by Steve Coll
He briefed this audacious plan to the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, who approved. As one longtime analyst of the Pakistani army later observed, it was perhaps the greatest strategic error by an overmatched military since Pearl Harbor, yet neither Sharif nor Musharraf seemed able to imagine how India or the world would react.15
In early May, Pakistani commandos disguised as jihadist volunteers seized Kargil without a fight. The disaster unfolded quickly. Pakistani army officers summoned ambassadors to a meeting in Islamabad and admitted the Kargil attackers were regular Pakistani army troops in disguise—even as other government spokesmen publicly insisted the incursion was an independent guerrilla uprising. Stunned, Bill Milam, the U.S. ambassador, poured classified cables into Washington reporting that Pakistan had in effect started a war. India launched aerial bombardments and a worldwide campaign to whip up outrage about Pakistan’s aggression. Its politicians threatened a wider conflict to finish off Pakistan’s army once and for all. Fearing nuclear escalation, Clinton delivered a dozen secret letters to Sharif and Pakistani generals in as many weeks, each time imploring them to see their folly and withdraw. He also pressured Sharif on the Taliban and al Qaeda. “I urge you in the strongest way to get the Taliban to expel bin Laden,” Clinton wrote Sharif on June 19. But the crisis only deepened. In early July the CIA picked up intelligence that Pakistan’s army was preparing nuclear-tipped missiles for launch against India if necessary.16
An overwhelmed Sharif feared he had lost his shaky grip. He flew hurriedly to Washington to meet with Clinton on July 4. He brought his wife and children, as if he might be flying into exile.17
At Blair House on Pennsylvania Avenue, with only a National Security Council note taker present, Clinton ripped into Pakistan’s prime minister. Clinton had “asked repeatedly for Pakistani help to bring Osama bin Laden to justice from Afghanistan,” the president ranted. Sharif had “promised often to do so but had done nothing. Instead the ISI worked with bin Laden and the Taliban to foment terrorists.” It was an outrage, Clinton said. He was going to release a statement calling worldwide attention to Pakistan’s support for terrorists. Is that what Sharif wanted? Clinton demanded. Did Sharif order the Pakistani nuclear missile force to get ready for action? Did he realize how crazy that was?
“You’ve put me in the middle today, set the U.S. up to fail, and I won’t let it happen,” Clinton said. “Pakistan is messing with nuclear war.”18
Doughy and evasive, Sharif gave in. He had already been working with Saudi Arabia, Europe, and by back channels with India to find a way to climb down. He announced a total withdrawal of Pakistani forces from Kargil. By doing so he ended the crisis, but he took heavy heat at home. Sharif blamed the army for getting him into this mess. The generals let it be known that it was all the prime minister’s fault. An army-led coup attempt seemed possible, perhaps likely, the U.S. embassy reported.
But Musharraf hung back. In late summer he and the prime minister traveled to an army celebration near the Kashmir line of control. The general and Sharif ate, talked, and even danced, and they tried to patch things up. On a walk back to their hotel rooms, Sharif pulled an adviser aside and asked, referring to Musharraf, “What do you think?” In English, self-consciously quoting what Margaret Thatcher had once said of Mikhail Gorbachev, the minister replied: “I think he’s a guy you can do business with.”19
Sharif hoped that Pakistani intelligence might yet rescue him. The prime minister remained much closer to his intelligence chief, Khwaja Ziauddin, his family’s friend and political protégé, than to Musharraf.
Clinton’s rant at Blair House spurred Pakistan to deliver on a plan to train commandos who might be sent into Afghanistan to snatch bin Laden. Sharif tried to shore up his connection to the CIA. Nearly every politician in Pakistan believed, at least some of the time, that the CIA decided who served as prime minister in Islamabad. In September, Ziauddin flew to Washington to meet with Cofer Black, the new head of the Counterterrorist Center, and Gary Schroen. Ziauddin carried a message: “I want to help you. We want to get bin Laden… . If you find him, we’ll help you.” The Pakistani commando training accelerated, and the agency brought the snatch team to “a pretty good standard,” as an American official recalled. The commandos moved up to the Afghanistan border. A staging camp was constructed. From Langley and the Islamabad station, the Counterterrorist Center was positioning its agents and collection assets and “getting ready to provide intelligence for action,” the American official recalled.20
That same week Sharif sent his brother and confidential adviser, Shahbaz, to Washington. Ensconced at the Willard Hotel, all Shahbaz wanted to discuss was “what the U.S. could do to help his brother stay in power,” as Bruce Riedel of the National Security Council recalled it. “He all but said that they knew a military coup was coming.”21 The State Department’s Rick Inderfurth, speaking to reporters on background, warned against any “extraconstitutional” measures by Pakistan’s army. In Rawalpindi, Musharraf and his officers fumed. Why did they need another lecture about democracy from the Americans? Who said they were about to launch a coup anyway? It was Sharif who was the greater danger to Pakistan. And what kind of game was his crony, General Ziauddin, cooking up at the CIA? In the parlors of Islamabad’s and Rawalpindi’s elite, where conspiracy talk is appetizer and aperitif, suspicion piled upon suspicion as September ended.
Ziauddin heard an earful at Foggy Bottom from Undersecretary of State Pickering, who urged the ISI chief to intervene personally with Mullah Omar about bin Laden. In desperate need of allies, Sharif and his intelligence chief wanted to do all they could to ingratiate themselves with the CIA. Ziauddin flew into Kandahar on October 7 and met with Omar to tell him how strongly the Americans felt about bin Laden. The Taliban leader, as he had so many times before, rebuffed him.22
Sharif tried again to ease the tension. He appointed Musharraf to the additional post of chairman of Pakistan’s joint chiefs of staff. This was a largely symbolic job, but Sharif had left it open for a year, creating the impression that he might use it to kick Musharraf upstairs, out of direct army command. Now Sharif seemed to make clear that he did not want Musharraf to go. The general felt relaxed enough to take his wife on a working golf junket to Sri Lanka. Bill Milam forecast a temporary peace and left for vacation in California.
On October 12, 1999, as Musharraf flew back to Karachi on a Pakistan International Airlines jet, Nawaz Sharif announced that he was firing his army chief. Against all protocol, he elevated Ziauddin to take Musharraf’s place. Ziauddin had few friends among the powerful army corps commanders. He had risen as an engineer on the army’s margins, and his turn at ISI had won him more allies in Langley than in Rawalpindi. He had so few connections in General Headquarters that when Sharif told him of his promotion, Ziauddin had to shop for the proper epaulets in a commercial market in Rawalpindi, according to accounts that later reached the U.S. embassy.
The first hours after Sharif’s stunning decision unfolded in confusion. It took time for word of Musharraf’s dismissal to circulate among senior generals and for them to discuss a response. They intended to hold to military discipline. Musharraf was still in charge, but he was airborne and difficult to reach.
The CIA-funded secret anti–bin Laden commando force on the Afghan border now teetered in the balance. As the new army chief on paper, Ziauddin called the commandos to the capital to help defend his new office and Nawaz Sharif. There were not many of them, but they could provide a lethal bodyguard.23
The commando team’s leaders knew that in political terms they were Ziauddin’s men. If they moved now on his behalf, they might reap rewards. But if they tried to defend the general against a hostile army command, they could find themselves under arrest or worse. In the first hours several of the commando team’s officers, dressed in plain clothes, moved quietly into Rawalpindi to assess how Ziauddin’s faction was doing. They did not want to commit until they could estimate their chances of success.
Acco
rding to accounts later circulated by the CIA, the commando team leaders quickly discovered the army’s outrage about Musharraf’s dismissal. The high command intended to move against Sharif and his allies. The army’s Tenth Corps, the politically sensitive unit barracked nearest to Islamabad, soon rolled into the streets to detain Sharif and his political allies, including Ziauddin. Without calling attention to themselves, the commando leaders hurriedly communicated to their men: This is a losing cause.
“That unit disappeared” almost overnight, an American official recalled. “I mean, it just dissolved.” By one Pakistani account, some of the commandos had become uneasy about their mission against bin Laden. Another U.S. official who was managing the coup crisis in Washington remembered: “The expression I did hear was that they were heading for the hills and haven’t been heard from since.”24
Desperate, Sharif ordered the Karachi airport to refuse permission for Musharraf’s plane to land. The jet had only twenty minutes of fuel left, the pilot reported. Circling above the Arabian Sea, the airplane pitched and turned. “The hostess was white as a sheet,” recalled Musharraf’s wife, Sheba. “Two anti-hijacking guards had come forward.We were gaining and losing height. I could see the lights of Karachi receding.”25
The army prevailed on the controllers and the plane landed. Musharraf barely had time to absorb that he was now Pakistan’s supreme leader.Wearing mismatched civilian clothes hurriedly borrowed, he interrupted the bland folk dancing that had soothed viewers of state-run television during the crisis. Backed by tanks now spreading across Pakistan’s major cities, Musharraf declared that a new political era in Pakistan had begun and that Sharif had been dismissed. A day later he issued an emergency decree and appointed himself chief executive.
The coup severely disrupted the Clinton administration’s covert campaign against bin Laden. Musharraf immediately arrested Ziauddin. The ISI-supplied, CIA-trained commando team was lost. Richard Clarke and others at the National Security Council had invested little hope in the group, but some CIA officers thought there was at least a 25 percent chance it might have gone into action around Kandahar.
Pakistani intelligence was in for another leadership upheaval. Musharraf had personal cause for suspicion of his own intelligence service. ISI’s internal security group had investigated the general’s suitability for high office when Sharif was considering him for army chief, Musharraf complained angrily. Now he would have to clean house at ISI to make sure that it was under control, loyal to his new government, and not off running private errands for Clinton or the CIA.
Bill Milam flew back hurriedly to Islamabad and met Musharraf privately at 11 A.M. on Friday, October 15, at General Headquarters in Rawalpindi. Musharraf wore his uniform and surrounded himself with aides. He seemed uncomfortable. Milam had met with Musharraf monthly over the previous year. At first the discussions had been formal and constrained. Gradually they evolved into private, more candid talks. Now Milam handed Musharraf a letter from President Clinton. It chastised the general for taking power and urged him to establish a “roadmap” for restoring democracy. If they discussed any issue besides the army takeover, it was only in passing. Musharraf explained his reasons: Sharif had pulled Pakistan down to one of the lowest points in its history. The general unfurled a long account of his hours on the PIA jet, uncertain of his fate. “He was actually, clearly quite angry with Nawaz,” recalled an American involved. “He thought Nawaz was trying to kill him.”26
Milam knew from his previous meetings that Musharraf had traditional, uncompromising views about Afghanistan and Kashmir. By the time of the coup, Musharraf and his corps commanders felt that “the Americans had adopted a certain approach towards the Taliban without really understanding what the Taliban was all about,” as one senior Pakistani official close to the general put it. Musharraf believed that “by marginalizing the Taliban” the Clinton administration had “made them more dependent on the Arabs,” and therefore the United States “had ended up with a self-fulfilling prophecy” of rising terrorism. Musharraf wanted Clinton to engage with the Taliban, to seek their moderation, and “to win the hearts and minds of Afghans.”27
Clinton’s Cabinet split over how to react to Musharraf’s takeover. Richard Clarke and his allies in the counterterrorism bureaucracy did not want to alienate Musharraf for fear that he would make a difficult bin Laden problem even worse. Albright and others argued that, given Clinton’s emphasis on the promotion of democracy worldwide, it would be hypocritical to accept an army-led coup against an elected prime minister, however great Sharif’s flaws. Musharraf was the architect of Kargil, she and other skeptics pointed out. He facilitated terrorism in Kashmir. The whole debate about how bad Musharraf might be “diverted the discussion” about counterterrorism in the Cabinet and at the White House, one participant recalled. The coup “introduced a whole new issue in our bilateral relationship; in addition to Kashmir, in addition to proliferation, now there was the issue about the return to democracy.”28
With Pakistan, at least, bin Laden and al Qaeda were slipping yet further down the list.
AS CELEBRATIONS of the end of the millennium and the dawn of 2000 neared, George Tenet called his old mentor from his days on Capitol Hill, the former senator from Oklahoma, David Boren.
“Don’t travel,” Tenet told him. “Don’t go anyplace where there are big crowds.”
Boren was incredulous. “Oh, come on, George,” he said dismissively.
“No, no, no,” Tenet answered, serious. “You don’t understand. You don’t understand people like bin Laden.” Boren thought Tenet sounded obsessive, but he paid attention.29
It had been a rough autumn for the threat-reporting managers at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. Beginning in September they picked up multiple signs that bin Laden had set in motion major terrorist attacks timed to the turn of the year. Jordan’s security services tapped telephones of suspected al Qaeda members and began to gather evidence about one apparent plot to hit American and Israeli targets. There were many other ominous fragments in the CIA’s daily threat matrix.
Tenet went to the White House to deliver a forecast: He expected between five and fifteen terrorist attacks around the millennium. “Because the U.S. is [bin Laden’s] ultimate goal,” Tenet reported, “we must assume that several of these targets will be in the U.S.”30 He grabbed the National Security Council’s attention with that prediction. Yet there was still an undercurrent of tension between Richard Clarke’s office at the White House and the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA over how much threat reporting was too much. Clarke’s two principal aides at the time, Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin, wrote later that the CIA was still “overloading the President’s Daily Brief” that autumn with alarming but inconclusive threat reports, “so great was the fear of failing to give timely notice.” This sort of caustic skepticism about CIA motivations frustrated Langley’s officers. They believed the White House—especially Clarke’s office—would be the first to pounce on them if they failed to pass along a relevant warning.31
Two arrests—one made public at the time, the other kept secret initially—shocked them all into panicked cooperation. On November 30, Jordanian intelligence listened as one of bin Laden’s top lieutenants, Abu Zubaydah, gave orders by international telephone to begin carrying out an attack he called “the day of the millennium.” Jordanian police swooped down on the Amman houses they had under surveillance. In the early hours of December 5, a militant in custody led them to a house with a false floor covered by cinder blocks. Beneath an iron hatch and down a ladder they found seventy-one plastic containers of nitric acid and sulfuric acid. It was enough for explosives as powerful as sixteen tons of TNT, enough to destroy a hotel and the neighborhood around it. The Islamists arrested confessed they had already picked a target: a Radisson Hotel that expected to host American and Israeli tourists for a gala millennium party. The suspects admitted to another plan: They intended to release cyanide gas inside a crowded movie theater that was popula
r with foreigners.32
National Security Adviser Sandy Berger convened daily hour-long White House meetings to review every thread of intelligence, surveillance, and warning available. The interagency group issued streams of nationwide and international alerts. From Langley, Tenet and Cofer Black cabled stations worldwide. They ordered intensified collection and disruption campaigns against any known Islamist individuals or groups whose record suggested they might be involved in the millennium attacks. They sought to target “operations we knew were being planned for the millennium turnover,” as one CIA officer at the Counterterrorist Center recalled, “and that we suspected would carry over to the end of the Muslim month of Ramadan in early January 2000.”33
Nine days after the explosives cache was unearthed in Jordan, a watchful customs agent named Diane Dean saw a Middle Eastern man sweat profusely as he sat in the back of a line of cars exiting a ferry from Canada, through Port Angeles, Washington. She popped the trunk of the man’s Chrysler and found enough explosives to level a section of the Los Angeles International Airport, which he later admitted was his target.
Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian, had migrated to Canada, fallen in with a cell of Montreal Islamists, and then traveled to Afghanistan to enroll in camps run by bin Laden. His proximity to America attracted bin Laden’s recruiters, and he was enrolled in graduate-level training in explosives at Derunta, a camp near Jalalabad. In mid-January 1999, Ressam departed from Afghanistan with $12,000 in cash and extensive course notes about how to build a devastating bomb.34