Hard Measures

by Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr.

  As Patti and I watched in stunned silence amid our moving boxes, my colleagues back at CIA headquarters were on the move. Many of them were sent home from work, because there were additional planes aloft that were unaccounted for and there had been previous al-Qa’ida threats to attack the Agency headquarters. A relatively small group of officers in the Agency’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC) remained at their desks, desperately trying to find out who was behind the morning’s attacks and what additional assaults might be on the horizon.

  For the men and women of CTC, the events that morning were a doubly bitter blow. Like all Americans, they were shocked by what they saw, but like few others, they were not surprised, because they had been warning about and fighting against the al-Qa’ida target for years. Sometimes, seemingly alone in the U.S. government, they had been battling Usama bin Ladin and his cohorts for all those years. They were haunted by the knowledge that they had been unable to thwart the 9/11 attack, which had killed thousands of innocent men, women, and children.

  A few days later I went back to Langley to discuss with my superiors my next assignment. Always a very securely guarded facility, the place was now bristling with new defenses. Armored Humvees with security officers carrying automatic weapons were everywhere, in a show of vigilance that was duplicated at prominent buildings all around the Washington area.

  I made my way to the seventh floor, the part of the Agency occupied by CIA’s seniormost leadership. All about me people were buzzing around with a redoubled sense of urgency. I could tell by the look in their eyes, and sometimes by the stubble on their chins, that many of my colleagues had had little sleep since the attacks on Tuesday morning. My message to Pavitt and his colleagues was a simple one: Put me in. I didn’t care what I was given to do; I just wanted to contribute to the fight. My reaction was not unique. Hundreds of retired Agency officers, some recent, others long past their prime, dropped whatever they were doing and called headquarters offering to come back and pitch in. Some, unable to get through on the phone, just jumped into their cars and drove to Virginia and showed up at the gate ready to take on any mission.

  As had been the case a few days before, Pavitt, the deputy director for Operations (the DDO), was still unclear exactly what he might ask me to do, but there was no question about where the need was greatest. “Go down to CTC,” he said, “and help Cofer Black out.” That kind of vague marching order is not typical in a bureaucracy, but this was no ordinary time.

  Although I was no expert in counterterrorism, I had had lots of experience running relatively large operations for the Agency. At the time I was an SIS 4 (Senior Intelligence Service 4), equivalent to about a three-star general, and had commanded a Directorate of Operations division and large overseas stations. While the CIA is not a particularly rank-conscious organization, when you reach the upper levels of the Senior Intelligence Service, you are expected to be able to get things done, and quickly.

  Cofer Black, my classmate from the Farm a quarter century before, certainly could use the help. Even as a junior officer, Cofer had carried himself with a style and class that set him apart. He speaks in cultured, measured (but often colorful) tones. Cofer always had a flair for the dramatic, and even when we were young trainees, I always thought he had his act together. He was married and settled while I was single and nomadic. I remember having dinner at his townhouse once and being amazed that he and his wife had china, real silverware, and drank wine from a bottle that did not have a screw-off top. I, on the other hand, was a bachelor living in a sublet studio apartment that contained just the bare essentials.

  Now, twenty-five years later, Cofer held one of the most significant jobs in our profession. We had not had much contact since our training days. He had spent much of his career in Africa, just as I had spent mine in Latin America. It has been widely reported that Cofer was heavily responsible for the collection of intelligence that resulted in the capture of the terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as “Carlos the Jackal,” in Sudan in 1994.

  Since mid-1999, Cofer had been chief of CTC. A “center” in Agency parlance (like the Crime and Narcotics Center I worked in during the midnineties) is an organization whose staffs include both operations officers and analysts as well as representatives from many other agencies across the intelligence community. In much of the rest of the Agency those two skill sets are largely separated. “Case officers” and their associates are the people who go out and collect intelligence and conduct operations. Analysts are the people who study that information plus the material gathered through other means, such as signals intelligence and open-source materials, and try to make sense of it.

  In CTC the two cultures merge, often working side by side, leveraging the skills of one to help the other succeed. It was, as one of my colleagues described it, in a football analogy, like being fortunate enough to have the offense and the defense on the field at the same time.

  Before 9/11, I don’t think most people at the CIA would have described CTC as a small organization, but compared to what the public might imagine or compared to what it is today, it certainly was quite small. One of outsiders’ big misconceptions is that the Agency is a large, omnipresent operation. Despite its worldwide responsibilities, the Agency has a fraction of the manpower of some of its counterparts. Before 9/11 there were more FBI special agents in New York City alone than the CIA had case officers around the globe.

  At the time of 9/11, there were several hundred people assigned to CTC and a relatively small annual budget. Within months of the attacks on the World Trade Center the resources available would increase tenfold. No organization can handle such explosive growth without considerable pain, and that’s where I came in.

  While the smoke was still rising from the pile of rubble in New York and the gaping hole in the Pentagon, CIA Director George Tenet tapped Cofer to come up with a plan to go after al-Qa’ida and their Taliban protectors in Afghanistan and to bring to justice terrorists elsewhere around the world. Cofer and his team were able to quickly assemble such a plan because they had been working on it for years. Tenet and Black briefed President Bush and other senior administration officials at Camp David on Saturday, September 15.

  While September 11 was undoubtedly the worst day in CIA history, September 15 turned out to be one of its best. On that day the CIA demonstrated that it had the knowhow and, most important, the nimbleness to come up with a workable operation that our highly capable but more lumbering colleagues at the Pentagon could scarcely match.

  I arrived in CTC at a time of organized chaos. The sense of urgency was palpable. Most of the longest-serving officers were convinced that a second strike was imminent. No one knew where that might take place. Everything and everyone seemed vulnerable.

  Walking into CTC’s offices on the ground floor of the CIA’s “new” headquarters building, which had been around for about a decade (as opposed to its neighbor, the “original” headquarters building, which opened in the early 1960s), one couldn’t help but feel the sense of mission. Cofer was consumed with meetings at the White House and Pentagon and soon would launch on trips around the world to enlist allies in the war on terror. His able deputy, Ben Bonk, a brilliant analyst who, in addition to being one of the brightest people at the Agency, was hands down one of the nicest, was trying to get his arms around the flood of intelligence that was suddenly pouring in on the terrorist target. Ben spent most of his day at meetings “downtown,” which is what we called the White House and State Department.

  I had no clear job, no office, and no title, and neither Cofer nor Ben had time to help me find them. So I created them for myself. I had a copier machine moved out of a room not much bigger than a closet and created an office. I elected to call myself CTC’s chief operating officer, since most of the other logical titles were taken. I jumped in and tried to make sense of the influx of added people, dollars, and, most important, missions that were coming CTC’s way. Cofer and Ben welcomed the help and gave me all the latitude I could
want. I never experienced either before or since such a sense of teamwork.

  Director Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin, had directed that CTC get whatever it needed in the way of resources. We had only to ask. Knowing what to ask for, and where to get it, proved to be a challenge. Normally when there is a surge situation, the parts of the organization that lose some of their people, turf, and mission put up a fight. Not this time. When we asked for something from other offices and directorates within the Agency and for people to be detailed from other parts of the government to us, the answer was always “you bet.”

  Bruce Pease, another of the Agency’s top analysts, was brought in to set up a new analytical structure within CTC called the Office of Terrorism Analysis. It was based on an existing unit of twenty to thirty people but needed to expand rapidly, growing to almost three hundred people. Bruce decided that we did not have time to bring in lots of people as individuals and train them to work against the terrorist target while simultaneously training them to work together as a unit. So a plan was developed to go to the Directorate of Intelligence, the home of the analysts, and draft entire teams. We grabbed entire units that one day might have been in charge of doing political analysis for Eastern Europe or perhaps Southeast Asia and moved them lock, stock, and barrel to CTC. Senior officers to the newest analytical recruit were moved en masse.

  On the operational side we pulled the best people we could find from units across the Agency. We also grabbed the entire output of our clandestine training facility, the Farm, and threw them into the fight. Suddenly cadres of men and women detailed to us from the Pentagon, NSA, DIA, and elsewhere started showing up on our doorstep.

  I was blown away by the ability and dedication of the people we were bringing together. But if there was one group or category of individual that was most impressive, hands down, it was our women officers. I never met such a determined, focused, and capable group of people. You couldn’t help but notice that so many of the key decision-making positions in CTC were filled by women. I recruited several of our key performers from elsewhere in the Agency. One woman, whom I’ll call “Sara,” had worked with me a few years before in the Agency’s Crime and Narcotics Center (CNC). As Sara put it, she and I had “done drugs” together in the basement where the CNC was located. She was a whiz at organization and, more than any other single individual, was responsible for rewiring CTC to handle its explosive growth in mission and resources. When she got to CTC we were drowning in paper. We had only one person assigned to answer the mail and one to handle budgets, and we had no earthly idea how many people actually worked in our organization, which had suddenly been flooded with fresh talent. Sara built a structure that allowed us to work at maximum efficiency.

  Another superstar whom I recruited was “Jane,” who had served extensive time overseas and was working in an Agency organization that provided surveillance support. I stole her away and had her head one of our earliest “black sites,” where terrorists were interrogated. Later she became my right arm as chief of staff when I led the clandestine service. Both Sara and Jane went on to very high-ranking positions within the Agency, positions that they still serve in today. I owe a lot of my success to their hard work and dedication.

  Just as we were grabbing people, we commandeered physical space. Wide spots in hallways became administrative centers, conference rooms became command centers, and small rooms that once housed two or three officers suddenly became home to dozens.

  Cofer delegated to me much of the organization and management of the dramatic growth. He simply didn’t have time to deal with it. He also had little patience with the myriad meetings on the seventh floor and quickly deputized me to attend a 7:30 a.m. daily session in Jim Pavitt’s office.

  At 5:00 p.m. each day there was a remarkable meeting in the director’s conference room at which Cofer, Ben, and I, along with a dozen or more of our key people, would meet with Tenet, McLaughlin, and Pavitt to manage our counterterrorism efforts. In all my years in government, I never saw a meeting like that one. There were countless important decisions made and orders given at that session with little time for debate and no time for dithering. The DCI conference room was packed with people who could make stuff happen, and regularly people were sent, often literally running out of the room, to implement a decision that came down from the top.

  Only a small percentage of CTC officers were in that room, but down in our spaces on the ground floor, everyone was expected to contribute and innovate. Senior leaders like Bruce Pease would cram his troops into the biggest office they could find and stand on a chair to be seen and heard by those in attendance. “I don’t have time to tell each of you what to do,” he said on many occasions. “We expect everyone to innovate and to exercise greater leadership and responsibility than you have ever before.” They did.

  We were very much flying by the seat of our pants. At one five o’clock meeting, Pease gave the DCI a quick status report on the influx of new analysts into CTC. “It’s working,” he said, “but we are going to make some mistakes.” Tenet looked at Bruce and then the rest of CTC’s leadership and said: “We can’t afford mistakes. Mistakes will kill us.” He probably had in mind the second-guessing that had become rampant in the months after 9/11, much of it by people who had ignored CTC’s warnings about al-Qa’ida before September 11, and who were now suddenly asking why the Agency had not done more to prevent the attacks. More than being directed at the CIA as an institution, Tenet’s caution was a reminder that lapses by our analysts could easily result in the deaths of thousands more Americans. We couldn’t promise Tenet we would not make analytical and operational mistakes in the future, but the message was received. We had to do everything in our power to prevent them.

  Terrorism has always been one of the toughest targets on which to collect intelligence. Unlike the old Soviet Union, where the things to keep track of (tanks, ships, missiles, and so on) were big, the things counterterrorist analysts are concerned with are small, often single individuals. And the secrets you want to steal frequently don’t reside in computer systems that can be hacked, or safes that can be broken into, but in the inner recesses of a handful of individuals’ minds.

  Yet by dint of hard work, the cooperation of allies and even former enemies around the world, and the application of some new tools, we were suddenly awash in data. The problem was making sense of it.

  The cliché about intelligence work is that doing intelligence is like working on a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle but not having the box top to tell you what the finished picture should look like. If only it were that easy. In fact, it is more like working on a million-piece puzzle, with no box top, and having millions more random pieces that look like they might fit, but actually are from different puzzles altogether.

  It fell to us to make sense of the countless fragments of information and to take action on the chunks of the puzzle that represented a real and growing threat to the United States and our allies.

  I remember going into a room that a few weeks before had been the CTC conference room. Now it was a command and data triage center. Every seat along the lengthy conference table had a computer in front of it. Scores of cables snaked their way down the center of the table and under the floor. Each computer had a cardboard name plate with a hand-scrawled ID to tell others what function the person in that seat filled. Many in the room had not yet met each other a few days before. Also strewn about the room were pairs of telephones color coded to let the users know which ones were for unclassified conversations and which were for talking to colleagues around the world on sensitive classified matters. The unclassified phones (known as “black lines”) did not get much of a workout other than to let spouses know that their loved one was going to miss dinner yet again. Walking into the room you were hit by a cacophony of noise that one officer described as being like having to work at Chuck E. Cheese.

  While there was often a sense of creative chaos, there was no doubt about what we were trying to accomplish. Less tha
n a week after 9/11, the president provided us with written authorization that allowed us to capture, render, and interrogate terrorists. As with all such authorizations, these documents are the bedrock of what we could and could not legally do as an organization. They were briefed to the congressional leadership, who, to a man and woman, expressed no objection, even to the very specific authorization of what we could do against al-Qa’ida operatives. Armed with new authorities and with the full backing of a united government and the American people, we went to war.

  Chapter 3

  ABU ZUBAYDAH

  The CIA had been deeply concerned about bin Ladin’s organization since at least 1996, when we set up a small unit specifically designed to target a group that was known as “the base,” or al-Qa’ida, but we did not know nearly enough about the shadowy organization. The unit pursued bin Ladin’s outfit vigorously around the globe. And although they learned much about al-Qa’ida, by 9/11 it was still an organization that remained quite mysterious to us. We did not have the human source penetration of the organization required and had an inadequate understanding of it below Usama bin Ladin. Moreover, we did not have a good grasp on what other individuals among its leadership were doing, nor did we have a deep understanding of al-Qa’ida’s objectives and capabilities for transcontinental attack.

  There was one notable exception to our shallow base of knowledge. There was a Palestinian who grew up in Saudi Arabia by the name of Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, better known as Abu Zubaydah. To us, he quickly and simply became “AZ.” We had been chasing him for years. He spoke openly on phone lines and used email to communicate with fellow operatives, so he was one of the al-Qa’ida senior figures on whom we had collected considerable intelligence. We knew him to be a premier recruiter and facilitator for bin Ladin’s organization and knew he had been involved in a December 1999 Millennium Plot that, had it not been thwarted by the U.S. and Arab partners, would have killed hundreds of innocent people in the U.S., Jordan, and elsewhere.