CIA was not just collecting information on Bin Ladin and his activities; it was actively trying to undermine him. Alec Station was working hard on a program to disrupt his finances, arrest the operatives he sent abroad, and bring him to justice. Thanks to Tenet, we were not sitting on our hands, but the rest of the Agency, with the exception of Alec Station, did not take al Qa‘ida as seriously as did its director.
Significantly, Alec Station, arguably one of the most important CIA operational units at the time, was led by an analyst. As a career analyst myself, I strongly believed that people from my career path could make enormous contributions. But I couldn’t get over that the leader of Alec Station—an officer by the name of Mike Scheuer—was not a trained operations officer and that few operations officers played a significant role in the unit.
Alec Station also did not get the support it needed to do its job. Part of this was due to Scheuer’s personality. He was a zealot. In the years before 9/11, I don’t think anyone knew more or cared as much about al Qa‘ida. His analytic assessments were always on the mark, but he also had a penchant for angering anyone who didn’t see things exactly as he did. Scheuer was constantly getting into fights with the FBI, the NSA, and his own bosses within the Directorate of Operations. (Mike got a chance to vent when he anonymously published a couple of books, but he eventually left the Agency bitter and questioning our commitment to the fight.) But I am convinced that the Agency did not give him enough support in part because Scheuer was an analyst. At the time there were strong divisions between the operational and analytic sides of CIA. When I started in 1980, the two organizations were on different sides of the building and their officers ate in different cafeterias. There was a strong “not invented here” culture in the Directorate of Operations. I believe the DO, as we called it, rejected Scheuer because he was not one of its own.
The lack of support also reflected the fact that not all levels of management understood the source of the passion Alec Station’s officers brought to the job. And not all CIA managers understood that because the threat had not yet manifested itself. They could not see it and feel it (this was also an issue in the broader government and in the country at large). One of the analysts in Alec Station was once counseled that she was spending too much of her career on Bin Ladin.
Scheuer frequently complained about the lack of support. For example, he believed he did not receive the backing he needed from the Agency’s geographic operational units (the “owners” of our overseas stations), from other agencies in the intelligence community, or from foreign intelligence services. And Scheuer believed that his superiors in CIA did not push those organizations hard enough to be more forthcoming. Some of this was hyperbole, but some of it reflected reality. Scheuer was a frequent visitor to my office after a meeting in the director’s suite and would share his frustrations with me. I wondered to myself if an operations officer, as chief of Alec, would have received more support. I thought so, and would occasionally share this view with Tenet.
Perhaps one of the best examples of this lack of support was the reaction of the leadership of the Directorate of Operations—headed at the time by a gruff Cold Warrior named Jack Downing—to a plan from Alec Station to capture Bin Ladin. The plan, put together in the fall of 1997 under the presidential authorities we had at the time to undermine and degrade terrorist groups, called for members of a particular Afghan tribe, codenamed TRODPINTS and with an undistinguished record of fighting, to ambush Bin Ladin, capture him alive (despite his being under constant heavy guard by highly trained gunmen), whisk him off, and hide him in a cave for up to a month until a US military aircraft could swoop in clandestinely and spirit him out of Afghanistan. The plan from Scheuer and his team, presented to Tenet in the spring of 1998, was imaginative and aggressive, but it had little chance of succeeding. This was an overly complicated paramilitary operation. The more moving parts in such an operation, the greater the risk of failure, and there were a lot of moving parts in the Alec Station plan. There was also an issue regarding collateral damage, as Bin Ladin seemed constantly surrounded by his wives and children. The Covert Action Review Group, the board of senior officers at the Agency that reviews all covert action proposals, gave the operation only a 30 percent chance of success. All in all, it was a poorly conceived plan.
But what struck me most about the Alec Station proposal was that it ever showed up in the director’s office. Not a single person in Scheuer’s chain of command thought his plan was wise. Typically the Directorate of Operations would protect its people and not let them see the boss unless everyone was supportive of whatever plan they had in mind. But in this case they brought Scheuer in, allowed him to do the briefing, then, once Scheuer left the room, told Tenet (correctly, in my view) that the plan was implausible.
I asked myself why Scheuer’s bosses would let him hang out there like that. The answer, it seemed to me, was that he was a mere analyst they did not respect and to whom they owed nothing. And yet they did not seem to respect Alec Station’s mission sufficiently to put one of their own in the job—until after the threat became real, after the East Africa bombings, when Scheuer was replaced with one of the best operations officers of his generation.
One of the consequences of the way Alec Station was managed in the early years was that we did not have al Qa‘ida penetrated with spies to the extent that we should have. While we knew a bit from spies on the periphery about the organization and its plans and intentions, we had few human sources—fewer than a handful—with access to the leadership of al Qa‘ida itself. This significantly lowered the chances that we would detect an attack in preparation and disrupt it. This was the fundamental responsibility of Alec Station, and its failure helped lead to the bombings of our embassies in East Africa; this failure did not even start to get remedied until the leadership of Alec Station changed and a career operations officer was placed in charge and until the East Africa bombings galvanized the rest of the Agency.
The bottom line is that Mike Scheuer should have been in Alec Station as the senior analyst—but he should not have been running the show. That job should have gone to an experienced operations officer from the very beginning. And the rest of the clandestine service should have been pushed harder to support the work of Alec Station. These were a failures on the part of Downing and his leadership team.
* * *
My drive to work on the morning the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed brought me to the office at five a.m. Tenet was already there. I gathered all the materials on the bombing, read them carefully, and highlighted key passages for the director, who was on and off the phone with a number of his colleagues around government. At eight a.m. we assembled the relevant players in the director’s conference room to go over what we knew, what we did not know, and what we needed to do. Tenet walked into the conference room, sat in his usual spot—in the middle of the table rather than at the head, a gesture that is respected by the workforce in the egalitarian CIA—and immediately asked the assembled representatives “Who did this?” Scheuer, sitting directly across from the director, responded almost instantaneously, “This is al Qa‘ida; no doubt about it.” Although we did not yet have a shred of intelligence linking al Qa‘ida to the attack, no one questioned Scheuer because everyone in the room knew he was right.
By Sunday evening, just two days after the bombing, we had intelligence from a human source that confirmed Scheuer’s instinct. That night we gathered in Tenet’s office, and I listened as he spoke on a secure telephone with President Clinton, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen, and other members of the National Security Council (NSC) in a conference call about the attacks. Tenet briefed them on the intelligence pointing strongly to Bin Ladin’s responsibility for the deaths of twelve Americans, including CIA’s Molly Hardy. The entire country, for the first time, was now aware of Bin Ladin and al Qa‘ida.
Tenet taught me an important lesson in leadershi
p that evening. We were waiting for the talking points for the director’s call with the president, and they were late. I was becoming impatient, wondering aloud, “What the hell are they doing down there?” Tenet counseled me, saying, “Calm down. They are doing the best they can.” He went on to say that in a crisis situation, everyone is working all out and there is no need to push, that doing so would actually be counterproductive. “In the normal day-to-day situation—in the absence of a crisis—is when folks need a swift kick in the butt,” he said.
In the immediate aftermath of the embassy bombings, Tenet went to visit the troops in Alec Station to bolster their morale, and I went along. It wasn’t an unusual event for him. He regularly “went walkabout” and enjoyed popping in unannounced to offices all over the headquarters complex. He relished bantering with Agency officers of all ranks much more than he liked rubbing elbows with senior administration officials. But this occasion was not at all enjoyable.
After he made brief informal remarks, one of the analysts, a woman who was among those intensely loyal to Mike Scheuer, raised her hand and said, “Mr. Director, I hope you know that if you had let us proceed with the plan to capture Bin Ladin some months ago the attacks on the embassies would not have happened.” She was blaming Tenet for the attacks and the deaths of Americans. I found it to be a stunning, disrespectful, and inaccurate thing to say. Such an outburst was also highly unusual in Agency culture, but many of her coworkers seemed to agree with her fully. To his credit, Tenet did not respond harshly but simply said something about everyone having a right to his or her opinion. In fact, the plan to go after Bin Ladin had had a minimal chance of success, and we later learned through intelligence sources that the plots to blow up our embassies had been under way long before the proposed capture of Bin Ladin. And later, when the TRODPINTS were given the green light to go after Bin Ladin, they failed miserably to put together any workable plan.
Once we were certain that al Qa‘ida was responsible for the embassy attacks, President Clinton wanted to hit back hard. Al Qa‘ida training camps in Afghanistan were an obvious target, and we were fortunate enough to intercept an al Qa‘ida communication that told us Bin Ladin and other senior al Qa‘ida leaders were likely to be meeting at one of the group’s training camps near Khost, Afghanistan, a few days hence. That became target number one. But the president and others wanted to strike at least two targets, since two embassies had been hit, and he wanted to hit somewhere outside Afghanistan to demonstrate a willingness by the United States to go beyond the group’s sanctuary. From a list of other potential sites, a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, that was suspected of producing chemical weapons for al Qa‘ida was selected.
Early on the morning of August 20—the day of the US military response—Tenet was woken by a two a.m. phone call from President Clinton, who asked if he was comfortable with the plan. Tenet later told me that he advised the president that the attack on the training camp near Khost was a “no-brainer,” but that he was less convinced about the plan to hit the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant. Tenet told me that the president said something like, “That’s OK; I want al Qa‘ida, if they are going to attack us, to wonder a bit how I am going to respond.”
As it turned out, the US counterattacks—our opening shot in the new war against al Qa‘ida—were not a great success. The strike on the training camps killed only a handful of terrorists, as Bin Ladin and his al Qa‘ida leadership had left Khost a short while before seventy-five cruise missiles hit. While we were never able to prove it, I strongly suspect that someone tipped him off. The United States had sent General Joe Ralston, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to Pakistan to let its government know that US cruise missiles would soon be transiting Pakistani airspace en route to Afghanistan. There had been plenty of time for some sympathizer within the Pakistani government to warn Bin Ladin, and I suspect someone did.
The attack on the pharmaceutical plant was worse. As it turned out, the plant was not involved in the production of chemical weapons. The key intelligence that had driven the decision to attack the facility—that CIA had collected a soil sample outside the plant that contained a precursor for chemical weapons (O-ethyl methylphosphonothioic acid, or EMPTA)—was shaky at best. And we were wrong in our assessment that the owner of the factory was a person associated with Bin Ladin. He was not.
Rather than viewing the failed attack on the al Qa‘ida training camp as a near miss, I am convinced that Bin Ladin and his associates saw it and the strike on the pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum as victories. First of all, Bin Ladin had narrowly escaped—garnering even more status among extremists as a result—and second, he was convinced that we had embarrassed ourselves in the eyes of the world by blowing up what critics of the strike called an “aspirin factory.” There is no doubt that this had an emboldening effect.
One of the key consequences of the East Africa bombings was an even more determined director of central intelligence. On the flight home from a December 1998 meeting with our British counterparts in London—during which the discussion had been dominated by the threat from al Qa‘ida—Tenet took out a pad of legal paper and handwrote the first draft of a letter to the leadership of CIA and the leaders of all the agencies of the intelligence community. (At the time, in addition to leading his own agency, the CIA director also provided leadership for all the agencies of the intelligence community. In April 2005 the position of director of national intelligence took over that role as a result of the passage and signing of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act in late 2004.) Tenet wrote furiously for forty-five minutes, and when he finished, he ripped the pages from the pad and handed them to me. He simply said, “Here.” As I read what he had written, I was struck by the language. The director made clear that we should consider ourselves at war with al Qa‘ida and that no effort or resource should be spared in prosecuting the war.
For CIA, the “we are at war” memo, as it was called, became an early 1999 directive to the Agency’s operational arm to review CIA strategy against al Qa‘ida and to suggest enhancements. There was a similar memo for the rest of the intelligence community. Then, in the spring of 1999, as the intelligence grew that Bin Ladin was planning another operation and as our efforts to locate the al Qa‘ida leader and remove him from the battlefield were going nowhere, Tenet asked for a new strategy—one not constrained by resources or authorities. In response the Counterterrorism Center in the fall of 1999 produced what was called “the Plan.” The Plan involved a major shift in resources to the al Qa‘ida problem and greater integration of the Agency with the rest of the intelligence community, particularly the NSA. This work had some real successes, namely the disruption of a number of attacks during the pre-millennium period, both inside the United States and overseas (Tenet had told President Clinton to expect five to fifteen attacks). But these successes did not get us any closer to Bin Ladin.
In the aftermath of the embassy bombings, increased attention was also given at the White House to the Bin Ladin problem. New covert action authorities—called Memorandum of Notifications (MONs), additions to an overall 1986 presidential finding on counterterrorism—were approved to give CIA increased authority to go after Bin Ladin.
A common misconception is that the Central Intelligence Agency conducts covert action on its own authority. This is not true. Covert action can be proposed by the Agency or initiated by the most senior national security officials at the White House. But only with White House approval can CIA put together an actual plan. The policy objective for the plan comes from the White House, and the Agency builds a program designed to meet that objective, producing either a draft finding or a draft MON—essentially a set of authorities giving approval to the Agency to conduct specific activities. That draft is vetted within the Agency and throughout the interagency, including by the Department of Justice; it is approved by both the principals and the deputies of the National Security Council, and it is formally approved by the president via his signatu
re. In keeping with its legal obligations, CIA then notifies the leadership of Congress, the Senate and House intelligence committees, and the two defense appropriations subcommittees from which CIA gets its funding. While Congress is technically only “notified,” in reality it can withhold money from the operation and therefore prevent it from getting off the ground. As a participant in this process, I can tell you that it would be very wrong to assume that there is any “rubber-stamping” during any part of it.
People might wonder, with all those steps required—how does anything stay secret? And the answer is that, for the most part, things do not. Most covert actions leak. But, contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not Congress that leaks (there are exceptions). It is generally the White House—as officials there want, for political reasons, to show the American people that it is doing something about a particular national security threat—or officials in executive branch agencies who leak secrets to try to get a leg up in a policy debate.
In the aftermath of the East Africa bombings, President Clinton signed a number of new MONs related to Bin Ladin. Prior to the East Africa bombings, CIA had been permitted only to capture Bin Ladin, and the use of lethal force had been expressly prohibited. The draft of this new MON allowed CIA, using its Afghan surrogates, to kill Bin Ladin if it judged that capture was not feasible during an operation. It was a significant step—essentially allowing CIA to kill a terrorist. The Clinton administration’s position, which has remained consistent throughout both the Bush and Obama administrations, was that under the Law of Armed Conflict, killing a person who poses an imminent threat to the United States and who cannot be captured is self-defense, not an assassination.
Sandy Berger, the national security advisor, sent the draft MON to President Clinton on the morning of Christmas eve, 1998. The White House had told us that the president would sign the MON that day, and it fell to me to wait around the office until he did so. My job was to obtain confirmation that the president had signed the document, so that our headquarters officers could send the president’s instructions out to the field. Everyone else in the front office had gone home or was on annual leave, but there I was sitting by the phone waiting. Mary Beth was home with her parents and brother, who were visiting, along with the three kids, all under the age of six at the time, waiting for Daddy and Santa, not necessarily in that order. They were all frustrated by my absence, but I could not tell them that I was waiting for an order from President Clinton to kill Bin Ladin.
The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS Page 3