that their “representative” would be in my area soon and would like to meet with me. That started a nearly two-year-long process of getting into the CIA.

  I met with recruiters, took tests, flew to Washington for interviews with psychologists and case officers, and, on my third trip to D.C., took a polygraph test designed to judge my reliability and ensure that I wasn’t already a spy—for someone else. I passed. The Agency amused me by insisting I take a Spanish language test before hiring me. They would have been wiser to insist on an English exam. I’m not sure how well I did on all the other written and psychological tests they gave me, but where I excelled was in the personal interviews. Two Agency officers from the Cuban operations group at CIA were among those who assessed me. I later learned that they went to bat for my candidacy, having been impressed with my “street smarts.” Without their support I would not have been hired, because I did not fit the mold of the traditional career trainee recruit. This is a problem that persists in the Agency to this day.

  While waiting for my application to be resolved, I went to San Juan and lived with my brother, who was working as a geologist. I supported myself by selling time shares and real estate, which turned out to be not only lucrative but also good experience for being an intelligence officer. Selling someone a time share is hard, not unlike trying to convince some foreign official to secretly work for the United States.

  Eventually, in November 1976, I left Puerto Rico to fly to Washington and begin my career in the CIA. After a few months at the Agency headquarters, learning the language of intelligence and serving in some interim assignments, I was shipped off to “the Farm,” the CIA’s clandestine training facility a few hours away from headquarters. My class of new recruits included Cofer Black (who decades later would be my boss and then predecessor as chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center). Others from my class also rose to important positions in the CIA. Having gone through training under such unique circumstances, we developed strong bonds of comradeship, which lasted through our respective careers.

  While at the Farm we learned the tradecraft of the clandestine service, how to spot, assess, and recruit foreign nationals to spy on behalf of the United States, how to conduct surveillance on others and avoid it for yourself, the use of disguise, how to drive like a madman to escape pursuit, and how to effectively use all manner of weapons and explosives when all else failed. While the training sounds like fun, all of us trainees were anxious for it to be over so that we could go out into the field and actually DO the work we had trained for. Perhaps prophetically, the hardest part for me was not learning how to conduct operations, but learning how to keep headquarters informed of what we were doing. Each day after all of our training we would have to type up “intelligence reports” to our imaginary bosses in Langley about the day’s take of intelligence. The many reports were typed on manual typewriters and each had its own specific format. For a hunt-and-peck typist like myself, that meant laboring away until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. to complete the mission and being ready to go again by seven the next morning.

  For your final exercise at the Farm you are sent out into an American city with a mission. You have to conduct surveillance of others, avoid it on yourself, and track down an elusive person. Using your guile and “tradecraft,” you must get up close to him and make a “pitch” that he come work on behalf of the U.S. government. My team was sent to a large American city and I managed to sweet-talk myself past some restaurant employees with a credible cover story to gain access to our target. The person we were after had deliberately secluded himself to make it difficult for us to get to him, but our approach worked brilliantly.

  My record at the Farm was good but not spectacular. The number one and two ranked trainees were women. I was somewhere in the middle of the pack. I rationalized that the Farm was like
law school. The joke there was that the A students would go on to become judges, the B students would be good lawyers, and the C students would end up rich. At the CIA, some of the B and C students at the Farm ended up doing very well, because many had the interpersonal skills, the ability to think on their feet, and the good judgment to succeed.

  Given my language skills, I was the first among my group to be deployed. Many of my classmates had to spend an additional year or more learning some new language. The government—being the government—decided that since I was a native-born Spanish speaker, it would send me to a country where another language is spoken. (Fortunately, I quickly became reasonably proficient in that language, too.)

  I learned a lot about operations during my first tour and put to use the skills I learned at the Farm and elsewhere. At one point I befriended a local army ophthalmologist who happened to be treating the mother of the commanding officer of a cavalry unit. I told my friend of my love of riding, and before long I found myself invited to ride with the regiment. Shortly thereafter, a new president of the country took over who had once been in command of the same cavalry regiment. He continued to ride with them weekly. So there I was, one of the most junior officers, with daily access to the country’s president. I can’t report that I collected any earth-shattering intelligence, but I provided valuable insights to my supervisors. I remember a cable from headquarters arrived saying that according to very sensitive intelligence, the president was reported to be in ill health. I was able to draft an immediate response saying, “This officer went riding with him this morning. His cheeks were pink and he looked well while downing a cup of intense and very sweet local coffee.”

  I rode every morning with the president and his entourage, and every so often I would sneak out during the week for a ride in the afternoon. I called my horse “Business” so that I could legitimately tell my colleagues that I was “going out on Business.”