Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  The plot to bomb American passenger planes over the Pacific was far along. Yousef had concocted a timing device fashioned from a Casio watch and a mix of explosives that could not be detected by airport security screeners. He planned to board an interlocking sequence of civilian flights. He would place the explosives on board, set the timers, and exit at layover stops before the bombs went off. He had already killed a Japanese businessman when he detonated a small bomb during a practice run, planting the device in an airplane seat and exiting the flight at a stopover before it exploded. If his larger plan had not been disrupted, as many as a thousand Americans might have died in the attacks during the first months of 1995.

  The plot to crash a plane into CIA headquarters was described in a briefing report written by the Manila police and sent to American investigators. Murad said the idea arose in conversation between himself and Yousef. The Filipino police wrote that winter that Murad planned “to board any American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary passenger. Then he will hijack said aircraft, control its cockpit, and dive it at the CIA headquarters. There will be no bomb or any explosive that he will use in its execution. It is simply a suicidal mission that he is very much willing to execute.”27

  THESE WERE NOT the only indications early in 1995 that the United States faced a newly potent terrorist threat in the Sunni Islamic world. Islamist violence connected to Arab veterans of the Afghan jihad surged worldwide.

  The attacks were diverse and the perpetrators often mysterious. Suicidal attacks became a more common motif. Increasingly, the attacks came from insurgent groups in North Africa, Egypt, Sudan, and Pakistan. Increasingly, evidence surfaced that Islamist terrorists had experimented with weapons of mass destruction. Increasingly, Osama bin Laden loomed in the background of the attacks as a source of inspiration or financial support or both.

  In August 1994 three hooded North Africans killed two Spanish tourists in a Marrakesh hotel. The attackers and their handlers had trained in Afghanistan. Bombings of the Paris Metro later that year were traced to Algerians trained in Afghan camps. In December 1994 four Algerian terrorists from the Armed Islamic Group hijacked an Air France jet. They planned to fly to Paris and slam the plane kamikaze-style into the Eiffel Tower. French authorities fooled the hijackers into believing that they did not have enough fuel to reach Paris, so they diverted to Marseilles where all four were shot dead by French commandos. In March 1995, Belgian investigators seized a terrorist training manual from Algerian militants. The document explained how to make a bomb using a wristwatch as a timer, and its preface was dedicated to bin Laden. In April, Filipino guerrillas swearing loyalty to the Afghan mujahedin leader Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf sacked the Mindanao island town of Ipil. They killed sixty-three people, robbed four banks, and took fifty-three hostages, killing a dozen of them. On June 26, 1995, Egyptian guerrillas with the Islamic Group, equipped with Sudanese passports, unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia. A month later a member of the Egyptian extremist group al-Jihad said in a published interview that bin Laden sometimes knew about their specific terrorist operations against Egyptian targets. On November 13, 1995, a car bomb loaded with about 250 pounds of explosives blew up near the three-story headquarters of the office of the program manager of the Saudi Arabian national guard in Riyadh. Five Americans died, and thirty-four were wounded. Months later one of the perpetrators confessed in a Saudi television broadcast that he was influenced by bin Laden and the Egyptian Islamist groups, and that he had learned how to make the car bomb because of “my experiences in explosives which I had during my participation in the Afghan jihad operations.” One week after the Riyadh bombing, Islamist terrorists drove a suicide truck bomb into the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, killing fifteen people and injuring eighty.28

  Imprinted in these events was an outline of the future. The CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and the FBI’s analytical units recognized essential parts of the new pattern, but they did not see it all.

  Murad’s confession about a plan to hijack a civilian airliner and crash it into the CIA received little attention at the FBI because that plot was not part of the evidentiary case the bureau was building for courtroom prosecution. The FBI was distracted. Domestic terrorism overshadowed Islamist attacks during 1995. In April, Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb outside the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 and wounding hundreds more. The bombing galvanized the Clinton administration to focus on terrorism, but the long investigation drained FBI resources. The bureau never followed up with a detailed investigation of the airplane kamikaze plan.29

  The CIA remained focused on Iranian and Shiite terrorist threats. Late in 1994 the CIA station in Riyadh reported on surveillance of American targets in the kingdom by Iranian agents and their radical Saudi Shiite allies. Woolsey visited the kingdom in December and huddled with Prince Turki. They discussed joint plans to monitor and disrupt the Iranian threat in the months ahead. CIA reporting about Iranian-sponsored terrorist threats inside Saudi Arabia continued at a high tempo throughout 1995. In October the White House received intelligence that the Iranian-backed, Shiite-dominated Hezbollah terrorist organization had dispatched a hit squad to assassinate National Security Adviser Tony Lake. He moved out of his home temporarily and into safehouses in Washington. Because the Saudi intelligence service was so heavily focused on the Shiites, Prince Turki recalled, the Riyadh bombing in November by bin Laden–inspired Afghan veterans came “out of nowhere.” Even after that attack, Iran remained a major threat, drawing attention and resources away from bin Laden and his followers.30

  The CIA’s Near East Division of the Directorate of Operations, responsible for much of the Sunni Muslim world, also was distracted by Iraq. Its ambitious covert operations to overthrow Saddam Hussein from bases in northern Iraq were collapsing that spring.

  All of this turmoil swirled in the weeks and months after Yousef’s arrest, presenting investigators with a rich cache of evidence. The essential analytical questions remained the same as they had been for several years. Were terrorists like Ramzi Yousef best seen as solo entrepreneurs or as operatives of a larger movement? Where were the key nodes of leadership and resource support? Was CIA analyst Paul Pillar’s notion of ad hoc terrorism adequate anymore, or did the United States now confront a more organized and potent circle of Sunni Muslim jihadists bent on spectacular attacks?

  Hardly anyone in Washington or at Langley yet saw the full significance of bin Laden and al Qaeda. When President Clinton signed Executive Order 12947 on January 23, 1995, imposing sanctions on twelve terrorist groups because of their role in disrupting the Middle East peace process, neither al Qaeda nor bin Laden made the list.31

  These blind spots among American intelligence analysts partly reflected the fragmentary, contradictory evidence they had to work with. Cofer Black’s cables from Khartoum showed the diversity of bin Laden’s multinational allies. Clearly bin Laden’s network did not operate as a conventional hierarchical group.

  Many American analysts clung to preconceived ideas about who in the Middle East was an ally and who was an enemy. American strategy in 1995, ratified by Clinton’s National Security Council, was to contain and frustrate Iran and Iraq. In this mission Saudi Arabia was an elusive but essential ally. It was an embedded assumption of Amerian foreign policy that Iraq and Iran could not be managed without Saudi cooperation. Then, too, there was the crucial importance of Saudi Arabia in the global oil markets. There was strong reluctance in Washington to challenge the Saudi royal family over its funding of Islamist radicals, its appeasement of anti-American preachers, or its ardent worldwide proselytizing. There was little impetus to step back and ask big, uncomfortable questions about whether Saudi charities represented a fundamental threat to American national security. The Saudis worked assiduously to maintain diverse contacts within the CIA, outside of official channels. Several retired Riyadh station chiefs and senior Near East Division managers went on the Saudi payrol
l as consultants during the mid-1990s.32

  American Arabists had studied the Middle East for decades through a Cold War lens, their vision narrowed by continuous intimate contact with secular Arab elites. American spies and strategists rarely entered the lower-middle-class mosques of Algiers, Tunis, Cairo,Karachi, or Jedda, where anti-American cassette tape sermons were for sale on folding tables at the door.

  Despite all these limitations, American intelligence analysts developed by mid-1995 a clearer picture of the new terrorist enemy. For the first time the image of a global network began to emerge. The FBI and the CIA each produced ambitious classified intelligence reports during the second half of 1995 that sifted the evidence in the Yousef case and pushed strong new forecasts.

  As part of a long review of global terrorism circulated by the FBI, classified Secret, the bureau’s analysts assessed the emerging threat under the heading “Ramzi Ahmed Yousef: A New Generation of Sunni Islamic Terrorists.”33 The Yousef case “has led us to conclude that a new generation of terrorists has appeared on the world stage over the past few years,” the FBI’s analysts wrote. Yousef and his associates “have access to a worldwide network of support for funding, training and safe haven.” Increasingly, “Islamic extremists are working together to further their cause.” It was “no coincidence” that their terrorism increased as the anti-Soviet Afghan war ended. Afghanistan’s training camps were crucial to Yousef. The camps provided technical resources and allowed him to meet and recruit like-minded radicals. Pakistan and Bosnia had also become important bases for the jihadists.

  The FBI’s report noted the vulnerability of the American homeland to attacks. It specifically cited Murad’s confessed plot to hijack a plane and fly it into CIA headquarters as an example.

  “Unlike traditional forms of terrorism, such as state-sponsored or the Iran/Hezbollah model, Sunni extremists are neither surrogates of nor strongly influenced by one nation,” the FBI’s analysts wrote. “They are autonomous and indigenous.” There was now reason to “suspect Yousef and his associates receive support from Osama bin Laden and may be able to tap into bin Laden’s mujahedin support network.” In addition, they may also have been able to draw on Islamic charities for support. The FBI analysis listed the huge semiofficial Saudi Arabian charity, the International Islamic Relief Organization, and the largest government-sponsored Saudi religious proselytizing organization, the Muslim World League, as important resources for the new terrorists. The cable concluded: “Yousef’s group fits the mold for this new generation of Sunni Islamic terrorists… . The WTC bombing, the Manila plot, and the recent [Islamic Group] attack against Mubarak demonstrate that Islamic extremists can operate anywhere in the world. We believe the threat is not over.”34

  The CIA also saw Yousef’s gang as independent from any hierachy. “As far as we know,” reported a classified agency cable in 1995, “Yousef and his confederates … are not allied with an organized terrorist group and cannot readily call upon such an organized unit to execute retaliatory strikes against the U.S. or countries that have cooperated with the U.S. in the extradition of Yousef and his associates.” That same year, working through the National Intelligence Council, the CIA circulated to Clinton’s Cabinet an annual National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism classified Secret. The estimate was titled “The Foreign Terrorist Threat in the United States” and drew on cables and analyses from across the American intelligence community. Echoing the FBI’s language, the estimate called Yousef’s gang a “new breed” of radical Sunni Islamic terrorist. This “new terrorist phenomenon” involved fluid, transient, multinational groupings of Islamic extremists who saw the United States as their enemy, the estimate warned. It then speculated about future attacks inside the United States. “Several targets are especially at risk: national symbols such as the White House and the Capitol, and symbols of U.S. capitalism such as Wall Street,” the estimate predicted. “We assess that civil aviation will figure prominently among possible terrorist targets in the United States. This stems from the increasing domestic threat posed by foreign terrorists, the continuing appeal of civil aviation as a target, and a domestic aviation security system [whose weaknesses have] been the focus of media attention.”35

  It was now clear that Yousef and his colleagues had developed their terrorist plans by studying American airline security procedures. “If terrorists operating in this country are similarly methodical, they will identify serious vulnerabilities in the security system for domestic flights.” The National Intelligence Estimate made no mention of Osama bin Laden.36

  16

  “Slowly, Slowly

  Sucked into It”

  THE MAN WHO BECAME KNOWN as Ahmed Shah Durrani, a celebrated king of Afghanistan, began his career as an unsuccessful bodyguard. His liege, the Persian emperor Nadir Shah, had conquered lands and treasure as far east as India, but he grew murderous and arbitrary even by the standards of a tyrannical age. Angry courtiers attacked him in his royal desert tent in 1747. Durrani found his ruler’s headless torso in a bloody pool. Sensing they were now on the wrong side of Persian court politics, Durrani and his fellow guards mounted horses and rode east for Kandahar, homeland of their tribes, known to the British as Pashtuns.1

  Kandahar lay uncomfortably exposed in a semiarid plain between the two great Islamic empires of the day: Persia, to the west, and the Mughal Empire, ruled from Kabul to the north. In the Pashtun homeland luscious orchards and farms dotted the banks of the snaking Helmand River. Mud-walled villages unmolested by outside authority nestled in fertile valleys. Swift snow-melt rivers in the surrounding hills seemed to invigorate the strong-boned, strong-willed pathwalkers who drank from them. The desert highways crossing Kandahar carried great caravans between India and Persia, providing road taxes for local governors and loot for tribal highwaymen. Yet Kandahar’s fractious tribes lacked the administrative and military depth of Persia’s throne or the natural defenses of Kabul’s rock-mountain gorges. The region’s two great tribal confederations were the Ghilzais, whose dispersed members lived to the north, toward Jalalabad, and the Abdalis, centered in Kandahar. They marauded against neighbors and passing armies. Chieftains of lineage clans consulted in circle-shaped egalitarian jirgas, where they forged alliances and authorized tribal risings as cyclical and devastating as monsoons. But they had yet to win an empire of their own.

  Ahmed Shah Durrani changed their fortune. His story recounts an inextricable weave of historical fact and received myth. In the standard version, when Durrani reached Kandahar from the scene of Nadir Shah’s murder, he joined a council of Abdali tribal leaders who had been summoned to a shrine at Sher Surkh to choose a new king. In the first round many of the chiefs boasted about their own qualifications. Ahmed, only twenty-four and from a relatively weak subtribe of the Popalzai, remained silent. To break the deadlock a respected holy man placed a strand of wheat on his head and declared that Ahmed should be king because he had given no cause for anger to the others. The tribal chiefs soon put blades of grass in their mouths and hung cloth yokes around their necks to show they agreed to be Ahmed’s cattle. Presumably the spiritual symbols cloaked a practical decision: The most powerful Abdali chiefs had elected the weakest among them as leader, giving them flexibility to rebel whenever they wished. This was a pattern of Pashtun decision-making about kings and presidents that would persist into the twenty-first century.2

  Durrani proved a visionary leader. He crowned himself king in central Kandahar, a flat dust-caked city constructed from sloping mud-brown brick. Its mosques and shrines were decorated by tiles and jewels imported from Persia and India. He called himself the Durr-I-Durrani, or Pearl of Pearls, because of his fondness for pearl earrings. From this the Abdalis became known as the Durranis. His empire was launched with an act of highway robbery near Kandahar. A caravan from India moved toward Persia with a treasure trove. Ahmed seized the load and used it as an instant defense budget. He hired a vast army of Pashtun warriors and subsidized the peace around Kandahar. H
e struck out for India, occupied Delhi, and eventually controlled lands as far away as Tibet. The Ghilzai Pashtun tribes submitted to his rule, and he united the territory that would be known during the twentieth century as Afghanistan. He summered in Kabul, but Kandahar was his capital. When he died in 1773 after twenty-six years on the throne, the region’s proud and grateful Durranis erected a decorated tomb with a soaring turquoise dome in the town center. Signaling the unity their king forged between Islam and a royal house, they built his memorial adjacent to Kandahar’s most holy site, a three-story white mosque inlaid with mosaics. The mosque housed a sacred cloak reputedly worn by the Prophet Mohammed.

  For two centuries Ahmed Shah Durrani’s legacy shaped Afghan politics. His reign located the center of Pashtun tribal and spiritual power in Kandahar, creating an uneasy balance between that city and Kabul. His vast empire quickly disappeared, but its legend inspired expansive visions of Pashtun rule. His unification of Pashtun tribes in a grand royal house laid the foundation for future claims to royal legitimacy in Afghanistan. Many of the kings who followed him came from a different tribal branch, but they saw themselves as his political heirs. King Zahir Shah, overthrown in 1973, exactly two hundred years after Durrani’s death, was the last ruler to claim the heritage of the jirga at Sher Surkh.3

  By 1994 the Kandahar Durranis had fallen into disarray. Many prominent leaders lived in scattered exile in Pakistan, Europe, or the United States. Pakistan’s army and intelligence service, fearing Pashtun royal power, squeezed out Durrani leaders who might revive claims to the Afghan throne. The mujahedin leaders most favored by Pakistani intelligence—Hekmatyar, Rabbani, Sayyaf, and Khalis—did not include any Durrani Pashtuns. Also, the geography of the anti-Soviet war sidelined Kandahar and its clans. The conflict’s key supply lines flowed north from Kabul to the Soviet Union or east toward Pakistan. None of this was Durrani territory. Kandahar knew heavy fighting during the Soviet occupation, but in the war’s strategic geography, it was often a cul-de-sac.