· NINETEEN ·
America’s War on Terror
I was at home on the morning of September 11, 2001, sharing the same fears and anxieties as most Americans, after the first tower was struck. The call came, as I sensed it would, even before the second tower was hit. I don’t remember David’s exact words, but the message was simple: “You are now permanently assigned to the biggest story of your career.” He was not talking about New York City’s response to the attacks—the next issue of the magazine would be devoted to that—but he was relying on me to try to answer the classic questions editors pose in such times: who, what, and why?
I had an anxious flashback to that moment in late 1972 at the Times when Abe Rosenthal insisted that I stop reporting on what I knew well, the Vietnam War, and delve into Watergate. Abe had the same confidence in me as did David, but this assignment was far more challenging. Watergate was an in-house Washington story, and I knew I had a chance to get to some of the players. The New York attack seemed far more challenging: I had never explicitly covered Islamic terrorism, nor had I traveled to Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden had his headquarters. On the other hand, I had written about Pakistan for The New Yorker and understood that the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, for Inter-Services Intelligence, had a profound, if murky, role inside Afghanistan.
I also knew that 9/11 was going to be a once-in-a-lifetime story that would require my developing new sources in Washington and the Middle East. I had done it many times before, so I wasn’t surprised to be told that some inside The New York Times, among them Tom Friedman, were suggesting that I be immediately rehired. I did get a telephone message from a senior editor at the paper who obviously was ambivalent about once again dealing with me. I did not return the call and heard no more. It did not matter, because I was Remnick’s man.
I began my new assignment by reading as much as I could absorb about the region in a few weeks as well as talking to those I knew inside the U.S. State Department and intelligence community who had served in South Asia; my goal was to get a basic understanding about Afghanistan, Pakistan, and international terrorism. I tracked down the few scholars in America who understood the ways of the Taliban, whose members were Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. It was unnerving to learn that revenge in Pashtun culture did not call for an immediate response, but could come months, and even years, after a violent act against a family member. I was convinced that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would respond violently in Afghanistan not only against bin Laden but also against his hosts, the Taliban, without having any idea of the long-term consequences of their decision.
My reporting on Jonathan Pollard and on the 1998 raid on the pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum led me to a number of senior FBI officials, and I risked an early morning call at home to one of them a few days after 9/11. I had always tried to be as open and straightforward with senior intelligence officials as possible, and the good ones—there are many good ones who deserved my respect—usually responded in kind. Things were hectic, of course, the official said, but one thing seemed clear to him and his colleagues: The nineteen suicide bombers, whether controlled by bin Laden or not, were not the leading edge, as many initially feared, of what would be a wave of terror inside America. They were the equivalent, he said, of a pickup basketball team that made it to the Final Four or a weekend soccer team that got to the World Cup. The American intelligence community might never be able to learn the whole story of the attack, he said, but he was convinced that the terrorists had been aided by the chronic lack of cooperation among the various intelligence services.
I set up meetings with some of those in and out of the CIA who had helped me on stories going back to the Vietnam War; former agents have always been able to gather amazing information from their onetime colleagues. I was eventually invited to join a group of operatives at a post-9/11 lunch at a Chinese restaurant in suburban Virginia. The discord was stunning as complaint after complaint was made about the Agency’s increasingly timid and rigid bureaucracy, the lack of freedom to maneuver, and budget restrictions. In their view, the CIA’s failure to detect the plot in advance was not the fault of the guys in the clandestine service but rather of the Agency’s vacillating leadership. The talk eventually turned to the CIA’s long-standing belief that its agents were superior to the others in the intelligence community. With that, I turned to an old friend, who had been a station chief in the Middle East and knew far more about terrorism than I did, and asked why, even after 9/11, there was so much contempt for the FBI. His answer stunned me. “Don’t you get it, Sy? The FBI catches bank robbers. We rob banks.” My friend went on: “And the NSA? Do you really expect me to talk to dweebs with protractors in their pockets who are always looking down at their brown shoes?” I was both shocked and bemused by his cynicism and could not help but laugh at his mention of NSA brown shoes.
I left the lunch convinced that total sharing of intelligence was never going to happen—even after 9/11. The nineteen suicide bombers had succeeded perhaps because of a culture war inside the intelligence community.
The New Yorker was eager for any story relevant to 9/11, and my immediate goal was to publish a detailed story on what had gone wrong—why America had missed the nineteen hijackers who, as we were learning day by day, had been far from discreet as they prepared for the 9/11 attack. I was hunting for any inside information and intelligence assessments I could get my hands on: My thought was to find a way to let those on the inside know I could be trusted to verify and accurately describe even the most highly classified information and not leave a trail that could point to sources. A similar process had worked for me at the AP and the Times, because insiders with differing points of view about the Vietnam War or CIA activities saw me as a conduit to have their say without any risk. So, in the first few months after 9/11, I was able to write about NSA intercepts that showed bitter infighting among the royal family in Saudi Arabia over money;*1 provided new intelligence about Pakistan’s emerging nuclear arsenal and its continual breach with India; and told of American fears about Iran and the possible decision of the Shiite leadership there to go nuclear, in part as a counter to the Pakistani threat. My reportage did not deal directly with 9/11, but it delineated other risks that America was facing in the region. My pieces in those early post-9/11 days were checked to death; Remnick made sure the most obsessive of the obsessive New Yorker fact-checkers were on the case.
Bush and Cheney, as expected, went to war in Afghanistan in early October. In a piece a few weeks later I revealed that twelve members of the army’s secretive Delta Force had been injured, some seriously, as a result of a stupid decision by General Tommy Franks, the American commander in charge of the war. The special ops soldiers, moving at night and sleeping in foxholes during the day, were assigned to capture or kill a major Taliban leader and were nearing his well-protected home when Franks ordered Army Rangers and helicopters to provide backup. The show of force tipped off the Taliban that a raid was imminent, and the Delta Force soldiers were discovered and ambushed. It was, as one member of the Joint Special Operations Command told me, “a total goat fuck.” The easy-to-understand story made headlines, and the fact that many of the army’s best had been injured, some seriously, was predictably denied and denounced on the Sunday morning news shows by General Franks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. That afternoon I was called at home by a four-star officer who offered to provide me with a highly classified satellite photo showing the boot and part of a severed leg of one of those wounded. I said no to his offer but assured him that I and many of my colleagues knew what a disaster General Franks was proving to be when it came to special operations. I was contacted later by a second official with direct ties to the Special Forces Command who was offended by the Bush administration’s constant public lying. I stayed in touch, off and on, with those two men over the next fifteen years.
I was troubled st
ill by the failure of the major media to follow up on my stories, often dealing with the misuse of intelligence, as the American War on Terror intensified. After one such piece was published, James Risen, one of the best investigative reporters in the Washington bureau of the Times, telephoned me at home one night to compliment me on the piece and say that he and a few other reporters had been summoned to the office to try to match it. They found no one in the Bush administration willing or knowledgeable enough to help them do so, Risen said, with a laugh, and everyone had been told to go home. There would be no mention of the New Yorker story in the paper the next morning. “We couldn’t match it,” Risen added, “and so we’re going to ignore it.” I could not understand such thinking. During Watergate, Bob Woodward and I, aware that the story transcended competitiveness, had happily fed off each other’s work, as well as the reporting of the Los Angeles Times and others, and did our best to add to what had been published.
Ironically, the Times, while seemingly continuing to ignore my reporting, saw fit late in 2001 to publish a complimentary feature piece about what was described as the renewal of a rivalry between me and Woodward that began during Watergate. “Some of the most startling and controversial information to emerge from the crisis has appeared under their bylines,” the newspaper wrote, adding that three decades “after they battled each other in the unraveling of the Watergate scandal…they are at it again.” Woodward was depicted as “polished, smooth, punctilious.” I was “scruffy, scrappy, stubborn, loud….His charm is his lack of it.” Lack of charm and being scruffy, it seems, were the key to success in Washington—lots of reading, lots of interviewing, a few gutsy sources, not as much.
By early 2002, I was getting information from inside the White House and inside one of the major military commands, and protecting the sources of my information became more complex as Cheney’s authority grew. As usual, I was learning things I could not write at the time, lest the source, no matter how well disguised, become known to some on the inside. I knew, for example, that a decision had been made in late 2001—driven by neoconservative Republicans in and out of the government—to pull many special operations troops from Afghanistan, and from the hunt for bin Laden, in order to begin building up toward an all-out invasion of Iraq. The argument for doing so was that Saddam Hussein posed a more immediate threat because he had the capability to make the bomb. That was total nonsense. I knew from my earlier reporting on UNSCOM, the United Nations team whose mission had been to root out any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the 1991 American bombing in the First Gulf War had demolished the Iraqi nuclear weapons infrastructure, which had not been rebuilt. For the next fifteen months—until America began the Second Gulf War in March 2003—I wrote again and again about the distortion of intelligence and official lying about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq that paved the way for the war.
I began to comprehend that eight or nine neoconservatives who were political outsiders in the Clinton years had essentially overthrown the government of the United States—with ease. It was stunning to realize how fragile our Constitution was. The intellectual leaders of the group—Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle—had not hidden their ideology and their belief in the power of the executive but depicted themselves in public with a great calmness and a self-assurance that masked their radicalism. I had spent many hours after 9/11 in conversations with Perle that, luckily for me, helped me understand what was coming. (Perle and I had been chatting about policy since the early 1980s, but he broke off relations in 2003 over an article I did for The New Yorker linking him, a fervent supporter of Israel, to a series of meetings with Saudi businessmen in an attempt to land a multibillion-dollar contract from Saudi Arabia. Perle responded by publicly threatening to sue me and characterizing me as a newspaper terrorist. He did not sue.)
Meanwhile, Cheney had emerged as a leader of the neocon pack. From 9/11 on he did all he could to undermine congressional oversight. I learned a great deal from the inside about his primacy in the White House, but once again I was limited in what I would write for fear of betraying my sources. It was a burden I felt keenly. It was far more difficult after 9/11 to communicate with my contacts on the inside who had access to many of the secrets and were not afraid to talk about those operations, planned or ongoing—and only those operations—that were contrary to American values, or what was left of them. I came to understand that Cheney’s goal was to run his most important military and intelligence operations with as little congressional knowledge, and interference, as possible. It was fascinating and important to learn what I did about Cheney’s constant accumulation of power and authority as vice president, but it was impossible to even begin to verify the information without running the risk that Cheney would learn of my questioning and have a good idea from whom I was getting the information.
I was learning in detail about what amounted to a massively cynical and perhaps unconstitutional enterprise emanating out of the White House, but could tell no one about it. Maybe there would be a book in another decade, I thought. In the short run, however, what I had been told, and what I believed, darkened my view of the Bush/Cheney White House and convinced me that, as in Watergate, the worst was yet to come.
There was some tension between Remnick and me in the months before the invasion of Iraq. David saw the threatened American invasion as providing the Bush administration with a chance, as he wrote in the magazine at the time, to press “the case for peace and political reform in the Middle East.” I thought he was kidding himself; the prospects for future peace or political reform in Iraq, given the extreme politics of those running the war, were nil. I’m sure David also disagreed with my skepticism about the possibility of any weapons of mass destruction remaining in the Iraqi arsenal. To his credit, David did not stop me from writing what my inside sources were telling me—that the Bush administration was simply making up such intelligence—but David did insist that I note in each story that there remained a possibility that Saddam did indeed have weapons of mass destruction.
The war went badly, as those I knew on the inside were convinced it would—given the American lack of understanding about the power structure in Iraq—and within months the quick and easy American victory became a contested occupation, with resistance growing daily. The American response was more violence, including an escalation in assassination, imprisonment, and torture. I was told again and again in those early days by involved officials who insisted on not being named that there was a widespread understanding that those who died in interrogation were not to be buried—lest the bodies be disinterred later—but had to be destroyed by acid and other means. It would be years, given the possibility that Cheney would begin a witch hunt for my sources, before I felt comfortable writing as much in print.
Over the years, the extent of Cheney’s contempt for congressional oversight also became known to a few senior Democratic members of the House Appropriations Committee, among them David Obey of Wisconsin, the committee chairman, and John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a longtime member who, as a former marine, was close to the Pentagon’s military leadership. Obey and Murtha were members of a special four-man intelligence subcommittee—the other two members were Republicans who usually did Cheney’s bidding—that was to be briefed on all CIA covert operations. The two Democrats did not get along, and they rarely talked. I decided to share what I had been learning about Cheney’s off-the-books operations with Murtha and realized that he knew much more than I did about them and was equally alarmed. My talks with Murtha became known to Obey, and I thought it important to relay to him some of the inside information that Murtha was telling me. It also led the very taciturn Obey to develop trust in me. At a later point, Obey told me, he had gone to see Cheney and David Addington, the vice president’s counsel, and told them they were violating the Constitution by conducting their off-the-books operations without any congressional authorization and funding. The answer was, in essence, that President Bush had the
authority to do whatever he deemed necessary in wartime. The specific message he got from the two men, Obey told me, was “If you don’t like what we’re doing, go into federal court and sue us.”
It was confidential information I could not share with anyone and could not put into the magazine because it would suggest, whether accurate or not, where I had been getting some of the information I published on covert CIA operations. (Murtha passed away in 2010, and Obey retired in 2011 after more than forty years in Congress.)
A few months after the invasion of Iraq, during an interview overseas with a general who was director of a foreign intelligence service, I was provided with a copy of a Republican neocon plan for American dominance in the Middle East. The general was an American ally, but one who was very rattled by the Bush/Cheney aggression. I was told that the document leaked to me initially had been obtained by someone in the local CIA station. There was reason to be rattled: The document declared that the war to reshape the Middle East had to begin “with the assault on Iraq. The fundamental reason for this…is that the war will start making the U.S. the hegemon of the Middle East. The correlative reason is to make the region feel in its bones, as it were, the seriousness of American intent and determination.” Victory in Iraq would lead to an ultimatum to Damascus, the “defanging” of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, and other anti-Israeli groups. America’s enemies must understand that “they are fighting for their life: Pax Americana is on its way, which implies their annihilation.” I and the foreign general agreed that America’s neocons were a menace to civilization.
Donald Rumsfeld also was infected with neocon fantasy. Turkey had refused to permit America’s Fourth Division to join the attack of Iraq from its territory, and the division, with its twenty-five thousand men and women, did not arrive in force inside Iraq until mid-April, when the initial fighting was essentially over. I learned then that Rumsfeld had asked the American military command in Stuttgart, Germany, which had responsibility for monitoring Europe, including Syria and Lebanon, to begin drawing up an operational plan for an invasion of Syria. A young general assigned to the task refused to do so, thereby winning applause from my friends on the inside and risking his career. The plan was seen by those I knew as especially bizarre because Bashar Assad, the ruler of secular Syria, had responded to 9/11 by sharing with the CIA hundreds of his country’s most sensitive intelligence files on the Muslim Brotherhood in Hamburg, where much of the planning for 9/11 was carried out. (I had written about Assad’s action in The New Yorker in July 2003.) Rumsfeld eventually came to his senses and backed down, I was told, but not before demanding that all military planning for Syria and Lebanon be transferred to America’s Central Command, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, and led by the more accommodating Tommy Franks.*2
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