Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  The bin Laden unit and the Afghan specialists in the Near East Division of the Directorate of Operations traded ideas. They had to confront a basic question: Were they willing to go in deeper with Ahmed Shah Massoud?

  Gary Schroen, now the deputy chief in Near East, accepted the Counterterrorist group’s ardent view that Massoud was the only game in town. The scattered Pashtun opposition to the Taliban—Hamid Karzai, Abdul Haq, and the rest—simply could not get anything done, Schroen and his colleagues argued. On the other hand, continuing with outreach to supposed Taliban moderates, as urged by the State Department, “is crap,” Schroen said. Schroen had flown with a State team to Europe for secret meetings with supposed Taliban intermediaries that fall. It was all a game, he reported. The Taliban only sought to string the United States along and discourage them from launching military attacks. If the CIA was going to pressure the Taliban in a new and serious way, Schroen said, they had to work with Massoud.31

  The purpose of CIA covert aid, they all decided, should be to strengthen Massoud, keep him in the fight after the loss of Taloqan, put more pressure on al Qaeda and Taliban troops, and create conditions for more effective counterterrorist work on the ground, directed at bin Laden and his lieutenants. “From an intelligence perspective,” as Black recalled their thinking later, “to have a fighting chance” against bin Laden, the CIA “needed to attack the Afghan terrorist sanctuary protected by the Taliban.”32

  This meant a new and sizable covert action program to shore up Massoud’s finances and supplies. They sat down at Langley in November and drew up a specific list of what Massoud needed based on the assessments of the Counterterrorist JAWBREAKER and NALT teams who had been traveling regularly to the Panjshir. They agreed that Massoud needed cash to bribe commanders, to counteract a Taliban treasury swollen with Arab money. He needed trucks, helicopters, light arms, ammunition, uniforms, food, and maybe some mortars and artillery. He did not need combat aircraft. Tanks were not a priority. The plan they had in mind was not designed to help Massoud conquer Afghanistan or challenge Taliban control of Kabul. The goal was to disrupt al Qaeda’s safe haven and put the CIA into a better position to attack bin Laden. The list of covert supplies they proposed for Massoud would cost between $50 million and $150 million, depending on how aggressive the White House wanted to be.33

  Under the plan, the CIA would establish a permanent base with Massoud in the Panjshir Valley. Rich, the bin Laden unit chief at the Counterterrorist Center, argued that the CIA had to show Massoud a more serious commitment. The agency’s officers had to be down around the campfire with Massoud’s men, drawing up plans and looking for opportunities to attack. They needed to be on the ground and on the front lines all the time, the CIA’s proposal documents argued. To overcome the confusion and mistrust that had developed with Massoud about snatch operations, CIA officers would now be able to go directly into action alongside the Northern Alliance if they developed strong intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts. There would be no more embarrassments like the episode where the CIA had attempted to call back Massoud’s rocket attack on Derunta.

  It took some time to develop a consensus around the Massoud plan among the CIA’s leadership. There was still a sense in some quarters at Langley that the Counterterrorist Center’s bin Laden unit—the Manson Family—was over the top. Tall and intense, Rich was seen by some of his colleagues as typical of the unyielding zealots the unit had seemed to produce one after another since about 1997. The bin Laden team talked about the al Qaeda threat in apocalyptic terms. And if you weren’t with them, you were against them.

  Cofer Black tried to keep the discussions in balance and tried to see the other side’s point of view, but at the end of almost every argument, he backed the bin Laden unit. There was a continual undercurrent of bureaucratic tension between the Counterterrorist Center and the Directorate of Operations. The center was quasi-independent, with a direct line to Tenet, but it drew on D.O. resources and officers. There were always questions about where budget funds would come from and who would have operational control. These tensions were heightened by the emotion that seemed to surround the bin Laden issue. If Jim Pavitt, who ran the D.O., questioned details about the new covert plan to aid Massoud, somebody from the Counterterrorist Center would jump on him, arguing that he just didn’t understand how serious this was. They bristled at each other, but soon they had a finalized plan of options for the White House. The “Blue Sky memo,” as it was called, landed at the National Security Council in December. Yet Pavitt scribbled on one draft of the memo that he did not believe “a proposal of this magnitude should be on the table” so late in the Clinton Administration. This was the sort of ambivalence at what he called the “passive-aggressive” CIA that drove Richard Clarke to distraction.

  They were worse than lame ducks now at the White House. The November presidential election had deadlocked and then devolved into a weeks-long national crisis over Florida recounts and constitutional disputes. It looked as if George W. Bush would prevail, but Clinton’s White House aides were enduring the strangest postelection transition in a century as the CIA’s options paper landed.

  The national security cabinet met on December 20. Apart from Clarke there was hardly any support for the CIA’s covert action proposals. The cabinet members raised old objections and new ones. Massoud was a drug trafficker; if the CIA established a permanent base in the Panjshir, it risked entanglements with the heroin trade. Pickering and others at the State Department still believed there was at least a 25 percent chance that, through patient negotiation, the Taliban could be persuaded to hand bin Laden over for trial. Berger believed that it would be a mistake to break with Pakistan by backing Massoud. In Islamabad in March, Musharraf had promised Clinton that he would deliver on the bin Laden problem. The general had not done much yet, but it would be rash to change horses now. Moreover, by sending covert aid to Massoud they would be handing the next administration a new proxy war in one of the most dangerous corners of the world. What if Pakistan responded to the Massoud aid by escalating its jihad attacks in Kashmir, provoking a nuclear crisis? Wasn’t that the sort of risk the next administration should calculate for itself? They discussed other options to pressure al Qaeda that had been prepared by Clarke in a detailed strategy memo that sought to “roll back” al Qaeda over three to five years, in part through aid to Massoud. These included new efforts to secure cooperation from Pakistani intelligence and to seek bin Laden’s expulsion. Clinton’s Cabinet remained enticed by the promises of partnership with Pakistan’s army and fearful of a total break.34

  The word went back to the Counterterrorist Center: There would be no covert action program for Massoud. The CIA’s continuing aid to Massoud—its relatively small payments and its intelligence collection and sharing program—could not be redesigned in any way that would “fundamentally alter” the Afghan battlefield.

  The decision chilled the CIA’s liaison with Massoud. Both the CIA’s officers and Massoud’s leadership group felt they were approaching the limits of cooperation under the existing White House ground rules. Massoud’s contact with the CIA went “a bit” cold that winter, recalled one of the commander’s intelligence aides. The Panjshir visits from Langley halted, but Massoud’s men were not completely sure why. “I presume that they were searching for a clear demonstration of willingness from [our] side to conduct a capture operation” against bin Laden or one of his lieutenants, said the intelligence aide.35

  A CIA team flew out to Uzbekistan early that winter. They inspected the agency’s recently purchased Mi-17 helicopter and decided to prepare it for winter storage. “They kind of mothballed it,” recalled Gary Schroen, speaking of the CIA helicopter but also of the agency’s liaison with Massoud.36

  The Clinton administration’s eight-year struggle with Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and Afghanistan had ended. “You replay everything in your mind, and you ask, ‘Was there anything else that could have been done?’ ” Clinton said later. “I tried to ta
ke Mr. Bin Laden out of the picture for the last four years-plus I was in office… . I don’t think I was either stupid or inattentive, so he is a formidable adversary.”37

  30

  “hat Face Will Omar

  Show to God?”

  GEORGE W. BUSH NEVER SPOKE in public about Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda during his campaign for the presidency. The Republican Party’s foreign policy and defense platforms made no mention of bin Laden or his organization. Terrorism barely registered as an issue during the 2000 contest. After the USS Cole attack in October, a reporter asked Bush about Afghanistan: “If a country is hosting a terrorist cell, should that country also be subject to reprisals?” Bush answered that he would not “play his hand” on that issue until he was president. “But I would tell the world that we’re going to hold people accountable… . There’s going to be a consequence.” Asked if the Clinton administration “had done enough to capture the likes of Osama bin Laden or other suspected terrorist leaders,” Bush demurred again. “I don’t have enough intelligence briefings,” he said.1

  Reporters peppered him with pop quizzes about foreign policy. Bush’s intellect and qualifications had become campaign issues. He had traveled abroad very little and had no direct experience in international affairs. He could not spontaneously identify General Pervez Musharraf as Pakistan’s leader. His lapses prompted a writer from Glamour magazine to list a series of names and ask Bush what came to mind: Christine Todd Whitman, Madonna, Sex and the City, the Taliban. Whitman was a “good friend.” On the television show, Bush explained that he did not “get cable.” About the Taliban, he shook his head in silence. The writer provided a hint: “Because of the repression of women—in Afghanistan.” Bush lit up. “Oh, I thought you said some band. The Taliban in Afghanistan! Absolutely. Repressive.”2

  Bush relied heavily on Condoleezza Rice, his chief foreign policy adviser during his campaign. Rice was a self-described “Europeanist.” She had written books on the communistera Czechoslovak army and on the reunification of Germany. She had run the Soviet affairs directorate of the National Security Council under Bush’s father. “I like to be around her,” Bush explained, because “she’s fun to be with. I like lighthearted people, not people who take themselves so seriously that they are hard to be around.” Rice was a self-confident administrator with well-developed views about post–Cold War Europe. But she had to cram during the campaign about areas of the world she knew less well. At one point she described Iran as “the state hub for technology and money and lots of other goodies to radical fundamentalist groups, some will say as far-reaching as the Taliban.” But Iran’s Shiite regime and the Taliban’s radical Sunni mullahs were blood enemies, and Iran actually sent arms and money to Ahmed Shah Massoud, to aid his war against the Taliban. Challenged by a reporter, Rice insisted that the Iranians were “sending stuff to the region that fell into the hands of bad players in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” She did not explain what players. Asked about her statement once again, she said that of course she was aware of the enmity between Iran and the Taliban.3

  None of the rest of Bush’s closest foreign policy advisers had recent experience in South Asia, either. Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had wide knowledge of global affairs but no personal acquaintance with Pakistan or Afghanistan. Paul Wolfowitz, appointed as deputy defense secretary after the election was resolved, was a specialist in Southeast Asia. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had perhaps the most experience in the region. Each had worked closely with Pakistan’s army and government during the 1980s and early 1990s. Armitage had been heavily involved from Washington in the last phase of the anti-Soviet jihad. Powell had worked with Pakistan’s military during the 1990 run-up to the Gulf War. Their experiences, however, were rooted in the close ties between the United States and Pakistan’s army and intelligence service during the Cold War years. Both men had been out of government during the 1990s as that alliance had frayed to the point of dysfunction, partly over bin Laden’s terrorism and the related issue of jihadists fighting in Kashmir.

  The son of a former CIA director, Bush was conditioned to believe in the agency’s mission and people. During the long recount dispute in Florida he heard from family friends who urged him to consider leaving George Tenet in place for the good of the CIA’s professionals. Tenet’s most important mentor in the Senate, David Boren, the conservative Democrat from Oklahoma, was a Bush family friend. Boren and his daughter had belonged to the same secretive Yale fraternity, Skull and Bones, as had the two George Bushes. Boren’s daughter later worked for George W. Bush in the Texas state government. In Boren’s estimation, “The families trust each other.” Just after New Year’s Day, 2001, the former senator, now president of the University of Oklahoma, was in Miami to watch his Sooners play in the Orange Bowl football game. His cell phone rang in the midst of a boisterous pep rally. “I want to talk to you about George Tenet,” president-elect Bush said over the noise, as Boren recalled it. “Tell me about this guy.”4

  Boren talked Tenet up enthusiastically. “I don’t know if he’s a Democrat or a Republican,” Boren told Bush. “He’s a straight shooter… . If there’s anything a president needs, it’s somebody who will tell him what he really thinks, have the courage to disagree with you, and look you in the eye and do so.” These were among Tenet’s great strengths, Boren said. “If you give him a chance to stay, I think it would be good for the agency because he’s totally nonpolitical… . The agency has had so many directors, its morale is down. And I think it would be a great gesture for continuity and professionalism if you kept him on.”

  “I’m going to meet with him face-to-face,” Bush replied. “I’ll be able to judge this.”5

  For a president who valued “lighthearted people” who did not take themselves too seriously, Tenet was made to order. Like Bush he was salty, casual, and blunt. Tenet’s emphasis on the CIA’s traditional missions of warning and objective analysis had also appealed to the elder Bush, after whom Tenet had renamed the CIA’s Langley headquarters. The White House announced on January 16 that Tenet had been asked to stay on at the CIA for “an undetermined period of time.” President Bush would decide “at a later period” how long Tenet would remain at Langley.6

  The CIA director had survived, but he was on a tryout. He now had to build steadily, meeting by meeting, an entirely new set of relationships with Bush, Rice, and the national security cabinet. He began to brief Bush on intelligence matters each morning, face-to-face. The president agreed to make an early visit to CIA headquarters at Langley. “We are grateful to you for the active interest that you have demonstrated in our work from day one,” Tenet declared before an overflow headquarters audience. Bush reflected on the differences between the CIA his father had run in 1976 and the agency now. His father’s era had faced “an overarching threat” from Soviet communism, Bush said, but now “that single threat has been replaced by new and different threats, sometimes hard to define and defend against: threats such as terrorism, information warfare, the spread of weapons of mass destruction.”7

  Sandy Berger, who felt the first President Bush had failed to arrange adequate transition briefings on national security for the incoming Clinton team, vowed to run a handoff of the sort he would have wished to receive. The “number one” issue on his agenda, he recalled, “was terrorism and al Qaeda… . We briefed them fully on what we were doing, on what else was under consideration, and what the threat was.” Berger ordered each directorate in the National Security Council to write an issues memo for Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley. The memos were then enhanced by oral briefings and slide show presentations. Berger himself attended only one, the session organized by Richard Clarke to talk about bin Laden and al Qaeda. “I’m here because I want to underscore how important this issue is,” Berger explained to Rice. Later, in the West Wing of the White House, Berger told his successor, “You’re going to spend more time during your four years on
terrorism generally and bin Laden specifically than any issue.”8

  The warnings did not register. The CIA briefed Bush’s senior national security team about al Qaeda, but its officers sensed no deep interest. Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz—the four with the strongest ideas and the most influence—had spent many months thinking and talking about what they would emphasize during their first one hundred days in the White House. They were focused on missile defense, military reform, China, and Iraq. Neither terrorism nor South Asia was high on the list.

  In their early briefings, Clarke’s office described bin Laden as an “existential” threat to the United States, meaning that the danger he posed went beyond the dozens or hundreds of casualties al Qaeda might inflict in serial bombing attacks. Bin Laden and his followers sought mass American fatalities and would use weapons of mass destruction in American cities if they could, Clarke and officers at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center firmly believed. Tenet and Pavitt briefed Bush, Cheney and Rice on intelligence issues, including the al Qaeda threat, which Pavitt recalled describing as one of the gravest threats to the country. Bush asked whether killing bin Laden would end the problem. Pavitt and Tenet replied that it would make an impact but not end the peril.When the CIA later elaborated on this point in assessments for Bush’s White House, agency analysts argued that the only way to seriously hurt al Qaeda would be to eliminate its Afghan sanctuary. But they failed to persuade Bush or his top advisers. Throughout the 2000 campaign Bush and his team described missile defense as a central priority. They defined the most important security threat faced by the United States as hostile regimes that possessed or might soon acquire ballistic missiles that could strike American cities. In tandem they argued that China and to some extent Russia loomed as crucial security challenges. CIA briefers sensed that Bush’s national security cabinet viewed terrorism as the kind of phenomenon it had been during the 1980s: potent but limited, a theatrical sort of threat that could produce episodic public crises but did not jeopardize the fundamental security of the United States. “I don’t think we really had made the leap in our mind that we are no longer safe behind these two great oceans,” Armitage said later.9