Ghost Wars
Page 60
All this was discussed at the White House just two days before President Clinton faced a final vote on impeachment charges in the U.S. Senate. It seemed clear that Clinton would win the trial and finish out his term, but his power had fallen to its nadir. This hardly seemed an ideal time for an all-or-nothing attack against a terrorist who made few Americans feel directly menaced.
Some of the CIA officers involved could not understand the White House’s hesitation. The CIA’s reporting—human agents, the tracking team outside the camp, the satellite photography, signals intelligence—left some officers involved with an unusually high feeling of certainty that bin Laden was really there. It was rare to see bin Laden sit still in one place for so long. Some in the U.S. embassy in Islamabad speculated that perhaps the recent Pakistani report about bin Laden’s illness was truthful and bin Laden had traveled to the luxurious camp to recuperate.29
Neither the Islamabad station nor the Counterterrorist Center at Langley could offer a 100 percent guarantee that bin Laden was in the hunting camp, however. They did not have a picture of bin Laden standing outside his tent. The satellites could not take a photograph of that quality, and the tracking team could not get close enough. If they launched a strike, they would have to accept some doubt. George Tenet, for one, was not convinced that the reporting was completely solid.
The U.S. military relied heavily on its alliances with the wealthy Persian Gulf emirates despite their occasional support for Islamists. To even consider a strike against bin Laden they needed to be completely sure, some of those involved argued. In the American military, recalled Gary Schroen, “Nobody wanted to say, ‘Well, you blew up a camp full of U.A.E. princes and half of the royal family of the U.A.E.’s dead—and you guys didn’t get him.’ ”30
Clinton’s national security cabinet had been tracking the camp for more than a week. They had learned what they could; they had to decide. Richard Clarke recommended against a cruise missile shot. George Tenet, too, recommended no. By February 12, the day of Clinton’s acquittal on impeachment charges, bin Laden reportedly had left the camp.
Afterward, the U.S. embassy in Abu Dhabi, capital of the U.A.E., contacted Sheikh Zayed’s government and asked for precise coordinates of the family’s Afghan hunting camp. The aviation maps and other data supplied through the U.A.E. foreign ministry confirmed that it had been the royal family’s camp. The U.A.E. later reported to the White House that no members of the royal family had been present at the hunt and that as far as they could determine, bin Laden had not been there, either. The Americans later concluded that high-level U.A.E. officials had, in fact, been at the camp, which was quickly torn down in March, after Clarke called U.A.E. officials. The call angered some CIA officers who had hoped to watch the camp quietly, hoping bin Laden would return. The U.S. embassy in Abu Dhabi began pressuring the royal family to cease its hunting trips altogether. The Americans argued that the trips violated United Nations sanctions meant to isolate the Taliban. Based on United Nations and other reporting, the Americans also suspected that the C-130s flying out of Dubai carried weapons to the Taliban. The U.A.E. government was one of three in the world that recognized the Taliban, yet its officials told the Americans that they “wanted to cooperate and wanted to know what they could do to help,” recalled a State Department officer involved in relaying the map data about the Afghan hunting camps.
For its part the U.A.E. was anxious to make sure the data it handed over were properly entered into American targeting computers. The royal family “had its own concern, in the aftermath of al Shifa, about making sure their camps were properly understood,” the State official recalled.31
For some of the ground-level officers involved in the bin Laden chase the decision to hold fire seemed almost unforgivable. It had been one thing before the Africa embassy bombings to have their plan to raid Tarnak Farm and kidnap bin Laden turned down. That plan contained a great deal of risk and uncertainty. But with the desert camp, recalled Schroen, reflecting the views of other officers as well, “We knew he was there. We had assets in place. There was little risk to life and limb to anybody—not our Afghan colleagues, nobody on the American side. And it would have been, we thought, definitive. We could take him out. Yeah, some of these other people would be killed, but we would really be able to take him out.” Some of them blamed Clarke, speculating that he was so close to the U.A.E. royal family because of defense deals he had previously negotiated that he would never take the risk of offending them.32
The cycle of frustration repeated itself that May. A CIA source reported with unusual specificity about bin Laden’s movements and sleeping patterns over five nights in Kandahar. A cruise missile attack was again prepared; the national security cabinet again discussed whether they had enough intelligence to fire, and whether the risk of civilian deaths was too great. As the White House hesitated, Mike Scheuer, the discouraged chief of the Counterterrorist Center’s bin Laden unit, wrote to a colleague in the field that “having a chance to get UBL three times in 36 hours and foregoing the chance each time has made me a bit angry … the DCI finds himself alone at the table, with the other princip[als] basically saying ‘we’ll go along with your decision Mr. Director,’ and implicitly saying that the Agency will hang alone if the attack doesn’t get bin Laden.” For his part, even when he “knew more or less” where bin Laden might spend the night, Clinton remembered how he had been told that bin Laden would attend a leadership meeting in eastern Afghanistan just after the Africa embassy bombings, and yet, “he left a couple of hours before” the missiles struck. As new single-threaded reports of bin Laden’s whereabouts arrived, Clinton remembered, “So what did I have? A 40 percent chance of knowing we could have hit it.”
Around this time Scheuer fired off more emails protesting the agency’s heavy reliance on its liaison with untrustworthy allies in the Persian Gulf. The bin Laden unit leader personified the single-minded passion that prevailed inside the Counterterrorist Center’s partitioned office suite. He was a disheveled, blunt, undiplomatic career officer who felt the United States ought to kill Osama bin Laden as a matter of the greatest urgency. The White House sometimes complained to Tenet that Scheuer was not well suited to manage the bin Laden group; he was too myopic in his approach. The email exchanges Scheuer generated after the hunting camp incident were angry, unusual, and widely circulated, according to one person who read them. During his three years in the bin Laden unit, Scheuer said later, he believed the CIA’s Directorate of Operations “was the only component of the Intelligence Community that could be said to have been waging the war that bin Laden declared against the United States in August of 1996. The rest of the CIA and the Intelligence Community looked on our efforts as eccentric and, at times, fanatic.” Afterward Scheuer transferred to another position at Langley headquarters. In the heavily compartmented CIA, where by careful design officers knew little about one another’s work, his colleagues could not be sure exactly what had happened, but among at least a few of them a belief settled in that Scheuer had been exiled, in effect, for becoming too passionate about the bin Laden threat, too angry about the failure to attack at Tarnak Farm and at the desert hunting camp.33
Tenet did not widely explain his reasoning. He made clear years later that in every case where Clinton’s Cabinet discussed cruise missile strikes, a decisive problem was the lack of absolute certainty that bin Laden was present. Tenet concluded that the CIA’s strategy against bin Laden had to be reexamined. Early in 1999, Tenet ordered the Counterterrorist Center to begin a “baseline” review of the CIA’s operational strategy against bin Laden. He wanted the entire operation turned upside down, looked at from fresh angles. From the White House, Clarke lobbied Tenet for change, arguing that neither Scheuer at the bin Laden unit nor senior managers such as Paul Pillar were the right leaders for a campaign against bin Laden.34
Within months Tenet had dispatched a fast-track executive assistant from the seventh floor—a traditional breeding ground of CIA leadership—to
replace Scheuer in the bin Laden unit. When the Counterterrorist Center’s director, Jeff O’Connell, rotated out of his position (he soon became the CIA station chief in Tel Aviv), Tenet had another opportunity to shake things up. Who would know better how to get after Osama bin Laden—or be better motivated to break the stalemate—than a CIA officer bin Laden had once tried to kill?
25
“The Manson Family”
BY EARLY 1999, George Tenet believed that bin Laden could strike the United States again at any time. There was “not the slightest doubt” that bin Laden was planning new attacks, Tenet said. The CIA director issued this warning in public and in private. He saw evidence that bin Laden had contacts inside the United States. Tenet anticipated “bombing attempts with conventional explosives,” he told Congress and the White House. Bin Laden’s operatives were also “capable of kidnappings and assassinations.” He worried that al Qaeda might acquire and use weapons of mass destruction. Tenet believed a chemical or biological attack by bin Laden or his allies was now a “serious prospect.”1
Tenet grew frustrated by the on-and-off attention paid to the al Qaeda threat within Clinton’s Cabinet. He spent weekends watching his son play soccer in the suburbs, and he complained to his CIA colleagues that the administration’s bin Laden policy sometimes seemed “like two-year-olds playing soccer—they all go to the ball,” then their interest would wane, and they would run to the other side of the field to chase something else.2
Yet for all his stark warnings, the CIA director did not describe bin Laden in 1999 as the gravest, most important threat faced by the United States. Like the president he served, Tenet worried most about the global spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and of the missiles that could deliver them to the American homeland. When he inventoried the threats faced by the United States, Tenet listed bin Laden second, after the proliferation of unconventional weapons. In a ninety-seven-paragraph unclassified statement he issued that winter about rising dangers in an unstable world, Tenet devoted four paragraphs to bin Laden. Also, the CIA director placed virtually no emphasis on Afghanistan as a cause or context of bin Laden’s menace. Tenet never said publicly that bin Laden and al Qaeda were a powerful faction in Afghanistan’s civil war, that they thrived on their links to Pakistani intelligence, or that they took succor from Saudi and Persian Gulf sheikhs and proselytizers. In the statement he issued that winter, for instance, Tenet only mentioned the Taliban in passing as a potential source of inspiration for Islamist extremists in Pakistan. He did not describe the Taliban as a threat to the United States or to stability in Central and South Asia, or as bin Laden’s most important military allies.3
Years later Tenet rued that among the “daunting impediments” facing the CIA’s campaign against al Qaeda during 1999 was that “U.S. policy stopped short of replacing the Taliban regime, limiting the ability of the U.S. government to exert pressure on bin Laden.” But if Tenet felt frustrated by that policy at the time or conceived alternatives to it, he did not say so in public and did not press his views within the Cabinet.4
Tenet had matured at Langley and had succeeded in a job that had thwarted more experienced predecessors. By early 1999 he had proved himself an exceptional manager and leader of people, and he had won Clinton’s personal confidence. Yet he remained to some extent the staff director he had been on Capitol Hill, a synthesizer and manager of other people’s views. A profoundly visceral person, Tenet felt the bin Laden threat in his gut and responded actively with warnings and exhortations to his covert action team at the Counterterrorist Center. But Tenet seemed to accept the bin Laden problem on its received terms, as a traditional antiterrorism or policing issue best addressed by a lightning covert capture operation or a decapitating missile strike. As Tenet noted later, to confront bin Laden and the Taliban more broadly would have required a new foreign policy.
More than a decade earlier the passionate anticommunist William Casey had helped create and drive his president’s global policies from Langley. That was not George Tenet’s vision of himself or of the CIA.
In shuffling his lineup at the Counterterrorist Center that spring of 1999, Tenet demanded “a new, comprehensive operational plan of attack” against bin Laden and his allies. The plan’s purpose would be “to capture and bring to justice bin Laden and his principal lieutenants.” For this the CIA needed better intelligence about bin Laden’s movements. Tenet wanted more human sources in Afghanistan, deeper liaison with regional intelligence services, and more effective technical collection, including communications intercepts and satellite photography.5
The sense in Tenet’s seventh-floor suite—as well as in the counterterrorism office at the White House—was that the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center had grown too dependent on the gang of tribal agents in southern Afghanistan. One of Tenet’s aides referred to them derisively as “weekend warriors,” middle-aged and now prosperous Afghan fighters with a few Kalishnikovs in their closets. The tribal agents were being asked to take on vicious, religiously motivated bin Laden bodyguards who would fight to the death; it was small wonder that the team was reluctant to attack. Their reporting about bin Laden’s movements was very good although often a day or two behind. The agents communicated reliably. As in the episode at the desert hunting camp, they were willing to take risks as a tracking team, spying on bin Laden from a distance. But it was too much to expect them to act as a decisive paramilitary force against al Qaeda’s hardened Arab killers, especially since the White House’s rules of engagement cautioned them against indiscriminate attacks.6
Tenet’s push for a new bin Laden plan emphasized operations: agent recruitment, risky insertion of technical collection equipment, paramilitary covert action. But the bin Laden tracking unit at the Counterterrorist Center was heavily staffed by analysts from the Directorate of Intelligence, not spies from the Directorate of Operations. That spring, 70 percent of the unit’s professionals were women, and two-thirds had backgrounds as analysts. They could call on spies in the CIA’s far-flung stations, but their own operating experience was limited. They were highly educated, worked unusually long hours, and had become fanatically motivated about the bin Laden threat. They studied bin Laden’s fatwas, drew up elaborate charts of his international networks, scrutinized interrogation reports, and monitored the most obscure nuances in theological debates among Sunni Islamist extremists. They were a relatively junior group, with an average of three years’ experience, as compared to the average of eight years in the mainline Directorate of Intelligence. They struggled at times to persuade case officers in the Directorate of Operations to work on their requests. CIA field officers abroad did not like to “take direction from the ladies” working back at Langley, one Counterterrorist Center manager recalled.7
The bin Laden unit’s analysts were so intense about their work that they made some of their CIA colleagues uncomfortable. The unit had about twenty-five professionals in the summer of 1999. They called themselves “the Manson Family” because they had acquired a reputation for crazed alarmism about the rising al Qaeda threat. “Jonestown,” said one person involved, asked to sum up the unit’s atmosphere. “I outlawed Kool-Aid.” Some of their colleagues thought they had lost their perspective. “It was a cult,” recalled a second American official. “There was frustration: Why didn’t everybody else share their view on things?”8
Tenet valued the bin Laden unit’s intensity, but he needed a breakthrough. “We have seen numerous reports that bin Laden and his associates are planning terrorist attacks against U.S. officials and facilities in a variety of locations, including in the U.S.,” he told a closed Senate hearing on June 24. That spring the director appointed one of his deputy’s key executive assistants, known to his colleagues as Rich, to take charge of the bin Laden unit. The new chief had worked as a case officer in Algeria during the early 1990s, in the midst of a gruesome uprising waged by violent Islamist radicals, some of them veterans of Afghanistan. He knew the bin Laden issue, he knew the Thir
d World, and he did not mind high-risk travel. Like his new colleagues Rich was intense and sometimes emotional and combative. Since he came directly from Tenet’s leadership group, his arrival was seen as a signal of renewed high-level interest in the bin Laden case. The new chief’s connections presumably would help attract resources to the cause and smooth decision-making.