by Fred Burton
As the meetings unfolded, the sheikh’s followers used all of this preoperational surveillance to build brilliantly simple attack plans. For the Waldorf, they decided the most elegant way to defeat our security was also the most direct. Using a stolen van repainted to look like it belonged to Federal Express, they would drive the wrong way down Park Avenue and collide with Hosni Mubarak’s motorcade just as it pulled up to the hotel’s underground entry point for the rich and famous. We called that vulnerable choke point “the well.” A commando team armed with grenades and machine guns would spill out of the van, disable our counterassault vehicles, then take down Mubarak’s limo.
Another plan they developed included inserting a team into the UN Plaza Hotel’s stairwells, where they would shoot their way to the target’s quarters. They also considered planting operatives among the hotel staff. A few waiters armed with automatic pistols could support the hit team very effectively. That was an old Black September trick.
They’ve studied their history.
More plans and more target profiles come to light on every page of the transcripts. One involved blowing up Marine One while the president’s helicopter landed in downtown Manhattan. I’m left utterly speechless. Why didn’t the FBI take this cell down months ago?
I can get no answers for that question. My only guess is that they did not take the colonel’s information seriously. It was a mistake that cost our country dearly.
The way the sheikh’s underlings constructed their target profiles was absolutely brilliant. They are flexible enough to be applied elsewhere. If passed around the Dark World, they could almost function as terror-franchise business plans for other groups.
Why did they elect to launch the WTC bombing first? Only the sheikh and Ramzi Yousef can answer that question. Additional evidence uncovered during raids around New York and New Jersey show that they placed the Ryder truck under the Twin Towers in hopes of knocking one of them down into the other. They weren’t looking to maximize casualties on the street, they were looking to totally destroy two icons of American economic might.
Stick and I meet. He tells me that the blast seat was almost ninety feet wide. The bomb, composed of only about a thousand pounds of explosives, tore holes through four stories’ worth of concrete. Had it been placed closer to one of the key support pillars inside the garage, Yousef ’s plan might just have succeeded. Hezbollah would have been happy with hundreds of casualties on the street. This group wanted to kill fifty thousand and destroy an international symbol of American strength. They had the knowledge, the operational skill, and the intelligence to execute any of their planned operations.
Although Ramzi Yousef and the bomb maker, Abdul Rahman Yasin, escaped, the authorities take down almost everyone else in the cell, including the blind sheikh. Incoming intelligence reveals Yasin, who is Iraqi, managed to return to Baghdad. Yousef fled to Pakistan, then disappeared off the grid.
Yousef, the sheikh’s key operations man, is out there somewhere on the loose. He knows our tactics. He knows our weaknesses. He knows how to defeat our protective security details. He’s also the nephew of bin Laden’s right-hand man, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. This new group in Afghanistan has made it to the major leagues. If we don’t make a generational leap forward in how we do business, they are going to hammer us. The smoking hole in the WTC’s parking garage serves as a warning for all my countrymen. But the transcripts I read at One Police Plaza are the true lesson to emerge from February 26. It is time to push the panic button.
The day I leave for home, I sit in the terminal at JFK and open up my moleskin journal. I add Yousef and Yasin to my list. We must find them at all costs before they can unleash another attack.
On the flight back to Washington, I can’t help but obsess over the plans to hit our motorcades. They followed us without our knowing. They watched us from every angle, both fixed and while we were under way. They never broke cover for status or cover for action. They were ghosts who swirled around us, studying our every move as we unsuspectingly went about our duties.
I run through their scenarios over and over in my head. The FedEx van swings onto Park Avenue, racing for our motorcade. Nobody in the Crown Vic at the head of the column would have expected that. In fact, with the motorcade just pulling up to the Waldorf, we’d all be preoccupied with getting Mubarak out of his limo and into the lobby.
The van screeches to a halt. Bang! The back doors fly open and the commando team launches its assault. AKs blazing, they toss grenades at our unarmored vehicles. For us, it would have been like Custer’s last stand. Would we even have been able to draw our weapons in time? I shudder at that question. I don’t think we had the correct mind-set to handle such an attack. We’ve been too focused on stopping the lone nut from walking up to our high-value target and taking a shot, just like John Hinckley Jr. did to President Reagan a decade ago.
It would have worked. Oh, God, it would have worked.
thirty-one
WATCHING THE WATCHERS
Standing in Clark Dittmer’s office later that week, I detail everything that I found in the colonel’s transcripts. When I finish, I outline my new ideas. It will take a lot of manpower and training, but we’ve got to do something new. Fortunately, Mr. Dittmer is one of the most open-minded men I’ve met in this business.
“Okay, Fred,” he says. “You’re right. Give your ideas a shot and let’s see what happens.”
In the days and weeks to come, we develop a new countersurveillance program. When we’re running around in motorcades or doing protective-detail duty at events, the agents near our VIP have an immediate situational awareness of not more than fifteen to twenty feet. We operate in that bubble, studying the nearby threats to the exclusion of everything else.
Not anymore. We’ll still have the protective agents right there with the VIP, but my group is going to push the perimeter out. We’ll go undercover, mix into the crowds, move on the peripheries of the motorcades, and look for anyone or anything out of the ordinary. We’ll search out the surveillance operatives, calculating where they’d best be situated, then find perches out of normal eyelines to watch those areas. If we’re moving our VIP from point A to point B, we’ll send an advance surveillance team to Point B to study the situation.
We’ll do it from deep cover. We’ll blend in and move among the crowds as one of them. We’ll outghost the ghosts who have been following us.
That’s a start, but it won’t be enough. We’re going to videotape every crowd and every speaking engagement involving the VIPs we protect. After each event, we will cull through the tapes, looking for familiar faces, searching for anyone who makes a habit of going to these functions. We’ll look for anything out of the ordinary as well. If we see a person acting erratically, we’ll get his physical description out to our surveillance teams. If he shows up at another event, we won’t just keep an eye on him, we’ll talk to him. Agents will mingle through the crowd, make their way to our oddball, and chat him up to determine if he’s a legitimate threat. Just a normal conversation, mind you, not an interrogation. This way, we may be able to intercept the Hinckleys and Gallos of the world long before they come into that fifteen-foot bubble around the VIP.
We’re going to need to practice our field craft until we are absolutely invisible. No mistakes. No breaking our cover for status or cover for action. We will learn how to follow suspects in every venue imaginable, from large crowds to busy streets to subway systems. We’ll learn the best composition of each countersurveillance team; we’ll develop the optimal formations that give us all-around visibility. Situational awareness is what we need. It will be our new watchword.
But it isn’t enough. Hand in hand with our countersurveillance program, we ramp up another one that I call protective intelligence. When we have a VIP under our care, we’re going to do some serious homework. We’ll examine every prior threat to that person and draw up a list of organizations or individuals who pose a risk to our VIP. Then we’ll study their MOs and look for
the ways that these various groups operate so we can develop tactics to counter them. If a terror group likes to kill high-value targets with car bombs, we’ll make sure to clear the streets in front of the VIP’s hotel and destination points. If a lone nut has sent threatening letters to our VIP, we’ll track him down and send a team to sit on him while the VIP’s in country. We won’t tip our hand. We’ll just watch. If the nut makes a move for our protectee, we’ll bring him down.
The CT gang loves the new ideas. They’re an aggressive, creative bunch, and they throw themselves into the new training program we develop. Some of them get so good that during our surveillance exercises around D.C., they learn to follow suspects, changing clothes along the way to further mask their presence. One minute, Mr. Jogging Suit is two blocks behind a suspect. The next, he sheds his pants and jacket on the fly. Now he’s just another guy in a nondescript T-shirt and a pair of shorts. The shoes are the only giveaway, and as we work on our skill sets, we even learn to change shoes on the fly.
To communicate, we use Walkman-style headphones plugged into our radios. Now, instead of having to break cover to talk on a Motorola, or expose our earpieces, we simply look like we’re enjoying some good tunes. A hand in the pocket, finger on a button, and we’re ready to talk to one another. That innovation alone makes us significantly more effective on the street. We can choreograph our dance without anyone being the wiser.
We wear shoulder and ankle holsters hidden under layers of clothing. Beneath our shirts, our badges hang like St. Christopher medals.
We’ll use every asset and department at our disposal. Around D.C., Eagle One will fly sweeps for us along motorcade routes, giving us another perspective in our quest to root out threats. Local police will be used to seal off areas, clear destinations, and design our motorcade routes through their city. They will know the best way to get around their towns, and we’ll rely on that skill set.
But that still isn’t enough. What if this new group in Afghanistan, which apparently calls itself “the Base”—or al-Qaeda in Arabic—decides to target another embassy or fixed site of some sort? The sheikh’s cell in New York City had a long list of monuments, tunnels, and bridges they wanted to hit, so there’s no doubt in our minds that such attacks are coming again. How do we get out in front of that?
The colonel’s transcripts gave me detailed insight into al-Qaeda’s targeting cycle. It starts with preoperational surveillance. They do their homework. They study their targets. They watch our comings and goings to learn the weaknesses of the security setup they’ll be penetrating. If we can uncover these preliminary moves, we can defeat them and lives will be saved. We must learn to watch for the watchers. We push out the word to our agents in the field. Extend your situational awareness, look for the unusual. Find the guy who sits too long on the park bench or the garbage-man who never seems to empty any cans. Search for the ghosts, and when they’re identified, follow them. See where they go, discover what they’re doing. Then develop countermeasures to defeat their plans, and call in the cavalry to bring down that cell.
On that front, we score an early success. One of our best agents, a believer in our new way of doing business, implements our ideas in Beirut. It does not take long for his guys to discover a Hezbollah observation point right by the U.S. Embassy’s front gate. The terrorists are hunkered down in a nearby apartment that commands a perfect view of all the comings and goings at the gate. They’re obviously studying targets, looking for gaps to exploit. We send in the cavalry to catch this surveillance team, but we’re just a hair too late. They vanish into the city. However, we discover they’d leased the apartment after it became vacant. Two can play at that game. We put the manager on our payroll—now we have a watcher in place—and lease all the empty apartments that have views of the embassy gates.
Our situational awareness just helped plug a security gap.
Here in the States, we score other successes. During one weekend in New England, we put a surveillance team out around the security perimeter guarding Princess Diana. One of our guys literally stumbles across a paparazzo who had crawled through a dense forest for over a mile in hopes of getting in a position to use her telephoto lens. A small success, to be sure, but one that I’m sure the royal family appreciated.
The first big test comes in California. We head out to the Golden State to protect Mikhail Gorbachev as he gives a series of speeches around the Bay Area. During one event, our countersurveillance team notices a bearded man in a green jacket acting just a little out of the norm. We study him and peg him as a potential lone nut. During Gorbachev’s next speech in San Francisco, our countersurveillance team spots him at the edge of the crowd. We send an agent to talk to him. Disguised as any other face in the crowd, our spook strikes up a conversation with Green Jacket. It doesn’t take long for him to conclude Green Jacket’s not playing with a full deck. Quietly, we take him down, and discover he’s carrying a twelve-inch butcher knife under his coat. He’d been planning to hack to death one of the great world leaders of our era.
When the royal family returns for a visit, we run a full check of all past and current threats against Prince Charles and Princess Diana. The check turns up another kook from Texas, who had actually penetrated security at Buckingham Palace in his quest to get at the royals. We send a team to watch our lone nut in Texas until our visitors depart. The guy never moved, but we’d pushed our situational awareness out thousands of miles. Had he made any attempt to get close to our VIPs, we would have known about it and brought him down long before he got anywhere near them.
Our ideas take off. We share them with other agencies, including the FBI, CIA, and Secret Service. We sell countersurveillance as an outer security ring designed to filter out the threats before they get to the guys with the Uzis standing next to their VIPs. We get almost complete buyin. The new countersurveillance tactics are used to protect peace conferences and heads of state, dignitaries and fixed sites that have registered threats against them.
But our agents in the field can’t do everything alone. We need to have reinforcements. In the months after implementing these changes, we build a fire brigade team stationed out of our Virginia Avenue office. Should an embassy receive a credible threat, our team flies out to it on a moment’s notice. They set up shop and start looking for the watchers. At the same time, we change our tactics and timetables to disrupt any planning the local terrorist cells are conducting. Such moves set our foes back to square one in their targeting cycle, and if we find their preoperational surveillance teams, we shove them right out of the game.
We’re finally getting ahead of our enemies. Instead of reacting to smoking craters and blown-up airliners, we’re scouring the Dark World, eyes open, ready to pounce.
But we’re still not to the point we need to be. All these changes make a clear difference in the first year we use them, but gaps remain. Airline security is still a significant problem. In the wake of Pan Am 103, a commission recommended a long list of changes in the way the air carriers protect their passengers. Full searches of carry-on items and screening all checked luggage with X-rays and bomb-sniffing dogs are great ideas, but they are not implemented. The air carriers claim they can’t afford it. Our government does not force them. There’s little we can do about it; it has become so political and so far above our pay grade that we can only pray another hijacking or Lockerbie does not take place.
I know better. The likes of Mugniyah and Hasan Izz-Al-Din, Ramzi Yousef and Osama bin Laden are out there. And their minions are searching for ways to strike at us.
We pick up the pace, and hone our skills even further. We change our tactics frequently and use increasingly clever covers for our countersurveillance teams. One memorable week, I speed around D.C. as part of the security detail for a delegation of Indian diplomats. Fred Davis pilots Eagle One and covers my back from the air. For just a fleeting moment, I feel like we’re working as a team again, like we did when we drove the old rescue squad vehicles back when we were yo
ung and eager. So damn eager.
Not long after, we cover the old man, Yasir Arafat, the ultimate terrorist turned statesman. I view it as the supreme challenge. Everyone wants Arafat dead. He’s survived so many assassination attempts that he must have more lives than a cat. This is the most dangerous assignment I can give our agents, so I take it myself. The idea of protecting a man who killed countless civilians appeals to no one. He’s what I’ve spent my entire career fighting against. Now my country welcomes him to New York City as an envoy of his people. We must protect him.
As we race around Manhattan, I can’t help but think of one of the cold cases I’ve personally reopened. Back in 1973, when I was still in school in Bethesda, Israel’s air attaché assigned to their embassy in D.C. was assassinated in his front yard, mere blocks from my own home. I went to school with his oldest daughter, though I never met her. Yosef Alon died as the Bethesda–Chevy Chase Rescue Squad reached his house and worked frantically to save him.
This case has always been personal to me. The Alon family left our neighborhood the day after the assassination, never to return to the States. When I became deputy chief of the Counterterrorism Division, I made a point of reopening the case. What I found was a long list of errors and cover-ups, FBI mistakes and sinister silence from both the Mossad and the CIA. Using my contacts in the Dark World, I was able to discover who had orchestrated the hit.
The Red Prince. Ali Hassan Salameh was the assassination’s architect. The founding father of modern Arab terrorism and the mastermind of the 1972 Munich massacre, he’s the man others like Mugniyah, Hasan Izz-Al-Din, and Ramzi Yousef have emulated their entire careers. When I first started in the CT office, Steve Gleason told me that to understand Middle Eastern terror, I had to understand Black September, Salameh’s organization. I’d studied the Red Prince, not realizing that his long reach had once scarred my own neighborhood. Through it all, Yasir Arafat remained one of his closest friends. Salameh became his security chief and even came with Arafat to the UN General Assembly meeting in 1974. I’ve built a private Red Prince file. In it, I have a photo of his son sitting on Arafat’s lap.