Hard Measures

by Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr.

  After Ahmad Ressam was captured by an alert U.S. customs agent as he was trying to sneak across the Canadian border into the U.S. in late 1999, he told the FBI that AZ was among those planning multiple attacks against U.S. cities.

  And when George Tenet, Cofer Black, and several top CTC officers visited Condi Rice at the White House in July 2001 with “their hair on fire” to warn about pending al-Qa’ida attacks against U.S. interests, one of the prime names they cited was Abu Zubaydah.

  So it was not surprising that following the attacks of 9/11, AZ would have been on the top of our list of most wanted enemies. We knew that following the failed Millennium attacks he had sought a haven in Afghanistan. After the CIA-led efforts to rout al-Qa’ida and the Taliban in the fall of 2001, we assumed that AZ, like much of the rest of his organization’s leadership, had fled across the mountainous border to Pakistan. But he had gone “radio silent.”

  Then in early 2002 he came back “on the air” again. We could tell he was in Pakistan but had little indication where among that country’s 170 million people he was hiding.

  As troublesome as the U.S.-Pakistani relationship was in the 1990s, and as difficult as it has become in recent years, it is important to remember that in the days immediately after 9/11, Pakistan’s government made the strategic decision to come to the aid of the United States. Then-President Musharraf took some critical concrete steps, such as replacing the head of ISI, and directing that the military and paramilitary cooperate with the U.S.

  No doubt this assistance was undertaken with self-protection in mind. But for whatever reason, Musharraf and his top aides correctly read the handwriting on the wall and cast their lot with the Americans. That decision became especially important as we tried to track down elements of al-Qa’ida’s senior leadership, many of whom we believed were hiding in his country’s highly populated urban areas.

  It is hard to overstate the urgency we felt in getting our hands on some of bin Ladin’s top deputies. Intercepted communications both before and after 9/11 gave the clear impression that additional, even more spectacular attacks were planned. The anthrax attacks in the United States only heightened fears that mass killings using unconventional means were indeed possible and perhaps already under way. Confirmed reports that al-Qa’ida was seeking nuclear material and had access to rogue Pakistani nuclear scientists raised our legitimate concerns exponentially.

  In early 2002, Director Tenet asked CTC to brief him on our efforts to find and capture Abu Zubaydah. Cofer Black and several of our top people told Tenet that we believed AZ was moving around the cities of Faisalabad, Islamabad, Peshawar, and Karachi. It is not hard to tell when George has been underwhelmed in a briefing, and this was one of those occasions. He let Cofer know in no uncertain terms that we had to do better.

  It wasn’t long after Cofer made the trip from Tenet’s seventh-floor office to our warren of cubicles on the ground floor that changes started to happen. Our lone conference room was reconfigured again. Now it became home to the Abu Zubaydah Task Force. Twenty-five computer terminals were crammed into the twenty-five-foot-by-fifteen-foot conference room, and we assembled a team of people whose sole mission in life was to find and capture AZ.

  To lead the effort we selected Jennifer Matthews, a no-nonsense officer in her midthirties. A bundle of energy, Jennifer was passionate about her job. She would literally tremble with excitement when things were going well at work. She was one of CTC’s most effective, dedicated, and successful officers. Originally an imagery analyst, she shifted to the clandestine side of the Agency and became an operations officer following graduation with top honors from the FTCC Field Tradecraft Course in 2000. Jennifer’s skill set now bridged the two main cultures within CTC, the analysts and the operators.

  At the time of this assignment Jennifer was well along in her pregnancy with her third child. Somehow, however, she managed to balance a family life with total dedication to her operational mission. Jennifer worked closely with senior Agency officers in Pakistan, feeding them information on details we were able to elicit at headquarters and demanding from them additional information that could be collected only in the field to help piece together the puzzle.

  The job of finding AZ was largely a case of sifting through mountains of technical information to pinpoint his location. This required calling on the skills of several other U.S. intelligence agencies. AZ was not making it easy on us. He seemed to have learned from his earlier days, when his operational tradecraft was considerably sloppier. Now he was constantly changing locations, using different cell phones, communicating through surrogates, and connecting on the web by one-time visits to obscure internet cafés.

  To carry out her mission, Jennifer led a large team that worked around the clock for three weeks. Operational leads were coming in from Pakistan on a twenty-four-hour basis and needed to be analyzed and exploited by the AZ Task Force without a moment’s delay.

  While Jennifer was given several experienced senior managers to help run the task force, it was a labor-intensive operation, and much of the “critical mass” came from young officers who had been with the CIA for less than a year. These trainees were recent hires who were getting a crash course in Agency life even before they went off for operational training.

  Jennifer masterfully led her young workforce, motivating them to dedicate the countless hours necessary to sift through the reams of operational data to help identify possible patterns of AZ’s travels and communications.

  The CIA had a parallel organization in the field. We had learned the value of sending analysts “downrange” in situations like this to push information and leads in both directions. In the region we had ten people crammed into a room that should have held two, working on the Abu Zubaydah hunt.

  The link analysis quickly began to offer hope. As AZ’s trail got hotter, I remember Jennifer briefing Director Tenet several times at our critical five-o’clock meeting on what she was finding. Being an inclusive leader, she often would let one of her trainees address the group. Imagine being just six months out of college and finding yourself face-to-face with the director of the CIA, briefing him on a matter of enormous importance to U.S. national security. The young officers would go back down seven floors to CTC’s cramped conference room inspired to work even harder in their relentless search.

  While we were making good progress in narrowing the hunt for AZ, the effort still had very much a “needle-in-the-haystack” feel to it. There was a technical device that I am not at liberty to describe further that would help. Tenet ordered that every device be ripped away from wherever it was and devoted to the AZ hunt.

  To augment maps received from the CIA’s extensive map library, Agency officers in Islamabad went to a local bookstore and bought every map they could find of cities, including Faisalabad. Pinning the maps to the wall, they started plotting possible target locations and exchanged daily situation reports with Jennifer’s operation at HQ.

  By mid-March, the intense collection effort had yielded about sixteen locations where AZ might conceivably be. On March 17 there was a terrorist attack on a church in Islamabad that killed a U.S. State Department employee and wounded her two children and husband. As a result, the FBI sent a bunch of special agents to Pakistan, and they were quickly folded into our anti-AZ effort.

  Working with our Pakistani partners, we decided to raid all sixteen sites simultaneously. With the recent influx of FBI special agents, we now had enough U.S. assets to have people at each target site along with the Pakistanis. The decision to go after all the sites at once was unusual but if we had worked through them one by one, he would likely have found out that we were closing in on him and fled the area entirely. There were reports that Abu Zubaydah planned to relocate to Iran, so time was of the essence. We started gathering more data about each location. The address of one location turned out essentially to be a vacant lot. It would have been understandable to write that one off as a technical glitch and to focus solely on the other sites. Bu
t one of our Pakistani liaisons explained to our officers in the field that it was common practice in the area for people to steal telephone lines. What they would do was tap into a nearby phone line and run their own “pirate” line to a home or business where they could enjoy anonymous (and free) phone service. Our Pakistani colleague visited the vacant lot, climbed a telephone pole, and followed an unofficial phone line to a nearby building. That site remained on the target list.

  As the hunt heated up, Director Tenet briefed the White House staff on the progress. He took Jennifer Matthews to the White House Situation Room to brief National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Jennifer walked through the simultaneous takedown operation, explaining the complex way she and her colleagues had collected, synthesized, and exploited all available intelligence to come up with the list. She highlighted for Rice how helpful the Pakistanis had been. As White House officials are wont to do, Rice asked Jennifer what the odds were on AZ’s being captured as part of this operation. Given his propensity for moving around and constantly changing locations, Jennifer placed the chance of success at no more than 40 percent.

  The raids were set for about 1:00 a.m. Pakistani time on March 28. As it turned out, given the time difference, they were taking place while we were in Director Tenet’s five-o’clock meeting. We didn’t expect to hear even preliminary results until a little later, but the thoughts of many of us were half a world away. A few minutes before the meeting concluded, Jennifer burst into the DCI’s conference room with a gaggle of breathless trainees behind her. She read a brief email from a CIA team leader in Faisalabad. The raid on the house identified by our Pakistani liaison following a pirate phone line resulted in a shootout. One individual was seriously wounded by a Pakistani-U.S. pursuit team while attempting to jump from one building’s roof to another while firing an AK-47. Initial reports said he had been shot three times. Although his identity was unconfirmed, Agency officers on the scene said he looked an awful lot like the man they had been pursuing, Abu Zubaydah.

  We later learned that one of AZ’s associates, a Libyan, was killed in the raid, and that at least one escaped. That individual was later believed to have been involved in the killing of a U.S. diplomat, Lawrence Foley, in Jordan.

  As I recall, there was no applause in the conference room, no high fives for sure. But there was a sense of satisfaction that, if the reports were true, we had just achieved the biggest victory in the long battle since 9/11 by capturing the highest-level al-Qa’ida terrorist we ever had.

  Immediately, Jennifer and her team went back to their conference room/command center and continued the tedious but rewarding work of following the trail and exploiting the information that had just come into our hands.

  Jennifer Matthews was emblematic of the terrific officers who worked in CTC. As significant as her contributions were, I doubt I would be telling you her name today (such are the concerns of secrecy) except for the fact that on December 30, 2009, she was continuing the fight against al-Qa’ida by serving as chief of base at a CIA facility in Khost, Afghanistan. There, she and six other Agency officers and a Jordanian intelligence service liaison were killed by an al-Qa’ida suicide bomber. To the very end of her life, she was leading in the fight against our murderous foes.

  Abu Zubaydah’s capture and its aftermath soon became the subject of legend. As with most legends, much of what is said is false. Some of the myths came from our own colleagues. One former CIA analyst even wrote a book suggesting that he led the whole operation and was present when AZ was taken down. In fact, that officer was said by some to have been hours away, observing one of the nonfruitful raids, but has since made a career out of implying that the AZ victory was of his making.

  The real success of the Abu Zubaydah takedown allowed us to use the same methodology over and over again. When AZ was captured, we also were able to seize his computer, phones, writings, and lots of other material that helped inform our future efforts.

  Given his importance, a decision was made to exploit the captured material (a process known as document exploitation) at CIA headquarters. While tons of critically important material was discovered, the process also led to one uncomfortable moment. Included among the material that was quickly packed up and shipped back to headquarters was a piece of live ordnance. When it was discovered, security was called. One of our best analysts recalls sitting in his office when someone came along stringing a piece of yellow tape across his desk. “What’s this?” he asked. “Oh, we found a piece of unexploded ordnance next door,” he was told. The analyst decided this might be an excellent time to go to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee.

  Before capturing Abu Zubaydah, when it came to holding and interrogating terrorists, the CIA often relied on a procedure known as “rendition.” Like so many things the Agency has been involved with, renditions have been the subject of myth and misunderstanding.

  Conventional wisdom these days is that renditions were an invention of the Bush administration in order to allow suspected terrorists to be snatched off the street and taken to third countries, where they would be tortured. That’s just not so. The technique has been in use for many years, going back at least to the Reagan administration. It reached its zenith during the Clinton administration, when some seventy people around the world were subjected to rendition.

  During the nineties many terrorists were picked up in one part of the world, almost always with the active or tacit cooperation of the country in which they were living, and spirited to another location at which they might be wanted for crimes. Often the place they ended up was their home country. Sometimes it was a country against which they plotted or one that had special insights into the group to which the terrorist belonged. Occasionally, they were brought to the United States if there was an active warrant for their arrest, as was the case, for example, with Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani man who shot and killed two CIA officers and wounded three others outside the Agency headquarters in January 1993. Kasi was picked up in Pakistan in 1997, brought back to the United States, stood trial, and was executed in November 2002.

  More often than not, however, the prospect of a conviction in the U.S. was not so clear-cut, and it was deemed more productive to disrupt the terrorist’s plans by transferring him to a third country. Agency critics and the media invented a new term, “extraordinary rendition,” to refer to this effort. To us a rendition was a rendition, and we never used that phrase. The rendition process was used quite regularly during the Clinton administration, and those who regularly briefed Congress on the program tell me they never heard any opposition to it.

  In the early days after 9/11, we continued to use the program. An al-Qa’ida operative who went by the name of Ibn al Shaykh al-Libi was captured in Pakistan in late 2001. He was picked up along with other Arabs who were fleeing Afghanistan and the massive U.S. bombing at Tora Bora aimed at getting bin Ladin. Al-Libi was believed to have been the director of an al-Qa’ida training camp in Afghanistan. Someone in that position would be well equipped to tell interrogators about people who had passed through the camp, plots that had been hatched there, and support al-Qa’ida had received. But at this initial stage of the war we were so swamped with the business of routing the Taliban from Afghanistan that it was thought best that we pass al-Libi along to the Egyptians, who might be able to get the most out of his interrogation. As always with renditions to a third country, the CIA insisted that the receiving country promise not to abuse the detainee, but to a large extent we had to rely on the host country’s assurances. In the case of al-Libi, we were not that comfortable. The results that the Egyptians passed to us from his interrogation were problematic. Although they did pass along a lot of threat information about various al-Qa’ida plots, there was a notable lack of follow-up or detail in their questioning. The Egyptians had their own priorities.

  Eventually al-Libi did provide some explosive information, including allegations that al-Qa’ida had worked with Russian organized-crime syndicates to try to bring “canisters” o
f nuclear material into the United States. He also told the Egyptians that al-Qa’ida operatives had been in touch with Iraq to obtain training on the use of poisons. This information eventually made its way into Secretary of State Powell’s early 2003 presentation to the U.N. justifying action against Iraq.

  But al-Libi later recanted much of the information he supplied, including the stories about nuclear material and cooperation with the Iraqis. Since we were not present when the information was offered, we didn’t know if he was lying in the first instance or the second. That kind of uncertainty made those of us in CTC very uncomfortable about contracting out the interrogation of some of our most important detainees. We couldn’t control interviews done by others, had limited ability to ask time-urgent follow-on questions, and quite significantly, could not guarantee that the prisoner’s rights were being respected. And therefore we pushed for the establishment of our own detention and interrogation facilities, the “black sites”—facilities in a third country where detainees could be held and questioned in secrecy.

  It is more than a little ironic that the secret detention facilities that the CIA established, at which we have been widely accused of abusing prisoners, were established in part for the express purpose of making sure that these critical detainees were not mistreated.

  The rendition program did not end with the establishment of the black sites. It continued to be valuable in a select group of cases in which our capacity to interrogate certain prisoners had been maxed out or a third country had some special understanding of or connection with the detainee that made it the best choice to question someone. We continued to do all we could to insist that prisoners were not abused. Not every rendition was well-handled or well-advised, however. There are a few cases that have become notorious, some with good reason. But the vast majority of rendition cases were handled appropriately and produced valuable intelligence. Most of them you have never heard of. None, however, produced the kind of critical intelligence that we got when we established our own capability.