The public blame war over who in the U.S. intelligence community and the Clinton and Bush administrations was responsible for the failure to prevent 9/11 intensified when Bob Woodward’s book State of Denial was published in September 2006. In it, Woodward detailed a meeting that reportedly took place on July 10, 2001, two months before the 9/11 attacks. Then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with Black, then head of the CTC, at CIA headquarters. The two men reviewed current U.S. intelligence on bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Black, Woodward reported, “laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.”42 At the time, “Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.”43 After reviewing the intelligence with Black, Tenet called National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice from the car en route to the White House. When Black and Tenet met with Rice that day, according to Woodward, they “felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off.” Black later said, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.”44
On August 6, 2001, President Bush was at his Crawford Ranch, where he was delivered a Presidential Daily Brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” It twice mentioned the possibility that Al Qaeda operatives may try to hijack airplanes, saying FBI information “indicates patterns of suspicious activity in [the U.S.] consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”45 Nine days later, Black addressed a secret Pentagon counter-terrorism conference. “We’re going to be struck soon,” Black said. “Many Americans are going to die, and it could be in the U.S.”46
While the debate on responsibility for 9/11 would continue for years—with Clinton and Bush administration officials hurling stones at one another—it was irrelevant to Cofer Black in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Black found himself in the driver’s seat with a Commander in Chief ready and eager to make Black’s covert action dreams a reality. Black had long been frustrated by the restraints and prohibitions governing U.S. covert actions—namely a prohibition against assassinations—and the war on terror had changed the rules of the game overnight. “My personal emotion was, It is now officially started,” Black said. “The analogy would be the junkyard dog that had been chained to the ground was now going to be let go. And I just couldn’t wait.”47
In his initial meeting with President Bush after the 9/11 attacks, Black came prepared with a PowerPoint presentation, and he threw papers on the floor as he spoke of deploying forces inside Afghanistan.48 On September 13, he told Bush point-blank that his men would aim to kill Al Qaeda operatives. “When we’re through with them, they will have flies walking across their eyeballs,” Black promised, in a performance that would earn him a designation in the inner circle of the administration as “the flies-on-the-eyeballs guy.”49 The President reportedly loved Black’s style; when he told Bush the operation would not be bloodless, the President said, “Let’s go. That’s war. That’s what we’re here to win.”50
That September, President Bush gave the green light to Black and the CIA to begin inserting special operations forces into Afghanistan. Before the core CIA team, Jawbreaker, deployed on September 27, 2001, Black gave his men direct and macabre directions. “Gentlemen, I want to give you your marching orders, and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed this with the President, and he is in full agreement,” Black told covert CIA operative Gary Schroen. “I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead. . . . They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the President. I promised him I would do that.”51 Schroen said it was the first time in his thirty-year career he had been ordered to assassinate an adversary rather than attempting a capture.52 Black asked if he had made himself clear. “Perfectly clear, Cofer,” Schroen told him. “I don’t know where we’ll find dry ice out there in Afghanistan, but I think we can certainly manufacture pikes in the field.”53 Black later explained why this would be necessary. “You’d need some DNA,” Black said. “There’s a good way to do it. Take a machete, and whack off his head, and you’ll get a bucketful of DNA, so you can see it and test it. It beats lugging the whole body back!”54
As the United States plotted its invasion of Afghanistan, Black continued with his apparent fixation with corporal mutilation when he accompanied Colin Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage, to Moscow for meetings with Russian officials. When the Russians, speaking from experience, warned Black of the prospect for a U.S. defeat at the hands of mujahedeen, Black shot back. “We’re going to kill them,” he said. “We’re going to put their heads on sticks. We’re going to rock their world.”55 Interestingly, the covert operations Black organized immediately after 9/11 relied heavily on private contractors, answering directly to him, rather than active-duty military forces. Black’s men used their contacts to recruit about sixty former Delta Force, ex-SEALs, and other Special Forces operators as independent contractors for the initial mission, making up the majority of the first Americans into Afghanistan after 9/11.56
In late 2001, Black was exactly where he had wanted to be his entire career, playing an essential role in crafting and implementing the Bush administration’s counterterror policies. “There was this enormous sense among the officers that had lived in this campaign before Sept. 11 that . . . finally, these lawyers and these cautious decision makers who had gotten in our way before can be overcome, and we can be given the license that we deserve to have had previously,” said Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars.57 Black’s CTC rapidly expanded from three hundred staffers to twelve hundred. 58 “It was the Camelot of counterterrorism,” a former counterterrorism official told the Washington Post. “We didn’t have to mess with others—and it was fun.”59 People were abducted from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other hot spots and flown to the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—most held without charge for years, designated as enemy combatants and denied access to any legal system. Others were kept at hellish prison camps inside Afghanistan and other countries. In 2002, Black testified to Congress about the new “operational flexibility” employed in the war on terror. “This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know: There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11,” Black said. “After 9/11 the gloves come off.”60
Black would later brag, in 2004, that “over 70 percent” of Al Qaeda’s leadership had been arrested, detained, or killed, and “more than 3,400 of their operatives and supporters have also been detained and put out of action.”61 As part of this new “operational flexibility,” the CIA carried out “extraordinary renditions” of prisoners—shipping them to countries with questionable or blatantly horrible human rights records, where they were sometimes psychologically or physically tortured. The Washington Post reported that Black’s CTC heavily utilized its “Rendition Group, made up of case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside, or a secluded corner of an airport where local authorities wait.”62 According to the Post’s Dana Priest:
Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their d
estinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA’s own covert prisons—referred to in classified documents as “black sites,” which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.63
The CIA would provide the host countries with questions it wanted answered by the prisoners. One anonymous U.S. official directly involved in rendering captives told the Post, “We don’t kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them.”64 Another official who supervised the capture and transfer of prisoners told the paper, “If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job,” adding, “I don’t think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was the whole problem for a long time with the CIA.”65
Black played an integral role from the very beginning in the use of “extraordinary renditions” in the war on terror, beginning in November 2001 when the United States captured alleged Al Qaeda trainer Ibn al-Shayk al-Libi. 66 New York-based FBI agent Jack Cloonan felt that Libi could be a valuable witness against Zacarias Moussaoui and alleged would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid, both of whom had trained at the Khalden camp Libi allegedly ran. Cloonan told FBI agents to “handle this like it was being done right here, in my office in New York.”67 He said, “I remember talking on a secure line to them. I told them, ‘Do yourself a favor, read the guy his rights. It may be old-fashioned, but this will come out if we don’t. It may take ten years, but it will hurt you, and the bureau’s reputation, if you don’t. Have it stand as a shining example of what we feel is right.’”68 But that didn’t sit well with the CIA, which felt it could get more information out of Libi using other methods. Invoking promises of wider post-9/11 latitude in questioning suspects, the CIA Afghanistan station chief asked Black, then counterterrorism chief, to arrange for the agency to take control of Libi. Black in turn asked CIA Director George Tenet, who got permission for the rendition from the White House over the objections of FBI Director Robert Mueller.69
The White House, meanwhile, had its lawyers feverishly working to develop legal justifications for these ultraviolent policies. It “formally” told the CIA it couldn’t be prosecuted for “torture lite” techniques that did not result in “organ failure” or “death.”70 Black had quickly earned an insider’s pass to the White House after 9/11, and his former colleagues said he would return from meetings at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. “inspired and talking in missionary terms.”71
A year later, with Osama bin Laden still at large, releasing videotaped messages and praising anti-U.S. resistance, Cofer Black abruptly left the CIA. Some charged that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had him fired after Black allegedly served as a “deep background” source for a Washington Post story published on April 17, 2002, that described how the Pentagon allegedly allowed bin Laden to escape after being injured at Tora Bora in Afghanistan.72 In its lead paragraph, the paper called it the administration’s “gravest error in the war against al Qaeda.”73 A month later, buried within another Post story on May 19, came this announcement: “In other developments yesterday, CIA officials said Cofer Black, head of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center for the past three years, has been assigned to another position. They described the move as part of normal turnover at the agency.”74 The UPI news agency later interviewed former CIA officials, one of whom said, “Black was fired. He was kicked out.”75 The news agency also reported, “Not only was Black fired, but he was barred from entering CIA headquarters. ‘That’s standard procedure if you’ve been fired,’ former CIA Iraq analyst Judith Yaphe told UPI. Humiliated, Black was restricted to an agency satellite location at Tysons Corner, which separated him from old, trusted colleagues and the comfort of familiar surroundings.” 76 Black, however, was not yet finished in government and clearly retained friends in high places. On October 10, 2002, President Bush appointed him as his coordinator for counterterrorism, with the rank of at-large ambassador at the State Department .77
Shortly after assuming his new post, Black spoke to a group of Egyptian journalists via satellite from Cairo, where he was pressed on several of the administration’s new “war on terror” policies. “I have been to Guantánamo,” Black told them. “I must say that I have been very well pleased. I mean, you know, you and I would be very lucky to be housed that way by our enemies.”78 It wouldn’t take long for controversy to hit him.
During the 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush declared, “Tonight, I am instructing the leaders of the FBI, the CIA, the Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense to develop a Terrorist Threat Integration Center, to merge and analyze all threat information in a single location. Our government must have the very best information possible.”79 As part of this mission, Black was to coordinate the government’s annual report on “Patterns of Global Terrorism,” which would serve as a report card of sorts for how the administration’s “war on terror” was progressing. A few months later, on April 30, 2003, Black released the report and claimed that 2002 had seen “the lowest level of terrorism in more than 30 years.”80 While there was little public scrutiny of the statement at the time, that would not be the case when Black released the report a year later and made an almost identical claim.
On April 29, 2004, with anti-U.S. resistance in Iraq exploding, Black and Deputy Secretary of State Armitage unveiled “Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003,” boldly claiming it showed that the United States was winning its loosely defined war on terror. “You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight,” said Armitage. The report, he said, was prepared “so that all Americans will know just what we are doing to keep them safe.”81 For his part, Black said that 2003 “saw the lowest number of international terrorist attacks since 1969. That’s a 34-year low. There were 190 acts of international terrorism in 2003. That’s a slight decrease from the 198 attacks that occurred the previous year, and a drop of 45 percent from the 2001 level of 346 attacks.”82 For the White House, the report was held up as clear evidence of a successful strategy; after all, the Congressional Research Service called the State Department’s annual report “the most authoritative unclassified U.S. government document that assesses terrorist attacks.”83
The trouble was, it was a fraud. Congressional investigators and independent scientists soon revealed the truth. “The data that the report highlights are ill-defined and subject to manipulation—and give disproportionate weight to the least important terrorist acts,” wrote Alan Krueger and David Laitin, two independent experts, from Princeton and Stanford, in the Washington Post shortly after the report was released. “The only verifiable information in the annual reports indicates that the number of terrorist events has risen each year since 2001, and in 2003 reached its highest level in more than 20 years. . . . The alleged decline in terrorism in 2003 was entirely a result of a decline in non-significant events.”84 Instead of a 4 percent decrease in terrorist acts, as Black’s report claimed, there had actually been a 5 percent increase.85 Attacks classified as “significant,” meanwhile, hit the highest level since 1982.86 What’s more, the report stopped its tally on November 11, 2003, even though there were a number of major terrorist incidents after that date.87 Despite the fact that in speeches, U.S. officials routinely referred to resistance fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan as “terrorists,” in Black’s report attacks on forces in Iraq were classified as combat, not terrorism. Black said they “do not meet the longstanding U.S. definition of international terrorism because they were directed at [combatants], essentially American and coalition forces on duty.”88 California Democratic Representative Ellen Tauscher later said this was evidence that the administration “continues to deny the true cost of the war and refuses to be honest with the American people.”89
On May 17, 2004, in a letter to Black’s direct supervisor, Secretary of State Colin Powell, California Dem
ocratic Representative Henry Waxman, the ranking member of the House Government Reform Committee, blasted the report, saying its conclusions were based on a “manipulation of the data” that “serve the Administration’s political interests. . . . Simply put, it is deplorable that the State Department report would claim that terrorism attacks are decreasing when in fact significant terrorist activity is at a 20-year high.”90
“The erroneous good news on terrorism also came at a very convenient moment,” wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “The White House was still reeling from the revelations of the former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who finally gave public voice to the view of many intelligence insiders that the Bush administration is doing a terrible job of fighting Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, Bush was on a ‘Winning the War on Terror’ campaign bus tour in the Midwest.”91 By June, the White House was forced to issue a major correction of the report, acknowledging there had actually been a significant increase in terror attacks since the launch of Bush’s “war on terror.” The revised report said that 3,646 people were wounded by terror attacks in 2003, more than double the number in Black’s original report, while 625 were killed, dwarfing the report’s original count of 307.92 As Krugman observed, Black and other officials blamed the errors on “‘inattention, personnel shortages and [a] database that is awkward and antiquated.’ Remember: we’re talking about the government’s central clearinghouse for terrorism information, whose creation was touted as part of a ‘dramatic enhancement’ of counterterrorism efforts more than a year before this report was produced. And it still can’t input data into its own computers? It should be no surprise, in this age of Halliburton, that the job of data input was given to and botched by private contractors.”93 Bush’s Democratic challenger in the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry, charged through a spokesperson that Bush was “playing fast and loose with the truth when it comes to the war on terror,” adding that the White House “has now been caught trying to inflate its success on terrorism.”94 There was talk of heads rolling at the State Department over the report, but not Black’s. “It was an honest mistake,” Black claimed, “not a deliberate deception.”95
Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army Page 39