The Secret Sentry
Page 29
In May and June 2000, NSA intercepted a number of additional telephone calls to al-Hada’s house from the anonymous “Khaled.” As before, NSA could not identify the caller or his location. And because the calls dealt mostly with personal matters, the agency did not report the content or even the substance of these conversations. Thanks to the spadework done by the 9/11 Commission, we now know that the purpose of the call was for al-Hada to tell his son-in-law that his wife was expecting their first child. Upon being told by al-Hada of the birth of his son in late May 2000, al-Mihdhar closed his San Diego bank account, transferred the registration of his car to his colleague Nawaf al-Hazmi, and made reservations to fly home to Yemen. He apparently did not bother to tell his boss in Afghanistan, al Qaeda operations chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that he was abandoning his post for purely personal reasons. Al-Mihdhar drove to Los Angeles on June 9 and took Lufthansa Flight 457 from Los Angeles International Airport to Frankfurt the next day. He was not to return to the United States for more than a year.90
Despite NSA’s successes, it was only a matter of time before al Qaeda finally succeeded. On October 12, 2000, al Qaeda suicide bombers drove a speedboat laden with high explosives into the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Cole as it lay at anchor in the port of Aden, Yemen, waiting to be refueled. Seventeen sailors were killed in the blast and another thirty-nine wounded. On the same day that the attack on the Cole occurred, NSA issued an intelligence report based on intercepts (most likely calls coming in and out of Ahmed al-Hada’s home in Sana’a) warning that terrorists were planning an attack in the region. However, the NSA warning message was not received by consumers until well after the attack had taken place.91
CHAPTER 12
Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory 9/11 and the Invasion of Afghanistan
What you are prepared for never happens.
—PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH PROVERB
Zero Hour Is Near
President George W. Bush, who had been inaugurated on January 20, 2001, quickly became a devotee of NSA’s intelligence reporting based on the briefings he had received before becoming president.1What the president did not know was that the agency was struggling mightily to both modernize its decrepit infrastructure and to meet the varied intelligence needs of its ever-growing clientele in Washington, with NSA analysts admitting, “they had far too many broad requirements (some 1,500 formal ones) that covered virtually every situation and target.” Under these adverse conditions, NSA just did not have enough manpower and equipment resources to devote to international terrorism. And although terrorism had been NSA’s top priority since the August 1998 East Africa embassy bombings, the agency’s director, General Michael Hayden, later admitted that he had at least five other “number one priorities,” and was unable to dedicate sufficient personnel and equipment resources to terrorism. The lack of resources available to cover al Qaeda and other terrorist targets was to come back to bite the agency in the months that followed.2
Prior to the September 11, 2001, bombings, NSA intercepted a steadily increasing volume of al Qaeda messages indicating that Osama bin Laden was about to launch a major terrorist operation against an American target. In late 2000, NSA intercepted a message in which an al Qaeda operative reportedly boasted over the phone that bin Laden was planning a “Hiroshima” against the United States. Most U.S. intelligence analysts concluded that the threat from al Qaeda was primarily to U.S. military or diplomatic installations overseas, particularly in the Middle East and Persian Gulf.3
Beginning in May and continuing through early July 2001, NSA intercepted thirty-three separate messages indicating that bin Laden intended to mount one or more terrorist attacks against U.S. targets in the near future. But the intercepts provided no specifics about the impending operation other than that “Zero Hour was near.”4
In June, intercepts led to the arrest of two bin Laden operatives who were planning to attack U.S. military installations in Saudi Arabia as well as another one planning an attack on the U.S. embassy in Paris. On June 22, U.S. military forces in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East were once again placed on alert after NSA intercepted a conversation between two al Qaeda operatives in the region, which indicated that “a major attack was imminent.” All U.S. Navy ships docked in Bahrain, homeport of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, were ordered to put to sea immediately.5
These NSA intercepts scared the daylights out of both the White House’s “terrorism czar,” Richard Clarke, and CIA director George Tenet. Tenet told Clarke, “It’s my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one.” On Thursday, June 28, Clarke warned National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that al Qaeda activity had “reached a crescendo,” strongly suggesting that an attack was imminent. That same day, the CIA issued what was called an Alert Memorandum, which stated that the latest intelligence indicated the probability of imminent al Qaeda attacks that would “have dramatic consequences on governments or cause major casualties.”6
But many senior officials in the Bush administration did not share Clarke and Tenet’s concerns, notably Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who distrusted the material coming out of the U.S. intelligence community. Rumsfeld thought this traffic might well be a “hoax” and asked Tenet and NSA to check the veracity of the al Qaeda intercepts. At NSA director Hayden’s request, Bill Gaches, the head of NSA’s counterterrorism office, reviewed all the intercepts and reported that they were genuine al Qaeda communications.7
But unbeknownst to Gaches’s analysts at NSA, most of the 9/11 hijackers were already in the United States busy completing their final preparations. Calls from operatives in the United States were routed through the Ahmed al-Hada “switchboard” in Yemen, but apparently none of these calls were intercepted by NSA. Only after 9/11 did the FBI obtain the telephone billing records of the hijackers during their stay in the United States. These records indicated that the hijackers had made a number of phone calls to numbers known by NSA to have been associated with al Qaeda activities, including that of al-Hada.8
Unfortunately, NSA had taken the legal position that intercepting calls from abroad to individuals inside the United States was the responsibility of the FBI. NSA had been badly burned in the past when Congress had blasted it for illegal domestic intercepts, which had led to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). NSA could have gone to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for warrants to monitor communications between terrorist suspects in the United States and abroad but feared this would violate U.S. laws.9
The ongoing argument about this responsibility between NSA and the FBI created a yawning intelligence gap, which al Qaeda easily slipped through, since there was no effective coordination between the two agencies. One senior NSA official admitted after the 9/11 attacks, “Our cooperation with our foreign allies is a helluva lot better than with the FBI.”10
While NSA and the FBI continued to squabble, the tempo of al Qaeda intercepts mounted during the first week of July 2001. A series of SIGINT intercepts produced by NSA in early July allowed American and allied intelligence services to disrupt a series of planned al Qaeda terrorist attacks in Paris, Rome, and Istanbul. On July 10, Tenet and the head of the CIA’s Coun-terterrorism Center, J. Cofer Black, met with National Security Advisor Rice to underline how seriously they took the chatter being picked up by NSA. Both Tenet and Black came away from the meeting believing that Rice did not take their warnings seriously.11
Clarke and Tenet also encountered continuing skepticism at the Pentagon from Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. Both contended that the spike in traffic was a hoax and a diversion. Steve Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, asked Tenet if he had “considered the possibility that al-Qa’ida’s threats were just a grand deception, a clever ploy to tie up our resources and expend our energies on a phantom enemy that lacked both the power and the will to carry the battle to us.”12
In August 2001, either NSA or Britain’s GCHQ intercepted a telephone call from one of b
in Laden’s chief lieutenants, Abu Zubaida, to an al Qaeda operative believed to have been in Pakistan. The intercept centered on an operation that was to take place in September. At about the same time, bin Laden telephoned an associate inside Afghanistan and discussed the upcoming operation. Bin Laden reportedly praised the other party to the conversation for his role in planning the operation. For some reason, these intercepts were reportedly never forwarded to intelligence consumers, although this contention is strongly denied by NSA officials.13Just prior to the September 11, 2001, bombings, several Eu rope an intelligence services reportedly intercepted a telephone call that bin Laden made to his wife, who was living in Syria, asking her to return to Afghanistan immediately.14
In the seventy-two hours before 9/11, four more NSA intercepts suggested that a terrorist attack was imminent. But NSA did not translate or disseminate any of them until the day after 9/11.15 In one of the two most significant, one of the speakers said, “The big match is about to begin.” In the other, another unknown speaker was overheard saying that tomorrow is “zero hour.”16
A Day in Hell
On the morning of September 11, 2001, nearly twenty-two thousand NSA employees headed for the gates at Fort Meade to begin their workday, which typically started at seven a.m. They faced delays at the gates because the army had recently restricted public access to the base; security had been drastically tightened because of the recent spate of terrorist threats against U.S. military installations. Only four gates were open full-time (with four more open part-time), which led to long lines of cars waiting for clearance during the morning and afternoon rushes.17
There was a second security cordon around what NSA calls the Campus, a massive complex of twenty-six separate buildings patrolled by a 388-man NSA police force, plus an additional forty-nine buildings and warehouses used by NSA in the area surrounding Fort Meade. This was the equivalent of thirty-four hundred four-bedroom homes jammed together into a single office complex. Surrounding these buildings was the largest parking lot in the world.18 General Hayden arrived in his office on the eighth floor of the Ops 2B building before seven a.m. The director’s office suite was the envy of all NSA employees, with some staff members calling it “The Penthouse” because it was on the top floor. Not only was the suite spacious and well appointed, but the view from Hayden’s windows, which faced eastward, was of one of Fort Meade’s two tree-shaded eighteen-hole golf courses. As was his penchant, he immediately began going through his e-mails, then turned to the large stack of reports and messages that his executive assistant Cindy Farkus had deposited in his in-box for his perusal.19
Elsewhere on the Campus, more than twenty thousand NSA employees were also plowing through their “Read File” of e-mails, cables, reports, and raw intercepts that had come in overnight.
Then at eighty forty-six a.m. on that beautiful Tuesday morning, a Boeing 767 jet, American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston’s Logan International Airport, struck the north side of the North Tower of the World Trade Center between the ninety-fourth and ninety-eighth floors.
Within minutes of the crash, all of the major network television and cable morning news shows had broken into their regularly scheduled broadcasts to show their viewers the first dramatic pictures of the burning North Tower.
Nineteen minutes later, at five past nine a.m., while network news cameras carried the event live, another Boeing 767 commercial jet, United Airlines Flight 175, lazily flew across the television screen and crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. It was obvious then that this was no accident, but the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil in history. Everything came to a stop as people gathered around TV screens and watched in horror as the Twin Towers collapsed. Those with family or friends in New York City frantically began trying to reach them, only to discover that virtually all of the phone lines along the East Coast of the United States were jammed with calls, quickly causing AT&T’s telephone circuits going in and out of New York City to collapse under the strain.20
At nine ten a.m., five minutes after the second crash in New York City took place, Colonel Michael Stewart, the army base commander of Fort Meade, ordered that his post be locked down and declared a Threat Condition Delta, the highest force protection alert level in the U.S. military, which is used only in war time. No one was allowed to enter or leave the base without proof that he or she worked or lived there.
Base public works crews quickly placed rows of three-foot-high concrete barriers in front of all of the closed gates to prevent anyone from ramming their car through one of them. The Maryland State Police closed down a section of Route 32 that ran next to the NSA headquarters complex, which caused a massive traffic jam.21
At nine thirty a.m. Hayden ordered that all nonessential NSA personnel be sent home immediately and, as a security precaution, that all remaining, mission-essential personnel be moved out of NSA’s two black-glass office towers into the older (and less vulnerable) three-story-high Ops 1 office building next door. He then called his wife, Jeanine, at their quarters on base and asked her to check on their three grown children, all of whom lived or worked in Washington. Before he could explain the reason for his request, he had to hang up the phone as his staff poured into his office with the latest news bulletins.22
The planes crashing into the Pentagon and a deserted field in western Pennsylvania were the final outrages— 2,973 Americans were dead, surpassing the death toll at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.23
Within minutes of the crash, NSA’s internal emergency broadcast system was activated, and announcements began to be read out over the agency’s public address system ordering all nonessential personnel to leave the base immediately. In a matter of minutes, the first of thousands of NSA employees began leaving the Campus. Within a few hours, the streets of Fort Meade resembled those of a ghost town.24
For the rest of the day, inside the NSA operations buildings a form of controlled chaos reigned. In room 3E099, on the top floor of Ops 1, the duty officer began calling senior NSA officials who were still at home, on leave, or on the road on business and ordering them to report back to work immediately. At the direction of Richard Berardino, the chief of the National Security Operations Center (NSOC), NSA’s watch center, his thirty analysts and reporting officers began rapidly compiling whatever information they could to brief Hayden and the agency’s senior officials about what had just transpired. Other NSOC staffers began systematically going back over the past several days’ worth of SIGINT reporting to see if anything had been missed that might have given any warning of the terrorist attacks. They found nothing.25
A now-retired NSA intelligence officer remembered the next twenty-four hours of his life as “a day in hell.” Like all of his colleagues, he sat in on countless video and telephone conferences with other senior U.S. and British intelligence officials and attended one staff meeting after another until he reached the point where he could not remember why he was at the meeting. When he finally got back to his office, his secretary had a stack of telephone messages that had to be answered. Then there was a never-ending flow of memos and reports that he had to read and respond to. At midnight, he decided to leave because he was too exhausted to think coherently. “How I got home without crashing the car, I don’t know.”26
Nowhere was the blunt-force trauma inflicted by the 9/11 attacks felt more deeply than within NSA’s one-hundred-man counterterrorism unit, called the Counterterrorism Product Line, whose leader, Bill Gaches, was well qualified for the job, having served from 1998 to 2000 as the deputy chief of NSA’s Office of the Middle East and North Africa, where, one of his former analysts recalled, “terror was king.”27Hayden later described the state of morale in the NSA coun-terterrorism office on September 11 as “emotionally shattered.” Later that morning, Maureen Baginski, the chief of NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, visited the counterterrorism office and held an impromptu staff meeting, first taking the time to calm the clearly distressed staff, then urging them to get back to wo
rk. Recalling the days of the London blitz, some were busy putting up blackout curtains over the office windows so as to shield their activities from the outside world.28
What Hayden and his staff did not know was that messages among al Qaeda officials and sympathizers that had been intercepted by the agency within minutes of the 9/11 attacks were causing a firestorm at the White House and the Pentagon. A number of senior Bush administration officials, including Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, were convinced that the attacks were the handiwork of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and not al Qaeda. Tyler Drumheller, then the head of the CIA Clandestine Service division responsible for Europe, noted,
Within fifteen minutes of the attacks the National Security Agency intercepted a call from an al Qaeda operative in Asia to a contact in a former Soviet republic reporting the “good news” of the attacks in New York and on the Pentagon. [CIA director George J.] Tenet passed that report on to Rumsfeld around midday, but according to notes taken by aides who were with the Secretary of Defense, he characterized the NSA report as “vague” and said there was “no good basis for hanging hat” on the fact that al Qaeda had conducted the assaults.29
The intercept that Drumheller referred to, between a known al Qaeda official in Afghanistan and an unidentified person in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, was intercepted by NSA at nine fifty-three a.m., less than fifteen minutes after American Airlines Flight 77 had hit the Pentagon. And despite overwhelming evidence accumulated by the CIA that the hijackers were known al Qaeda operatives, at two forty p.m. Rumsfeld ordered Pentagon officials to immediately begin preparing plans to launch retaliatory air strikes on Iraq. In the days that followed, Rumsfeld and a number of other senior administration officials continued to refuse to accept the fact that the 9/11 attacks had been conducted by Osama bin Laden’s operatives. As it turned out, this was a portent of things to come.30