by Tim Weiner
Deutch said there were “tremendous deficiencies in the way the agency carried out its business” in Guatemala. The problem was lying—or, as he put it, “a lack of candor”—between the chief of station and the American ambassador, the station and the Latin American division, the division and headquarters, and finally between the agency and Congress.
It was rare—very rare—for anyone to be fired from the clandestine service. But Deutch said he was going to do exactly as the review board recommended. The announcement did not go over well at the Bubble. The hundreds of officers gathered there were ferociously angry. Deutch’s decision signified to them a suffocating political correctness. The director told them that they had to keep going out into the world and taking risks in the name of national security. A low growl rose from the back of the Bubble, a bitter laugh signifying: Yeah. Sure. That was the moment when the director and the clandestine service washed their hands of one another. It sealed his fate at the CIA.
“WE WANT TO GET THIS RIGHT”
The break was unbridgeable. Deutch decided to hand the portfolio of problems at the clandestine service to his number-two man—George Tenet, the deputy director of central intelligence. Now forty-two years old, Tenet, always the tireless and loyal aide, had spent five years as staff director of the Senate intelligence committee and two years as the National Security Council’s point man for intelligence. He had vital insights in managing the CIA’s tortured relationships with the Congress and the White House. And he soon came to see the clandestine service differently than Deutch did—not as a problem to be solved but a cause to be championed. Tenet would do his utmost to lead them.
“Let me explain life to you,” Tenet said he told the clandestine service chiefs. “Here are the ten or fifteen things, that we cannot tolerate to fail against, to advance the national-security interests of the United States. This is what we want you to devote your money, your people, your language training, and your skills to. We want to get this right.”
Terrorism soon rose to the top of Tenet’s list. In the fall of 1995, a barrage of threatening reports started coming from the CIA station in the Sudan to the agency headquarters and the White House counterterrorism czar, Richard Clarke. They were based on the word of a single recruited CIA agent. They warned of an imminent attack against the station, the American embassy, and a prominent member of the Clinton administration.
“Dick Clarke came to me and said, ‘They’re going to blow you up,’” remembered Tony Lake, the president’s national security adviser. Who is going to blow me up? Lake asked. Maybe the Iranians, Clarke replied, maybe the Sudanese. “So I went to live in a safe house and drove to work in a bulletproof car,” Lake said. “They could never show it was real. I suspect not.”
The Sudan was an international clearinghouse for stateless terrorists in those days. Among them was Osama bin Laden. The agency first knew him in the late 1980s as a rich Saudi who supported the same Afghan rebels that the agency armed in their fight against their Soviet oppressors. He was known as a financier of people who had grand visions of attacking the enemies of Islam. The CIA never pulled together its shards and fragments of intelligence on bin Laden and his network into a coherent report for the White House. No formal estimate of the terrorist threat he represented was published until after the entire world knew his name.
Bin Laden had returned to Saudi Arabia to rail against the presence of American troops after the 1991 Gulf War. The Saudi government expelled him, and he settled in the Sudan. The CIA’s station chief in the Sudan, Cofer Black, was an old-school operator of considerable courage and cunning who had helped hunt down the burned-out terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. Black tracked bin Laden’s movements and motives in the Sudan as best he could. In January 1996, the CIA created a counterterrorism unit of a dozen people devoted entirely to the Saudi—the bin Laden station. There was a sense that he might start taking aim at American targets abroad.
But in February 1996, the CIA, heeding the warnings of its recruited agent, shut down its operations in the Sudan, blinding itself to fresh intelligence on its new target. The station and the American embassy were shuttered and their personnel moved to Kenya. The decision came over the strongest objections of the American ambassador, Timothy Carney, a man of military discipline along with diplomatic sensibilities. He argued that for the United States to withdraw from the Sudan was a dangerous mistake. He questioned the CIA’s warnings about an imminent attack, and he was proved right. The agent who had raised the alarm was later found to be a fabricator, and the CIA formally withdrew roughly one hundred reports based on his information.
Shortly thereafter, bin Laden moved to Afghanistan. The chief of the bin Laden station, Mike Scheuer, saw this as a tremendous opportunity. The CIA had reestablished contacts with a network of Afghan exiles in the tribal northwest territories of Pakistan. The “tribals,” as the CIA called them, were helping in the hunt for Mir Amal Kansi, the gunman who had killed two agency officers outside headquarters.
The hope was that they could help kidnap or kill bin Laden someday. But that day would have to wait. The CIA had another man in its crosshairs at that moment.
The chief of the Near East division of the clandestine service, Stephen Richter, had been working for two years on a plan to support a military coup against Saddam Hussein. The order had come from President Clinton, the third such command from the White House to the CIA in five years. In Jordan, a team of CIA officers met with Mohammed Abdullah Shawani, a former commander of Iraqi special forces. In London, the agency conspired with an Iraqi exile named Ayad Alawi, who headed a network of rebellious Iraqi military officers and Ba’ath Party leaders. The CIA backed him with money and guns. In northern Iraq, the CIA gathered the tribal leaders of the stateless Iraqi Kurds, renewing an old and troubled romance.
Despite the CIA’s best efforts, none of these disparate and fractious forces came together. The agency invested many millions trying to recruit key members of Saddam’s military and political circles, hoping they would rise up. But the plot was penetrated and subverted by Saddam and his spies. On June 26, 1996, Saddam began arresting at least two hundred officers in and around Baghdad. He executed at least eighty of them, including General Shawani’s sons.
“The Saddam case was an interesting case,” Mark Lowenthal, who had been staff director of the House intelligence committee and a senior CIA analyst, said after the coup collapsed. “All right, so we get rid of Saddam Hussein, good thing. But who do we get after him? Who’s our guy in Iraq? Anybody that we put in power in Iraq is likely to have the staying power of a flea. So this was a case where you had policy makers saying do something. This do something urge really expressed their frustration.” They failed to see that the CIA “had no way to deal with Saddam Hussein,” he said. “The problem with the operation was that there were no reliable Iraqis to deal with. And the reliable Iraqis you’re looking at have no access to do what you want to them to do. So the operation was a bust. It wasn’t feasible. But it’s very hard for an operator to say, ‘Mr. President, we can’t do that.’ So you end up with an operation that probably shouldn’t have been started in the first place.”
“FAILURE IS INEVITABLE”
Deutch infuriated Clinton by telling Congress that the CIA might never solve the problem of Saddam Hussein. His seventeen-month tenure as director of central intelligence ended in bitterness. In December 1996, after Clinton was re-elected, he dismissed Deutch from the government and turned to his national security adviser, Tony Lake, to take the job so few coveted.
“It would have been a great challenge,” Lake mused. “What I had in mind was pushing the analytical side to make intelligence—both its sources and its products—fit in with the world of the mid-1990s. What we got was too often an overnight parsing of the news.”
But Lake would not be confirmed. The Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Richard Shelby of Alabama, decided to make him a whipping boy for everything that conservatives found wro
ng with the Clinton administration’s conduct of foreign policy. The appearance of bipartisanship that the intelligence committees had maintained for the better part of twenty years evaporated. There was also an undercurrent of opposition to Lake from inside the clandestine service. The message was: don’t send us any more outsiders.
“To the CIA, everyone is an outsider,” Lake observed.
It was not even close to a fair hearing. On March 17, 1997, Lake withdrew in anger, telling the president that he was not going to spend three more months as “a dancing bear in a political circus.” So the poisoned chalice was handed to George Tenet—the only choice remaining. Tenet was already running the agency as the acting chief. He would become the fifth director of central intelligence in six years.
“It is impossible to overstate the turbulence and disruption that that much change at the top caused,” the CIA’s Fred Hitz said. “Its impact on morale is hard to overstate, in terms of its destructiveness. You have the feeling—who’s in charge here? Can’t anybody up there play this game? Don’t they understand what we’re about? Don’t they realize what our mission is?”
Tenet knew what the mission was: save the CIA. But the agency approached the end of the American Century burdened by a personnel system invented in the 1880s, an information conveyor belt resembling assembly lines of the 1920s, and a bureaucracy dating to the 1950s. It moved people and money around in ways that summoned up memories of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans. Its ability to collect and analyze secrets was falling apart as the information age exploded and the Internet made encryption—the transformation of language into code—a universal tool. The clandestine service had become a place where “great successes are rare and failure is routine,” a report by the House intelligence committee noted.
Those failures once again were front-page news. The CIA’s capacity for spying had once again been wounded by a traitor from within. Harold J. Nicholson, who had been station chief in Romania, had taken up a two-year posting as a head instructor at the Farm, the CIA’s training school outside Williamsburg, Virginia. He had been spying for Moscow since 1994, selling the Russians files on dozens of CIA officers stationed abroad and the identities of every new officer graduated from the Farm in 1994, 1995, and 1996. The CIA told the federal judge who sentenced Nicholson to twenty-three years in prison that it would never be able to calculate the damage he had done to its operations worldwide. The careers of three years’ worth of CIA trainees were blighted; once burned, they could never serve overseas.
On June 18, 1997, three weeks before Tenet’s swearing-in, a new report by the House intelligence committee erased the remnants of the prideful notion that the CIA served as America’s first line of defense. The committee, led by Porter J. Goss, said the agency was filled with inexperienced officers unable to speak the languages or understand the political landscapes of the countries they covered. It said the CIA had a small and dwindling capability to gather intelligence through espionage. It concluded that the CIA lacked the necessary “depth, breadth, and expertise to monitor political, military, and economic developments worldwide.”
Later that summer, a career intelligence officer named Russ Travers published a haunting essay in the CIA’s in-house journal. He said America’s abilities to gather and analyze intelligence were falling apart. For years, he wrote, the leaders of American intelligence had been insisting that they were putting the agency on the right track. This was a myth. “We fine-tune our structures and marginally change our programs…getting the deck chairs on the Titanic nice and neat.” But “we are going to begin making more and bigger mistakes more often,” he warned. “We have gotten away from basics—the collection and unbiased analysis of facts.”
He offered a prophecy for the future leaders of the CIA. “The year is 2001,” he wrote. “By the turn of the century, analysis had become dangerously fragmented. The Community could still collect ‘facts,’ but analysis had long ago been overwhelmed by the volume of available information and were no longer able to distinguish between significant facts and background noise. The quality of analysis had become increasingly suspect…. The data were there, but we had failed to recognize fully their significance.
“From the vantage point of 2001,” he wrote, “intelligence failure is inevitable.”
47. “THE THREAT
COULD NOT BE MORE
REAL”
George Tenet was sworn in as the eighteenth director of central intelligence on July 11, 1997. He boasted to me back then, knowing his words would appear in The New York Times, that the CIA was far smarter and more skilled than any outsider could know. This was public relations. “We were nearly bankrupt,” he confessed seven years later. He had inherited a CIA “whose expertise was ebbing” and a clandestine service “in disarray.”
The agency was preparing to mark its fiftieth anniversary that September, and it had put together a list of the fifty greatest CIA officers as part of the celebration. Most were either old and gray or dead and gone. The greatest among the living was Richard Helms. He was not in a celebratory mood. “The only remaining superpower doesn’t have enough interest in what’s going on in the world to organize and run an espionage service,” Helms said to me that month. “We’ve drifted away from that as a country.” His successor, James Schlesinger, felt much the same. “The trust that was reposed in the CIA has faded,” he said. “The agency is now so battered that its utility for espionage is subject to question.”
Tenet started rebuilding. He called old stars out of retirement, including Jack Downing, who had served as station chief in Moscow and Beijing and agreed to run the clandestine service for a year or two. Tenet also sought a multibillion-dollar cash infusion for the agency. He promised that the CIA could be restored to health in five years’ time, by 2002, if the money started flowing immediately. Porter Goss, who held the agency’s purse strings in the House, arranged for secret “emergency assistance” of several hundred million dollars, followed by a onetime $1.8 billion shot in the arm. It was the biggest intelligence spending increase in fifteen years, and Goss promised to find more.
“Intelligence isn’t just something for the cold war,” Goss said back then. “When you think back to Pearl Harbor, you can understand why. Unpleasant surprises are out there.”
“CATASTROPHIC SYSTEMIC INTELLIGENCE FAILURE”
Tenet lived in a state of foreboding, awaiting the next snafu. “I will not allow the CIA to become a second-rate organization,” he proclaimed at a headquarters pep rally. A few days later, on May 11, 1998, the agency was caught by surprise again when India exploded a nuclear bomb. The test remade the balance of power in the world.
The new Hindu nationalist government had vowed openly to make nuclear weapons part of its arsenal. India’s atomic weapons commissioner had said he was ready to test if political leaders gave the go-ahead. Pakistan had fired off new missiles, all but daring New Delhi to respond. So a nuclear blast by the world’s largest democracy should not have come as a shock—but it did. The reporting from the CIA’s station in New Delhi was lazy. The analysis at headquarters was fuzzy. The warning bell never rang. The test revealed a failure of espionage, a failure to read photographs, a failure to comprehend reports, a failure to think, and a failure to see. It was “a very disturbing event,” said Charles Allen, the CIA’s longtime chief of warning, whom Tenet recalled from retirement to serve as his assistant director of central intelligence for collection. It was a clear sign of a systemic breakdown at the CIA.
People started having premonitions of a catastrophe. “The likelihood of a cataclysmic warning failure is growing,” Tenet’s successor at the National Security Council, Mary McCarthy, wrote in an unclassified report shortly after the Indian test. “Disaster looms!”
Tenet had a reason to be looking the other way at the time of the nuclear test. His troops were rehearsing an operation to capture Osama bin Laden. In February 1998, bin Laden had proclaimed that he was on a mission from God to kill Americans. In Afghanistan, he was gat
hering the shock troops and camp followers of the holy war against the Soviets for a new jihad against the United States. In Pakistan, the CIA’s station chief, Gary Schroen, was perfecting a plan to use the agency’s old Afghan allies to snatch bin Laden as he traveled to his mud-walled compound in the southern city of Kandahar. On May 20, 1998, they began a final, four-day, full-scale dress rehearsal. But on May 29, Tenet decided to cancel the operation. Success depended on coordination with Pakistan—which had now exploded its own nuclear test in response to India. The Pakistanis were pounding the war drums. The Afghans were unreliable. Failure was not an option—it was a probability. The chances for capturing bin Laden were slim to start, and the world was now too unstable to risk it.
June passed without the promised attack from bin Laden, then July. On August 7, 1998, President Clinton was awakened by a 5:35 a.m. call reporting the bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The explosions took place four minutes apart. The damage in Nairobi was horrific; I saw it with my own eyes. Twelve Americans, including a young CIA officer, died in that blast, which killed hundreds and wounded thousands of Kenyans in the streets and office buildings outside the embassy walls.
The next day, George Tenet went to the White House with the news that bin Laden was heading to an encampment outside Khost, Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. Tenet and Clinton’s national-security aides agreed to hit the camp with cruise missiles. They wanted a second target to even the score, and they chose al Shifa, an industrial plant outside Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. An Egyptian agent of the CIA had delivered a soil sample from outside the plant suggesting the presence of a chemical used to make VX nerve gas.