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All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the CIA or any other US government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US government authentication of information or Agency endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.
To the men and women involved in CIA’s fight against terrorists—the finest public servants you will never know
Credit: Courtesy of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism at the University of Chicago.
Preface
The drinks had not even arrived before the first phone call. It was August 4, 2013, and my wife, Mary Beth, and I had taken our daughter Sarah to dinner to celebrate her twentieth birthday. We were sitting outside in the garden of one of the D.C. area’s finest restaurants. L’Auberge Chez Francois is located along the Potomac River in the rolling treelined hills of Great Falls, Virginia. It was a beautiful evening—low seventies and low humidity—and Sarah was beaming. She was with her mom and dad—the latter of whom also just happened to be the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
In the span of the next two hours, senior officials from CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) called my cell phone nine times. Each time, I would walk into a field adjacent to the garden for privacy. Several times I had to follow up a call from CTC with my own call—either to CIA Director John Brennan or to President Obama’s White House Counterterrorism Advisor Lisa Monaco. At first Mary Beth and Sarah were frustrated with the calls, saying things like “Not tonight. Not during a birthday dinner.” But as more and more calls came, it became comedic, and the frustration turned to laughter. I would sit down after talking on the phone for five minutes, and then thirty or sixty seconds later, the phone would ring again. Although my phone was on vibrate so as not to bother the other patrons, my frequent walks through an archway into the field garnered the attention of all. No one, not even Mary Beth and Sarah, knew that each phone call I received that evening related to the most serious terrorist threat to face the United States since al Qa‘ida’s plot in August 2006 to bring down multiple airliners over the Atlantic Ocean. We ordered the birthday cake to go.
* * *
The birthday dinner took place on the Sunday evening before my last week as deputy director. Five days later I would step down from my three-and-a-half-year assignment as the Agency’s deputy director, enter CIA’s Transition Program, and prepare to retire from the Agency after thirty-three years of service.
For the previous fifteen years, I had been obsessed with al Qa‘ida and the threat it posed. In the late 1990s, I monitored increasingly worrisome intelligence coming in about the then-obscure terrorist group. At the time I was the executive assistant to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet. Like Tenet, I was frightened by what I saw and concerned that few in or outside government shared our alarm.
Then, in early 2001, I began an assignment as the daily intelligence briefer for the newly elected president of the United States, George W. Bush. Again and again I would deliver warnings in the President’s Daily Brief that were both ominous in their potential and frustrating in their lack of actionable specificity. You could not have lived through the day of 9/11 at the president’s side and looked down from Air Force One at the smoldering ruins of the Pentagon, as I did, without becoming obsessed by the issue of terrorism or vowing to do everything possible to prevent the recurrence of such a tragedy.
In the decade that followed 9/11, the United States and its premier intelligence agency, CIA, had enormous successes in their fight against terrorism, and a few significant failures. I was part of both—from CIA’s failure to correctly assess Iraq’s capabilities regarding weapons of mass destruction to the operation that brought Usama bin Ladin to justice. I also had to deal with the political backlash that occurred against the aggressive counterterrorism programs put in place in the aftermath of 9/11. One issue in particular was CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques to acquire information from captured senior al Qa‘ida operatives. A second was the NSA’s operations to ensure that terrorists could never again take advantage of the pre-9/11 seam that had existed between overseas intelligence collection and domestic law enforcement.
* * *
In early October 2013—just weeks after my retirement—I received a phone call from a good and trusted friend. He asked me to consider writing a book. I said, “No, that is not what professional intelligence officers do,” but as I thought about the phone call, I changed my mind. Three things led me to this conclusion—and to this book. First, I wanted to tell the remarkable story of CIA’s fight against the group that killed nearly three thousand people on that beautiful sunny morning in September 2001. No department or agency has done more to keep the country safe than CIA, and I wanted Americans to know that.
Second, without putting our operations at risk, I believed more can and should be shared with the American people about what the Agency does every day. This is important because popular culture creates many myths about the Agency. One is that the Agency is all-powerful—that there is no secret it cannot steal or discover, no threat it cannot disrupt, and no adversary it cannot defeat. This is the “Jack Ryan” myth from countless Tom Clancy novels. Then there is the opposite view, that the Agency is incompetent, made up of people who screw up everything they touch. This is the “Maxwell Smart” myth from the 1960s TV series Get Smart and the 2008 movie with the same title. Finally, and most perniciously, is the notion that CIA is a rogue agency—sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, but always pursuing its own agenda, all without the authority, direction, or control of America’s elected leaders. This is the “Jason Bourne” myth, from the wildly popular book and film series.
The truth is that all these myths are wrong. CIA gets many things right and a few things wrong. And in my experience CIA officers always did what they thought was best for the country, and they undertook operations only with the approval, authorization, and direction of our nation’s elected leaders. Creating an accurate picture of CIA is important because the Agency is a secret organization operating in a democracy, and the American people need to have confidence that the Agency is functioning both effectively and within the Constitution and laws of the United States.
Third, and most important, I wanted to tell Americans how deeply concerned I am about the threat that remains to our country from al Qa‘ida and various groups associated with it. The threat of terrorism has not gone away. It did not die in Abbottabad along with Bin Ladin. It is going to be with us for decades to come, and as a nation we must be prepared. If we are not, we will, with certainty, face another devastating attack on our homeland.
Taken together, these three reasons are why I decided to write a book and why I decided to focus it on the Agency’s fight against terrorism—the great war of our time.
* * *
In July 2013, the threat reporting coming out of Yemen skyrocketed. The intelligence was clear—al Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the al Qa‘ida franchise most closely tied to the al Qa‘ida leadership in Pakistan and the one posing the greatest threat to the United States, was planning attacks against American interests. The reporting pointed to multiple targets and attacks of significance. But, as is almost always the case, the intelligence was frustratingly lacking in details—about targets, locations, and timing.
The hope of a quiet last few weeks on the job turned out to be wishful thinking. I had to cancel many of the visits I had planned throughout the Agency to say thank you to the women and men of CIA for all the hard work that they do for the country and all the work they had done for me as deputy director (and twice acting director). My days, evenings, and nights—including the birthday dinner—were now consumed with the new threat reporting.
Our counterterrorist experts briefed me multiple times a day, and I took their information and analysis to the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee—a policy-making forum of the number two officials from the most important national security departments and agencies in the US government. The Deputies Committee is where departments and agencies share information to understand issues, develop strategies to deal with them, and make policy recommendations to the “principals”—the heads of their agencies—and ultimately to the president. I told my colleagues, “This is the most serious threat reporting I have seen during my three and a half years as deputy director.”
They paid attention. The deputies recommended actions to our bosses on the Principals Committee and to President Obama. The president made decisions to protect our diplomats and to disrupt the terrorists. He ordered embassies in the region closed for a number of days—with some sending their employees home to make the US footprint smaller.
And he ordered a flurry of drone strikes in Yemen. The targets of the drones were those AQAP members the United States knew were at the center of the attack plotting. This action was successful. The plot, which turned out to be simultaneous AQAP attacks against US diplomatic facilities in Yemen as well as Yemeni military facilities, was disrupted. It was called off because many of the key operatives involved in the plot had been killed by US air strikes. Hundreds of lives were saved. It was another in a line of unheralded intelligence and military successes in the war against al Qa‘ida. And it was the last issue in which I was involved as an intelligence officer—my final engagement in a war that had defined my career.
* * *
What follows is the story of CIA’s fight against al Qa‘ida told from the perspective of someone who always seemed to find himself in the middle of history-making events and who has always been nonpartisan—seeking and reporting the truth no matter what policy-makers wanted to hear—serving six different presidents, three Republicans and three Democrats. There are, of course, many things related to this story that I cannot recount because they are and should remain secret. What I can promise is that I will offer an intimate, insider’s look at how we at CIA have faced the biggest threat to our nation since the darkest days of the Cold War.
CHAPTER 1
Opening Salvos
On Friday, August 7, 1998, Molly Hardy was a CIA officer operating under cover in Nairobi, Kenya. Molly was from Georgia, and she had single-handedly raised a daughter as she traveled the world over a lengthy career. Molly was a finance officer, and a good one. Her job was handing out and keeping track of the money that CIA uses to pay its sources for the information that keeps America safe. She dealt largely in cash—in many different currencies and many different denominations. In August 1998 she was fifty-one and a grandmother, and she was looking forward to returning home to see her granddaughter.
For a number of weeks over the summer of 1998, intelligence sources had been picking up chatter among terrorists about a looming attack, about coming “good news.” But the talk was nonspecific about target, location, and timing. All of those missing details would become clear on the morning of August 7.
At ten thirty a.m. Molly, among many others at the embassy in Nairobi, heard gunfire and a small explosion from a grenade. It was the breach of the embassy security barrier by al Qa‘ida suicide bombers. The noise attracted employees to the windows—including Molly. Molly, sensing what was about to happen, warned others to stay away from the windows and to “get down.” As she did, a massive truck bomb exploded—destroying a large part of the embassy as well as much of an adjacent building. Over two hundred people were killed—including twelve Americans. More than four thousand were injured. Molly’s last words were heroic ones, saving the lives of many of her embassy colleagues. Molly was among CIA’s first casualties at the hands of Bin Ladin.
* * *
In Washington, eight thousand miles from Nairobi and Dar es Salaam—where there was a near-simultaneous attack against our embassy in Tanzania—it was the middle of the night. My wife, Mary Beth, and I, along with our three children, were fast asleep in our small three-bedroom house in Arlington, Virginia. It was the type of house a mid-level intelligence officer could afford. Our two older children, Sarah and Luke, had their own bedrooms, but Peter, our baby, was sleeping in a crib in the master bedroom. At the time I was the executive assistant to the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, and one of the requirements of my job was that I have a special STU-III secure telephone at home so I could discuss classified information at any time. Because our house was cramped, the secure phone was on the floor of the master bedroom, under Peter’s crib, and that night, as usual, it was also buried under a pile of laundry.
The ringing jolted me awake. I scrambled to find the phone and answer it before it woke Mary Beth or Peter. I failed on both counts, and Peter loudly expressed his displeasure. I had taken my share of calls in the middle of the night, but this one was not typical. The senior duty officer from the CIA Operations Center, the Agency’s most senior officer after hours, told me that a DOD (Department of Defense) satellite system had detected two enormous explosions in East Africa. He added that other reports, most important from the State Department Operations Center, had confirmed large explosions at the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and that these were quite clearly terrorist attacks. I told the officer to wake Director Tenet and tell him everything—one of only two times I woke him during my two years as his executive assistant (the other being when CIA-provided information led NATO to accidently bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade). I quickly showered, jumped in my car, and headed to work.
* * *
At this point in my career, I was an eighteen-year veteran of CIA, an organization that has three primary missions: collecting secrets clandestinely, conducting all-source analysis for the president and his senior advisors, and undertaking actions covertly to further US foreign policy objectives. No one who had known me as a young man would have even predicted that CIA would hire me. I did not get serious about education until I was a senior in high school. I lived at home during college, never traveled overseas, and did not speak a foreign language.
I majored in economics, and my aspiration was to go to graduate school, earn a PhD, and teach. But one of my professors had a different idea. “You ought to send a résumé to the CIA,” he said, stressing that the Agency hired economists and that it might be a good fit for me. My professor knew that economics is one of a handful of academic disciplines that teaches critical thinking—the number one skill needed to be a successful intelligence analyst.
To be honest, I had little understanding of CIA or what an economist would do there, and even less interest in joining its ranks. But on a lark I sent off an application and was surprised a few months later to be invited for a visit. I had never been to Washington, D.C., and after four austere years living at home while going to college, I figured it would be a treat to see the sights. I set off for our nation’s capital with no intent of accepting a job offer from CIA.
What I found when I a
rrived, however, was a group of amazingly talented people who were enormously dedicated to an important mission. I found an Agency that was helping the nation address a world of challenges, including an ongoing hostage crisis in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It needed young men and women to help unravel some enormously complex issues. It was enticing, but I told my recruiter that I really had my heart set on graduate school. “No problem,” he said. “Come here. Do a good job. We’ll eventually send you to grad school on our dime” (a promise on which the Agency would make good). I accepted an entry-level job paying fifteen thousand dollars a year and began my career as an intelligence analyst.
As an analyst I was fortunate to be involved in some important work early on. For example, I led a small team that statistically demonstrated—using a combination of information provided by intelligence sources and the Philippine government’s publicly released election results—that President Ferdinand Marcos had stolen the presidential election in 1986 from Corazón Aquino. Marcos had used a new technique—the systematic disenfranchisement of millions of voters in areas expected to vote in large numbers for Aquino. Our analysis showed that Marcos’s 54–46 victory would have been a victory for Aquino by a wide margin in a fair election. CIA’s findings played a role in the Reagan administration’s decision to distance itself from Marcos after the election, which helped lead to his fall from power only weeks later in the peaceful “People Power Revolution.” It was exhilarating to be a young analyst and to see my work have such impact. I was hooked. And then, in the early 1990s, I was involved in a larger team effort that uncovered the nascent North Korean nuclear weapons program, which remains a serious threat to this day. Our work included supporting the initial US diplomatic negotiations with the North Koreans on the issue—analysts providing real-time assistance to the US negotiating team.
The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS Page 1