by Tim Weiner
Bush and Tenet met at the White House almost every morning at eight. But nothing Tenet said about bin Laden fully captured the president’s attention. Morning after morning at the eight o’clock briefing, Tenet told the president, Cheney, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice about portents of al Qaeda’s plot to strike America. But Bush was interested in other things—missile defense, Mexico, the Middle East. He was struck by no sense of emergency.
During the Reagan administration, when the president was hard of hearing and the director of central intelligence mumbled unintelligibly, aides used to joke that there was no telling what went on between them. Bush and Tenet had no such infirmities. The problem lay in a lack of clarity at the CIA and a lack of focus at the White House. It’s not enough to ring the bell, Richard Helms used to say. You’ve got to make sure the other guy hears it.
The noise—the volume and frequency of fragmentary and uncorroborated information about a coming terrorist attack—was deafening. Tenet could not convey a coherent signal to the president. As the klaxon sounded louder and louder in the spring and summer of 2001, every nerve and sinew of the agency strained to see and hear the threat clearly. Warnings were pouring in from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Jordan and Israel, all over Europe. The CIA’s frayed circuits were dangerously overloaded. Tips kept coming in. They’re going to hit Boston. They’re going to hit London. They’re going to hit New York. “When these attacks occur, as they likely will,” Clarke e-mailed Rice on May 29, “we will wonder what more we could have done to stop them.”
The agency feared an onslaught overseas during the July 4 holiday, when American embassies across the world traditionally let down their defenses and open their doors to celebrate the American Revolution. In the weeks before the holiday, Tenet had called upon the chiefs of foreign intelligence services in Amman, Cairo, Islamabad, Rome, and Ankara to try to destroy known and suspected cells of al Qaeda and its affiliates throughout the world. The CIA would supply the intelligence, and the foreign services would make the arrests. A handful of suspected terrorists were jailed in the Gulf States and in Italy. Maybe the arrests had disrupted plans of attack against two or three American embassies, Tenet told the White House. Maybe not. Impossible to tell.
Tenet now had to make a life-and-death decisions unlike any that had ever confronted a director of central intelligence. A year before, after a seven-year struggle between the CIA and the Pentagon, a small pilotless aircraft equipped with video cameras and spy sensors called the Predator had been declared ready to be deployed over Afghanistan. The first flight had come on September 7, 2000. Now the agency and the air force had figured out how to put antitank missiles on the Predator. In theory, for an investment of a few million dollars a CIA officer at headquarters would soon be able to hunt and kill bin Laden with a video screen and a joystick. But what was the chain of command? Tenet wondered. Who gives the go-ahead? Who pulls the trigger? Tenet thought he had no license to kill. The idea of the CIA launching a remote-control assassination on its own authority appalled him. The agency had made too many mistakes picking targets in the past.
On August 1, 2001, the Deputies Committee—the second-echelon national-security team—decided that it would be legal for the CIA to kill bin Laden with the Predator, an act of national self-defense. But the agency came back with more questions. Who would pay for it? Who would arm the aircraft? Who would be the air traffic controller? Who would play the roles of pilot and missile man? The hand-wringing drove counterterrorism czar Clarke crazy. “Either al Qaeda is a threat worth acting against or it is not,” he fumed. “CIA leadership has to decide which it is and cease these bi-polar mood swings.”
The agency never had answered a question put to it by President Bush: could an attack come in the United States? Now was the time: on August 6, the president’s daily brief began with the headline “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” The warning beneath the headline was a very weak piece of reporting. The freshest intelligence in it dated from 1999. It was a work of history, not a news bulletin. The president continued his vacation, chopping brush in Crawford, unwinding for five weeks.
The long White House holiday ended on Tuesday, September 4, when Bush’s first-string national security team, the Principals Committee, sat down together for the first meeting it ever held on the threat of bin Laden and al Qaeda. Clarke sent an agonized note that morning to Condoleezza Rice, begging the national security adviser to envision hundreds of Americans lying dead from the next attack. He said the agency had become “a hollow shell of words without deeds,” relying on foreign governments to stop bin Laden, leaving the United States “waiting for the big attack.” He implored her to move the CIA to action that day.
“WE’RE AT WAR”
Intelligence fails because it is human, no stronger than the power of one mind to understand another. Garrett Jones, the CIA station chief during the disastrous American expedition in Somalia, put it plainly: “There are going to be screw-ups, mistakes, confusion, and missteps,” he said. “One hopes they won’t be fatal.”
September 11 was the catastrophic failure Tenet had predicted three years before. It was a systemic failure of American government—the White House, the National Security Council, the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the congressional intelligence committees. It was a failure of policy and diplomacy. It was a failure of the reporters who covered the government to understand and convey its disarray to their readers. But above all it was a failure to know the enemy. It was the Pearl Harbor that the CIA had been created to prevent.
Tenet and his counterterror chief, Cofer Black, were at Camp David on Saturday, September 15, laying out a plan to send CIA officers into Afghanistan to work with local warlords against al Qaeda. The director returned to headquarters late Sunday and issued a proclamation to his troops: “We’re at war.”
The agency, as Cheney said that morning, went over to “the dark side.” On Monday, September 17, President Bush issued a fourteen-page top secret directive to Tenet and the CIA, ordering the agency to hunt, capture, imprison, and interrogate suspects around the world. It set no limits on what the agency could do. It was the foundation for a system of secret prisons where CIA officers and contractors used techniques that included torture. One CIA contractor was convicted of beating an Afghan prisoner to death. This was not the role of a civilian intelligence service in a democratic society. But it is clearly what the White House wanted the CIA to do.
The CIA had run secret interrogation centers before—beginning in 1950, in Germany, Japan, and Panama. It had participated in the torture of captured enemy combatants before—beginning in 1967, under the Phoenix program in Vietnam. It had kidnapped suspected terrorists and assassins before—most famously in 1997, in the case of Mir Amal Kansi, the killer of two CIA officers. But Bush gave the agency a new and extraordinary authority: to turn kidnapped suspects over to foreign security services for interrogation and torture, and to rely on the confessions they extracted. As I wrote in The New York Times on October 7, 2001: “American intelligence may have to rely on its liaisons with the world’s toughest foreign services, men who can look and think and act like terrorists. If someone is going to interrogate a man in a basement in Cairo or Quetta, it will be an Egyptian or a Pakistani officer. American intelligence will take the information without asking a lot of lawyerly questions.”
Under Bush’s order, the CIA began to function as a global military police, throwing hundreds of suspects into secret jails in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, and inside the American military prison in Guantánamo, Cuba. It handed hundreds more prisoners off to the intelligence services in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and Syria for interrogations. The gloves were off. “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” Bush told the nation in an address to a joint session of Congress on September 20. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”
; “I COULD NOT NOT DO THIS”
There was a war at home as well, and the CIA was part of it. After 9/11, James Monnier Simon, Jr., the assistant director of central intelligence, was placed in charge of homeland security for the intelligence community. He went to a meeting at the White House with Attorney General John Ashcroft. The subject was the creation of national identity cards for Americans. “What would it have? Well, a thumbprint,” Simon said. “Blood type would be useful, as would a retinal scan. We would want your picture taken a special way so that we could pick your face out of a crowd even if you were wearing a disguise. We would want your voice print, because the technology is coming up that will pick your voice out of every other voice in all the cell phones on earth, and your voice is unique. In fact, we would like to have a bit of your DNA in there, so if something ever happens to you we can identify the body. By the way, we would want the chip to tell us where this card is, so that if we needed to find you we could. Then it dawned on us that if we did that, you could set the card down. So we would put the chip in your bloodstream.”
Where would this drive for security end? Simon wondered. The names of Stalin’s and Hitler’s intelligence services sprang to his mind. “It could in fact end up being the KGB, NKVD, Gestapo,” he said. “We, the people, need to watch and be involved.” Precisely how the American people were supposed to watch was a problematic question. What a representative of the director of central intelligence was doing at the White House discussing the implantation of microchips in American citizens was another. The national identity card never materialized. But Congress did give the CIA new legal powers to spy on people in the United States. The agency was now permitted to read secret grand jury testimony, without a judge’s prior approval, and obtain private records of institutions and corporations. The agency used the authority to request and receive banking and credit data on American citizens and companies from financial corporations. The CIA had never had the formal power to spy inside the borders of the United States before. It did now.
Tenet talked to General Michael Hayden, the director of the National Security Agency, shortly after the attacks. “Is there anything more you can do?” he asked. “Not within my current authorities,” Hayden answered. Tenet then “invited me to come down and talk to the administration about what more could be done.” Hayden came up with a plan to eavesdrop on the communications of suspected terrorists within the United States without judicial warrants. It was arguably illegal but arguably justified on a theory of “hot pursuit”—chasing suspects beyond the borders of the map and outside the limits of the law. President Bush ordered him to execute the plan on October 4, 2001. It had to be done, Hayden said: “I could not not do this.” The NSA once again began to spy within the United States.
Cofer Black ordered his counterterror corps to bring him bin Laden’s head in a box. The Counterterrorist Center, born fifteen years before as a small freestanding unit of the clandestine service, still working in the basement at headquarters, was now the heart of the CIA. Retired officers returned to duty and new recruits joined the agency’s tiny cadre of paramilitary commandos. They flew into Afghanistan to make war. The agency’s men handed out millions of dollars to marshal the loyalties of Afghan tribal leaders. They served nobly for a few months as advance troops for the American occupation of Afghanistan.
By the third week of November 2001, the American military knocked out the political leadership of the Taliban, leaving behind the rank and file, but paving the way for a new government in Kabul. It left tens of thousands of Taliban loyalists unscathed. They trimmed their beards and melted into the villages; they would return when the Americans began to tire of their war in Afghanistan. They would live to fight again.
It took eleven weeks to organize the hunt for Osama bin Laden. When that hunt began in earnest, I was in eastern Afghanistan, in and around Jalalabad, where I had traveled on five trips over the years. An old acquaintance named Haji Abdul Qadir had just reclaimed his post as the provincial governor, two days after the fall of the Taliban. Haji Qadir was an exemplar of Afghan democracy. A well-educated and highly cultured Pathan tribal leader in his early sixties, a wealthy dealer in opium and weapons and other basic staples of the Afghan economy, he had been a CIA-supported commander in the fight against the Soviet occupation, the governor of his province from 1992 to 1996, and a close associate of the Taliban in their time. He personally welcomed Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan and helped him establish a compound outside Jalalabad. Now he welcomed the American occupation. Haji Qadir was a good host. We walked in the gardens of the governor’s palace, through swayback palms and feathery tamarisks. He was expecting a visit from his American friends any day now, and he was looking forward to the renewal of old ties and the ritual exchange of cash for information.
Haji Qadir had gathered the village elders of his province at the governor’s palace. On November 24, they reported that bin Laden and the Arab fighters of al Qaeda were holed up in an isolated mountain hideout thirty-five miles south-by-southwest of the city, near the village of Tora Bora.
On November 28, at about five in the morning, as the first call to prayer sounded, a small plane landed at the rocket-pocked runway of the Jalalabad airport with a delegation of CIA and Special Forces officers aboard. They were carrying bales of $100 bills. They met with Haji Zaman, the newly appointed Jalalabad commander of the self-proclaimed government. He told the Americans he was “90 percent sure” that bin Laden was in Tora Bora. The dusty road south from Jalalabad to Tora Bora ended in a rough mountain trail impassable to all but men and mules. The trailhead connected with a network of smugglers’ routes leading to mountain passes into Pakistan. Those routes had been a supply line for the Afghan rebels, and Tora Bora had been a place of great renown in the fight against the Soviets. A cave complex dug deep into the mountainside had been built, with the CIA’s assistance, to meet NATO military standards. An American commander with orders to destroy Tora Bora would have been well advised to use a tactical nuclear weapon. A CIA officer with orders to capture bin Laden would have needed to requisition the Tenth Mountain Division.
On December 5, as American B-52 bombers pounded away at that stony redoubt, I watched the attack from a few miles’ distance. I wanted to see bin Laden’s head on a pike myself. He was within the agency’s reach, but beyond its grasp. He could only be taken by siege, and the CIA could not mount one. Those who went after al Qaeda in Afghanistan were the best the agency had, but they were too few. They had come armed with lots of cash, but too little intelligence. The futility of hunting bin Laden with dumb bombs was soon made manifest. Moving from camp to camp in the Afghan borderlands, bin Laden was protected by a phalanx of hundreds of battle-hardened Afghan fighters and thousands of Pathan tribesmen who would sooner die than betray him. He had the CIA outnumbered and outmaneuvered in Afghanistan, and he escaped.
Tenet was red-eyed, furious, gnawing on cigar stubs, near the limits of his endurance. His counterterror troops were pushed beyond their capacity. Alongside American special-operations soldiers, they were hunting, capturing, and killing bin Laden’s lieutenants and foot soldiers in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Indonesia. But they started hitting the wrong targets again. Armed Predator attacks killed at least twenty-four innocent Afghans in January and February 2002; the CIA handed out $1,000 in reparations to each of their families. Fanning out across Europe, Africa, and Asia, working with every friendly foreign intelligence service on earth, CIA officers snatched and grabbed more than three thousand people in more than one hundred countries in the year after 9/11, Tenet said. “Not everyone arrested was a terrorist,” he cautioned. “Some have been released. But this worldwide rousting of al Qaeda definitely disrupted its operations.” That was inarguable. But the fact remained that as few as fourteen men among the three thousand seized were high-ranking authority figures within al Qaeda and its affiliates. Along with them, the agency jailed hundreds of nobodies. They became ghost prisoners in the war on terror.
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br /> The focus and intensity of the mission to kill or capture bin Laden began to ebb in March 2002, after the failed assault on Tora Bora. The CIA had been commanded by the White House to turn its attention to Iraq. The agency responded with a fiasco far more fatal to its fortunes than the 9/11 attacks.
49. “A GRAVE
MISTAKE”
“There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Vice President Dick Cheney said on August 26, 2002. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld said the same: “We know they have weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “There isn’t any debate about it.”
Tenet provided his own grim warnings in a secret hearing before the Senate intelligence committee on September 17: “Iraq provided al Qaeda with various kinds of training—combat, bomb-making, and chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear.” He based that statement on the confessions of a single source—Ibn al-Shakh al-Libi, a fringe player who had been beaten, stuffed in a two-foot-square box for seventeen hours, and threatened with prolonged torture. The prisoner had recanted after the threat of torture receded. Tenet did not correct the record.
On October 7, on the eve of congressional debate over whether to go to war with Iraq, President Bush said that Iraq “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons.” He went on to warn that “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorist.” This created a dilemma for Tenet. Days before, his deputy, John McLaughlin, had contradicted the president in testimony to the Senate intelligence committee. On orders from the White House, Tenet issued a statement saying, “There is no inconsistency between our view of Saddam’s growing threat and the view as expressed by the President in his speech.”