But General Franks’s version of events does not square with the facts. SIGINT coming out of NSA and intercepts collected by frontline U.S. military intelligence units proved that bin Laden was indeed at Tora Bora. The official history of the U.S. Special Operations Command indicates that U.S. Special Forces continued to collect hard “all-source” intelligence, most of which was coming from SIGINT, that “corroborated” bin Laden’s presence at Tora Bora from December 9 through December 14, 2001. Only after December 14 did the trail go dead, the official history indicates.61
The most significant intercept of al Qaeda message traffic occurred on December 7, when one of Hazrat Ali’s commanders at Tora Bora said, “We have intercepted radio messages from Kandahar to the Al Qaeda forces here, and they ask, ‘How is the sheik?’ The reply is, ‘The sheik [i.e., bin Laden] is fine.’ ”62
But despite repeated and increasingly urgent pleas from Ali’s Green Beret advisers, his Afghan militiamen refused to press home their attacks.63In retrospect, we should not be surprised that the militiamen, whose motivations were purely mercenary, did not aggressively move in on the Tora Bora cave complex, or that bin Laden and his fighters somehow managed to escape through Ali’s lines without being detected. In any case, the evidence is now clear that at some point prior to December 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden and as many as eigh teen hundred of his fighters slipped away in the dead of night from the Tora Bora mountains and made their way across the border to the safety of northern Pakistan.64Regardless of who is responsible, bin Laden and over a thousand of his fighters managed to escape and are still on the loose today. 65
Amazingly, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the Pentagon refused to accept the assessments from commanders on the ground that bin Laden was gone. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld told reporters that he believed that bin Laden had not escaped and was still trapped inside Afghanistan. On what factual basis (if any) Rumsfeld made this claim is not known, but it ran completely contrary to the classified reporting that he and his staff were getting from Afghanistan at the time. This was not the first time that the acerbic secretary of defense was to be proved wrong.66
By December 19, even the most optimistic “true believers” at the Pentagon and at CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida, knew that the Tora Bora operation had been an abysmal failure. Captain Robert Harward, a veteran Navy SEAL and the commander of the elite twenty-three-hundred-man U.S.-coalition Special Forces unit Task Force K-Bar, was quoted as saying after Tora Bora, “All of this had got us nothing. No weapons, no ammunition, nothing.”67
But we now know that the failure to kill Osama bin Laden and destroy his al Qaeda forces at Tora Bora was a massive strategic blunder by the White House, the Pentagon, and CENTCOM. Today, al Qaeda has reconstituted itself and is back in the business of killing Americans whenever and wherever it can. Author and terrorism expert Peter Bergen neatly sums up the Tora Bora fiasco this way: “Allowing Al Qaeda’s leadership to escape from Tora Bora and fight another day has proven to be a costly mistake. And it was only the first of many.”68
CHAPTER 13
A Mountain out of a Molehill
NSA and the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction Scandal
The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.
—LOUIS PASTEUR
The Hiatus
After the Battle of Tora Bora, there followed a six-month hiatus where the attention of the White House, the U.S. military, and the entire U.S. intelligence community, including NSA, were largely focused on the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the remainder of his al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
But while the U.S. military and intelligence community were focused on finding and killing bin Laden, they ignored a new threat that was once again rearing its ugly head—the Taliban. Within a matter of weeks of the end of the Battle of Tora Bora, the Taliban had managed to resurrect themselves across the border in northern Pakistan. After the fall of Kandahar in December 2001, between one thousand and fifteen hundred hard-core Taliban guerrillas, including their one-eyed leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and virtually all of his senior commanders, slipped across the border to the safety of northern Pakistan. No attempt was made by the U.S. Army or the Pakistani military to prevent their exodus from Afghanistan. Thousands more Taliban fighters disappeared into remote mountain hiding places in southern Afghanistan, or returned to their villages to wait to fight another day.1
A few weeks later, in mid-January 2002, SIGINT reporting coming out of NSA revealed that a relatively small number of Taliban military commanders had returned to Afghanistan and were operating along the Afghan-Pakistani border. The intercepts showed that the Taliban had reestablished a crude but effective communications system using satellite telephones, which allowed its field commanders inside Afghanistan to communicate with their superiors in northern Pakistan. Within days of this discovery, small teams of Taliban fighters began launching sporadic mortar and rocket attacks against U.S. military outposts in southern and southeastern Afghanistan, as well as ambushing U.S. Army patrols operating along the Afghan-Pakistani border. By the end of January 2002, U.S. intelligence reporting, including SIGINT, had confirmed that Taliban guerrillas were operating in seven Afghan provinces.2
Unfortunately, the reappearance of the Taliban was ignored by the Bush White House, which had already set its sights on Iraq. So beginning in February 2002, and continuing without letup through the summer of 2002, just as Taliban guerrilla attacks were on the rise inside Afghanistan, virtually all CIA and U.S. military intelligence assets (including SIGINT) were withdrawn and sent back to the United States to prepare for the invasion of Iraq. Only a few tactical SIGINT collectors assigned to the small army and marine contingents in Afghanistan remained to keep track of the Taliban and al Qaeda.3
Operation Anaconda
The precipitous withdrawal of the CIA and U.S. military intelligence assets could not have come at a worse time. In February 2002, just as the withdrawal of intelligence commenced, a force of three hundred Afghan militiamen plus CIA and Green Beret personnel left the sleepy town of Gardez in southeastern Afghanistan to reconnoiter reported al Qaeda positions in the nearby Shah-i-Kot Valley. They were accompanied by a three-man Green Beret SIGINT team, whose job was to scan the airwaves searching for any sign that the patrol’s movements had been detected by al Qaeda forces in the area. Near the village of Zer-mat, only a few miles from the entrance to the valley, the SIGINT personnel picked up several walkie-talkie radio transmissions by individuals speaking Arabic who were carefully noting the movements of the Green Beret convoy. The gist of one of the intercepted transmissions was: “Where was the convoy headed?” Clearly al Qaeda fighters in the hills were closely monitoring the patrol’s movements with the intention of ambushing it if and when the opportunity presented itself. The Green Beret patrol commander prudently ordered the convoy back to the safety of Gardez. It was clear that the enemy was guarding the entrance to the valley.4
A few weeks later, in early February, unmanned Predator reconnaissance drones discovered what appeared to be a small concentration of al Qaeda forces in the Shah-i-Kot Valley. But SIGINT indicated that the size of the enemy force might be larger than the drone’s imagery indicated, and the intercepts revealed that there were a number of senior al Qaeda commanders operating in the valley, based on the number of satellite telephones detected sending and receiving messages from the valley floor. By mid-February, the rising volume of SIGINT “hits” emanating from the valley indicated that the al Qaeda force there was being reinforced with fresh troops coming across the border. The quantity and quality of the SIGINT, however, left much to be desired, with the desultory number of intercepts indicating that the al Qaeda commanders knew their communications were being monitored.5
That month, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Major General Franklin Hagenbeck, despite the bitter lessons of Vietnam, began planning a search-and-destroy mission to wipe out the enemy force. Operation A
naconda was supposed to have been a two-day operation using a reinforced brigade of 1,500 troops drawn from the Tenth Mountain Division and the 101st Airborne Division. At the time the operation was being planned, Hagenbeck’s staff thought there were only 150 to 200 al Qaeda fighters in the valley. But once the operation began on March 2, 2002, the U.S. forces found themselves locked in a bitter battle with 2,000 entrenched and very determined al Qaeda fighters who would not retreat despite facing a superior force backed by airpower and heavy artillery. 6
SIGINT could not save the day. Intercepts quickly tailed off because the al Qaeda forces in the Shah-i-Kot Valley “were practicing systematic communications security,” which effectively denied American SIGINT operators access to enemy radio traffic. Another major part of the problem was that the SIGINT intercept equipment, designed for use against Soviet forces in Western Europe, was poorly suited for Afghanistan. The mountainous terrain also made SIGINT collection very difficult. Compounding the problem, army SIGINT personnel had to somehow hump their heavy SIGINT intercept equipment up to the tops of the surrounding mountains or hillsides in order to monitor what radio traffic could be picked up.7
When Operation Anaconda finally sputtered to its unhappy conclusion on March 18, eight American and three Afghan soldiers were dead and another eighty wounded. Equipment losses were much higher than expected. American commanders claimed that the al Qaeda forces had suffered anywhere from eight hundred to one thousand dead, but no bodies could be found to support these dubious claims. Hagenbeck later asserted that “few bodies had been found because they had been vaporized by the intense bombing by U.S. B-52s.”8
General Tommy Franks characterized Operation Anaconda as “an absolute and unqualified success.”9But it was a Pyrrhic victory at best because almost no prisoners were captured, as the al Qaeda fighters preferred to fight to the death. The few documents that were captured offered little in the way of hard information about Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts or details of al Qaeda’s strength and capabilities. The United States pulled out and the enemy moved back in. Ultimately, nothing had been gained for all the effort.10
Hunting al Qaeda
With the end of Operation Anaconda, the focus of the secret intelligence war against al Qaeda shifted to Pakistan, where the NSA’s assets were few. Al Qaeda’s communications traffic had almost completely disappeared from the airwaves, and decrypted Pakistani military and diplomatic communications did not prove to be a fruitful source of intelligence because the Pakistanis themselves did not seem to know where bin Laden was or what he was up to. The CIA’s station in Islamabad, headed by Robert Grenier, had some high-level phone taps and audio surveillance sources targeted against key Pakistani government officials, but it does not appear that these sources were much help either.11
Ahmed al-Hada’s al Qaeda “switchboard” in Yemen, however, was still up and running. Many of the intercepted telephone calls made through that hub were originating in Pakistan, where the remnants of bin Laden’s organization had gone to ground. So, shortly after New Year’s Day 2002, NSA, the CIA, and the U.S. military put many of their best SIGINT collection assets into Pakistan to try to locate the source of these al Qaeda phone calls.
But then disaster struck when NSA suddenly lost its access to al-Hada’s telephone traffic. The government in Yemen discovered that al-Hada was a member of al Qaeda, and his house was immediately placed under surveillance, which was apparently detected. On the evening of February 13, al-Hada, his wife, their son, and two unidentified men made an attempt to flee. Finally cornered in an alley after a frantic car chase involving Yemeni security personnel, al-Hada’s son pulled a grenade from his jacket; the grenade went off in his hand, killing him instantly. The rest got away. With his death, NSA lost its ability to exploit his telephone calls, which was to prove to be an incalculable intelligence loss.12
Despite the loss of the “Yemen switchboard,” NSA and the CIA managed to find a number of fugitive al Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistan, but not bin Laden. One of bin Laden’s top lieutenants, Abu Zubaida, was arrested in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad on the night of March 27, 2002, after NSA intercepted a number of satellite phone calls, which CIA operatives inside Pakistan used to locate his hideout.13Further SIGINT reporting led to the arrest in June in Morocco of al Qaeda’s Saudi-born chief of operations, Fowzi Saad al-Obeidi, whose cover name within al Qaeda was Abu Zubair al-Haili.14The following month, intercepted phone calls enabled Pakistani security forces to arrest a thirty-three-year-old Kenyan named Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan, who was wanted by U.S. authorities for his role in planning the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.15
On August 27, an NSA listening post intercepted a satellite telephone call placed from somewhere in Karachi, Pakistan, to a known al Qaeda operative. NSA analysts who studied the translation of the phone conversation were not able to deduce much of value.16On September 9, on an entirely unrelated matter, Pakistani security forces bagged three Yemenis after an extended exchange of gunfire. One of them was Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was well known to U.S. intelligence as one of the key al Qaeda planners of the September 11 attack. The call that NSA had monitored coming out of Karachi two weeks earlier had come from his phone. Subsequently, additional al Qaeda phones and laptops were found in Pakistan and eventually turned over to NSA. The telephone numbers and e-mail addresses in the memories of the phones and laptops were downloaded and fed into NSA’s burgeoning databases of numbers and addresses of known or suspected al Qaeda members, which were under full-time monitoring. Those telephone numbers or e-mail addresses that were located in the United States were passed to the FBI for investigation.17
Then in early November, NSA intercepted al Qaeda’s Yemen operations chief as he held a lengthy conversation on his satellite phone while driving through the desert in the so-called Empty Quarter of eastern Yemen. Using the locational data provided by NSA, a CIA unmanned Predator drone was immediately dispatched from Camp Lemonier in Djibouti to the location. The drone quickly found the convoy just where NSA said it would be. The Predator fired a Hellfire missile at the lead vehicle, killing the al Qaeda official instantly. Back at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was furious when he found out that it was the CIA and not the U.S. military who had killed the official. “How did they get the intel?” Rumsfeld demanded from the assembled chiefs of the Pentagon’s intelligence agencies. NSA director Michael Hayden admitted that the intelligence had come from NSA. Rumsfeld’s reported response was “Why aren’t you giving it to us?”18
The Focus Shifts to Iraq
In June 2002, NSA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community turned their attention away from Afghanistan and al Qaeda and toward a new target—Iraq. After U.N. weapons inspectors were forced out of Iraq by Saddam Hussein in 1988, NSA’s ability to collect intelligence there deteriorated rapidly; all of the high-grade Iraqi radio traffic that the agency had been exploiting since Operation Desert Storm in 1991 disappeared from the airwaves. In 1999, there were press reports about how the U.S. and British intelligence communities had used the U.N. weapons inspectors to conduct sensitive SIGINT collection operations inside Iraq, and analysts in NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate concluded that these had prompted the Iraqis to improve their already superb communications security procedures.19
In 1998 and 1999, the Iraqis began shifting most of the Iraqi Republican Guard and Regular Army’s radio traffic from the airwaves to a network of one hundred thousand lines of modern fiber-optic cables connecting Baghdad with all of the major command centers of the Iraqi army and air defense forces. The result was that by early 2001, the newly laid fiber-optic cables were depriving NSA of most of the sensitive traffic formerly carried by radio.20In February 2001, NSA persuaded the U.S. Air Force and the British Royal Air Force to send fighter-bombers to attack the network as a means of forcing the Iraqis to resume radio communications. But the NSA SIGINT operators subsequently reported that there was not much of significance to listen to coming fro
m within Iraq.21
Beyond the diminishing volume of Iraqi radio traffic, Hussein had banned the use of cell phones inside Iraq so as to maintain a tight grip on the flow of information in his country, and only 833,000 Iraqis out of a population of 26 million had telephones. This meant, in effect, that NSA’s impressive capability to intercept e-mails and cell phone calls was next to worthless when confronted by the low-tech Iraqi target.22Every senior Iraqi military and Republican Guard commander had a Thuraya satellite phone for his personal use, but these insecure phones were rarely used prior to the U.S. invasion in March 2003. After the invasion began, Iraqi commanders stopped using them altogether, knowing that once they activated the phones, they were inviting an air strike or artillery bombardment on their position within a matter of minutes.23
So, given the lack of high-level access to Iraqi government, diplomatic, and military communications, the best intelligence NSA was then producing on Iraq came from intercepting and exploiting the thousands of Iraqi commercial and private messages coming in and out of the country by phone and telex every month. NSA was paying particular attention to the telephone calls, faxes, and e-mails between representatives of various Iraqi government ministries and private companies (some of them fronts for the Iraqi government) and a host of foreign companies and individuals in Eu rope, Asia, and the Middle East.24
There had been high expectations among some NSA intelligence analysts that data mining this traffic would produce some hard evidence that Hussein was trying to rebuild his capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missiles. These same sorts of commercial intercepts had already produced extremely valuable intelligence concerning Iran’s nascent nuclear weapons research and development program.25
The Secret Sentry Page 31