Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  Pillar saw terrorism fundamentally as “a challenge to be managed, not solved,” as he put it later. Terrorist attacks seemed likely to become a permanent feature of American experience, he believed. He objected to the metaphor of waging “war” against terrorism because “it is a war that cannot be won” and also “unlike most wars, it has neither a fixed set of enemies nor the prospect of coming to closure.” A better analogy than war might be “the effort by public health authorities to control communicable diseases.” A lesson of American counterterrorism efforts since the 1980s was that the threat could not be defeated, only “reduced, attenuated, and to some degree controlled.” Striving for zero terrorist attacks would be as unhealthy for American foreign policy as pushing for zero unemployment would be for the economy, Pillar believed. In a broad sense, Pillar’s outlook accorded with Clinton’s: Terrorism was an inevitable feature of global change.34

  The White House aides felt Pillar did a solid job, although Clarke could be viciously critical of him in meetings. But they worried that CIA careerists like Pillar did not feel a sense of urgency—and political vulnerability—about terrorism, as they did. It sometimes seemed to his White House colleagues that Pillar looked out on the terrorist threat from the CIA’s wooded Langley campus in the weary way a veteran homicide detective might gaze out his office window at a darkened city, listening to the ambulance sirens wail in mournful repetition. The best way to attack the terrorists, Pillar argued, was through painstaking professional work, cell by cell, case by case, working closely with foreign intelligence and police services. This might not be glamorous or exciting, but it was effective, essential, pragmatic. “The U.S. hand can stay hidden, and the risk of terrorist reprisals is minimal” in this approach, Pillar argued. America should work the terrorist threat one interrogation room at a time, with foreign partners close at hand.35

  The emphasis Clinton, Clarke, Simon, and Benjamin placed on the danger of terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction seemed overwrought to Pillar. It was a diversion, a kind of hysteria, he thought. It produced “often sensational public discussion of seemingly ever-expanding ways in which terrorists could use chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear terrorism to inflict mass casualties in the United States.” The Clinton team seemed obsessed with the most unlikely scenarios. Clinton’s personal interest had catalyzed these discussions and diverted resources from more sensible uses, Pillar wrote at the time, such as funding anemic CIA liaisons with foreign intelligence and police forces. The hype about weapons of mass destruction created “skewed priorities and misdirected resources.” The White House would be better off spending more money and time on the basics of CIA-led intelligence collection and counterterrorist work.36

  Also, those at the White House, Congress, and elsewhere who criticized the CIA for not being aggressive enough, for failing to station enough officers undercover overseas, just didn’t understand the intelligence business. As Pillar put it sarcastically, “The image of the Ivy Leaguer who goes where it is dangerous to drink the water and, unencumbered by annoying instructions from headquarters, applies his brilliance and James Bond–like daring to the job of saving America from terrorism appeals to our imaginations but has little to do with the real business of intelligence and counterterrorism.”37

  Pillar worried that Osama bin Laden had become “a preoccupation” for the United States after the Africa embassy bombings. Capturing bin Laden had become “a grail” whose pursuit threatened to overshadow all else. “Certainly bin Laden is a significant foe,” Pillar acknowledged, “whose call to kill Americans … is backed up by considerable ability to do just that.” Religiously motivated terrorism such as that preached by bin Laden was on the rise, and this terrorism threatened greater casualties than past forms, Pillar acknowledged. Taking bin Laden out of action would be “a positive development,” he believed, yet al Qaeda would likely survive, other leaders would emerge, and Sunni Islamist extremism in Afghanistan and across the Arab world would continue. Pillar worried that “fixating” on bin Laden personally only inflated the Saudi’s global reputation and represented another “misallocation of attention and resources” by the Clinton White House. As Pillar summed it up: “Having counterterrorist managers and many of their officers concentrating on a single enemy may be an unaffordable luxury when the same people have to handle other current terrorist threats as well as staying ahead of the next bin Laden.”38

  It was this sort of commentary that fueled suspicions in Clinton’s White House that the CIA was just not up to the job at hand. Clarke, Simon, and Benjamin had their “hair on fire” over their fear of bin Laden’s next strike, they readily admitted to their colleagues. They endorsed much of Pillar’s analysis and his painstaking cell-by-cell counterterrorism tactics, but it frustrated them that one of the CIA’s most senior counterterrorism managers and thinkers did not, in their estimation, share their sense of urgency or alarm. After the Africa bombings Simon and Benjamin began to call attention to what they later called “a new, religiously motivated terrorism” whose most important feature was that it did not feel “constrained by the limits on violence that state sponsors have observed themselves or placed on their proxies.” Where Pillar saw a permanent condition of chronic disease, Simon and Benjamin saw “unmistakable harbingers of a new and vastly more threatening terrorism, one that aims to produce casualties on a massive scale.”39

  Simon and Benjamin recast the terrorism analyst Brian Jenkins’s 1970s-era observation that terrorists wanted a lot of people watching their attacks but not a lot of people dead. Osama bin Laden and his adherents, Simon and Benjamin warned, “want a lot of people watching and a lot of people dead.”40

  To an extent the major Cabinet departments involved in counterterrorism in the autumn of 1998 possessed institutional viewpoints on bin Laden. The White House, most sensitive to the political consequences of both terrorism and failed covert action, rang loud alarm bells about the threats but also proved cautious about operations that might go bad. The State Department emphasized diplomatic engagements and the value of enduring alliances with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The Justice Department promoted law enforcement approaches. Yet within each department there was debate among senior officials. Office mates in the South Asia bureau of the State Department disagreed vehemently about whether the Taliban would ever negotiate in good faith or whether Ahmed Shah Massoud deserved American aid. At the FBI some senior agents were alarmed and engaged by the al Qaeda threat, while others dismissed it as a distraction, one terrorism problem among many.

  At the CIA, Pillar’s articulate skepticism reflected in part the intellectual traditions of the Directorate of Intelligence. They would not be cowed by political fashion; they would take the long view. Spies and operators from the Directorate of Operations tended to have a more openly alarmist, aggressive view of the bin Laden threat. This was also true inside the bin Laden unit of the Counterterrorist Center, where analysts and operations officers became nearly obsessive about their mission after the Africa bombings. If anyone suffered from a “grail” complex about capturing bin Laden, it was Pillar’s own colleagues in the CIA’s bin Laden tracking group.

  Increasingly George Tenet seemed to be with them, at least in spirit. The CIA director talked frequently with Berger and Clarke at the White House. He absorbed their anxieties, and he could read the threat reporting for himself; it was often scary stuff. Reading the cables every day, it did not take Pillar’s Princeton Ph.D. to see that bin Laden could easily be the source of a sudden, terrible attack. Tenet would call Berger regularly and urge him to share particularly worrisome threat reports with President Clinton.41

  Nor did Tenet share Pillar’s wariness about the metaphor of waging “war” on bin Laden. In fact, Tenet’s instinct was to think of the challenge in just those terms. As the weeks passed that autumn he worried that his colleagues were losing their momentum. On December 4, 1998, Tenet wrote a memo to his senior deputies at Langley headquarters.

  “We must n
ow enter a new phase in our efforts against bin Laden,” Tenet declared. “Our work to date has been remarkable and in some instances heroic; yet each day we all acknowledge that retaliation is inevitable and that its scope may be far larger than we have previously experienced… .

  “We are at war. I want no resources or people spared in this effort.”42

  It did not happen. Resources and people at the Counterterrorist Center remained tight. Tenet and other managers tried to shift budgets around to help the bin Laden unit but they did not have the money to fight anything more than a metaphorical war. Tenet was not prepared to tear down other bureaus of the CIA and pour every dollar into the campaign against al Qaeda. There were too many other active threats and important national priorities that demanded expensive intelligence collection, he believed. On paper, as Director of Central Intelligence, Tenet set priorities for all of the resources of the American intelligence community, including those at the behemoth Pentagon. In practical reality he could only control the CIA’s relatively modest budget. In the classified bureaucratic system that tried to define priorities for all government intelligence collection, targets were ranked in tiers. Late in 1998 Tenet designated the bin Laden threat as “Tier 0,” the very highest. Yet few elsewhere in the scattered and Balkanized intelligence bureaucracy took notice. The prioritization process was so broad and diffuse that it was worthless, some involved believed. The result was that an American government that spent hundreds of billions of dollars annually on defense and national security directed an infinitesimally tiny fraction of that money to disrupt and combat an enemy group identified by the CIA director as a mortal, even existential threat to the United States. Who, ultimately, was responsible? President Clinton had perhaps the greatest power to change these resource allocations; the Republican-controlled Congress was a close second. Tenet and other intelligence department heads had some discretionary power over the budgets they did possess. “In hindsight, I wish I had said, ‘Let’s take the whole enterprise down’ and put five hundred more people there sooner,” Tenet said later. But he did not. The practical result was that “we never had enough officers from the Directorate of Operations,” recalled one former chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. “The officers we had were greatly overworked… . We also received marginal analytic support from the Directorate of Intelligence.” Tenet felt the CIA’s budget needed an infusion of about $1 billion annually for at least five years, but when he advocated for these numbers at the White House and in classified hearings on Capitol Hill, he “never got to first base.”43

  To wage even a modest war it was usually necessary to fight with reliable allies. For nearly two decades the CIA had been running covert action in Afghanistan through its liaison with Pakistani intelligence. To disrupt bin Laden’s embedded network in Afghanistan and capture al Qaeda’s leaders, the agency would have to revive its partnership with Pakistan’s ISI—or, if this failed, the CIA would soon have to find another intelligence service to work with in Afghanistan’s rough neighborhood.

  24

  “Let’s Just Blow

  the Thing Up”

  PAKISTANI PRIME MINISTER Nawaz Sharif lived in continual fear of his own army. Generals had invented the Sharifs as a political dynasty. They endorsed Nawaz as the civilian face of their favored alliance, a center-right artifice of industrialists, landlords, Muslim clerics, and freelance opportunists. Sharif was attentive to his self-interest if not always witting about how to secure it. He was presumed to be raking millions from Pakistan’s treasury for his family’s benefit. He also knew that any Pakistani politician, especially one handpicked by the army, risked overthrow if the generals felt threatened by the civilian’s independence or popularity. Sharif sought to forestall this fate by manipulating appointments at the top of the army command. He stacked the senior ranks with generals he believed were loyal to him and his family. The two crucial jobs were the chief of army staff, traditionally the top military job in Pakistan, and the position of chief spy, the director-general of ISI.

  Two months after the American cruise missile strikes in Afghanistan, Sharif fired his army chief. Jehangir Karamat was a secular thinker who supported civilian-led democracy. Yet Sharif interpreted speeches that Karamat had made about civil-military relations as portents of an army-led coup. Later it became clear that Sharif had badly misread the situation. Still, in typical style, the prime minister plunged ahead. He named Pervez Musharraf, a little-known general with a liberal reputation, to head the army. Although he had no intimate relationship with Musharraf, Sharif let it be known in the Pakistani press that Musharraf was his personally chosen general, his protégé. This was a public relations blunder that ensured Musharraf would distance himself from Sharif, at a minimum to preserve his credibility with other generals.1

  At the same time Sharif appointed General Khwaja Ziauddin as the new chief of Pakistani intelligence. This, too, was an overtly political decision. Ziauddin had made his career in the engineering corps, a section of the military that rarely produced army leaders. But he had married into a wealthy, connected family in Lahore, and he was a frequent social visitor at the sprawling Model Town estate of Nawaz Sharif’s influential father. It was a violation of army protocol for a rising general to allow himself to become visible socially, especially under the wing of a civilian political family like the Sharifs. Still, Sharif’s father tapped Ziauddin as a favored brigadier, and he won an appointment to army headquarters, where he worked with the country’s top-secret nuclear program. When Sharif sent him in the fall of 1998 to run ISI, Ziauddin was widely regarded as an emissary and protector of the prime minister.2

  Sharif hoped to further defend himself from his army by drawing close to the Clinton administration. This was by now an old tactic of weak civilian prime ministers in Pakistan. Bill Clinton seemed to have a soft spot for Sharif. They had spent long hours on the telephone in the spring of 1998 when Clinton unsuccessfully sought to persuade the prime minister to forgo nuclear weapons tests in response to a surprise test by India. But many of Clinton’s senior aides and diplomats, especially those who knew Pakistan well, regarded Sharif as an unusually dull, muddled politician. He seemed to offer a bovine, placid gaze in private meetings where he sometimes read awkwardly from note cards. Still, Sharif tried to make himself indispensable in continuing American-led talks over the region’s nuclear crisis. Now there was suddenly another way for Sharif to make himself useful to the Americans: He could aid the secret effort to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

  The new U.S. ambassador to Pakistan was a lively career diplomat named William Milam, an ambassador previously in crisisridden Liberia and Bangladesh. A mustached, suspender-snapping man with a potbelly and an easy laugh, Milam was accustomed to security threats and unstable politics, and he got along well with his CIA station chief, Gary Schroen. The pair opened private talks about bin Laden and Afghanistan with Musharraf and Ziauddin.

  The CIA hoped to persuade Ziauddin to betray bin Laden, to set him up for capture or ambush. The Islamabad station remained heavily invested in its tribal tracking force of former anti-Soviet mujahedin. Bin Laden was suddenly a much more difficult target, however. He moved frequently and unpredictably. After newspapers disclosed that the Americans had tapped his satellite telephone, bin Laden stopped using it, making it harder still to track him. Schroen and other CIA officers concluded that the best way to capture bin Laden was to enlist help from Pakistani intelligence officers who had his trust. They wanted ISI to lure him into a trap.3

  Milam, Schroen, and their colleagues in the Islamabad embassy found Ziauddin a straightforward, accessible character. The new Pakistani intelligence chief was a stocky man, about five feet nine inches tall, and his face looked as if it had been boxed around in a few fights. He was not shy, as some generals were, about talking openly with the CIA about Pakistani politics. He also acknowledged that neither he nor Sharif could work their will down the ranks by just snapping their fingers. He wanted to cooperate closely with t
he CIA and the Americans where he could, Ziauddin said, but the CIA would have to understand what was politically feasible in Pakistan.4

  By the fall of 1998, CIA and other American intelligence reporting had documented many links between ISI, the Taliban, bin Laden, and other Islamist militants operating from Afghanistan. Classified American reporting showed that Pakistani intelligence maintained about eight stations inside Afghanistan, staffed by active ISI officers or retired officers on contract. CIA reporting showed that Pakistani intelligence officers at about the colonel level met with bin Laden or his representatives to coordinate access to training camps for volunteer fighters headed for Kashmir. The CIA suspected that Pakistani intelligence might provide funds or equipment to bin Laden as part of the operating agreements at these camps. There was no evidence that ISI officers worked with bin Laden on his overseas terrorist strikes, such as the embassy bombings in Africa. The reported liaison involved Pakistan’s regional agenda: bleeding Indian forces in Kashmir and helping the Taliban defeat Massoud’s Northern Alliance.5

  American intelligence analysts assumed that it was very difficult for ISI headquarters in Rawalpindi to control officers who worked inside Afghanistan. There seemed little reason to hope that Nawaz Sharif, nervous as a cat around anyone in his military, could easily issue orders to undercover colonels in Afghanistan. Nor was Ziauddin, with no background in intelligence and a reputation as Sharif’s lackey, likely to exercise uncontested control.

  Senior Clinton administration officials who consumed this classified reporting about Pakistan intelligence officers in Afghanistan “assumed,” as one of them put it later, “that those ISI individuals were perhaps profiteering, engaged in the drug running, the arms running.” Not only was Ziauddin probably unable to control them, but “headquarters, to some extent, probably didn’t know what they were doing.” At the same time these Pakistani intelligence officers clearly were following orders from Islamabad in a broad sense. In their use of jihad to extend Pakistan’s influence east and west, they had full backing from their country’s army and from sectors of the civilian political class. “The policy of the government, never declared, particularly in Kashmir, was to foster guerrilla warfare,” recalled one American official who regularly read the CIA’s reporting that autumn. Ziauddin and his senior colleagues, as well as their colonels on the ground, “thought they were carrying out the overall policy of their government.” At the White House, Clinton’s senior foreign policy team saw “an incredibly unholy alliance that was not only supporting all the terrorism that would be directed against us” but also threatened “to provoke a nuclear war in Kashmir.”6