Most of my time, however, was spent on East Asian economic issues—significant matters but not the stuff of spy novels. In 1996, however, an unexpected part-time assignment changed the course of my career. At the time, CIA Director John Deutch and his deputy, George Tenet, were fielding complaints from the secretary of the treasury, Robert Rubin, and his deputy, Larry Summers, about the intelligence community’s collection of information on economic matters. (This followed the French declaring persona non grata a senior Agency official in Paris for allegedly stealing information on French trade policy.) Rubin and Summers believed that much of the effort the intelligence community was expending to obtain economic data on other countries, as well as other nations’ plans for economic policy, was unnecessary and could become counterproductive to our diplomatic relationships with those countries. Tenet, whom I had met briefly on several occasions, asked me to lead an interagency team to examine the question.
The bottom line of my study was that Rubin and Summers were right. Much of what the intelligence community was collecting on economic issues was available through public means, or what is internally referred to as “open-source” information. Even though the study went against the status quo, it was well received, particularly by Tenet, who told me that he liked the rigor of the report and the clarity with which the results were conveyed. Not surprisingly, Rubin and Summers liked the answer as well, with Rubin writing a letter to Deutch complimenting the study.
Just eighteen months later, Director Deutch stepped down as DCI and was succeeded by Tenet. On December 11, 1997, I was at Arlington Hospital in Virginia waiting for Mary Beth to deliver our third child, Peter. A phone rang—not in the waiting room and not at the nurses’ station but in the delivery room. Mary Beth, in the initial stages of labor, did not look pleased. Neither did the attending nurse who answered, then handed me the phone, saying with some sarcasm, “It’s for you.” On the other end of the line was a friend, Greg Tarbell, who at the time was the daily intelligence briefer for Director Tenet and who would later become my chief of staff when I served as deputy director and acting director. Being resourceful, Tarbell had tracked down the phone number in the delivery room.
Tarbell said with some excitement, “I know you are busy, but I thought you’d want to know—Tenet told me this morning that he remembered the good work you did on that economic intelligence study and that he is considering asking you to be his new EA.” Being tapped to serve as the director’s executive assistant would be a significant career opportunity, but with my mind understandably elsewhere, I ended the call by simply saying, “That’s interesting.” Mary Beth asked, “Who was that?” I gave her the standard answer that an Agency officer provides to a questioning spouse, “Oh, it was nothing,” and I went back to my primary job of delivering ice chips on demand.
A few days after Peter’s birth, I was back at work. Tenet called me to his office to offer me the job. As I crossed the threshold of his long, rectangular office, he handed me a cigar from his private stash to offer congratulations on Peter’s arrival. Excited, I accepted the position on the spot.
Exciting, however, is not the word I would use to describe the first few weeks on the job. Overwhelming was more like it. I had never had a job anything like it before. It was 24/7 and totally consuming. I was the director’s only executive assistant at the time; now there are two or three, depending on the director. I was reluctant to get up from my desk to walk down to the cafeteria for lunch, or even to visit the men’s room, for fear that the stack of new e-mails in my inbox would double during even a brief absence. On top of this, I had, at first, no earthly clue what people were talking about. Tenet and his senior subordinates from across the agency often spoke or wrote in the kind of shorthand that only people who have worked an issue for a long time can understand. And there were so many cryptonyms (code words) to learn that my head was swimming. Furthermore, the breadth and scope of the issues coming at me were unlike anything I could have imagined.
After I had been on the job for a few weeks, Tenet said as I handed him a report, “Are you OK?” I fibbed and told him everything was fine. But as time went on I caught up to the pace of the work and also learned the lingo. I kept my head well above water, and I settled into one of the best jobs of my life.
One of the things that made the job special was the chance to work with Tenet, the most down-to-earth, approachable senior government official I have ever met. The son of Greek immigrants, who learned hard work busing tables in his father’s diner in Queens, Tenet has an everyman quality about him that makes him impossible to dislike. He is brilliant in an unthreatening way, and kings and cafeteria workers thought he was their best friend. And they were right. Ranging from slightly to very rumpled in appearance, Tenet set an informal mood in the office, where he would frequently burst out in Motown hits like Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” do spot-on imitations of foreign leaders (he did an incredible Yasser Arafat), or dribble a basketball in the hallways of the Agency. Tenet never took himself too seriously, a vital trait in a place where the work, which he attacked vigorously, was often a matter of life and death (literally).
I loved working for him. There were four main parts to the job—any one of which might have kept me fully occupied. First I was to review every piece of information coming into the director’s office—whether in a letter, memo, e-mail, cable, phone call, or personal visit—and make a snap decision on whether Tenet needed to know it or not and, if so, whether he needed to know it immediately or it could wait for that evening’s nightly “Read Book.” Information was flooding in every minute from many different sources. If I passed too much of it to the boss, he would be overwhelmed and unable to focus on the most critical matters. If I kept some critical bit of intelligence from the director, something could go badly wrong.
The second duty was to review and organize decisions that he needed to make—in the form of official brown folders from various parts of the organization asking the director for a formal judgment on a wide range of issues, informal questions to which someone needed an answer, and letters drafted by others for the director to sign and send. If I decided something was routine—if I was confident that I knew how Tenet thought about the issue—I could have a machine (called an autopen) sign it. I would then put a copy of what had gone out in the director’s name in his overnight reading materials. This autopen was to become the source of my first mistake as EA.
A senior Agency officer named Joan Dempsey—who had just finished a stint as Tenet’s chief of staff—handed me a letter that she said needed to be signed right away and sent to the secretary of defense. The subject, an intelligence community technical issue, was incomprehensible to me, but she assured me it was no big deal and I should simply have the guys down the hall crank up the machine and affix the “George J. Tenet” signature to the letter she had drafted. Trusting her judgment, I did just that and put a copy of the resulting letter in Tenet’s thick pile of materials to read at home that night, telling him in a note that I had sent the letter to the “SECDEF.” The next morning I got the letter back with Tenet’s distinctive scrawl all over it. At the top he had written, “Never ever, ever, ever…,” and the evers continued across the top of the page… down the right side, upside down across the bottom, and up the left-hand margin. After the final ever, he’d written, “autopen a letter to a cabinet member!”
Properly chagrined, I affixed a Post-it note to the letter: “Your instructions are not clear to me. Would you please clarify?” I put it in the night’s reading file. He accepted my riposte in good humor, which tells you a great deal about the kind of boss he was.
My third responsibility was to make sure that when Tenet was scheduled to have a meeting he had everything he needed in advance. This was perhaps the toughest part of the job, because some materials that came forward from lower levels of the Agency and intelligence community were poorly written, badly argued, confusing, or just too long. So I would have to rewrite a lot of stuff on the fly—parti
cularly talking points for his use at White House meetings. Often I did a good job, but sometimes not. Once he read a page of talking points and, not thinking much of it, asked, “Who was the idiot who wrote this?” I raised my hand and said, “That would be me.”
The final part of the job was to do whatever else he asked of me. I was a messenger, a deliverer of good news and bad, a source of information on morale in the building, a traveling companion, the butt of many jokes, and the participant in much humor. Tenet once threatened to give me as a gift to a world leader who had a special interest in young men, going so far as to quickly leave a dinner with the leader while I was visiting the restroom. Luckily I jumped into the last car as the director’s motorcade left the presidential palace. On another occasion, in a large meeting in the director’s conference room, we were discussing a request from another foreign leader for six helicopters as “payment” for operational support that that country had just undertaken on behalf of the Agency. Tenet responded to the leader’s request by saying, “How about we give him three helicopters and Morell?” The room exploded in laughter.
But I had my moments. Tenet was in his office with his senior leadership team late one morning, just before leaving for a particularly important testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee—to explain how CIA had failed to predict India’s May 1988 test of a nuclear weapon. Tenet asked for one piece of advice from everyone and started around the room. I quickly calculated that I would be last, but I didn’t know if Tenet planned to ask me, since I was the most junior officer in the room. But when the circle ended with me, Tenet did ask, “Any thoughts?” I said, “Pull up your zipper!” I had noticed when we entered the room that his fly was down. The room broke into laughter, and Tenet said, “Finally, a fucking piece of advice that is actually useful.” Tenet had a way with colorful language.
* * *
The global array of problems that the director of central intelligence had to worry about was mind-boggling. At the start of each calendar year, the Agency’s director was obliged to appear before the Senate and House intelligence oversight committees and lay out what concerns him. In January 1998 Tenet did just that, and he had no shortage of things to discuss. Each of the five main areas of challenge he talked about was suddenly something on which I had to quickly come up to speed. At the top of his list of worries were transnational issues that threatened all Americans. Included in this category were the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, international terrorism, drug trafficking, information warfare (what we would call cyber warfare today), and, interestingly, the fallout from a financial crisis that had befallen Asia.
Close behind those worries was a second major category—the threat posed by major powers like Russia and China. The two traditional foes of the United States were on very different trajectories—Russia down and China up—and both were trying to navigate difficult political and economic transformations. Next was the threat from rogue nations like Iraq, North Korea, Libya, and Iran. Fourth on Tenet’s list were regional trouble spots like the Middle East, South Asia, and Bosnia. And finally he mentioned humanitarian emergencies caused by natural disasters, ethnic conflict, and foreign government mismanagement—any one of which could suddenly place heavy demands on US military and economic resources.
That was quite a list, and the director could not afford to ignore any part of it. But I can tell you there was one entry on that parade of threats that dominated his days and thus mine—and that was international terrorism. This was a revelation to me. Throughout my prior time at the Agency I had had little involvement in that arena, and the vast majority of my colleagues at Langley would have told you that counterterrorism—or “CT”—was not a front-burner issue. But Tenet didn’t see it that way. For years before 9/11, the terror threat was the single issue that would keep him up at night. He was focused on it, laser-like.
The counterterrorism arena had a dizzying array of bad guys—Lebanese Hezbollah, responsible for several mass attacks against the United States and for more American fatalities than any terrorist group prior to 9/11; Egyptian terrorist groups al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya and the Islamic Jihad, the latter responsible for the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981; Palestinian groups responsible for multiple attacks against Israel; and many others outside the Middle East—ranging from the Irish Republican Army in the United Kingdom to the Sendero Luminoso or “Shining Path” in Peru. But the one group on which Tenet was intensely focused—and the one that caught my attention as I read and listened—was a group called “al Qa‘ida,” under the leadership of a man named Usama bin Ladin.
* * *
Bin Ladin was born in 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the son of one of the kingdom’s richest men. Usama, meaning “lion,” attended King Abdulaziz University. While he took practical courses in construction engineering and business administration, undoubtedly under pressure from his family, his true passion was religion, studying the Koran and what it meant for how Muslims should live their lives. At school, Bin Ladin became close to members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic organization intent on imposing Koranic law throughout Muslim societies. He loved poetry, black stallions, and soccer. He was an avid follower of English football.
After college Bin Ladin was drawn to the war in Afghanistan. He felt a religious duty to support the Afghan freedom fighters, and he went to South Asia in the early 1980s. As he traveled back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan, his role was one of funding and organizing the flow of foreigners into Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. (Despite many stories over the years to the contrary, CIA never worked with Bin Ladin in the Agency’s own efforts to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the 1980s.) Bin Ladin’s time in South Asia convinced him that ideologically motivated insurgents can defeat a much better-equipped and -trained military force. It was the defining experience of his life.
Bin Ladin had two advantages as he moved through life—a piece of his family’s wealth, which helped him in his early years, and, even more important, charisma. His personality was magnetic. This was not an American-style appeal consisting of a dominant personality that could take over a room. It was an Arab-style charisma made of a soft-spoken, poetic voice and a gentleness of movement in the manner of the Prophet Muhammad.
* * *
CIA’s interest in Bin Ladin began during his time in Sudan, from 1991 to 1996, when he combined business ventures with jihad. Bin Ladin established terrorist training camps in Sudan and financed the travel of hundreds of Afghan War veterans to Sudan to attend those camps. In late 1992, Bin Ladin financed the bombing of a hotel in Aden, Yemen, housing US servicemen, and in 1996 he sent his operatives to Somalia to work as advisors to the warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid, responsible for the tragedy commonly referred to as “Black Hawk Down.” These were Bin Ladin’s opening salvos against the United States, but we learned of his role only years later. We also learned later that during this time Bin Ladin acquired what would be an enduring interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
Bin Ladin’s early activities create an interesting dichotomy. As far as most Americans are concerned, the fight against al Qa‘ida began in 1998 in East Africa or on 9/11. But from Bin Ladin’s perspective, he had been at war against the United States dating back to 1992.
CIA knew that Bin Ladin relocated to Afghanistan from Sudan in late 1996, taking many operatives with him. What we did not know at the time was whether Bin Ladin was just a financier of terrorists or the head of a terrorist organization himself. Because his name was popping up in the intelligence so much, CIA decided to find out. The Agency in 1996 created a special unit to follow Bin Ladin, called Alec Station. Unlike a typical CIA station, this one was based in the United States, within driving distance of CIA headquarters. (The code name Alec was taken from the unit chief’s oldest son.) Its initial objective was to find out who Bin Ladin really was.
By 1997, Alec Station had its answer. CIA had learned and had told policy-makers that Bin Ladin
was the head of a terrorist organization whose goal was the establishment of a global caliphate. And we had learned and reported that, to Bin Ladin, the United States was the key to his goal—and therefore the prime target or, as al Qa‘ida referred to us, the “far enemy.” To achieve his caliphate he had to drive the United States out of the Middle East and then overthrow what he saw as the US-supported apostate leaders currently sitting atop the countries in that region, al Qa‘ida’s so-called near enemies.
Not only did the intelligence make that known, but so did Bin Ladin himself, publicly. He announced his intentions to attack the United States with great clarity. In at least five public statements between mid-1995 and early 1998, Bin Ladin professed his hatred for America and everything it represents. He directly announced his intent to force us to retreat from the Muslim world. And he stated his plan to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction, which he called a “religious duty.” In international relations, sometimes the best indicator of what someone is going to do is what he tells you he is going to do. And, since it is a religious obligation in Islam to warn your enemies in advance, there was reason to pay particular attention to what he had to say. While the intelligence community did so, Bin Ladin’s public statements generated little interest among the American media—even though some of his pronouncements were made directly to US news outlets.
To put teeth behind his rhetoric, Bin Ladin, under the protection of the Taliban, was increasing his capabilities. Al Qa‘ida built training camps in Afghanistan, attracting recruits from all over the world and turning out committed jihadists by the thousands. Bin Ladin built a document forgery capability and mechanisms to move money securely.
The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS Page 2