by Steve Coll
“The decision is that we will fight,” Saleh said. “We will not surrender. We will fight to our last man on the ground. This resistance was not about Massoud. It was about something much, much bigger. We will hold.”
Saleh was putting together a list of the weapons and logistical supplies they needed most urgently. “What can you do for us?”
Blee said he understood the question. It was Monday, September 10, the beginning of a new working week in Washington. He would need a day or two. “Let me come back to you on this,” he said.14
TWO
Judgment Day
On September 11, ALEC Station held down a small area of the D.C.I. Counterterrorist Center, a windowless expanse of cubicles and computers on the ground floor of the New Headquarters Building. It was the worst office space at the C.I.A., in the opinion of some who worked there. It felt like a bunker. During the last days of the Cold War, the Soviet–East Europe Division had occupied the floor; its impermeability would thwart the K.G.B.’s eavesdroppers, the thinking went. The C.I.A.’s Russia hands eventually found better quarters and C.T.C. moved in. The center was a bureaucratic stepchild. It had been founded in 1986 as an experiment, a place where analysts—typically, writers and researchers with graduate degrees but no operating experience on the street—might work alongside or even supervise case officers, also known as operations officers, the career spies who recruited agents and stole secrets. The C.I.A.’s case officer cadre enjoyed the greatest prestige and power at the agency. It was not natural for them to collaborate with analysts. It was akin to creating teams of detectives and college professors to solve crimes. Senior C.I.A. leaders advised newly minted case officers to avoid C.T.C. because being assigned there might inhibit promotions and overseas assignments. Yet during the late 1990s, as terrorism evolved amid post–Cold War disorder, the Counterterrorist Center’s budget more than doubled, including one-time supplemental appropriations, while the rest of the C.I.A. dealt with flat or declining budgets.
By September 2001 there were about 350 people working at C.T.C. About three or four dozen worked in overseas stations, but most of the rest were jammed into the New Headquarters bunker. Besides ALEC Station, the center housed branches and sections assigned to Sunni extremist groups other than Al Qaeda, such as Hamas, as well as ideologically diverse groups such as Hezbollah (a Shiite Islamic faction based in Lebanon), Colombian guerrillas (mainly Marxist and secular, yet operating within a Catholic country), the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka (Hindu and ethnically nationalist, yet fighting for autonomy in a Buddhist-majority country), the Japanese Red Army (a fragment of the Cold War), and more than six dozen other targets. The office featured low-grade industrial carpeting and cookie-cutter government cubicles. It was poorly lit and smelled vaguely sour. Wanted posters of grim-looking terrorist fugitives, including Osama Bin Laden, decorated the walls. In an attempt at relief, someone had mounted fake windows looking out on beaches and palm trees.1
A job at C.T.C. came with a certain dark glamour and a lifesaving mission, but the federal government’s general schedule salaries were no better than those at the Department of Agriculture. The C.I.A.’s bureaucracy was thick and intrusive. The agency’s counterintelligence division, charged with detecting traitors and other abusers of security clearances, surveyed the workforce and administered polygraphs that could be highly unpleasant, no matter how diligent and loyal the person examined might be. Mid-level C.I.A. managers could be lazy or cantankerous or stupid or all three. Federal employment rules made it difficult to do anything about poor performers, short of proof of theft or felony violence. Overall, C.T.C.’s employees liked their jobs better than typical C.I.A. employees did in the summer of 2001, according to an internal survey. They knew their mission mattered. Yet ALEC Station’s analysts suffered from information overload. They handled more than two hundred incoming cables a day from other parts of C.I.A., plus another two hundred or more from the Pentagon, the State Department, the National Security Agency, and elsewhere. Dozens of these were “action cables” requiring a prompt reply or follow-up. The analysts often felt stressed. About a third of C.I.A. employees overall felt they handled too much work, but at ALEC Station, almost six in ten felt that way.2
The pressure and the sense of foreboding that informed office life at ALEC was not felt widely across the government or in Congress. The analysts and operators were strikingly small in number, considering that Al Qaeda had carried out several successful attacks against the United States claiming hundreds of lives. ALEC and its counterparts, equally modest in number, at the National Security Council, the F.B.I., and the National Security Agency were largely on their own, to grind out whatever detection, arrests, and disruptions they could deliver. The C.I.A.’s counterterrorism operations in the summer of 2001 often resembled the surveillance operations and criminal investigations carried out domestically by the F.B.I., with the difference that C.T.C. typically worked overseas, clandestinely, often without regard to the laws of other countries. A common C.T.C. operation involved intensified intelligence collection on a terrorist suspect in an impoverished, unfriendly city like Khartoum or Karachi. That meant operators built a file on a suspect by observing his movements and taking clandestine photographs of his visitors. They might also work with the National Security Agency to tap his phones or hack into his bank accounts or bribe a clerk for the records. A special roster of C.I.A. independent contractors—ex-soldiers, ex-cops, and assorted other adrenaline junkies—carried out the riskiest surveillance and break-in work overseas because full-time case officers, if caught in the act, likely would have their mug shots publicized by the host government, rendering their expensive training and years-in-the-making cover stories useless. In comparison to career case officers, the contractors were “sort of cannon fodder,” as one of them put it.
Some of them specialized in “area familiarization,” as it was called, meaning long stakeouts and detailed mapping of a suspect’s neighborhood, routes, and routines. These C.I.A. operatives also observed local police and intelligence services so as to plan how to get away if caught. If burglary or planting a listening device was called for, that required a specialized C.I.A. team that resided offshore. These contractors were trained to break into a home or office or embassy, plant a device or steal documents, and get out of the country as fast as possible.
The C.T.C. analysts in the basement of New Headquarters supported these surveillance and profile-building operations by assessing and logging the photos, wiretaps, and reporting cables that poured in. If C.T.C. wanted to take a suspect off the streets, it typically relied on friendly governments to make arrests, but the center also had some capacity to detain and transport individuals on its own in a procedure called “rendition.” The C.T.C.’s Renditions Branch would sometimes transfer a terrorism suspect from one country to another for interrogation, including to countries like Egypt, whose military dictatorship had a stark record of torturing detainees.3
The director of C.T.C. that summer was Cofer Black, a former Khartoum station chief who had worked the Al Qaeda account on and off since the mid-1990s. He was six foot three, perhaps twenty pounds overweight, with thinning hair and a pasty skin tone befitting a man whose office along one of the basement’s walls now ensured that he rarely saw the light of day.
His father had been an international airline pilot. Black had spent his childhood in Germany and England, before attending boarding school. He had joined the C.I.A. after studying international relations at the University of Southern California. He had spent much of his career as an operations officer in the Africa Division, managing American allies, supplying arms, and working on Somalia’s conflicts. The C.I.A.’s Africa Division also recruited Soviet, Chinese, Cuban, North Korean, and Iranian diplomats, spies, or defense attachés who were posted to African embassies, where the targeted individuals were far from headquarters and susceptible to compromise. During the Cold War, the division had a reputation among young operations officers
as an exciting, unrestrained place of action, adventure, and professional opportunity, but also as a place untethered from headquarters and lacking the prestige and centrality of Moscow, Berlin, or Beijing.
After many years in Africa, Black’s manner had become theatrical and self-dramatizing. He was the sort of C.I.A. officer one would expect to encounter in an Oliver Stone film. His years abroad had left him with a hard-to-place accent—a touch of South Africa seemed evident. He had proven to be an effective office politician as he rose within C.I.A. He had a subtler intelligence than his melodramatic speech might suggest, and because he could be funny and generous, he had won the loyalty of senior colleagues. George Tenet had sent him to run C.T.C. in 1999, at a time when the Seventh Floor, as the C.I.A.’s leadership was known, was becoming highly alarmed about Al Qaeda.
Black was not a Harvard Business School–inspired manager. Even more than most operations officers, who as a class prided themselves on their ability to freelance and improvise, Black considered it his mission to bend or ignore the C.I.A.’s bureaucracy, to concentrate on action and operations. Yet he also managed to keep many of his superiors on his side.
As Khartoum station chief, Black had overseen intelligence collection operations against Osama Bin Laden. He tried to infuse C.T.C. with the spirit of streetwise operational gusto that Africa Division considered its trademark. He brought in Hank Crumpton, who had spent more than a decade as an operations officer in Africa, as his principal deputy. At ALEC Station, he inherited Rich Blee, another familiar Africa hand. They recruited others from their old division as well.4
—
At 8:00 a.m. on September 11, 2001, Cofer Black convened a regular briefing meeting in his office. Each week, C.T.C. presented three separate update briefings on Al Qaeda to C.I.A. director George Tenet; James Pavitt, the head of the clandestine service; and A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, the agency’s executive director. Black asked for a read-in on each briefing before it was delivered. That morning they were scheduled to provide their weekly update to Krongard.
Rich Blee walked into Black’s office. He was preoccupied by the aftermath of Ahmad Shah Massoud’s assassination. Despite Amrullah Saleh’s brave talk, Blee figured that without Massoud’s leadership, the Panjshiri resistance to the Taliban would soon collapse. It seemed doubtful that the Bush administration would do anything to prevent that. Yet Blee owed Saleh an answer.
Also at the meeting was the head of analysis at C.T.C., Ben Bonk. He was a Detroit native who evangelized about its Corvettes and sports teams, and who had become a specialist in South Asia and Central Asia, at one point serving as national intelligence officer for the region.
Just after 8:46 a.m., Black’s secretary came in to say that a private plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
Black was a licensed pilot like his father. Glancing at the news coverage on a television mounted in the corner of his office, he could see a hole in the World Trade Center’s North Tower. The weather looked clear. He figured the accident involved a light aircraft and that the pilot might have committed suicide. It was an oddity, not necessarily an act of terrorism.
A little before 9:00 a.m., several visitors arrived outside Black’s office. They had no appointment but they wanted to make a short courtesy call. The group included U.S. Navy commander Kirk Lippold, who had been at the helm of the USS Cole the previous October when Al Qaeda suicide bombers attacked the ship. He had driven over to the C.I.A. that morning to receive an update from agency analysts about Al Qaeda.
Just as he prepared to greet Lippold, a phone on Black’s desk rang. His desk had several secure telephone lines and he wasn’t sure how all of them worked. Yet he knew that the one ringing was a nonsecure phone for sources or contacts that he didn’t want to route through the C.I.A. switchboard. Most of the time when that line rang, the callers were selling credit cards or oil changes.
He picked it up. It was an old friend, an officer from the C.I.A.’s paramilitary division. They had worked together during the Angolan war. His friend had since risen to a senior position at the agency. He happened that morning to be visiting the C.I.A.’s station in New York, which was located in an office building next to the World Trade Center.
“Hey chief, we’ve got a problem,” the officer said. “I watched this 737-like civilian airliner. I was watching the control surfaces of the aircraft. The pilot flew it into the World Trade Center.”
He spoke in the clipped vernacular of battlefield operations. “We’ve been struck. I’m evacuating my position.”5
—
Rich Blee walked across the hall to ALEC Station’s cluster of cubicles. “That’s Bin Laden or Al Qaeda,” he said, pointing to a nearby television hanging from the ceiling.
“You can’t say that,” one of his colleagues objected. “It could be an accident. Every time something happens, you can’t say that it’s Al Qaeda.”
They stood around arguing. There was a split verdict within ALEC Station, but most of the analysts credited the possibility of an accident. ALEC analysts had written warning report after warning report, briefing slide after briefing slide, for the White House and the Bush cabinet. They had provided insights for the article in the President’s Daily Brief received by George W. Bush on August 6, 2001, headlined BIN LADIN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN US.
“It’s Bin Laden,” Blee insisted to his colleagues.
They were still arguing among themselves at 9:03 a.m. when United Airlines Flight 175 struck the World Trade Center’s South Tower.6
—
George Tenet raced up the George Washington Parkway to C.I.A. headquarters at about eighty miles an hour. His security detail had pulled him out of a breakfast at a downtown hotel after the first plane hit. Tenet called ahead and asked for the agency’s senior leaders to assemble in 7D64, the director’s conference room at Old Headquarters.
Cofer Black grabbed an experienced administrative colleague on the C.T.C. staff as he prepared to head upstairs. “Wherever I go today, you come right with me,” he told her. “No matter who’s there, you come in. I want you to write down every order people give me because I’m not going to remember them all.”
At 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon while flying about 530 miles per hour.
In Tenet’s conference room, there was “a lot of yelling and screaming,” as Charles Allen, a sixty-five-year-old agency veteran in charge of intelligence collection, put it.
“We have to get out of here!” one senior officer exclaimed. “They’re heading for us!”7
At 9:40 a.m., Black and deputy C.I.A. director John McLaughlin spoke by secure video link with Richard Clarke, the lead counterterrorism expert at the White House. Clarke said the Federal Aviation Administration was uncertain how many other planes might have been hijacked and still in the air. Several planes were not responding to air controllers or were squawking signals that might indicate a hijack. There were rumors of a car bombing at the State Department.8
C.T.C. officers who accompanied Black upstairs mentioned to the group in 7D64 that Ramzi Yousef, the ringleader of the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, had once discussed flying a Cessna packed with explosives into C.I.A. headquarters. And here they all were packed in together on the building’s highest floor.
“Let’s get out of here,” the head of Tenet’s personal security detail recommended. “Let’s evacuate.”
Should we leave? Tenet asked his senior team.
“We should stay here and work on,” Charles Allen argued. “Where are we going to go?”9
Tenet had risen in Washington as a staff member on Capitol Hill known for his charisma and his succinct, colorful briefings. He explained later that he “didn’t want the world to think we were abandoning ship,” yet he “didn’t want to risk the lives of our own people unnecessarily,” and “we needed to have our leadership intact and able to make decisions.”10
> He ordered the senior team downstairs. Around 10:00 a.m., he directed C.I.A. personnel to evacuate the grounds. Within minutes every computer at the agency flashed EVACUATE in red. Intelligence officers trudged down the stairwells. The evacuation did not sit well with all of them; it felt like running away. When they got outside, they saw a huge traffic jam as several thousand employees tried to drive out of the campus simultaneously.11
During the Cold War, the C.I.A. had maintained a secret, bunkered alternate campus to which its leaders could retreat in the event of nuclear war. The alternate campus had been eliminated from the federal budget after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The C.I.A. and its budgeters in Congress had failed to prepare for an emergency on this scale. Tenet’s office had the agency’s printing plant on the Langley campus as a nearby emergency site, if needed. Charles Allen’s office had been working to build a new, survivable emergency site, away from the campus, for the C.I.A. and other critical agencies of government, but this was still a work in progress.12
Tenet now led a march of senior officers toward the C.I.A. printing plant, an outbuilding across the campus. When they reached there, a technician set up a secure terminal equipment, or S.T.E., line to the White House. Tenet raised Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser.
President Bush was by now in the air aboard Air Force One, en route to a Louisiana air base. Vice President Dick Cheney had been hustled into a White House bunker. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was inside the smoldering Pentagon. Secretary of State Colin Powell was traveling in Latin America. The country’s leaders communicated only sporadically, and the attack still seemed to be in progress.