by Steve Coll
“I’m not at liberty to say, but I’m the one making this call,” Hayden hinted. A couple of hours later, Kappes called back and said he was on board.27
Like many outsiders before him who had arrived in the director’s suite on the Seventh Floor, Hayden had to adjust to the C.I.A.’s insular, loose, self-protecting, and hubristic culture. He was dismayed and a little upset the first time he entered a conference room and none of the C.I.A. officers assembled stood up; his N.S.A. colleagues had stood up for him. Hayden thought to himself, “Well, this will be different.” At N.S.A., the image of Langley was “Old Yale and patch elbow sleeves and pipes,” as a colleague put it. By contrast, the N.S.A. “was University of Maryland computer geeks . . . the worst sort of professional dressing—people in sweat suits, or even in sweat suits with torn pants.”28
Soon after Hayden settled in on the Seventh Floor, senior C.I.A. officers complained to him about the Office of Inspector General, which was still led by John Helgerson, the career analyst who had written skeptically of the black sites and enhanced interrogation techniques in internal reports. The C.I.A. veterans told Hayden that Helgerson’s internal investigations were “killing morale” around the agency. Hayden asked Robert Deitz, his general counsel, to look into the complaints. It was an awkward assignment. Congress had set up Helgerson’s office as an internal watchdog at the C.I.A.; Hayden had no power to remove him. Deitz conducted interviews with senior intelligence officers and presented findings to Helgerson. Essentially, Deitz concluded, the conflict was between the analytical side of the C.I.A., which Helgerson represented, and the operational side, who took risks in the field and did not appreciate second-guessing. Ultimately, Deitz and Helgerson worked out a classified settlement agreement. It set up a new ombudsman for C.I.A. employees to complain to if they thought the inspector general was mistreating them and it required the I.G. to tape important interviews about alleged misconduct. This was not Hollywood’s C.I.A.; it reflected the prosaic reality of office life in the federal government.
Another challenge involved the agency’s hollowed-out workforce, “graybeards and all these goddamned kids,” as the Hayden colleague put it.29 At the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, still spread out in the bunker at New Headquarters, Hayden inherited Mike D’Andrea, the chain-smoking Muslim convert, as his director. D’Andrea had been promoted to run the center after Rodriguez removed Grenier early in 2006. The budget he oversaw ran into the billions of dollars annually; C.T.C. had become by far the largest organization at the agency. Its new overlord wore dark clothes, was physically unattractive, and treated colleagues harshly. He was regarded as a “brilliant operational thinker,” as a colleague put it, but “if he thought you were his inferior, he’d just crush you. He had no tolerance. If you’re really bright, he would nurture you, but he would crush you if you didn’t run at his speed.”30
D’Andrea huddled with a handful of fellow smokers outside New Headquarters, although he was constantly trying to quit, covering his arms with nicotine patches or chewing nicotine gum. Sometimes he smoked while wearing patches. He worked hard and was reliably at his desk at 8:00 p.m., flanked by equally devoted mentees. Colleagues compared him half facetiously to Darth Vader or, more ominously, as his power grew, to James Angleton, the long-serving, independently powerful counterintelligence chief at the C.I.A. during the Cold War, an intimidating power unto himself.
During his first months at Langley, Hayden internalized C.T.C.’s battle rhythms, the “responsibility to confront that external threat unceasingly, every minute of every hour,” as he put it. At C.T.C., he told the operators and analysts, “Today’s date is September 12, 2001.” But when he got into his chauffeured C.I.A. car and drove “down the G.W. Parkway” to Washington, Hayden reflected, “It begins to feel like September 10th.” The country was getting comfortable with the threat of terrorism, but anyone who read the threat reporting would worry that they were vulnerable to another big surprise.
It was a “true fact,” Hayden admitted, that the misbegotten war in Iraq had become “a cause célèbre for jihadist recruitment,” making America, Britain, and other European allies unsafe. Hayden went so far as to describe the evolved, Iraq-inflamed conflict with Al Qaeda as a greater danger to Americans than the Cold War, when the United States faced a hair-trigger threat of nuclear annihilation. His logic was stretched but he meant that as a practical matter, Americans and Europeans who lived or worked in major cities now faced a realistic prospect of sudden violence, whereas the Cold War’s nuclear threats had never materialized.
In public, Hayden adamantly defended the C.I.A.’s enhanced interrogation techniques, targeted killings, and secret renditions of terrorism suspects. Privately, after the journalist Dana Priest and others exposed the black sites and their treatment of prisoners, Hayden moved in tandem with Bush’s second-term national security cabinet to empty the C.I.A.’s secret prisons and transfer the remaining prisoners to Guantánamo. He made no judgment about what his predecessors had done in the post–September 11 emergency. He recognized that the C.I.A. required a broad political consensus to sustain operations over a long period and that this required accommodating the opposition to torture expressed by influential Republicans like Senator John McCain, who had been tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Hayden tried to keep the C.I.A.’s options open—he declined to repudiate E.I.T.s and felt they should remain available in an emergency—but he also sought to assure Congress that C.I.A. operations were on a tighter leash. Still, Hayden insisted the country continued to face a grave emergency. “For us it’s simply war,” he said. At the C.I.A. and the Pentagon, “It’s a word we use commonly, without ambiguity.” He sought to lead “an expeditionary campaign” to “capture or kill those behind the threat.” The C.I.A.’s leadership would be essential because this was largely “an intelligence war,” Hayden said.
“Our primary adversary is easy to kill,” he added. “He’s just very hard to find.”31
PART THREE
THE BEST INTENTIONS,
2006–2009
FOURTEEN
Suicide Detectives
In the late summer of 2006, Brian Glyn Williams, an assistant professor of Islamic history at the University of Massachusetts, was sitting on the back porch of his Davis Square home in Somerville when a contractor for the C.I.A. telephoned. The caller said that analysts at the agency’s Counterterrorism Center were seeking insights from scholars about a wave of suicide bombings remaking the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. Williams agreed to talk further. The C.I.A.’s analysts, he soon learned, were puzzling over elemental questions. Why had the targets and use of suicide attacks changed so suddenly? Who were the recruiters, trainers, and financiers? What were the ages and backgrounds of those persuaded to kill themselves? Was there evidence of “diffusion” or “contagion” of suicide bombing from Iraq to Afghanistan? The agency wanted a large, multicountry study and hoped independent academics would participate.
Williams was intrigued. He had spent much of his earlier years in Florida and then made his way into Middle Eastern studies. He spent a semester in the Soviet Union during the 1980s and met soldiers returning from the war in Afghanistan; they told him that the war was “nothing but horror.” Later he published histories of Chechnya and Central Asia. Since 2001, he had been drawn into analysis of the Chechen war and the upheavals in Afghanistan. He was forty years old but looked younger. He smiled often, displaying perfect white teeth that reflected upon the profession of his Turkish-born wife, a dental hygienist.
She was unenthused about the project. “Can’t they send someone else?”
He agreed that field research for the C.I.A. in Afghanistan might be a little “beyond my pay grade.” But he found suicide bombing to be repugnant. If he could help reduce it by studying it, he should.1
There could be no doubt that autumn that suicide bombers had become a newly destabilizing feature of Afghanistan’s reviving war. Their inc
rease also represented a departure from Afghanistan’s recent military history. During the 1980s, across a long, bitter uprising against the Soviet Union, Afghan mujaheddin had not participated in suicide attacks. The mujaheddin’s prideful, family-supported ethos of jihad emphasized individual bravery and, where possible, living to fight another day. When the Taliban conquered Afghanistan during the late 1990s, Mullah Mohammad Omar and his commanders did not employ suicide bombers, either. (The Arab volunteers who blew themselves up while assassinating Ahmad Shah Massoud belonged to Al Qaeda.) During the three years from December 2001 through December 2004, there had been eight suicide bombings in Afghanistan, all in Kabul. Yet by 2006 suicide bombers struck two or three times a week around the country, shattering public confidence and forcing Afghan and N.A.T.O. forces to hunker down behind walls and checkpoints manned by nervous pickets.
The Taliban announced their new plan in a policy editorial published in Al Samood, in January 2006:
Let the Americans and their allies know that even though we lack equipment, our faith has been unshakable. And with the help of Allah the Almighty, we have created a weapon which you will not be able to face or escape, i.e. martyrdom operations. We will follow you everywhere and we will detonate everything in your face. We will make you terrified, even from vacant lands and silent walls. We know we are inevitably heading towards death, so let it be a glorious death by killing you with us, as we believe in the words of the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him): “The heretic and his killer will be united in the fires of hell.” We have thus prepared many suicide operations that even will involve women, and we will offer you the taste of perdition in the cities, villages, valleys and mountains with Allah’s help.2
The most visible spokesman of the Afghan Taliban’s initiatives was Dadullah Lang, a one-legged Taliban military commander who bragged about suicide operations on Al Jazeera. He called his young recruits “Mullah Omar’s missiles” and “our atomic bombs.” He told another interviewer in the summer of 2006, “We like the Al Qaeda organization. We have close ties and constant contacts.”3
The C.I.A. struggled to provide hard evidence to the national security cabinet about why this had evolved so suddenly. The agency offered to buy out Williams’s salary at UMass for a semester and to pay an additional $30,000 for his fieldwork and a research paper. He spent the autumn and winter working with a student researcher to build a matrix of suicide attacks in Afghanistan since 2001, to identify patterns and questions that he could examine when he traveled to the country. On his Excel spreadsheet, he recorded dates of suicide bombings, their locations, what category of target had been struck, the number of casualties, and details about the strikes, if they were available from media or other accounts.
As his grid of evidence morphed into color-coded patterns, two mysteries presented themselves initially. Williams realized that he was recording a surprising number of “zeros” in the casualty column, meaning that the suicide attack had failed altogether. There were about a dozen such cases in 2006, for example, about 9 percent of the total. Moreover, the most common outcome of an Afghan suicide attack that year was a single casualty—the bomber himself and no one else.
This was not what Williams had seen when he had previously studied suicide bombings in Iraq. There, failures were abnormal and high death tolls were common. This led to a second mystery about the Afghan pattern, concerning the bombers’ targets. In Iraq, suicide bombers typically struck crowds of civilians to sow terror by inflicting mass casualties, including women and children. The context for these attacks was often sectarian: Al Qaeda–influenced Sunni suicide bombers struck Shiite civilian marketplaces or mosques, and vice versa. In Afghanistan, however, suicide bombers most often struck military targets, such as heavily armed American or N.A.T.O. convoys moving on roadways. Remarkably often, only the bomber died. Williams and his researcher marveled morbidly about how incompetent some of these suicide bombers seemed to be. One had strapped on his vest, traveled to say goodbye to his parents, and accidentally detonated his device during the visit, taking his own life and theirs. But when Williams reflected on it, the pattern seemed tragic. Presumably such failures indicated how many suicide bombers recruited to die in Afghanistan might be coerced, naïve, illiterate, young, or disabled.4
The C.I.A.’s contractor and an analyst at the agency’s Counterterrorism Center arranged for Williams to travel to Afghanistan. He departed in the early spring of 2007. Williams connected with Hekmat Karzai, a cousin of the Afghan president who ran a Kabul think tank. He provided Williams with a base of operations. As to the risks he would take traveling to provinces to meet local police, investigate bombing case files, and speak with affected Afghans, he was largely on his own. His C.I.A. supervisors told him, “If you get caught, we don’t know you.” He wasn’t sure how serious they were, but their instructions were clear: “We appreciate your service, but don’t call us.”5
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The C.I.A.’s suicide bombing study coincided with a renewed stirring of interest in the Afghan war at the White House. The Afghan Inter-Agency Operations Group at the National Security Council remained the main vehicle for policy and budget decisions. The group was bureaucratically weak and often ignored. John Gastright of the State Department now cochaired the effort. His modest rank—deputy assistant secretary of state—signaled his operation’s low standing in the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld hierarchy, an apparatus focused almost entirely on the worsening war in Iraq. Yet at least Gastright’s group was organized across government to think about what American policy in Afghanistan required, a change from several years before.
“We ought to take a look at where we are and what we’re doing,” Gastright announced one afternoon in mid-2006 at the State Department, where the Operations Group met. In Kabul, Ronald Neumann had succeeded Zalmay Khalilzad as U.S. ambassador. Gastright would typically arrive at Foggy Bottom around 6:30 a.m. and the first thing he did was call Neumann. They agreed that the levels of aid to the country were grossly inadequate and that the U.S. military needed to mount a bigger effort to prevent the war’s further deterioration. They also knew that to persuade President Bush and the Office of Management and Budget to change course and spend more in the midst of the Treasury-draining fiasco in Iraq would require a formal policy review. Meghan O’Sullivan, the senior National Security Council adviser who worked mainly on Iraq but also kept track of Afghanistan, brought the idea for a review to Bush, who approved it.6
Neumann had tried with little success to persuade the State Department and the White House to radically increase investments in Afghanistan. He regarded the plan for a new policy review with skepticism. “Searching for a new strategy seems to be policymakers’ recurring default reaction to problems,” as he put it. Instead of properly resourcing the strategy the administration already possessed, it authorized a search “for a new idea. Certainly ideas are more easily come by than money and soldiers.”7
In the autumn of 2006, Gastright and his cochair, Tony Harriman, the N.S.C. senior director for Afghanistan, commissioned classified study papers on every major policy subject that seemed relevant: the Afghan justice system, the police, narcotics, the Afghan National Army, and civilian aid. The final drafts of these papers contained recommendations. In essence, they identified the need for more resources, more spending. Harriman liked to point out to his colleagues that there were more combat aircraft controlled by the State Department operating in Colombia, to support the fight against coca growing and Marxist guerrillas there, than there were combat aircraft controlled by the Pentagon in Afghanistan.
“We cannot win in Afghanistan on the cheap,” Neumann wrote to Washington. Michael Waltz, the Special Forces officer, rotated from Afghanistan to a policy position at the Pentagon late that year. He was “pleased to find some growing awareness . . . of the worsening situation” in Afghanistan, yet many of the Afghan hands he encountered were “increasingly frustrated. Even though our senior leaders recognized the growing prob
lem, the default response was to turn to the Europeans to do more.”8
The American electorate soon came to the aid of their cause. In early November 2006, in mid-term elections, voters repudiated President Bush and handed control of Congress to the Democrats. Bush accepted Rumsfeld’s resignation in the aftermath and appointed Robert Gates as secretary of defense. Gates had been at the C.I.A. and the White House when the United States abandoned Afghanistan in the early 1990s. He was determined not to preside over another failure in South Asia, yet he was skeptical that the United States could fix the war. His “historical perspective . . . screamed for caution” yet American generals in the field insisted they needed more forces and resources.
On November 13, 2006, the N.S.C. forwarded to President Bush a ten-page classified executive summary of “The Afghanistan Strategic Review.” Bush approved its findings on December 10. The plan called for more money, a reenergized effort to improve security and governance, a new push to undermine the booming drug economy, and more American troops on the ground. The hypothesis of the paper promoted the need to “connect the Afghan people to their government.” It proposed more schools, roads, and electricity. Of these recommendations, only the call for more American troops failed to materialize quickly. Early in 2007, Bush’s decision to authorize a “surge” of troops into Baghdad under the command of General David Petraeus effectively used up all of the Pentagon’s available personnel and then some. With about 150,000 American troops now in Iraq, there were no additional units available for Afghanistan. The Afghan review did reverse the administration’s parsimony about reconstruction aid, however. Now the O.M.B. approved a supplemental allocation to Afghanistan of more than $1 billion, although to Neumann’s disappointment, the White House split the funding across two fiscal years, diluting its impact. The ambassador “got pretty cranky,” as Gastright put it, and cabled in protest, but the decision stood.9