Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  One of Clarke’s talents was to sense where national security issues were going before most other people did, and to position himself as a player on the rising questions of the day. By 1997 he gravitated toward counterterrorism. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing and the downing of TWA Flight 800 (mistakenly believed at first to be a terrorist incident), the White House requested and Congress wrote enormous new appropriations for counterterrorist programs in a dozen federal departments. In an era of tight federal budgets, terrorism was a rare bureaucratic growth industry. From his National Security Council suite Clarke shaped these financial decisions. He also took control over interagency reviews of terrorist threats and counterterrorist policy. Backed by National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Clarke reorganized day-to-day policy making on terrorism and what later would become known as homeland defense.32

  Clarke declared that America faced a new era of terrorist threats for which it was woefully unprepared. He proposed a newly muscled Counterterrorism Security Group to be chaired by a new national security official, the National Coordinator for Infrastructure Protection and Counterterrorism. Naturally, his colleagues noted as memoranda and position papers flew back and forth to define this new job, it emerged that no one was better qualified to take it on than Richard Clarke himself.

  In this elevated role, he would chair a new working group whose core members would be the heads of the counterterrorist departments of the CIA, FBI, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Departments of Defense, Justice, and State. At the Pentagon and the FBI, officials who had been running counterterrorist programs without any White House oversight balked at Clarke’s power grabs. They protested that he was setting himself up to become another Oliver North, that the National Security Council would “go operational” by running secret counterterrorist programs. Clarke said his critics were “paranoid.” He was just trying to “facilitate” decision-making. In the end Clarke’s opponents did force President Clinton to insert language in his final, classified decision directive to make clear that Clarke had no operational power. But the rest of Presidential Decision Directive-62, as it was called, signed by Clinton on May 22, 1998, anointed Clarke as the White House’s new counterterrorism czar, with unprecedented authority. Over time he acquired a seat at Clinton’s Cabinet table as a “principal,” equal in rank to the secretary of defense or the secretary of state, whenever the Cabinet met to discuss terrorism. No national security staffer of Clarke’s rank had ever enjoyed such Cabinet status in White House history. PDD-62, formally titled “Protection Against Unconventional Threat to the Homeland and Americans Overseas,” laid out a counterterrorism mission on ten related tracks, with a lead federal agency assigned to each one. The CIA’s track was “disruption” of terrorist groups.33

  Clarke’s ascension meant the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center managers had a new man to please at the White House. CIA director Tenet enjoyed a close working relationship with Sandy Berger and others at the National Security Council because of Tenet’s years on the White House staff. But the CIA managers who worked two rungs down now had to build an equally effective relationship with Richard Clarke, no easy task given his forceful personality. On policy issues the CIA managers mainly regarded Clarke as an ally. He “got” the seriousness of the bin Laden threat, it was commonly said in the agency’s Counterterrorist Center, and Clarke generally supported the CIA’s nascent programs to capture or disrupt bin Laden in Afghanistan. Indeed, Clarke sometimes pushed harder for action on bin Laden than the CIA’s own officers recommended. The trouble was, Clarke could be such a bully that when the CIA managers felt he was wrong, they had no way to go around him. On the whole, this suited a White House wary of Langley’s unwieldy bureaucracy. As Berger said later: “I wanted a pile driver.”

  Bin Laden was by no means Richard Clarke’s only counterterrorist priority. Reflecting President Clinton’s private fears, he repeatedly sounded alarms about the danger of a biological weapons attack against the United States. He pushed for new vaccination stocks against smallpox and other threats, and he lashed departments such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency to prepare for unexpected terrorist-spawned epidemics. Clarke spent equally long hours on new policies to guard government and business against the threat of cyberterrorism—“an electronic Pearl Harbor,” as he called it.34

  To galvanize action he repeatedly issued frightening statements about the new terrorist danger facing the United States. American military superiority “forces potential future opponents to look for ways to attack us other than traditional, direct military attacks. How do you do that? Through truck bombs. Through nerve gas attacks on populated areas. Through biological attacks on populated areas.” Clarke compared his crusade to Winston Churchill’s lonely, isolated campaign during the 1930s to call attention to rising Nazi power before it was too late. If Churchill had prevailed when he first called for action, Clarke said, he would have gone down in history “as a hawk, as someone who exaggerated the threat, who saber-rattled and did needless things.”35 Increasingly, this was the charge Clarke himself faced. National security analysts and members of Congress accused him of hyping the terrorist threat to scare Congress into allocating ever greater sums of federal funds so that Clarke’s own influence and authority would grow.

  “I would be delighted three or four years from now to say we’ve wasted money,” Clarke said in reply. “I’d much rather have that happen than have to explain to the Congress and the American people why we weren’t ready, and why we let so many Americans die.”36

  AS THEY REFINED their snatch plans in the spring of 1998, the bin Laden unit at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center looked with rising interest at Tarnak Farm. This was a compound of perhaps a hundred acres that lay isolated on a stretch of desert about three miles from the American-built terminal building at Kandahar airport. On many nights, the CIA learned, bin Laden slept at Tarnak with one of his wives.

  Tarnak presented a raiding party with no challenges of terrain or urban maneuver. It had been constructed by the Afghan government years before as an agricultural cooperative. The farm itself was encircled by a mud-brick wall perhaps ten feet high. Inside were about eighty modest one-story and two-story structures made from concrete or mud-brick. These included dormitory-style housing, storage facilities, a tiny mosque, and a building that bin Laden converted into a small medical clinic for his family and his followers. On the edge of the compound stood a crumbling, water-streaked, six-story office building originally erected for bureaucrats from the government’s agricultural departments. Immediately outside the compound walls were a few irrigated plots, canals, and drainage ditches. But the most remarkable feature of Tarnak Farm was its stark physical isolation. Flat plains of sand and sagebrush extended for miles. Vineyards and irrigated fields dotted the landscape in checkerboard patches, but there were virtually no trees in any direction. The nearest buildings, haphazard extensions of the airport complex, were more than a mile away. Kandahar’s crowded bazaars lay half an hour’s drive beyond. 37

  Case officers in Islamabad spent long hours with the tribal team’s leaders devising a plan to attack Tarnak in the middle of the night. The Afghans would seize and hold bin Laden prisoner until the Americans figured out what to do with him. They ran two rehearsals in the United States late in 1997. Tenet briefed Berger in February. A third rehearsal took place in March. Still, Clarke wrote Berger that he felt the CIA seemed “months away from doing anything.”

  The raid plan was meticulously detailed. The Afghans had scouted and mapped Tarnak up close, and the CIA had photographed it from satellites. The agents had organized an attack party of about thirty fighters. They identified a staging point where they would assemble all of their CIA-supplied vehicles—motorcycles, trucks, and Land Cruisers. They would drive from there to a secondary rallying point a few miles away from Tarnak. The main raiding party, armed with assault rifles, secure communications, and other equipment, planned to walk across the flat plain toward Tarnak in blackened night, arriv
ing at its walls around 2 A.M. They had scouted a path to avoid minefields and use deep gulleys to mask their approach. On the airport side of the compound a drainage ditch ran underneath Tarnak’s outer wall. The attackers intended to enter by crawling through the ditch. As they did, a second group would roll quietly and slowly toward the front gate in two jeeps. They would carry silenced pistols to take out the two guards stationed at the entrance. Meanwhile the walk-in party would have burst into each of the several small huts where bin Laden’s wives slept. When they found the tall, bearded Saudi, they would cuff him, drag him toward the gate, and load him in a Land Cruiser. A second group of vehicles at the rally point would approach in sequence, and they would all drive together to the cave complex thirty miles away that had been stocked with food and water. Recalled station chief Gary Schroen, “It was as well conceived as a group of amateur soldiers with some training could do.” He wrote Langley on May 6 that the tribals were now “almost as professional” as U.S. commandos.38

  As they finalized the plan, the CIA officers found themselves pulled into emotional debates about legal authorities and the potential for civilian casualties if a shootout erupted at Tarnak. Satellite photography and reports from the ground indicated that there were dozens of women and children living at Tarnak. Langley headquarters asked for detailed explanations from the tribal team about how they planned to minimize harm to women and children during their assault. Case officers sat down with the team leaders and walked through a series of questions: “Okay, you identify that building. What if he’s not in that building? What if he’s next door? And what are you going to do about collateral damage?” It was a frustrating discussion on both sides. The Americans thought their agents were serious, semiprofessional fighters who were trying to cooperate with the CIA as best they could. Yet “if you understood the Afghan mind-set and the context,” Schroen put it later, you understood that in any raid on Tarnak, realistically, the Afghans were probably going to have to fire indiscriminately to get the job done.39

  During these talks the tribal agents would say, in effect, as Schroen recalled it, “Well, we’re going to do our best. We’re going to be selective about who we’ll shoot.” But by the time the cables describing these assurances and conversations circulated at Langley, where the plan awaited approval from senior managers, there were some at CIA headquarters who began to attack the proposed Tarnak raid as reckless. Schroen urged his superiors to “step back and keep our fingers crossed” and hope the tribals “prove as good (and as lucky) as they think they will be.” But the deputy chief of the CIA’s clandestine service, James Pavitt, worried aloud about casualties and financial costs. A classified memo to approve the raid reached the White House in May. The CIA ran a final rehearsal late that month and awaited a decision.40

  BIN LADEN CONTINUED to call public attention to himself. When India unexpectedly tested a nuclear weapon that May, bin Laden called on “the Muslim nation and Pakistan” to “prepare for the jihad,” which should “include a nuclear force.” In an interview with ABC News, broadcast to the network’s sizable national audience, bin Laden declared that his coalition’s “battle against the Americans is far greater than our battle was against the Russians. We anticipate a black future for America. Instead of remaining the United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.” Americans would withdraw from Saudi Arabia “when the bodies of American soldiers and civilians are sent in the wooden boxes and coffins,” he declared.41

  As these threats echoed, Richard Clarke pulled meetings together at the White House to consider options. The CIA Counterterrorist Center was represented at these sessions, but the CIA officer present was cautious about discussing the center’s tribal assets. Very few people in or out of the agency knew of the draft plan to snatch bin Laden at Tarnak Farm.

  There was a natural tension between Richard Clarke’s counterterrorism shop at the White House and the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. Clarke personified presidential authority and control over CIA prerogatives. He could influence budgets and help write legal guidance. There was a suspicion at the CIA that Clarke wanted direct control over agency operations. For their part, Clarke and his team saw Langley as self-protectively secretive and sometimes defensive about their plans. The White House team suspected that the CIA used its classification rules not only to protect its agents but also to deflect outside scrutiny of its covert operations. In one sense Clarke and the CIA’s counterterrorist officers were allies: They all strongly believed by the spring of 1998 that bin Laden was a serious threat and that action was warranted to bring him into custody. In other respects, however, they mistrusted each other’s motives and worried about who would be blamed if something went wrong in a risky operation. The CIA, in particular, had been conditioned by history to recoil from gung-ho “allies” at the National Security Council. Too often in the past, as in the case of Oliver North, CIA managers felt the agency had been goaded into risky or illegal operations by politically motivated White House cowboys, only to be left twisting after the operations went bad. White House officials came and went in the rhythm of electoral seasons; the CIA had permanent institutional interests to protect.

  Clarke and his counterterrorism group were interested in a snatch operation against bin Laden that could succeed. But they were skeptical about the Tarnak raid. Their sense was that the agents were old anti-Soviet mujahedin who had long since passed their peak fighting years and that they were probably milking the CIA for money while minimizing the risks they took on the ground. Some in the White House felt that the agents seemed unlikely to mount a serious attack on Tarnak. Worse, if they did go through with it, they would probably not be able to distinguish between a seven-year-old girl on a tricycle and a man who looked like Osama bin Laden holding an assault rifle. Women and children would die, and bin Laden would probably escape. Such a massacre would undermine U.S. national interests in the Muslim world and elsewhere.42

  The CIA’s leadership reviewed the proposed raid in late May. The discussion surfaced doubts among senior officers in the Directorate of Operations about the raid’s chances for success. In the end, as Tenet described it to colleagues years later, all of the CIA’s relevant chain of command—Jack Downing, then chief of the D.O., his deputy Jim Pavitt, Counterterrorist Center Chief O’Connell, and his deputy Paul Pillar—told Tenet the Tarnak raid was a bad idea. There was also no enthusiasm for it at the White House. Recalled one senior Clinton administration official involved: “From our perspective, and from George’s, it was a stupid plan. It was an open plain… . I couldn’t believe this was their great plan—it was a frontal assault.” Richard Clarke, by this official’s account, did little to disguise his disdain. He asked his White House colleagues and the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center team sarcastically, “Am I missing something? Aren’t these people going to be mowed down on their way to the wall?”

  Tenet never formally presented the Tarnak Farm raid plan for President Clinton’s approval. Tenet’s antennae about political risk had been well calibrated during his years as a congressional and White House staffer. He was unlikely to endorse any operation that posed high risks of civilian casualties. He also was in the midst of a new, secret diplomatic initiative against bin Laden involving Saudi Arabia; a failed attack on Tarnak might end that effort.

  The decision was cabled to Islamabad: There would be no raid. Mike Scheuer, the chief of the bin Laden unit, wrote to colleagues that he had been told that Clinton’s cabinet feared “collateral damage” and accusations of assassination. Decision-makers feared that “the purpose and nature of the operation would be subject to unavoidable misinterpretation … in the event that bin Laden, despite our best intentions and efforts, did not survive.”43 The tribal team’s plans should be set aside, perhaps to be revived later. Meanwhile the agents were encouraged to continue to look for opportunities to catch bin Laden away from Tarnak, traveling only with his bodyguard.

  Some of the field-lev
el CIA officers involved in the Tarnak planning reacted bitterly to the decision. They had put a great deal of effort into their work. They believed the raid could succeed. If bin Laden was not stopped now, the challenge he presented would only deepen.

  As it happened, this was only the beginning of their frustration.

  22

  “The Kingdom’s Interests”

  PRINCE TURKI AL-FAISAL, the Saudi intelligence chief, saw the threat posed by Osama bin Laden through a lens colored by Saudi Arabian politics. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri preached against the kingdom in its own language: They denounced the royal family’s claim to be the true and legitimate guardians of Sunni Islam’s two most important holy places, Mecca and Medina. They appealed to the Koran as inspiration for violent revolt against the ruling al-Sauds. Bin Laden continued to use his wealth and the global channels of digital technology to link up with other Saudi Islamist dissidents inside the kingdom and in exile. For years the Saudis had tried to hold bin Laden at a distance, hoping to isolate and outlast him. “There are no permanent enemies here in Saudi Arabia,” a leading prince once remarked, describing the kingdom’s swirling webs of family-rooted alliances and enmities.1 With his shrill cries for jihad against the royal family, however, bin Laden was starting to make himself an exception.