Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  Among Western intelligence analysts it became common to view al-Zawahiri as dominant over bin Laden. He was often described as a mentor, a successor to Abdullah Azzam as an intellectual father figure in bin Laden’s life. The Egyptian had grown from a lean, awkward youth whose face was framed by oversized eyeglasses into a fleshy, squat man with a round head and a long gray-flecked beard. He still wore square, plastic eyeglass frames, but the effect now was owlish. Al-Zawahiri was eight years older than bin Laden; he came from a more sophisticated Cairo world, and he had traveled more widely. He was a practicing physician who had been tortured while in prison, and he had emerged as a more hardened terrorist operator, a veteran of long prison debates about Islam and politics. He had the sharp convictions that bin Laden sometimes seemed to lack.

  Certainly al-Zawahiri was by 1997 a more experienced killer than the still soft-mannered, long-winded, project-oriented, media-conscious bin Laden. He had supervised terrorist operations from Cairo to Islamabad for nearly two decades. Some aspects of their personalities and careers might suggest that it was bin Laden who was the real leader between them. Accounts of al-Zawahiri’s life from family friends and prison cellmates paint him as an awkward, withdrawn, disputatious man of little grace and much violence. Between them it was bin Laden who had developed a greater sense of entitlement, presence, and public ambition. Al-Zawahiri and his Egyptian colleagues entered into endless internal battles over ideology, power, and leadership, struggles in which al-Zawahiri became increasingly isolated and reviled even among hardcore Egyptian radicals.13 This was not bin Laden’s style. Through his wealth and his personal charisma he managed over many years to ingratiate himself with a wide range of fellow Islamists, even those whose outlooks and interests differed markedly from his own. It is difficult to know, then, how bin Laden and al-Zawahiri interacted in private—where the power in their relationship lay, how much tension was present and when.

  In Sudan they began to work together on at least some terrorist operations against Egyptian and American targets, including an effort to train Somali militiamen to kill U.S. soldiers there. But when bin Laden migrated to Afghanistan in the spring of 1996, al-Zawahiri did not follow. He tried initially to travel to Chechnya to restart his own independent branch of the Islamic Jihad. He was arrested by Russian authorities in Dagestan and jailed for months, but because he was traveling on a false passport, the Russians never learned who he was and eventually released him.14 Hunted by Egyptian authorities, he slipped into Afghanistan and reunited with bin Laden. The manifesto they jointly published on February 23, 1998, marked the public rebirth of their partnership.

  Al-Zawahiri had spent most of his life in determined personal warfare against the government of Egypt, but by early 1998, exiled to Afghanistan and repudiated by many of his Egyptian colleagues, he had no plausible way to carry that battle on. Like bin Laden, al-Zawahiri decided to redirect his effort and his anger from “the near enemy” in Cairo toward the United States, which he called “the distant enemy.”15

  Bin Laden often spoke about the imperative for Islamist violence in frightening but general terms. Al-Zawahiri, on the other hand, spoke like a bloodthirsty staff sergeant just back from the trenches. “Tracking down the Americans and the Jews is not impossible,” he wrote. “Killing them with a single bullet, a stab, or a device made up of a popular mix of explosives, or hitting them with an iron rod is not impossible… . With the available means, small groups could prove to be a frightening horror for the Americans and the Jews.”16

  Like bin Laden, al-Zawahiri believed that it was time for jihadists to carry the war to “the distant enemy” because, once provoked, the Americans would probably reply with revenge attacks and “personally wage the battle against the Muslims,” which would make them ripe for a “clear-cut jihad against infidels.”

  A key war-fighting principle, al-Zawahiri believed, was “the need to inflict the maximum casualties against the opponent, for this is the language understood by the West, no matter how much time and effort such operations take.”17

  THE BIN LADEN UNIT at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center issued an alert memo within days of this manifesto’s issuance. The unit’s professional analysts, specialists in political Islam—the majority of them women, as it happened—had become nuanced students of bin Laden’s threats, media appearances, and self-styled fatwas. They recognized an escalation in the February 23 attack on “Crusaders and Jews.” The statements were “the first from these groups that explicitly justify attacks on American civilians anywhere in the world… . This is the first religious ruling sanctifying such attacks,” the CIA’s analysts wrote.18 Within weeks the State Department issued a worldwide alert calling attention to bin Laden’s threat.19 The government travel warning could offer no specifics, however. This would become a familiar limitation in the months and years ahead.

  At State’s Foggy Bottom headquarters, across the Potomac River from the CIA, bin Laden did not loom as a special concern that winter even in the small South Asia bureau. There the focus remained on larger, seemingly more pressing regional issues: nuclear proliferation in India and Pakistan; the steady rise of Hindu nationalism in India; corruption and political opportunism in Pakistan. State’s diplomats understood the poisonous alliance growing among the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Pakistani intelligence. When a U.S. diplomat formally protested to Pakistan about bin Laden’s threats on March 9, he discussed Pakistan’s arms shipments to the Taliban and its decision to let the Taliban “load up their planes” with fuel at Pakistani air bases. But bin Laden figured mainly as a subset of an already low-ranked issue. He was a talking point in routine démarches (from the French term for formal diplomatic communications). He could not be described as a priority.20

  When Madeleine Albright became secretary of state, she left the post of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. President Clinton appointed as her successor Bill Richardson, a lively, candid, and pudgy Hispanic former congressman from New Mexico with an adventurous spirit and a keen instinct for publicity. Richardson seemed to be a student of the Jesse Jackson school of international diplomacy: He was a self-promoting troubleshooter who loved to make lightning strikes behind enemy lines in search of dramatic negotiating breakthroughs, especially if they might deliver soundbite opportunities on the national network news programs. The post of ambassador to the United Nations was an ideal platform for such forays. It offered a ticket to the world and few political constraints. During Albright’s tour at the U.N., one of her key deputies had been Rick Inderfurth, the former ABC News correspondent who in 1997 had followed her to Foggy Bottom as assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs. During a brief overlap at the U.N., Inderfurth had suggested that Richardson consider Afghanistan as a destination for one of his signature foreign tours. Nobody had claimed Afghanistan as a policy priority at the State Department, Richardson recalled, and as a result “our policy seemed a little rudderless.” He saw opportunity.21

  In the winter of 1998, Richardson scheduled a South Asian trip. He invited the NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell to accompany him. Richardson planned to travel to India and Pakistan to talk about nuclear proliferation, to Sri Lanka to discuss the civil war, and to Afghanistan to see if he could jump-start peace negotiations with the Taliban. Mitchell could follow along and file exclusive reports to NBC Nightly News.

  Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri issued their anti-American manifesto just as Richardson was preparing to leave. The CIA caught wind of his schedule and set up an intelligence briefing before he departed. Bin Laden had been “a secondary issue,” as Richardson recalled, but the manifesto against Crusaders and Jews demonstrated the Saudi’s “growing strength” and presented a fresh opportunity to lobby the Taliban for bin Laden’s extradition. To whom bin Laden might be extradited was not clear since no American grand jury had yet handed down an indictment. Still, Richardson developed talking points that urged the Taliban “to extradite him … [that] we have evidence that he is a terrorist that is conspiring
to hurt the American people.”22

  Richardson discussed his plans in a brief sidebar chat with President Clinton after a White House Cabinet meeting. Clinton half-joked with Richardson, as the latter recalled it: “Hey, geez, I’m really jealous. You’re going to Afghanistan… . That should be a lot of fun.” He added, turning serious, “God, if we can get some stability there … that would be terrific.”

  Clinton pointed at Richardson and told him, “Make sure you get briefed by Langley.” As Richardson understood it, the president was referring to bin Laden’s recent threats.23

  Bruce Riedel, a CIA officer assigned to the National Security Council, walked Richardson through the Afghanistan issue set, including bin Laden, but he did not inform him about the Counterterrorist Center’s ongoing plans to use Afghan agents to kidnap the Saudi and render him to justice. To protect the integrity of such operations and the identity of paid agents, the CIA compartmented such material at a level of Top Secret classification so high that hardly anyone at the State Department knew of its existence.

  The CIA’s main worry about Richardson’s trip was that bin Laden would seize the presence of an American Cabinet member in Kabul to make good on the threats in his February declaration. The agency urged Richardson to consider canceling the Afghan leg of his travel. But Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.N., seeing an opportunity to legitimize the Taliban in international eyes, promised to make Richardson’s visit a success. Any harm to Richardson would rebound disastrously on Pakistan, now widely seen as the Taliban’s sponsors. Richardson figured that he could count on Pakistan’s self-interested influence with Mullah Omar to keep his travel party safe.

  Just in case, American fighter jets tailed Richardson’s U.N. plane as it banked across the barren Hindu Kush Mountains toward the Afghan capital. “God, the mountains,” Richardson exclaimed as he deplaned in the same lucky blue blazer he wore on all his troubleshooting journeys.24

  His bearded, robed Taliban hosts proudly drove him, Inderfurth, and Andrea Mitchell to the Kabul traffic circle where they had strung up the former Afghan president Najibullah and his brother eighteen months before. Their tour continued at the shuttered U.S. embassy. Afghan employees who swept the compound’s empty walkways greeted Richardson in celebration, hoping vainly that his visit marked an American return. On a Kabul parade ground the Taliban mustered an honor guard bearing swords.

  Mullah Rabbani, chairman of the Kabul shura, swept into a meeting room with bearded colleagues who carried Kalishnikov rifles and immediately began to pray. They were cordial but never looked at Richardson directly. The ambassador declared that he hoped to begin political negotiations that would lead to a ceasefire between the Taliban and Massoud’s Northern Alliance. To his amazement Mullah Rabbani said that he would be willing to participate in such talks. They adjourned to a nearby hall. Richardson and Rabbani talked privately about bin Laden over lunch, a heaping banquet of Afghan rice, meats, and fruits spread across a long table.

  “Look, bin Laden is in your territory,” Richardson told Rabbani. “He’s a bad guy.We have evidence that he has a terrorist network, that he’s conducted terrorist acts, that he’s using your country as a base, and we want you to turn him over to us. We would then legally find a way for this to happen.”25

  The conversation about bin Laden lasted for about forty-five minutes, as Richardson remembered it, with himself, Rabbani, Inderfurth, U.S. ambassador to Islamabad Tom Simons, and two CIA officers listening intently. Inderfurth noticed that in a bookshelf behind them lay tattered leather-bound volumes of the Complete Works of George Washington, apparently left behind by some long-forgotten cultural exchange program of the United States Information Agency.26

  The Taliban offered no concrete concessions. They denied that bin Laden was under their direct control or that he represented a significant threat to the United States.

  “He’s with you,” Simons told the Taliban official next to him. “He is not obeying you, whatever you told him, not to be politically active. There’s this fatwa in February which says that it’s an individual obligation to kill Americans.” The Taliban leaders listened, seemingly puzzled. Bin Laden was not a qualified Islamic scholar, they assured the Americans.27

  And with that, it was over. Richardson was back at Kabul’s airport in the afternoon, boarding his U.N. jet for another leg of his tight itinerary. The Taliban and their political sponsors in Pakistan had achieved their objective: a highly publicized visit with a Clinton Cabinet officer that showed the Taliban as accommodating, reasonable, and open to negotiations.

  The all-Afghan political talks initially agreed to by Rabbani collapsed within weeks. The Taliban’s war with Massoud resumed as if there had been no pause. In June, Richardson left his post at the United Nations for a new job as secretary of energy.

  At the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, Ambassador Tom Simons watched the empty aftermath of Richardson’s flying tour with cynical bemusement. Richardson was a “good guy,” hard to dislike, an able troubleshooter, but the visit seemed typical of the Clinton administration’s approach to Afghanistan. “I won’t call it fey,” Simons said later, “but you know the Clinton administration: ‘Hey, let’s try something!’ ”28

  IN RANK Richard Clarke labored one or two rungs down the Washington ladder from Bill Richardson. In political character he represented the other end of the capital’s spectrum. Richardson was an elected politician, a campaigner, a gifted popularizer, a master of media and public mood. Richard Clarke was a shadowy member of Washington’s permanent intelligence and bureaucratic classes, a self-styled “national security manager” who seemed to wield enormous power precisely because hardly anyone knew who he was or what exactly he did for a living.29

  As Richardson jetted with a camera crew around South Asia that spring, Clarke secluded himself for long hours in his high-ceilinged third-floor suite in a corner of the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the White House. He was working on three classified presidential decision directives that would transform the Clinton administration’s management of terrorism threats, catastrophic attacks, budgets, and decision-making. In doing so, the directives would elevate Clarke’s own power, confirming him formally as a de facto member of Clinton’s Cabinet on terrorism issues. Yet only a handful of other bureaucrats in Washington understood what Clarke was up to that spring. The memoranda he worked with were all classified, and the organizational issues were so obscured by jargon and the complex flowcharts of the Washington interagency process that they could not be easily understood even if they were accessed. Clarke’s plans seemed at once obscure and ambitious. THINK GLOBALLY—ACT GLOBALLY read a small sign near his desk.30

  Clarke’s tall office windows looked south across the Ellipse to the Potomac River and National Airport. His suite had been occupied during the mid-1980s by Colonel Oliver North, and it was possible to believe that Clarke had chosen it for just this reason, so palpably did he thrive on an air of sinister mystery. His preferred method of communication was the short, blunt intra– White House email delivered down classified channels in a signature red font. The son of a Boston chocolate factory worker, Clarke was a pale, stout man whose cropped red hair had turned steadily gray under the pressures of his work. He had ascended through education and restless work, winning entrance by competitive exam to the Boston Latin School, a centuries-old six-year high school whose Revolutionary War–era alumni included John Hancock, Paul Revere, and Benjamin Franklin, and which more recently had launched Joseph Kennedy, the political family’s patriarch. Clarke enrolled at age eleven, just as John F. Kennedy became president. Kennedy’s message about the importance of government service was drummed into Clarke and his classmates “to the extent of brainwashing,” as he recalled it.

  Clarke moved on to the University of Pennsylvania and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At college he was active in student government and was selected to join The Sphinx, an elite club for Penn seniors. It became only the first in a series of hidden, self-s
elected social networks in which Clarke thrived. After working as an intelligence analyst at the Pentagon he was appointed in 1985, at age thirty-four, as the deputy chief of intelligence and research at the State Department. There he authored a plan to spook Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafy by detonating sonic booms over Tripoli, floating rubber rafts mysteriously to the Libyan shore, and spreading false rumors of American military action. The scheme fell apart when the Reagan administration was exposed for planting false stories in an American newspaper. Later Clarke became embroiled in a bitter struggle over accusations that he had turned a blind eye to transfers of military equipment from Israel to China. The State Department’s inspector general concluded that Clarke had usurped his superiors, turning himself into a one-man foreign policy czar and arms-trafficking shop. But Clarke battled back, survived, and transferred to the National Security Council at the White House. His reputation for deft bureaucratic maneuvering grew. Even his friends conceded that he was a blunt instrument, a bully, and occasionally abusive. His enemies regarded him as not only mean but dangerous. Either way, the Israel affair would not be the last time Clarke was accused of running a unilateral American foreign policy.31

  During the first Clinton term Clarke popped up as an indispensable figure in some of the administration’s most interesting foreign policy episodes. He managed the American withdrawal from Somalia, the campaign to replace Boutros Boutros-Ghali as U.N. secretary general, the refugee crisis in east Africa after the Rwandan genocide, and dozens of other complex issues that required White House coordination of vast, divided federal departments. Officially a member of the Senior Executive Service, the highest class of permanent civil servant in the U.S. government, Clarke honed the art of the interagency maneuver in national security affairs. It was not only that he worked hard and bullied opponents until they did his bidding, but he understood in a precise, disciplined way how to use his seat at the White House to manipulate money in the federal budget to reinforce policy priorities that he personally championed. Clarke had also learned how to manage a formal, seemingly inclusive interagency decision-making process—one that involved regular meetings at which minutes were kept—while privately priming the process through an informal, back-channel network of personal connections. Rivals attributed to Clarke the unseen powers of a Rasputin, and even where these fears were exaggerated, Clarke did little to disabuse the believers. He shook his head modestly and said he was just trying to bring people together.