by Tim Weiner
The evidence was a very slender reed. “We will need much better intelligence on this facility” before bombing it, warned Mary McCarthy at the National Security Council. None ever appeared.
Navy ships in the Arabian Sea fired a barrage of million-dollar cruise missiles at both targets on August 20. They killed perhaps twenty Pakistanis passing through Khost—bin Laden was long gone—and a night watchman in Sudan. Clinton’s inner circle claimed that the evidence for attacking Sudan was airtight. First they said al Shifa was a weapons factory working for bin Laden. In fact, it was a pharmaceutical plant, and the link to bin Laden vanished. Then they said it was part of an Iraqi scheme to distribute nerve weapons. But the Iraqis had not weaponized VX, as tests by United Nations inspectors confirmed. The soil sample might have been a VX precursor, and it might as well have been weed killer.
The case was a dozen dots connected by inference and surmise. Nothing ever corroborated the decision to strike al Shifa. “It was a mistake,” said Donald Petterson, the American ambassador to Sudan from 1992 to 1995. “The administration failed to produce conclusive evidence that chemical weapons were being made at the pharmaceutical factory. The administration had grounds for suspicion, but to commit an act of war, which the missile attack was, the evidence should have been iron-clad.” His successor, Ambassador Tim Carney, said with deliberate restraint: “The decision to target al Shifa continues a tradition of operating on inadequate intelligence about Sudan.” The Clinton administration’s counterterrorist attack went off half-cocked.
Three weeks later, Tenet met with the rest of the leaders of the American intelligence community. They agreed that they had to make “substantial and sweeping changes” in the way the nation collected, analyzed, and produced information. If they did not, they said, the result would be “a catastrophic systemic intelligence failure.” The date was September 11, 1998.
“WE WILL CONTINUE TO BE SURPRISED”
If the CIA did not reinvent itself, and soon, “in ten years we won’t be relevant,” Tenet told me in October, his first on-the-record interview as director of central intelligence. “Unless you develop the expertise, we won’t achieve what we want to achieve.”
Since 1991, the agency had lost more than three thousand of its best people—about 20 percent of its senior spies, analysts, scientists, and technology experts. Roughly 7 percent of the clandestine service was headed out the door annually. That added up to a loss of about a thousand experienced spies, and it left not many more than a thousand in place. Tenet knew he could not guard against the future with so weak a force out on the front lines.
“There will always be days where we have to race to catch up to events we did not foresee, not because somebody is asleep at the switch, but because what’s going on is so complicated,” he said. “There is an expectation that we have built a no-fault intelligence system, that intelligence is expected not only to tell you about the trends and to tell you about events and give you insight, but in each and every case has a responsibility to tell you when the date, time, and place of an event is.” The CIA itself had created that hope and expectation long ago. It was an illusion. “We will continue to be surprised,” Tenet said.
He began to organize a nationwide talent hunt, painfully aware that his battle to rebuild the CIA would take many years, many billions of dollars, and many thousands of new officers. It was a desperate struggle against time. It takes five to seven years to turn a novice into a case officer capable of working in the rougher capitals of the world. American-born citizens who were both fluent in foreign cultures and willing and able to work for the CIA were hard to come by. A spy must know how “to use deception, to use manipulation, to use, frankly, dishonesty in the pursuit of his job,” said Jeffrey Smith, the CIA’s general counsel in the mid-1990s. “The management of the agency must always worry about finding that extraordinarily rare individual who has the talent to deal in this deceptive and manipulative world and keep his or her own moral ballast.” Finding, hiring, and keeping such exceptional minds had been a job that never was done.
Over the years, the CIA had become less and less willing to hire “people that are a little different, people who are eccentric, people who don’t look good in a suit and tie, people who don’t play well in the sandbox with others,” Bob Gates said. “The kinds of tests that we make people pass, psychological, and everything else, make it very hard for somebody who may be brilliant or have extraordinary talents and unique capabilities to get into the agency.” As a consequence of its cultural myopia, the CIA misread the world. Very few of its officers could read or speak Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, or Farsi—the languages of three billion people, half the planet’s population. Far too few had ever haggled in an Arab bazaar or walked through an African village. The agency was unable to dispatch “an Asian-American into North Korea without him being identified as some kid who just walked out of Kansas, or African-Americans to work around the world, or Arab-Americans,” Gates said.
In 1992, when Gates was director of central intelligence, he wanted to hire an American citizen raised in Azerbaijan. “He spoke Azeri fluently, but he didn’t write English very well,” he recalled. “And so he was rejected because he didn’t pass our English test. And when I was told this, I just went crazy. I said: ‘I’ve got thousands of people here who can write English, but I don’t have anybody here who can speak Azeri. What have you done?’”
The agency started combing the cities and the suburbs of America looking for the children of immigrants and refugees, young men and women who grew up in first-generation Asian and Arab households, reaching out with ads in ethnic newspapers throughout the United States. The harvest was thin. Tenet knew the agency would live or die in years to come by virtue of its ability to project an image of international intrigue and intellectual adventure to smart young people. But new blood was only part of the cure. The recruitment drive never resolved a fundamental question at the agency—could the CIA recruit the kind of person it would need five or ten years down the road? It did not know where the road would lead. It only knew it could not survive in the state into which it had fallen.
“WE’RE GOING TO BOMB THIS”
The enemy was growing stronger as the agency grew weaker. The failed attack on bin Laden supercharged his status and attracted thousands of new recruits to his cause. The urgency of the CIA’s campaign against al Qaeda escalated in concert with his popularity.
Tenet revived the plans to use Afghan proxies to capture him. In September and October 1998, the Afghans claimed they had mounted four failed ambushes against bin Laden—which the CIA strongly doubted. But they convinced the agency’s field officers that they could track him as he traveled from camp to camp inside Afghanistan. They reported on December 18 that bin Laden was heading back to Kandahar, and that he would spend the night of December 20 at a house inside the governor’s compound there. Station chief Gary Schroen sent word from Pakistan: strike tonight—there may never be a better chance. The cruise missiles were spinning in their chambers and locked on the target. But the intelligence was one man’s word and hundreds of people were sleeping in the compound that night. Tenet’s desire to do away with bin Laden was overcome by his doubts. The word from on high was no go. Courage gave way to caution and gung-ho became go slow.
From the fall of 1998 onward, “the United States had the capability to remove Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan or to kill him,” but it quailed when it came time to pull the trigger, said John MacGaffin, the number-two officer in the clandestine service earlier in the Clinton years. “The CIA knew bin Laden’s location almost every day—sometimes within fifty miles, sometimes within fifty feet.” At least fifteen American special-forces soldiers were killed or injured in training missions for the anticipated assault. Commanders in the Pentagon and civilian leaders in the White House continually backed down from the political gamble of a military mission against bin Laden.
They left the job to the CIA. And the agency could not execute it.
The Afghans reported in the first weeks of 1999 that bin Laden was headed for a hunting camp south of Kandahar favored by wealthy falconers. A spy satellite looked down on the camp on February 8 and fixed its location. A government aircraft from the United Arab Emirates—an American ally—was parked there. The lives of the emirs could not be sacrificed to kill bin Laden and the cruise missiles stayed in their launchers.
The Afghans kept tracking bin Laden’s travels in and out of Kandahar throughout April 1999. They locked onto him for thirty-six straight hours in May. Gary Schroen’s agents delivered detailed reports on his whereabouts. The intelligence would never be better, said Tenet’s deputy director of central intelligence, General John Gordon.
Three times the chance came to strike with cruise missiles. Three times Tenet said no. His confidence in the CIA’s ability to pick its targets had been badly shaken days before.
A NATO bombing campaign against Serbia had been launched with the intent of forcing President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his troops from Kosovo. The CIA had been invited to pick targets for American warplanes. The task was assigned to the agency’s counterproliferation division, the group that analyzed intelligence on the spread of weapons of mass destruction. The analysts identified their best target as the Yugoslav Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement, at 2 Umetnosti Boulevard in Belgrade. They used tourist maps to help them fix the location. The targeting flowed up through the CIA’s machinery to the Pentagon, and the coordinates were loaded onto a B-2 stealth bomber’s circuitry.
The target was destroyed. But the CIA had misread its maps. The building was not Milosevic’s military depot. It was the Chinese embassy.
“The bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was an acutely unpleasant experience for me,” said Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, who became director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in July 1999. “I was the one who showed the picture of the Chinese embassy to the President of the United States—among 900 other pictures I showed him—and said, ‘We’re going to bomb this, because it’s the Yugoslav department of military procurement.’” He had gotten that picture from the CIA.
This mistake cut deeper than anyone could know. It would be a long time before the White House and the Pentagon would trust the agency to put anything—or anyone—in the crosshairs of an American missile.
“YOU AMERICANS ARE CRAZY”
The military and intelligence services of the United States were still set up to work against armies and nations—hard to kill, but easy to find on the map of the world. The new enemy was a man—easy to kill, but hard to find. He was a wraith moving around Afghanistan at night in a Land Cruiser.
President Clinton signed secret orders that he thought gave the CIA the power to kill bin Laden. In the throes of his impeachment, he daydreamed aloud about American ninjas rappelling out of helicopters to grab the Saudi. He made Tenet the commander of a war against one man.
Tenet fought his own doubts about the CIA’s intelligence and its covert-action capabilities. But he had to devise a new plan of attack before bin Laden struck again. With his new counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, he laid out a new strategy at the end of the summer of 1999. The agency would work with old friends and old foes around the world to kill bin Laden and his allies. Black deepened his ties to foreign military, intelligence, and security services in places such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, on the Afghan border. The hope was that they would help CIA officers put their boots on the ground inside Afghanistan.
The goal was to link up with the Afghan warrior Ahmed Shah Massoud at the redoubt he had held for nearly twenty years, since the early days of the Soviet occupation, deep in a mountain valley northeast of Kabul. Massoud, a noble and courageous fighter who wanted to be the king of Afghanistan, proposed a grand alliance to his old contacts from the agency. He offered to attack bin Laden’s strongholds—and, with the help of the CIA and American arms, to overthrow the Taliban, the rabble of peasants, mullahs, and jihad veterans that ruled in Kabul. He could help the agency establish a base that would let it get bin Laden on its own. Cofer Black was all for it. His deputies were ready to go.
But the chances of failure were too high for Tenet. Once again, he said no—getting in and out was too risky. Reporters and foreign aid workers took those risks all the time in Afghanistan. The CIA at headquarters would not.
Massoud laughed when he heard that. “You Americans are crazy,” he said. “You guys never change.”
As the millennium approached, Jordan’s intelligence service, created and long supported by the CIA, arrested sixteen men whom it believed were prepared to blow up hotels and tourist sites during Christmas. The agency thought that this plot prefigured a global attack by al Qaeda timed for the new year. Tenet went into overdrive, contacting twenty foreign intelligence chiefs in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, telling them to arrest anyone associated with bin Laden. He sent an urgent message to all CIA officers overseas. “The threat could not be more real,” it said. “Do whatever is necessary.” The millennium passed without a catastrophic attack.
The president was briefed on the CIA’s covert-action plans against bin Laden in February and March 2000, and he said the United States surely could do better. Tenet and Jim Pavitt, the new chief of the clandestine service, said they would need millions in new funds to do the job. The White House counterterrorism czar, Richard Clarke, thought that the CIA’s will, not its wallet, was too thin; he said the agency had been given “a lot of money to do it and a long time to do it, and I didn’t want to put more good money after bad.”
The political season brought the return of the tradition inaugurated by President Truman: the intelligence briefing for the opposition. The acting deputy director of central intelligence, John McLaughlin, and the deputy chief of the counterterrorist center, Ben Bonk, went down to Crawford, Texas, and led a four-hour seminar for Governor George W. Bush over Labor Day in September. It was Bonk’s unhappy duty to tell the Republican candidate that Americans would die at the hands of foreign terrorists at some time in the coming four years.
The first deaths came five weeks later. On October 12, in the harbor of Aden, the capital of Yemen, two men in a speedboat stood and bowed as they approached an American warship, the USS Cole. The explosion killed seventeen, wounded forty, and ripped a $250 million hole in one of the American navy’s most sophisticated vessels.
Al Qaeda was the obvious suspect.
The CIA set up a satellite office in Crawford to keep Bush posted on that attack and other world events during the long struggle over the 2000 election. In December, after the Supreme Court declared Bush the victor, Tenet personally briefed the president-elect on bin Laden. Bush remembered specifically asking Tenet if the CIA could kill the guy; Tenet replied that killing him would not end the threat he represented. Bush then met alone with Clinton for two hours to talk about national security.
Clinton remembers telling him: “Your biggest threat is bin Laden.” Bush swore that he never heard those words.
48. “THE DARK SIDE”
“American intelligence is in trouble,” James Monnier Simon, Jr., the assistant director of central intelligence for administration, warned shortly after Bush took office in January 2001. The CIA “has had its centrality compromised,” he said. It lacked the power to collect and analyze the intelligence needed to protect the nation.
“The United States in 2001 is faced with a growing, almost dizzying disparity between its diminished capabilities and the burgeoning requirements of national security,” Simon said. “The disconnect between what we are planning for and the likelihood of what the United States will face has never been so stark.” The time would come when the president and Congress would have to explain “why a foreseeable disaster went unforeseen.”
American intelligence was almost as divided and diffused as it had been in 1941. Eighteen consecutive directors of central intelligence had failed in their duty to unify it. Now the agency was about to fail as an institution o
f American government.
The CIA stood at seventeen thousand people, about the size of an army division, but the great majority of them were desk jockeys. Roughly one thousand people worked abroad in the clandestine service. Most officers lived comfortably in suburban cul-de-sacs and townhouses in the orbit of the Washington beltway. They were unused to drinking dirty water and sleeping on mud floors. They were unsuited for lives of sacrifice.
Two hundred officers had joined the CIA’s clandestine service as charter members in September 1947. Perhaps two hundred were capable and courageous enough to tough it out in hardship posts in January 2001. The full complement of CIA personnel focused on al Qaeda amounted to perhaps twice that number. Most of them were staring at computers at headquarters, cut off from the realities of the outside world by their antiquated information technologies. To expect them to protect the United States from attack was at best a misplaced faith.
“A HOLLOW SHELL OF WORDS WITHOUT DEEDS”
Tenet was in the good graces at the White House, having formally renamed the CIA’s headquarters the Bush Center for Intelligence after the president’s father, and the new commander in chief liked Tenet’s tough-guy attitude. But the agency received the barest support from President Bush during his first nine months in office. He gave the Pentagon an immediate 7 percent budget increase. The CIA and the rest of the intelligence community received a boost of three-hundredths of one percent. The difference was set in meetings at Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, where not a single representative of the intelligence community was present. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, partners in the politics of national security since the days of Nixon and Ford, held enormous power in the new administration. They shared an abiding distrust in the capabilities of the CIA.