Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  GEORGE TENET’S EXHORTATIONS about bin Laden cascaded through the CIA. It was rare for the Director of Central Intelligence to personally invest himself in a single counterterrorist mission, as Tenet had done. The result during 1999 and early 2000 was a surge in recruitments of unilateral agents who could operate or travel in Afghanistan. It was the largest CIA drive for unilateral Afghan agents since the late years of the anti-Soviet war. Near East Division case officers and officers dispatched by the Counterterrorist Center sought contact with every potential Afghan source they could find. Some might be informal sources, helping the CIA because of their political opposition to the Taliban. Others were recruited secretly onto the CIA’s unilateral payroll. Case officers began to turn some Taliban military leaders, including a brigade-level commander in eastern Afghanistan. One energetic young case officer operating from Islamabad single-handedly recruited six or seven Taliban commanders operating in eastern Afghan border regions. The Islamabad-based case officers also contacted every mujahedin veteran of the anti-Soviet period who was known to the CIA. These included old commanders with Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf, who was now an ally of Massoud and opposed to the Taliban; Shiite commanders who had worked with the CIA around Kabul during the late 1980s; and Pashtun elders and political figures who spent most of their time in Pakistan but who had kin networks in eastern Afghanistan and sometimes traveled across the border. (An exception was Abdul Haq, still regarded as unreliable by his former CIA allies.) All of these recruitments and contacts were kept secret from Pakistani intelligence, just as the unilateral program had been in the late 1980s. None of the recruited agents was close to bin Laden. Despite several years of effort the CIA had been unable to recruit a single agent inside the core al Qaeda leadership. Black knew that the CIA was in trouble “without penetrations of [the] UBL organization,” as a classified Counterterrorist Center briefing to Clinton’s national security Small Group put it late in 1999. “While we need to disrupt operations … we need also to recruit sources,” Black’s briefing documents declared, even though “recruiting terrorist sources is difficult.” Still, the growing size of the CIA’s private agent network on the edges of the leadership, Tenet said later, could be measured in the agent reports that flowed through Langley headquarters: In 1999, for the first time, the CIA generated more unilateral reports about bin Laden from its own agents than reports from liaisons with other intelligence agencies. The Defense Intelligence Agency, working its own Pakistani and Afghan sources, produced scores of its own classified reports about bin Laden.7

  One purpose of the recruitments was to collect detailed intelligence about bin Laden’s movements, his training camps, the houses where he stayed, the houses where his wives stayed, and the houses where al-Zawahiri, Mohammed Atef, and other top lieutenants lived or worked. Gradually the CIA built up a detailed map of bin Laden’s infrastructure in Afghanistan. Reports and photography from unilateral agents were matched against satellite imagery to fill in maps of camps and urban neighborhoods.

  Bin Laden practiced intensive operational security. He was wary of telephones. He allowed no Afghans into his personal bodyguard, only Arabs he had known and trusted for many years. He varied his routes, did not stay in any one place for long, and never told anyone but his Arab inner circle about his plans. These practices limited the effectiveness of the CIA’s recruitments because the agency’s sources and paid agents were mainly Afghans who were kept at bay by bin Laden’s core bodyguard and leadership group. The CIA was unable to penetrate the inner circle, but bin Laden did have one security weakness, as agency operatives saw it: his several wives. Even after it was obvious that the Americans knew about Tarnak Farm near Kandahar, for example, bin Laden kept one of his families there and visited regularly. As a pious Muslim he tried to follow the Islamic practice of treating all his wives equally. The women had nearly identical lodging. At one point the CIA believed bin Laden had two different wives in Kabul. He would visit their houses regularly. The Islamabad station, through its tribal agents in Kandahar, recruited an Afghan who worked as a security guard at one of the Kabul houses bin Laden used. But the agent was so far down the al Qaeda information chain that he never knew when bin Laden was going to turn up; he was summoned to guard duty just as the Saudi’s Land Cruisers rolled in, and it was difficult to get a message out before bin Laden was gone again. “We occasionally learned where bin Laden had been or where he might be going or where someone who looked a little like him might be,” Madeleine Albright recalled. “We heard of suspicious caravans or of someone tall with a beard moving about with bodyguards … it was maddening.”8

  The CIA’s agent networks and operational problems were different in each of the cities where bin Laden stayed. The agency had the best coverage around Kandahar, where its core group of paid tribal assets had been operating for years. Their reporting was now supplemented by swelling networks of anti-Taliban Pashtun activists who could move in and out of the region from Pakistan with ease. “Anytime he went to Kandahar, we would know it,” an American official recalled. “We had very good sources in Kandahar. The problem was … nobody could say where he was going to be the next day at noon.” Kandahar also was the Taliban’s military stronghold. Even if the CIA pinpointed bin Laden downtown, there was no easy way to organize a snatch operation; the attacking force would face strong opposition from Taliban units. There was also a likelihood of civilian casualties if the White House ordered missile strikes in the city. Besides, American counterterrorism policy did not identify Mullah Omar or the Taliban as the enemy. By Clinton’s declared policy at the United Nations and elsewhere, the Taliban was not fair game for targeted strikes.9

  It would be less complicated to catch bin Laden at a training camp, on a road in rural Kandahar, or in nearby Uruzgan province, Mullah Omar’s home. In the summer of 1999 a truck bomb detonated outside Omar’s downtown Kandahar house, killing and wounding some of his relatives. In the aftermath bin Laden used his wealth to construct new compounds for the Taliban leader. He built Omar an extravagant, unapproachable walled palace on Kandahar’s outskirts. And bin Laden began a construction program in Uruzgan, including a new training complex for foreign al Qaeda volunteers. When the CIA learned about the Uruzgan project, it ordered satellite imagery and agent reports to document the camp. Its officers also hoped bin Laden might wander in for an inspection. Abdullah, Massoud’s foreign policy adviser, recalled that the CIA supplied detailed maps of the Uruzgan camp, based on satellite photography, in the hope that Massoud’s agents would mount an attack if bin Laden visited. At one point a team of four or five Afghan CIA agents with the southern tribal group approached the camp at night to scout it firsthand. Al Qaeda guards opened fire and wounded one of the agents. Bin Laden opened a similar camp near the Helmand River, to the west of Kandahar, but the CIA had few recruits whose tribal and ethnic heritage allowed them to travel comfortably in that area.10

  Kabul was an easier place to spy in than Kandahar. The Afghan capital was a sprawling and ethnically diverse city, a place of strangers and travelers, where any Afghan could claim to belong. At one stage the CIA’s southern tribal team moved north to Kabul’s outskirts and rented a farm as a base. They moved in and out of Kabul to scout homes where bin Laden stayed. They developed plans in which—if they had the right intelligence—they would strike a Kabul house where bin Laden slept, snatch the Saudi from his bed, and retreat from the city in jeeps. This was a variation on the 1998 plan to attack bin Laden at Tarnak Farm, which had been reviewed skeptically by White House aides and rejected by CIA managers. The tribal group even ordered explosives from the CIA because their plan called for them to blow up small bridges over culverts as they made their escape.

  The group never acted. Their elaborate plans were not matched by any apparent desire to carry them out. The agents reported about half a dozen aborted attacks. In some cases they claimed bin Laden had changed routes unexpectedly. In one case they reported women and children were with bin Laden, and that they held off in comp
liance with CIA guidance. At the White House the few Clinton aides who knew about the group had long been cynical about their intentions. Between late 1998 and early 2000 the White House attitude toward the TRODPINT team had evolved from “hopeful skepticism to outright mockery,” as one official recalled it. Now even the CIA, which still valued the group’s reporting and defended them against critics, realized they were not likely to mount risky assaults. The CIA’s assessment was that the tribal team knew it might succeed in killing bin Laden in a raid but was likely to suffer heavy losses in the effort. To try to kidnap bin Laden in a city as bustling as Kabul and move him to a safe location while being chased by his bodyguard, as U.S. policy officially required, looked like an implausible episode of Mission: Impossible. The group’s rented farm, paid for by the CIA, was a working vineyard. Bill Milam, the U.S. ambassador in Islamabad, who was briefed on the operation, would ask his intelligence colleagues sarcastically, “So what are they waiting for—the wine to ferment?” Still, the agents did help map al Qaeda safehouses around the capital, including three different places where bin Laden stayed and houses frequented by his Egyptian lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri.11

  The CIA’s tribal grape growers had been run mainly by case officers in the Near East Division. The new liaison with Massoud offered a chance for the Counterterrorist Center to attempt a fresh penetration of Kabul by working through the intelligence service of the Northern Alliance. About half of the capital’s population was Tajik. Massoud had a rich network of intelligence sources among Tajik residents and even some Taliban government officials. But bin Laden himself was “extremely elusive” while in Kabul, recalled Zekrullah Jahed Khan, one of Massoud’s intelligence aides. The Saudi might stay in Kabul for two straight months, but he would stay at one base for only two or three hours. He spent much more time in the eastern mountains and Kandahar than in the capital. Al-Zawahiri and Mohammed Atef were easier to track. The Egyptian doctor spent much of his time in Kabul. Atef traveled frequently to the military front lines around the capital. Recalled an American official: “We said, ‘Okay, bin Laden’s too hard. How about al-Zawahiri? And Atef?’ ”12

  That effort became a focus of day-to-day work between Langley’s Counterterrorist Center and Massoud’s intelligence network. The CIA supplied collection equipment and used satellite photography to validate observations made by Massoud’s agents on the ground. Together they developed “a pretty good idea of where the bad guys were,” as one American official recalled. One visual signature they relied on was the clustering of luxury sport utility vehicles. Most Afghans did not own cars, much less SUVs. The CIA would put its satellites over Kabul, and its analysts would say, as an official remembered, “Well, eight Land Cruisers. Someone is bad in that house.” But al-Zawahiri’s entourage was not as large or as conspicuous as bin Laden’s. He was not easy to track. Besides, when Massoud’s men began to get a fix, they confronted the problem of legal authorities for lethal operations. The CIA was not permitted to fly into the Panjshir with a sniper rifle and a satellite map of al-Zawahiri’s house even if it could develop one. Any joint operation had to be a plausible, well-planned attempt to capture the Egyptian. When they tried to discuss these kinds of plans with Massoud’s men, the Americans found them evasive. As an American official recalled: “The Northern Alliance thought, ‘Oh, okay, you want us to capture him. Right. You crazy white guys.’ ”13

  Reporting from Massoud’s intelligence service and unilateral Afghan agents, however, raised some hope that bin Laden might one day step unwittingly into a Northern Alliance trap. Massoud’s aides told the CIA that bin Laden sometimes inspected al Qaeda troops near Kabul or in northern Afghanistan. Once in a while bin Laden wandered into the wrong place. In a recent battle northeast of Kabul, Massoud’s men reported, bin Laden had gone on an inspection tour and become trapped on the northern side of Massoud’s position. He had escaped only by packing out over mountain paths. After the CIA obtained authorities for operations with Massoud, American officials began to hope that bin Laden would mistakenly stray behind Northern Alliance lines one more time.

  CIA and White House officials also were encouraged to discover that bin Laden had, at least once, traveled all the way to the northern border between Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, to the port town of Hairaton on the Amu Darya River. According to Afghans who had seen him, bin Laden made speeches there about coming Islamist political and military triumphs in Central Asia; he had wanted to see the sites of his future conquests for himself. The northern border region was controlled by the Taliban, but local commanders often were not committed to the cause; many had switched their allegiance from Massoud’s alliance only recently. The CIA harbored hopes that bin Laden would travel to the far north again. This was one reason they had invested so much effort training and equipping the Uzbekistan commando team: A strike just across the Amu Darya border into Uzbek areas of Afghanistan might be relatively easy to mount if they had the right intelligence. Mohammed Atef, too, traveled north to command military operations. He was not as conspicuous or famous a figure as bin Laden, but he might be a more accessible target.14

  Bin Laden’s journeys west and north followed a somewhat predictable path: He would ride west on the Ring Road from Kandahar, then loop north and east through Ghowr province where there was a valley he liked to visit. The CIA mapped houses in obscure Ghowr, one of Afghanistan’s most isolated and impoverished regions. From there the Saudi usually moved east to Kabul and then sometimes on to Jalalabad before turning south again to Paktia and Kandahar. Americans who studied this track called it “the circuit.” They tried to map reliable reports of bin Laden’s movements in great detail. At Richard Clarke’s Counterterrorism Security Group they even tried to develop logarithmic formulas that attempted to predict, based on past behavior, where bin Laden was likely to move next when he was at any given point on the circuit. Over time, even the most security-conscious people can repeat themselves out of habit or unconscious instinct.

  The agency’s working idea was to try to keep bin Laden out of “KKJ,” an insider’s acronym for the densely populated cities of Kabul, Kandahar, and Jalalabad. It did not seem plausible after 1999 that a CIA proxy force could mount a successful snatch operation in a Taliban-ruled urban area, but during 2000, bin Laden traveled to rural northern areas less frequently. The CIA picked up reports that he and his men had been intimidated by banditry and robbery gangs on some of the more lawless northern roads where the Taliban’s writ did not run. There were no more triumphal speeches on the border of Central Asia, and the Uzbek commandos languished.15

  The CIA developed a specific visual signature for bin Laden’s traveling convoy: several Land Cruisers and a bodyguard of twenty to one hundred Arab men. It was the daily work of officers at the Counterterrorist Center to develop and discuss specific operational plans for an armed snatch attempt against bin Laden. After the disappearance of the Pakistani commando team, they had three realistic options: the Uzbek commandos, Massoud’s forces, or the grape-growing tribal tracking team around Kandahar. The tactical problem was obvious: The CIA’s most plausible proxy forces operated in Afghanistan’s north, while bin Laden spent most of his time in the south and east. The CIA struggled to find a convincing plan.16

  SIX FEET FIVE INCHES TALL, chiseled and square-faced, General Hugh Shelton was a civilian’s idea of what a general should look like. Defense Secretary William Cohen appointed him Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top position in the American military, shortly before the Africa embassy bombings. After bin Laden became a pressing national security priority in the autumn of 1998, Shelton seemed an ideal Pentagon partner. He had been a Special Forces team leader in Vietnam, a commander of elite airborne troops, and finally commander of all American Special Forces. Unlike many generals he had direct experience in unconventional tactics, counterinsurgency, and the use of small strike teams in the Third World. As a military leader he preferred to operate by consultation and consensus. He did not seem to his civilian colleagu
es an especially original or forceful general, but his record of battlefield valor and field command marked him as an authentic war fighter, not one of the Washington generals who made their careers as uniformed politicians.17

  The White House first asked the Pentagon for detailed military plans to attack and arrest bin Laden in the autumn of 1998.When Shelton and his aides briefed Sandy Berger at the White House, they reported that a “boots on the ground” operation involving American Special Forces or Army Rangers would require large numbers of troops—thousands—plus aircraft carriers, transport planes, and refueling tankers. Even so, the chances of success were not great, Shelton said. They lacked a foothold in the region, a secure base of operations. “We don’t have Pakistan,” Shelton observed, as Sandy Berger remembered it. “We don’t have Uzbekistan, we don’t have Tajikistan.” Without better intelligence than what they were seeing from the CIA, even a well-supported mission was “likely to fail,” the Pentagon’s planners believed.18

  Shelton, Cohen, and their senior aides saw the CIA’s reporting from Afghanistan every day. Even as the size and scope of the agency’s unilateral agent network grew, the intelligence it produced looked unsound to them as a basis for committing American soldiers to Afghanistan. The CIA’s agents simply could not keep track of bin Laden on a daily basis. “All we had was a brother who had a brother of a man who was allegedly in his security detail, or the cousin of somebody who had once been told, ‘Get the feast ready, because the sheikh is coming,’ ” remembered a Pentagon civilian who regularly reviewed the CIA’s reporting. Cohen recalled telling his colleagues: “We can do this. It’s high risk, but if you’ve got the information to tell us where he is, we will be prepared to recommend that we use force.” But Cohen was cautioned by his recent experiences watching U.S. Special Forces hunt with limited success for fugitive war criminals in the Balkans. He concluded that “someone who exercises good tradecraft is very difficult to locate and capture in enemy territory,” and that bin Laden’s tradecraft was “better than senior Serb war criminals.”19