by Steve Coll
Through the CIA station in Islamabad, Pakistani intelligence endorsed a formal written request for the buffalo guns, plus supporting equipment such as night-vision goggles and high-powered scopes that would allow a shooter to hit his target from a mile away under cover of darkness. The incoming cable set off alarms in the general counsel’s office at the CIA. The night-vision equipment and scopes were clearly intended for missions that, if not outright assassination under the law, seemed uncomfortably close. Should the operation go sour, the Islamabad station chief might end up in handcuffs.
After several rounds of debate and teeth-gnashing, a compromise was reached: The guns could be shipped to Pakistan, but they would be stripped of the night-vision goggles and scopes that seemed to tilt their “most likely use” toward assassination. Also, the CIA would not provide ISI with target intelligence from satellites concerning where Soviet officers lived or how their apartment buildings might be approached stealthily. CIA officers tried to emphasize to ISI the guns’ value as “antimaterial” weapons, meaning that they could be used to shoot out the tires in a convoy of trucks from a distant mountaintop or to drill holes in a fuel tanker. American specialists traveled to Pakistan to train ISI officers on the rifles so that they, in turn, could train rebel commando teams. In the end, dozens of the sniper rifles were shipped to Afghanistan.21
THE TERRORIST ATTACKS came one after another during 1985, all broadcast live on network television to tens of millions of Americans. In June two Lebanese terrorists hijacked TWA Flight 847, murdered a Navy diver on board, and negotiated while mugging for cameras on a Beirut runway. In October the Palestinian terrorist Abu Abbas hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro in Italy, murdered a sixty-nine-year-old Jewish-American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, dumped his body overboard, and ultimately escaped to Baghdad with Egyptian and Italian collaboration. Just after Christmas, Palestinian gunmen with the Abu Nidal Organization opened fire on passengers lined up at El Al ticket counters in Vienna and Rome, killing nineteen people, among them five Americans. One of the American victims was an eleven-year-old girl named Natasha Simpson who died in her father’s arms after a gunman unloaded an extra round in her head just to make sure. The attackers, boyish products of Palestinian refugee camps, had been pumped full of amphetamines by their handlers just before the holiday attacks.
The shock of these events followed the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Lebanon, which claimed the lives of some of the CIA’s brightest minds on the Middle East, and the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in which 241 Marines died. The Shiite terrorist organization Hezbollah had seized American hostages in Lebanon. Casey and Reagan had been galvanized by this violence in Lebanon against official Americans and journalists. Now they confronted a new, wider wave of attacks targeting American civilians and tourists.
During 1985 about 6.5 million Americans traveled overseas, of whom about 6,000 died for various reasons, mainly from illnesses. Seventeen were killed by terrorists. Yet by the end of the year millions of Americans were canceling travel plans and demanding action from their government. Palestinian and Lebanese Shiite terrorists had captured America’s attention just as they had hoped to do.
“When we hijack a plane, it has more effect than if we killed a hundred Israelis in battle,” the Palestinian Marxist leader George Habash once said. “At least the world is talking about us now.” By the mid-1980s the American analyst Brian Jenkins’s observation had become famous: “Terrorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people listening and not a lot of people dead.” He coined another oft-repeated phrase: “Terrorism is theater.”22
In its modern form it was a theater invented largely by a stateless Palestinian diaspora whose leftist leaders sought dramatic means to attract attention to their national claims. In the new academic specialty of terrorist studies it was common to date the first modern terrorist event as the Habash-led hijacking of an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv on July 22, 1968. Thereafter inventive Palestinian terrorists attacked the vulnerabilities of aviation and exploited the new global reach of television, creating a succession of made-for-TV terrorist events that emphasized the spectacular. At the same time, because a purpose of their movement was to negotiate for statehood, they often sought to limit and calibrate their violence to create the greatest impact without alienating important political allies. As at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and at the Rome and Vienna airports in late 1985, these efforts to control public relations sometimes failed. In Washington especially the politics of antiterrorism were becoming angrier and angrier.
Shortly after the airport attacks Casey summoned the chief of the CIA’s European Division, Duane R. “Dewey” Clarridge, to his office on Langley’s seventh floor. A New Hampshire Yankee educated at Brown University, Clarridge was a cigar-chomping career officer who craved action and bridled at supervision. He had served in Nepal and India during the early Cold War, running anti-Soviet operations on obscure frontiers. He had impressed Casey as a hearty risk-taker, and the director rewarded him with full control over his secret war in Nicaragua. There Clarridge pushed the operation to the limits, running speedy Q-boats to smuggle guns and plant mines. When his harbor-mining operations created a congressional uproar, Casey moved Clarridge to the European Division in the Directorate of Operations. Now the director wanted his help again.
Reagan was putting intense pressure on the CIA to show more initiative in the fight against terrorism, Casey told Clarridge. The director wanted to reply by forming action teams that could put the CIA on the offensive in a global campaign against terrorist groups. Clarridge told Casey what the director already believed: To succeed, the CIA had to attack the terrorist cells preemptively. If not, “The incidents would become bolder, bloodier, and more numerous.”23
Casey erupted in a “sudden burst of animation” and told Clarridge to interview terrorism specialists around Washington and write up a proposal for a new covert CIA counterterrorist strategy. Clarridge found an office down the hall and started work just after New Year’s Day 1986. By late January Clarridge had drafted his blueprint, an eight-or nine-page double-spaced memo addressed to Casey.
The CIA had several problems in confronting the global terrorist threat, Clarridge wrote. The biggest was its “defensive mentality.” Terrorists operated worldwide “knowing there was little chance of retribution or of their being brought to justice.” Clarridge wanted a new legal operating system for the CIA that would allow offensive strikes against terrorists. He proposed the formation of two super-secret “action teams” that would be funded and equipped to track, attack, and snatch terrorists globally. The action teams would be authorized to kill terrorists if doing so would preempt a terrorist event, or arrest them and bring them to justice if possible. One action team would be made up of foreign nationals who could blend more easily into landscapes overseas. The other action team would be Americans.
Clarridge wrote that the CIA’s regional directorates, with their strict geographical borders, were a poor match for the international mobility of terrorist groups, especially the stateless Palestinians. Terrorism, Clarridge thought, “never fits one particular piece of real estate. It is effective precisely because it spreads all over the map.” Not only the CIA but “the government is not organized as a whole to really deal with transnational problems.”
He proposed a new interdisciplinary center at the CIA, global in reach, to be called the Counterterrorist Center, a “fusion center” that would combine resources from different directorates and break down the agency’s walls. The new center would be located within the Directorate of Operations but would include analysts from the Directorate of Intelligence and tinkerers from the Directorate of Science and Technology. This would be a sharp break from traditional agency organization where action-oriented spies in the Directorate of Operations were separated physically—by bars in some parts of the Langley compound—from the agency’s analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence, who wrote reports and forecasts. The separation h
elped protect the identities of espionage sources, clandestine service officers believed. But over the years the division had become calcified and unexamined.
The memo stirred sharp opposition from the Directorate of Operations. Among other things its officers feared the new center would poach resources and talent. Some spies in the D.O. sniffed at counterterrorism operations as “police work” best left to cops or the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But Robert Gates, then running the Directorate of Intelligence, weighed in to support Clarridge’s ideas, and Casey lined up, too. The CIA’s Counterterrorist Center was born on February 1, 1986. Clarridge was named its first director.
Clarridge helped draft a new highly classified presidential finding on terrorism, authorizing covert action by the CIA against terrorist groups worldwide. It was signed by Reagan at the time of the center’s birth, along with a broader policy document, National Security Decision Directive 207, “The National Program for Combatting Terrorism,” classified Top Secret.24
The covert action finding was developed through an interagency committee on terrorism formed at the National Security Council. The new NSC committee, under various names, would become the main locus for presidential decision-making about terrorism for years to come. Its founding directive highlighted counterterrorism questions that would surface repeatedly in the years ahead. Was terrorism a law enforcement problem or a national security issue? Should the CIA try to capture terrorists alive in order to try them on criminal charges in open courts, or should the goal be to bring them back in body bags? The policies set out in NSDD-207 came down on both sides of these questions. Yes, in some cases terrorism was a law enforcement problem, but in others it should be handled as a military matter. Terrorists should be captured for trial when possible, but that would not always be a requirement.
The initial draft finding authorized the new action teams Clarridge and Casey sought, and it permitted the CIA to undertake secret operations to defeat terrorism, both on its own and in liaison with foreign governments. The purpose of such covert action would be to detect, disrupt, and preempt terrorist strikes. This could include capturing terrorists for trial or striking militarily if the enemy were on the verge of launching a terrorist operation.
Clarridge interpreted the new finding as authority “to do pretty much anything he wanted against the terrorists,” recalled Robert Baer, one of the center’s early recruits from the Directorate of Operations. But the proposed action teams, particularly the one to be composed of foreigners, stirred nervous reaction on Capitol Hill. Some privately labeled them “hit teams.”25
The CIA and the NSC had to brief the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about the new presidential finding. Robert Gates recalled going to a secure Hill hearing room for one such session, “and we got to the question of when you could kill a terrorist, and we had this almost theological argument. ‘Well, if the guy is driving toward the barracks with a truck full of explosives, can you kill him?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, what if he’s in his apartment putting the explosives together?’ ‘Well, I don’t know.’ ”26
It was a debate that would continue, more or less in that form and largely unresolved, for the next fifteen years, until the morning of September 11, 2001.
The Counterterrorist Center took life on Langley’s sixth floor in a burst of “pure frenetic energy,” Baer recalled. “Everyone worked in one huge, open bay. With the telephones ringing nonstop, printers clattering, files stacked all over the place, CNN playing on TV monitors bolted to the ceiling, hundreds of people in motion and at their computers, it gave the impression of a war room.” But as the political and legal scandals surrounding Casey’s adventures in Nicaragua and Iran swelled across Washington during 1986, the original “war room” vision for action teams and an offensive posture yielded to a more cautious, analytical, report-writing culture than Casey and Clarridge had originally imagined.
“Casey had envisaged it as something different than what it eventually became,” recalled Vincent Cannistraro, who arrived as an operations officer soon after the center’s founding. The Iran-Contra scandal had involved disclosures of illegal support by Oliver North, Casey, and other policy makers for Nicaraguan rebels as well as illegal shipments of missiles to Iran in an effort to free the American hostages in Lebanon. In the aftermath, “Casey, of course, was looked on as an adventurer and Dewey as kind of a cowboy,” Cannistraro said. The appetite for risk-taking within the center and on the Hill oversight committees waned rapidly.27
Still, Clarridge remained in charge, and he began to push his colleagues.
Secular leftist groups carried out the most visible terrorist strikes in 1985 and 1986. Some of these groups advocated a nationalist cause—the Palestinian terrorists, the Irish Republican Army, the Basque separatists. Others chased more abstract Marxist revolutionary goals, such as Germany’s Baader Meinhof Gang and Italy’s Red Brigades. Most case officers and analysts at the CIA saw fewer direct links between the Soviet Union and these secular leftist terrorists than Casey did. Still, all these terrorists openly described themselves as vanguards in the left-right ideological struggle of the Cold War. Clarridge opened terrorism-focused liaisons with security services across Europe, providing technological help where possible, such as beacons that he inserted into planted weapons to help track the locations of Basque separatist cells in Spain.28 The CIA’s officers and their counterparts in Europe had long experience with these kinds of groups. They understood their mind-sets. In some cases they had attended the same universities as the radicals. They knew how to talk to them, how to recruit them, how to corrupt them.
At its start the Counterterrorist Center concentrated heavily on these leftist terrorists. The center was organized into subunits that targeted particular groups. One of the largest units focused on the Abu Nidal Organization, which had claimed hundreds of civilian lives in multiple strikes during the 1980s. Clarridge and his colleagues decided to sow dissent by exposing the group’s financial operations and trying to raise suspicions among members. Abu Nidal had become a paranoid, self-immolating group on its own accord, but the agency helped accelerate its breakup through penetrations and disinformation. Abu Nidal faded as an effective terrorist organization within three years. There were other successes, especially in Germany and Italy, where the terrorists began to consume themselves, sometimes helped along by covert operations.
Hezbollah, on the other hand, proved a very hard target. It was the new center’s first attempt to penetrate a committed Islamist terrorist organization that targeted American citizens. The experience offered ill omens for the future. A radical Islamic Shiite faction in Lebanon’s civil war that began to serve as a proxy force for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah had become a terrorist branch of the still-churning Iranian Revolution.
The CIA had no sources in Hezbollah’s leadership. Hezbollah’s pious members did not hang out in the hotels and salons that made Abu Nidal members such accessible targets. The CIA’s unilateral resources in the Middle East were spread thin. Baer was one of only two Arabic speakers in the Counterterrorist Center at the time it was launched. For a full year after Hezbollah kidnapped and tortured the CIA’s Beirut station chief, William Buckley, beginning in 1984, the agency “had absolutely no idea” who had taken him or the other American hostages in Lebanon, Baer recalled. Meanwhile, the Counterterrorist Center had to deal with hoax after hoax—some mounted by Hezbollah as disinformation—about where the hostages were located.29
Clarridge wanted to attack. He sought to enlist U.S. Special Forces to launch an elaborate hostage rescue operation in Beirut. He rigged up special refrigerator trucks in Europe, disguised to look as if they belonged to Lebanese merchants; he hoped they could be shipped in and used to run Delta Force commandos into West Beirut. But the Pentagon’s generals, citing weak intelligence about where the hostages were actually being held, said they would not launch such an operation unless there were American “eyes on the target,” confirming the presence of hostages, twenty-four
hours before the operation began. They would not trust a Lebanese or other Arab spotter; they wanted an American in place.30
Clarridge had no obvious way to infiltrate an American agent into West Beirut. The Counterterrorist Center trained a Filipino-born Delta Force soldier for insertion in disguise into Beirut, in the hope that he might be able to provide the required American eyes on the target. But that high-risk operation foundered. The center was “totally incapable of collecting real-time intelligence on Hezbollah because, one, we didn’t understand it,” recalled Cannistraro. “We understood secular terrorism, radical terrorism; these were people we were comfortable with.”
Clarridge wondered if technology might not solve the problem that human intelligence seemed unable to crack. He loved the Counterterrorist Center’s engineers on the science and technology side; they took what Clarridge liked to call a “Radio Shack approach” to problem-solving. Clarridge commissioned them to work on a highly classified pilotless drone equipped with intercept equipment, an infrared camera, and low-noise wooden propellers. It might fly overhead at about 2,500 feet and locate the American hostages. He spent $7 million on five prototypes in what he dubbed the Eagle Program.
Another use for the drones might be sabotage operations in Libya. Clarridge wanted to load one drone with two hundred pounds of C-4 plastic explosives and one hundred pounds of ball bearings. His plan was to fly it onto Tripoli’s air field at night, blow it up, and destroy “a whole bunch” of commercial airliners sitting unoccupied on the ground. He also tried to load small rockets onto the drones that could be used to fire at predesignated targets.31 But all of the technology was in its infancy. And Clarridge made some of his colleagues very nervous, especially in the era of Iran-Contra.