Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  12. That Prince Turki worked with Hamid Gul during this period is from Charles Cogan, former CIA Near East Division chief in the Directorate of Operations, writing in “Partners in Time,“World Policy Journal, p. 78, as well as from interviews with Saudi, Pakistani, and U.S. officials. The portrait of Javed Nasir’s Islamist outlook is from interviews with multiple Pakistani officials, including his successor as ISI director-general, Lt. Gen. Javed Ashraf Qazi (Ret.), May 19, 2002, Rawalpindi, Pakistan (SC).

  13. To: SECSTATE Washington, D.C., February 5, 1993, “Implications of Continued Stalemate . ..,” author’s files.

  14. That the White House did no policy review on Afghanistan during the first Clinton term is from multiple interviews with former Clinton White House and State Department officials. Christopher’s outlook and Raphel’s background are from interviews with former Clinton administration officials. David Halberstam’s War in a Time of Peace provides a deep account of foreign policy formation during the first Clinton term and the heavy priorities accorded to Clinton’s domestic policy agenda.

  15. What Raphel argued is from interviews with former Clinton administration officials. Quotations are from the author’s interviews with officials who declined to be further identified.

  16. “A place where” is from the interview with Woolsey, February 20, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

  17. Interview with Thomas Twetten, March 18, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

  18. “Just really background,” ibid.

  19. Cogan, “Partners in Time,” World Policy Journal, p. 82.

  CHAPTER 15: “A NEW GENERATION”

  1. Cofer Black’s biography and Khartoum station profile in 1993 are from interviews with U.S. officials. Black testified before the Joint Inquiry Committee on September 26, 2002. He referred to his service in Sudan in passing during his testimony. Later he became the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator.

  2. That the Operating Directive was limited to intelligence collection and did not authorize covert action to disrupt bin Laden is from the author’s interviews with U.S. officials. In prepared testimony for the Joint Inquiry Committee on October 17, 2002, CIA director George Tenet said, “As early as 1993, our units watching [bin Laden] began to propose action to reduce his organization’s capabilities.” The statement suggests that case officers may have proposed specific covert action plans from Khartoum to their superiors at Langley that were turned down.

  3. Interviews with U.S. officials.

  4. The Saudi-Egyptian intelligence report is from “Usama bin Ladin: Islamic Extremist Financier,” publicly released CIA assessment, 1996.

  5. Evidence later showed that bin Laden had by now paid for terrorist and paramilitary operations in Yemen, against a hotel occupied by American soldiers, and in Somalia, against U.S. Army Rangers fighting Somali Islamic militias. The CIA and FBI did not learn of bin Laden’s involvement in these plots until several years later. A key breakthrough came in the summer of 1996 when a close bin Laden aide, Jamal al-Fadl, who had been embezzling funds, defected from al Qaeda and walked into the U.S. embassy in Eritrea to provide testimony in exchange for asylum.

  6. The general portrait of bin Laden’s business activities and his $50 million bank investment are from “Usama bin Ladin: Islamic Extremist Financier,” the CIA assessment released in 1996. Specific land purchases and office details are from testimony of Jamal al-Fadl in the federal trial of al Qaeda members who attacked the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, February 6, 2001.

  7. Fadl testimony, February 6, 2001.

  8. “Talk about jihad,” ibid. Bin Laden’s movements and wariness are from Fadl testimony and author’s interviews with U.S. officials.

  9. The Khartoum assassination attempt has been described in many published accounts, although sometimes the details vary slightly. The version here is from interviews with U.S. officials with access to CIA reporting.

  10. Jamal al-Fadl was the embezzler. How bin Laden treated him is from his 2001 court testimony, February 6, 2001.

  11. “Insatiable carnal desires” is from Joshua Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou, p. 58. By the CIA’s count in “Usama bin Ladin: Islamic Extremist Financier,” 1996, his Advisory and Reformation Committee issued “over 350 pamphlets critical of the Saudi government.” Greater Hijaz and Greater Yemen are from Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou, pp. 77-78.

  12. Interviews with U.S. and British officials.

  13. Prince Turki discussed the effort in an interview with ABC’s Nightline on December 10, 2001: “His mother went to see him. His uncle-his uncle was eighty years old. He went to see him in Sudan to try to convince him to come back.” Bin Laden’s quotations are from Peter L. Bergen, The Holy War, p. 89. His $1 million allowance is from National Commission staff statement no. 15, p. 3-4.

  14. Bakr quotation is from Bergen, ibid. How senior Saudi princes thought of bin Laden in this period is from interviews with Saudi officials.

  15. In his congressional testimony on September 26, 2002, Black referred to bin Laden’s attempt to kill him but provided no details. This account is from interviews with U.S. officials.

  16. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 242-43.

  17. Five contemporaneous witness interview reports, produced as evidence in Yousef ‘s trial, document in detail the conversations between Yousef and U.S. federal agents immediately after his arrest. See note 15 in chapter 13. In addition, Parr testified twice at federal trials about his rendition of Yousef and their conversations aboard the jet that brought Yousef from Islamabad to New York. Parr testified on August 12, 1996, in the Manila airline bombings case and on October 22, 1997, in Yousef ‘s World Trade Center bombing case. The description of Yousef ‘s shackling and examination aboard the plane is from Parr’s testimony. Quotations are used only where the reports themselves indicate exact quotations.

  18. Interview with Fred Hitz, CIA inspector general during this period, March 8, 2002, Princeton, New Jersey (SC). Stephen Dycus et al., National Security Law, provides a detailed account of the legal issues.

  19. Witness interview report by FBI Special Agent Bradley J. Garrett, dictated February 7, 1995, transcribed February 10, 1995.

  20. Witness interview report by FBI special agent Bradley J. Garrett, “Pakistan to U.S. Airspace,” dictated and transcribed February 8, 1995.

  21. Discussions of motive and quotations, ibid.

  22. Witness interview report by FBI Special Agent Charles B. Stern and Brian G. Parr, United States Secret Service, “Aircraft in Flight,” dictated February 9, 1995, transcribed February 28, 1995.

  23. Yousef ‘s comments about his flight to Pakistan, who aided him in Manila, and bin Laden, ibid.

  24. The information about the guest house owned by bin Laden is from multiple published sources, including Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, p. 237. Yousef had also spent many hours at the International Islamic University in Islamabad where Abdullah Azzam first lectured when he came to Pakistan, according to Mary Anne Weaver, A Portrait of Egypt, p. 196.

  25. Stern and Parr witness interview report, “Aircraft in Flight,” February 9, 1995.

  26. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has recently been described by U.S. officials as a suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks. He was arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on March 1, 2003, by Pakistani police and intelligence officers. Most accounts sketch his life in tracks that run parallel to Ramzi Yousef ‘s: of Pakistani origin but raised in Kuwait and educated in engineering in the West. Mohammed briefly attended a Baptist college in North Carolina before transferring to North Carolina A&T, a historically black university, where he studied mechanical engineering. He reportedly told American interrogators that he joined the Muslim Brotherhood at age 16.

  27. The New York Times, June 9, 2002.

  28. Morocco attack, The New York Times, January 14, 2001. Air France hijacking and Eiffel Tower kamikaze plan from Eleanor Hill, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement, September 18, 2002.
Belgian manual, The New York Times, January 14, 2001. Mindanao attack, Asiaweek, May 5, 1995. For a thorough account of the Mubarak assassination attempt, see Weaver, A Portrait of Egypt, pp. 174-77. Threat to Lake, Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, p. 244. Among the multiple published accounts of the Riyadh bombing, Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou, pp. 73-74, has substantial detail. Among the multiple accounts of the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, al-Zawahiri, Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, provides the perspective of one of the conspirators.

  29. Eleanor Hill, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement, September 18, 2002.

  30. Woolsey’s December visit and CIA reporting on Shiite threats during 1995 are from “Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Staff Report on the Khobar Towers Terrorist Attack,” September 12, 1996. That Hezbollah was the reported source of the threat against Lake is from an interview with a Clinton administration official. “Out of nowhere” is from the author’s interview with Prince Turki, August 2, 2002, Cancun, Mexico (SC). Saudi Shiites with links to Iranian intelligence services detonated a truck bomb near a U.S. Air Force apartment compound called Khobar Towers in eastern Saudi Arabia on June 25, 1996, killing nineteen American airmen and wounding hundreds of others. The CIA’s Riyadh station, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Saudi intelligence detected the Shiite terrorist threat in the kingdom many months before the Khobar bombing occurred. The September 12 staff report describes intelligence reporting and protection planning in Saudi Arabia during 1995 in some detail. After the Khobar bombing, Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry was slow to cooperate with FBI investigators, creating new tensions in the U.S.-Saudi relationship.

  31. Federal Register, Executive Order 12947, January 25, 1995. The failure to list al Qaeda in 1995 is difficult to understand, given the steady stream of reporting then in hand at the CIA about bin Laden’s contacts in Khartoum with anti-Israeli groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group, Egypt’s Islamic Group, and some even more radical Egyptian factions. At that point, however, al Qaeda had not formally declared war on the United States or Israel, and it had not been directly implicated in any terrorist attacks. Later, in 1997, the State Department released its first list of officially designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and it did not include al Qaeda on that list, either. By then the evidence about al Qaeda’s global terrorism was far more substantial and far more widely available on the public record. The State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator at the time, Philip C. Wilcox, said in February 1995 that while “there are informal contacts among Islamists … there is little hard evidence of a coordinated international network or command and control apparatus among these groups.” Benjamin and Simon, in Age of Sacred Terror, quote Robert Blitzer, who was in charge of the FBI’s international terrorism division until 1996, as saying that until his departure, “the community kept saying ad hoc terrorists and loosely affiliated terrorists and I didn’t agree… . I thought this was some kind of major network. We just didn’t have enough of an intelligence base, didn’t know how bin Laden and others were commanding it, how they moved people and how they moved money. We didn’t have that information sorted out.”

  32. Interviews with Saudi officials and U.S. officials. Among the former Riyadh CIA station chiefs who were consultants for Prince Turki was Ray Close, who had run the station during the 1970s. Another station chief from a later period retired to Spain on a Saudi consultancy, according to his former colleagues. A number of Middle East specialists from Britain’s MI6 intelligence service also acquired retainer contracts. Frank Anderson, the CIA’s Near East Division chief, who had argued that the jihadists from Afghanistan were not a major factor in North African Islamist insurgencies, left the agency in 1995. He soon joined a Washington consultancy that maintained close ties with the Saudi government.

  33. The author is grateful to Walter Pincus who first reported on this document in The Washington Post on June 6, 2002, and who provided a copy of the passages analyzing Sunni Islamic terrorism.

  34. Ibid. All quotations are from the document.

  35. The estimate remains classified, but CIA director George Tenet quoted from it at length in his October 17, 2002, prepared testimony to the Joint Inquiry Committee investigating the September 11 attacks. Eleanor Hill also quoted portions of the estimate in her September 18, 2002, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement. The quotations here are from Tenet’s testimony, except for “new breed,” which is from the Joint Inquiry Committee’s final report, p. 4, and “As far as … his associates,” from the final report, p. 313.

  36. Ibid. “New terrorist phenomenon” from National Commission, staff statement no. 5, p. 1-2. Estimate title from staff statement no. 11, p. 4.

  CHAPTER 16: “SLOWLY, SLOWLY SUCKED INTO IT”

  1. The account of Durrani’s ascension is drawn primarily from Olaf Caroe, The Pathans, pp. 254-55, and Martin Ewans, Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics, pp. 22-23. A former British officer in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, Caroe draws on multiple original and imperial sources.

  2. Caroe, The Pathans. He attributes the story of Durrani’s selection at the jirga to the 1905 autobiography of the “Iron Amir” of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman, who recorded the story as it was recounted “in the Kabul annals.” Whatever its basis in fact, the story’s themes-Durrani’s humble silence and the attempt by more powerful khans to choose a weak king-became an oft-repeated, shaping narrative of Afghan politics.

  3. Ibid., pp. 251-85. The first dynasty of Durrani royals passed from Ahmed Shah through his son Timur, located in the Saddozai Popalzai tribal branch. The second and third dynasties, terminating with King Zahir Shah in 1973, drew its leaders from the Mohammedzai Barakzai tribal branch.

  4. The Naqibullah quotation is from Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker, January 28, 2002. Anderson had traveled in southern Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad and had spent weeks in a mujahedin encampment overseen by Naqibullah. After the Taliban lost Kandahar in December 2001, Anderson met up with Naqibullah again and spent several days in his company. He saw that the warlord was carrying a prescription written in Germany for antipsychotic medication and asked him about it, prompting Naqibullah’s explanation.

  5. Interview with Spozhmai Maiwandi, a Pashtun broadcaster with Voice of America who chronicled the Taliban’s rise and spoke regularly with Mullah Omar and other Taliban leaders, March 28, 2002, Washington, D.C. (GW). Maiwandi’s frequent interviews with the Taliban on VOA’s Pashto-language service led some other Afghans, especially those loyal to Ahmed Shah Massoud, to denounce the U.S.-funded radio service as pro-Taliban. VOA’s reputation in turn fueled suspicions in the region that the Taliban was an instrument of U.S. policy.

  6. The account of the rural roots of the Taliban is mainly from Olivier Roy, “Has Islamism a Future in Afghanistan?,” in William Maley, ed., Fundamentalism Reborn, pp. 204-11, as well as from interviews with Maiwandi and other Kandahar Pashtuns. Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia is the definitive book-length account of the movement. Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, and Larry P. Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War, also provide detailed accounts of the movement’s origins and rise.

  7. Rashid, Taliban, pp. 90-91, reports that the madrassa long funded about four hundred places for Afghan students. In 1999 it had fifteen thousand applicants. Rashid quotes the Haqqannia’s leader, Pakistani politician Samiul Haq, complaining that Pakistani intelligence ignored his madrassa during the anti-Soviet jihad, favoring a network of Muslim Brotherhood-linked religious schools affiliated with Jamaat-e-Islami and Hekmatyar. Jamaa-e-Islami was the Islamist political rival to Haq’s political party.

  8. Martin Ewans, Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics, p. 204. For deeper accounts of the roots of the School of Islamic Studies at Deoband and its role in Muslim theology and anticolonial movements, Ewans recommends A. A. Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India, two volumes, 1978 and 1983, and Rizvi’s Hist
ory of Dar al-Ulum Deoband, 1980.

  9. Rashid, Taliban, pp. 87-94.

  10. Interview with Hashmat Ghani Ahmadzai, May 12, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).

  11. Interview with Qayum Karzai, May 19, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW), and with Hamid Karzai, October 21, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (SC).

  12. This account of Karzai’s detention by Fahim, his interrogation, and the circumstances of his escape is drawn from interviews with multiple sources involved in the episode, including Qayum Karzai, May 19, 2002, and Afghan vice president Hedayat Amin-Arsala, May 21, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW). Amin-Arsala was foreign minister at the time of Karzai’s detention. Amin-Arsala was never certain who ordered Karzai’s arrest: “I’m not really quite sure if [then Afghan president Rabbani] ordered his arrest. But certainly the intelligence people, who were headed by Fahim, they knew.”

  13. Interview with Hamid Karzai, October 21, 2002.

  14. That Karzai provided $50,000 in cash and a large cache of weapons is from Karzai’s interview with Ahmed Rashid, The Daily Telegraph, December 8, 2001. Why Karzai supported the Taliban and that many Pashtuns hoped they would lead to the king’s return are from interviews with Qayum Karzai, May 19, 2002; Hedayat Amin-Arsala, May 21, 2002; Hashmat Ghani Ahmadzai, May 12, 2002; and Zalmai Rassoul, May 18, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).

  15. Even Omar’s birth year is uncertain. Rashid, Taliban, p. 23, places Omar’s birth “sometime around 1959.” An undated CIA biographical fact sheet about Omar describes his birth as “circa 1950.” Each of these dates has been used in various press accounts to estimate Omar’s age, compounding the confusion. The account given to U.S. diplomats is from the declassified State Department cable “Finally, a Talkative Talib,” from Islamabad to Washington, February 20, 1995, released by the National Security Archive.

  16. CIA fact sheet, ibid. Omar’s ties to Bashar and “charismatic nor articulate” are from “Finally, a Talkative Talib,” ibid.

  17. Taliban legend, Associated Press, September 20, 2001. Red Cross, Sunday Times, September 23, 2001.