Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  After Ressam’s arrest Clinton telephoned General Musharraf in Pakistan. He demanded that Musharraf find a way to disrupt or arrest bin Laden, according to notes of the conversation kept by the American side. Musharraf’s coup offered a potential fresh start in U.S.-Pakistan relations, Clinton said, but the potential benefits of a renewal—economic aid and trade relief—depended on whether Pakistan’s army helped remove bin Laden as a threat. Musharraf pledged to cooperate, but he was “unwilling to take the political heat at home,” cabled U.S. ambassador William Milam.35

  Clarke and the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center spent New Year’s Eve in restless watch for last-minute evidence of an attack. Midnight struck, but no terrorists did. As it happened, they had missed one bin Laden team on the verge of an assault. In Yemen a team of suicide bombers moved against the USS The Sullivans, an American destroyer, as it docked at Aden just after New Year’s Day. But the plotters overloaded their suicide skiff with explosives and struggled helplessly as it sank in the harbor. They salvaged the boat, but it would be months before they could organize another attack. Nobody noticed them.36

  At the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, “We were frantic,” Cofer Black recalled. “Nobody was sleeping. We were going full tilt.” They had launched “the largest collection and disruption activity in the history of mankind against terrorism,” he recalled, with “hundreds” of operations under way simultaneously.37

  In the midst of this surge a piece of intelligence originally turned up by the FBI during its investigations of the Africa embassy bombings “provided a kind of tuning fork that buzzed,” as one CIA officer later put it. A phone tap in the Middle East indicated that two Arab men with links to al Qaeda planned a trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A Counterterrorist Center officer noticed the connections and sought approval for surveillance operations to try to learn the men’s names and, “ideally, what they were doing,” as the CIA officer put it.38

  By January 5, 2000, the CIA had obtained a copy of one of their target’s passports. Khalid al-Mihdhar, a middle-class Saudi Arabian with no known links to terrorism, had been issued a U.S. B1/B2 multiple-entry visa in Jedda the previous spring, a visa that would not expire until April 6, 2000, the passport showed.39

  Working with a Malaysian internal security unit that cooperated regularly with the CIA station in Kuala Lumpur, officers photographed the suspects in and around a golf course condominium owned by an Islamic radical named Yazid Sofaat. The group included a number of known or suspected al Qaeda terrorists. “We surveil them. We surveil the guy they’re there to meet,” Black recalled. “Not close enough to hear what they’re actually saying, but we’re covering, taking pictures, watching their behavior. They’re acting kind of spooky. They’re not using the phone in the apartment. They’re going around, walking in circles, just like junior spies. Going up to phone booths, making a lot of calls. It’s like, ‘Who are these dudes?’ ”40

  The Counterterrorist Center briefed Tenet and FBI Director Louis Freeh, but when al-Mihdhar and his companions flew out of Kuala Lumpur, the CIA lost their trail. “Thus far, a lot of suspicious activity has been observed, but nothing that would indicate evidence of an impending attack or criminal enterprise,” one CIA officer wrote to another that week.41

  The email’s author had recently been posted to the Counterterrorist Center to help improve communication with the FBI. The officer reported that the FBI had been told “as soon as something concrete is developed leading us into the criminal arena or to known FBI cases, we will immediately bring FBI into the loop.”42

  None of the CIA officers at the Counterterrorist Center, who knew about al-Mihdhar’s valid American visa, and none of the FBI officers who were briefed thought to place al-Mihdhar on official American terrorist watch lists. A Counterterrorist Center circular had reminded officers of proper watch-listing procedures only weeks earlier. These lists were designed to alert customs, law enforcement, and immigration officers to the names of those whose entry to the United States should be blocked or reviewed. The CIA at the time was adding several hundred names to the watch list every month.

  The agency’s “lapse” in al-Mihdhar’s case, Tenet said later, “was caused by a combination of inadequate training of some of our officers, their intense focus on achieving the objectives of the operation itself, determining whether the Kuala Lumpur meeting was a prelude to a terrorist attack, and the extraordinary pace of operational activity at the time.” The first error in January was compounded by another weeks later when the CIA discovered that the second Saudi identified in Malaysia, Nawaf al-Hazmi, had flown to Los Angeles on January 15, 2000, and entered the United States. A March 5 cable to Langley from a CIA station abroad reporting this fact did not trigger a review of either of the Saudis. Nor was either of them placed on the watch list at this second opportunity. As it happened, both men were al Qaeda veterans of wars in Afghanistan and Bosnia.43

  Without the watch list there was little chance the suspects would face scrutiny. Under the State Department’s consular policies, as one investigator later put it, “Saudi Arabia was one of the countries that did not fit the profile for terrorism or illegal immigration.”44 For all of its sour experiences with the Saudi government on terrorism issues and for all of the mutual frustration and suspicion dating back two decades, the United States was still loath to reexamine any of the core assumptions governing its alliance with Riyadh.

  Beyond the names of the two mysterious Saudis and the inconclusive photography relayed from Kuala Lumpur, the CIA knew nothing at this stage about the multistranded plot that bin Laden had set in motion in Kandahar late in 1999 to attack American aviation.45 What Tenet did know about al Qaeda that winter frightened him more than ever before. The cyanide plot in Jordan and the evidence of populous Algerian networks in Canada and Europe stunned the CIA director and his senior colleagues. Among other things, the new cases reinforced Tenet’s fears about bin Laden’s ambitions to use weapons of mass destruction. Taken together, the evidence “confirms our conviction,” Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 2, that bin Laden “wants to strike further blows against America” and is “placing increased emphasis on developing surrogates to carry out attacks in an effort to avoid detection.” Al Qaeda had now emerged as “an intricate web of alliances among Sunni extremists worldwide, including North Africans, radical Palestinians, Pakistanis, and Central Asians,” Tenet warned. The Taliban was an increasingly obvious part of the problem, he said. Illicit profits that the Taliban reaped from opium trafficking reached extremists such as bin Laden “to support their campaign of terrorism.”46

  Still, in this briefing and others to the intelligence committees that winter, as he delivered his warnings in rough order of priority, Tenet continued to place the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction just ahead of the danger of terrorism. “It is simply not enough to look at al Qaeda in isolation,” Tenet explained later. The 1990s “saw a number of conflicting and competing trends.” He felt he could not concentrate only on terrorism. The CIA had to provide intelligence for American military forces deployed worldwide. It had to watch nuclear proliferation, chemical and biological weapons, tensions in the Middle East, and other pressing issues—and do so with “far fewer intelligence dollars and manpower” than in the past.47

  The senators, for their part, spent more time that February grilling Tenet about a controversy over the use of classified information by his predecessor at the CIA, John Deutch, than they did asking questions about bin Laden, Afghanistan, or the threat of spectacular terrorism.

  For all of the CIA’s global surge that winter, none of the wiretaps or interrogation reports picked up evidence of the four Arab men from Hamburg who had moved quietly in and out of Afghanistan that winter. The CIA and FBI pressed Germany’s police continually for help in watching Islamists in that country, including in Hamburg, but the efforts were frustrated by German laws and attitudes. Only half a century removed from the Nazi Gestapo, German courts adamantly limi
ted police spying. Many German politicians and intellectuals saw American fears of Islamic terrorism as overblown, even naïve. Nor did CIA cooperation with Pakistani intelligence yield day-to-day exchanges about Arab men entering and leaving the country on Taliban-sponsored visits to Afghanistan. In any event, the Hamburg four finalized their plans for pilot training in the United States without attracting attention from police or intelligence agencies.48

  Marwan al-Shehhi fell into conversation that spring with a Hamburg librarian, Angela Duile, as he prepared to depart for America. “Something will happen and there will be thousands dead,” he told her. He mentioned the World Trade Center, she recalled. She did not think he was serious.

  27

  “You Crazy White Guys”

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER THE MILLENNIUM had passed, the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center picked up intelligence that Osama bin Laden had arrived in Derunta Camp, in a jagged valley near Jalalabad.

  The camp had become a focus of White House and CIA intelligence collection efforts. It was a typical bin Laden facility: crude, mainly dirt and rocks, with a few modest buildings protected by ridges. Massoud’s intelligence sources reported that no Afghans were permitted in Derunta, only Arabs. Testimony from al Qaeda defectors and interrogation of Arab jihadists showed that Derunta was a graduate school for elite recruits. Ahmed Ressam had trained there. Richard Clarke’s Counterterrorism Security Group had examined evidence that al Qaeda pursued experiments with poisons and chemical weapons at Derunta. The Defense Intelligence Agency had reported about a year before the millennium that bin Laden aides were developing chemical arms at the camp. The Pentagon routed satellites above Derunta and took pictures. The CIA recruited Afghan agents who traveled or lived in the Jalalabad region. It was an area of high mobility and weak Taliban control, and it did not take long for the agency to develop sources. Through its new liaison in the Panjshir, the Counterterrorist Center pushed technical intelligence collection equipment to Massoud’s southern lines. These efforts produced intercepts of Taliban radio traffic in Kabul and Jalalabad. In addition, the CIA inserted an optical device, derived from technology used by offshore spy planes, that could produce photographic images from a distance of more than ten miles. Massoud’s men, with help from CIA officers, set up an overlook above Derunta and tried to watch the place with the agency’s high-tech spyglass. This intense collection effort did not produce conclusive evidence that bin Laden possessed chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, but it showed that he wanted them. The Derunta reporting fed Tenet’s fear that bin Laden’s acquisition of weapons of mass destruction was a “serious prospect.”1

  The Counterterrorist Center relayed its report to Massoud that bin Laden had arrived in Derunta. Bin Laden frequently inspected training camps, where he met with lieutenants, made speeches, and shot a few guns. He moved continuously in unannounced, zigzag loops around Afghanistan. He lectured at mosques, received delegations, and graced banquets with his presence, always surrounded by dozens of Arab bodyguards. Derunta was a regular stop.

  Massoud ordered a mission on the basis of the CIA’s report. He rounded up “a bunch of mules,” as an American official put it, and loaded them up with Soviet-designed Katyusha rockets. He dispatched a small commando team toward Derunta. Massoud’s shifting southern lines often allowed his men to move within artillery distance of Kabul and Jalalabad. Fighters who knew the terrain could walk on footpaths through the mountains to secure elevated firing positions.

  After the team was on its way, Massoud reported his plan to Langley. The CIA’s lawyers convulsed in alarm. The White House legal authorities that provided guidance for the new liaison with Massoud had not authorized pure lethal operations against bin Laden. The Massoud partnership, for now, was supposed to be about intelligence collection. Now the CIA had, in effect, provided intelligence for a rocket attack on Derunta. The CIA was legally complicit in Massoud’s operation, the lawyers feared, and the agency had no authority to be involved.

  The bin Laden unit at Langley shot a message to the Panjshir: You’ve got to recall the mission. We have no legal standing to provide intelligence that will be used in rocket attacks against bin Laden, the CIA officers pleaded. Massoud’s aides replied, in effect, as an American official put it, “What do you think this is, the Eighty-Second Airborne? We’re on mules. They’re gone.” There was no way to reach the attack team. They did not carry satellite phones or portable radios. They were walking to their launch site, and then they would fire off their rockets, turn around, and walk back.2

  Langley’s officers waited nervously. Some of them muttered sarcastically about the absurd intersections of American law and a secret war they were expected to manage. The worst case would be if the rocket attack went badly and killed innocent civilians. The best case would be if Massoud’s men killed bin Laden; they could take the heat if that happened. Days passed, and then weeks. Massoud’s aides eventually reported that they had, in fact, shelled Derunta Camp. But the CIA could pick up no independent confirmation of the attack or its consequences. The lawyers relaxed, and the incident passed, unpublicized.3

  For the bin Laden unit’s officers the episode only underlined the issues Massoud had emphasized at their meetings in the Panjshir. Why was the United States unable to choose sides more firmly in Massoud’s war against the Taliban? “What is our policy toward Afghanistan?” the bin Laden unit officers demanded in agency discussions. “Is it counterterrorism? Is it political?”4

  Although Clarke was a relative hawk on bin Laden in the Clinton Cabinet, increasingly Cofer Black and his colleagues at the Counterterrorist Center resented the role played by the White House–run Counterterrorism Security Group. They were in broad agreement about the seriousness of the bin Laden threat, but the CIA’s field operatives—“we who actually did things,” as one of them put it—sought only two kinds of support from Clarke’s White House team: funding and permissive policy guidance. By 1999 they felt increasingly that Clarke and Berger could not or would not deliver on either front. “We certainly were not better off by their intervention in ops matters in which they had no experience,” recalled one officer involved. In the CIA’s executive suites Tenet and clandestine service chief James Pavitt stressed that Langley would not make policy on its own—that was the lesson of the Iran-Contra debacle, they believed. For their part, Clarke and his White House colleagues repeatedly questioned the CIA’s ability to act creatively and decisively against bin Laden. Clarke felt that the current generation of CIA officers had “over-learned” the lessons of the 1960s and 1980s that covert action “is risky and likely to blow up in your face.” Clinton’s Cabinet lacked confidence in its spy service. Explaining what she perceived to be CIA caution in the field, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright quipped to her Cabinet colleagues that because of the scandals and trials suffered during earlier decades, the CIA’s active generation of field officers were still coping with the deep bruises of their “abused childhood.”

  Under the revised guidelines the CIA and Massoud’s men could only develop plans for bin Laden’s capture. They needed to have a way to bundle him up and fly him out of Afghanistan as part of the plan. Massoud’s men could use lethal force if they encountered resistance from bin Laden’s bodyguards—as they almost certainly would. The CIA also still had to avoid any action that would fundamentally alter Massoud’s military position against the Taliban.

  Albright and Berger continued to believe that providing covert military aid to Massoud would only lead to more Afghan civilian deaths while prolonging the country’s military stalemate. Massoud’s forces were too small and too discredited by their past atrocities to ever overthrow the Taliban or unite the country, they and many analysts inside the State Department believed. Increasingly the White House and even senior CIA managers such as Cofer Black worried as well about Pakistan’s stability. If they angered Pakistan’s army by embracing the Taliban’s enemy, Massoud, this could destroy the Clinton administration’s attempt to negotiate controls on Isla
mabad’s nuclear weapons program. As so often before, Pakistan’s Islamist-tinged elite managed to appear just dangerous and unpredictable enough to intimidate American officials. The Pentagon, especially General Anthony Zinni at CENTCOM, who remained close to Musharraf personally, emphasized engagement with Pakistan’s generals. To covertly provide weapons or battlefield intelligence to Massoud would be to join India, among others, in a proxy war against Pakistan. Zinni also opposed more missile strikes in Afghanistan.

  On the front lines of the Panjshir Valley, Massoud and his men took a jaundiced view of American priorities. Episodes like the Derunta attack confused and entertained them. “We were puzzled,” remembered one of Massoud’s senior aides. “What was ‘unlethal’ operations if you have an enemy that is armed to the teeth; they have everything. Then you are not allowed to have lethal operations against him?” Still, Massoud recognized that the CIA “represented a democracy, they represented an organized society where institutions function with restrictions,” as the senior aide recalled. Massoud also believed that within the American bureaucracy, “intelligence people are always aggressive.” Massoud and his advisers were “confident that the CIA wished to do a lot in Afghanistan, but their hands were tied. It was not intelligence failure. It was political failure.” When they met with visiting CIA officers or exchanged messages about the new, detailed rules for operations against bin Laden, even after the Derunta attack, “we never heard the word ‘kill’ from any American we talked to,” the senior Massoud aide remembered. “And I can tell you that most of the individuals who were reading these legal notes were also laughing. It was not their draft.”5

  For two decades Massoud had watched in frustration as the United States deferred to Pakistan in its policies toward Afghanistan. In that sense the Clinton administration’s policy was not new. Massoud understood that Washington’s “relationship with Pakistan was considered strategic,” as his senior aide put it. “Pakistan’s interference in Afghanistan was considered a minor issue,” and so the United States ignored it. This continuing American deference to Islamabad fueled Massoud’s cynicism about the CIA’s campaign against bin Laden, however. About a dozen Americans had died in the Africa embassy bombings. Many hundreds of Afghan civilians, the kin of Massoud’s commanders and guerrillas, had been slaughtered soon afterward by Taliban forces on the Shomali Plains north of Kabul. Yet American law did not indict the Taliban masterminds of the Shomali massacres. It did not permit military aid to attack the Taliban. American politicians rarely even spoke about these massacres. This seemed to some of Massoud’s men a profound and even unforgivable kind of hypocrisy.6