The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS

by Michael Morell

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  After only four months at NCTC, though, I returned to CIA. Mike Hayden replaced Porter Goss in late May 2006, just weeks after Dusty Foggo, the Agency’s number three, resigned and was later indicted and arrested on fraud charges. Hayden asked me to come back to CIA and replace Foggo.

  Hayden was exactly what CIA needed at that moment, and I wanted to be part of his team. Hayden is one the smartest individuals with whom I have ever worked. In grade school his football coach, the legendary owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Dan Rooney, made Hayden the quarterback simply because he was smarter than everyone else. Hayden was also a great briefer—one of the best I have seen. He is a master at explaining complex issues in extremely simple ways, often using sports metaphors to drive home a point. One of his common rhetorical refrains was that US law sets the boundaries of what the Agency can do and, while the country wants its premier intelligence agency to stay within those bounds, it also wants it to get chalk on its cleats—that is, to use all the space the law allows to protect the country. It was both a way to encourage proper risk-taking within the Agency and a way to be clear with the American people about what we would do and what we would not do.

  An outstanding leader, Hayden focused CIA on both strategic and tactical objectives. I learned a great deal from him about how to get your arms around a big Agency by dividing what you want to accomplish into manageable chunks. He took the most important issues—substantive ones like Iran and North Korea and management challenges like leadership training and developing language skills—and ordered regular updates. These programmatic reviews held people’s feet to the fire, which resulted in progress.

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  So in July 2006 I became a member of CIA’s senior leadership team, at a time when the al Qa‘ida threat from Pakistan was returning to levels not seen since 9/11. As number three in the Agency’s chain of command, I was tasked largely with keeping the administrative trains running. This side of the business was new to me, and I learned a great deal about information technology, federal budgets, security, and the like. I stayed abreast of substantive developments—on both the analytic and operational sides of the Agency. I made sure I received a daily intelligence briefing—which was the first time the number three at the Agency had ever asked for one—and I attended as many of the daily CT meetings as I could.

  The Agency had a serious morale problem. Goss had given his key aides—most of whom he had brought with him from the House Intelligence Committee—too much authority, and they mismanaged the place. Several senior officers were forced out and many retired, with many more contemplating it. Officers like me took rotations in other government agencies. The years between George Tenet’s and Mike Hayden’s tenures were the worst during my three decades of service. Goss’s aides did the damage, but Goss himself bears responsibility for choosing these aides and then giving them too much authority. I’m convinced that had he chosen a different team he would have had a successful tenure in the job. Hayden moved quickly to turn the situation around and did so, using a combination of tactics—frequent written notes to the workforce, regular “all-hands” meetings in which he talked about the key issues facing the Agency and what we were doing about them, and visits to work units both in Washington and overseas.

  It was an exceptionally important thing to do, particularly at a time when our biggest threat was on the rebound. Al Qa‘ida’s resurgence would become clearest in August 2006, when we discovered that a group of al Qa‘ida operatives were plotting to blow up somewhere between ten and fifteen airliners flying between London and the United States. The plan was to smuggle different parts of an explosive on board in bottles of everyday liquids and mixed with innocent-appearing substances such as Tang. If successful, the plot might have been worse than 9/11, killing thousands. The economic impact would have been devastating.

  Terrific intelligence and law enforcement work in multiple countries disrupted the plot. The British had the first lead. A British citizen of Pakistani descent had gone to the FATA for training, and the British had learned of his travel. When he returned he was put under surveillance and it soon became clear that he and more than a dozen others were plotting something of significance using liquids in bottles. We learned that another British citizen was in Pakistan working closely with the al Qa‘ida leadership on the plot, and it was CIA analysts remembering the details of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s mid-1990s plan to bring down multiple airliners over the Pacific Ocean who connected the final dots. In that plot, the terrorists also had planned to hide explosives in everyday containers. Arrests were made in Pakistan and the United Kingdom, and the plot was disrupted. The plan showed the 9/11-style ingenuity of al Qa‘ida as well as its ability to place operatives in the UK ready to act. It was a close call and it spoke loudly of al Qa‘ida’s resurgence.

  A few months later CIA’s counterterrorism analysts put the work of the previous several months together in a paper that warned policy-makers that al Qa‘ida in the FATA was again capable of conducting devastating attacks. The mood in the building was one of frustration that the group had rebounded. Discussions in meetings were punctuated with remarks like “They are back” and “We are going to get hit again.”

  In the early summer of 2007 the US intelligence community followed CIA’s lead and produced a National Intelligence Estimate on the threat from al Qa‘ida. Its conclusions were just as sobering as those of CIA’s paper. The NIE said that the al Qa‘ida leadership in Pakistan was in the process of planning high-impact attacks on the US homeland—attacks that would produce mass casualties, dramatic destruction, and significant economic fallout. The NIE added that al Qa‘ida had regenerated key elements of its homeland attack capability. The group’s safe haven in the FATA, the development of capable operational lieutenants, and a senior leadership now less concerned about its own security meant more time focused on planning and more capability to carry out an attack, according to the intelligence community analysts who had written the NIE.

  Together the two papers were a major warning to the Bush administration and to Congress. Al Qa‘ida was back and extremely dangerous. It was clear that Washington’s approach up to that point—occasional CT operations against the al Qa‘ida leadership—was not working and that we had to get more aggressive.

  The publication of both reports led to a policy process that, while it may have taken too much time, did lead President Bush to take action in August 2008. The number of CT operations went up sharply, and the leadership of al Qa‘ida was removed from the battlefield with regularity—this after the United States had failed to remove a single al Qa‘ida leader from the battlefield in 2007. (“0 for 07” was how Mike Hayden had put it.) The pressure was back on—and in a very significant way.

  The months that followed the president’s decision were filled with events that confirmed the correctness of his new policy. Al Qa‘ida attacked the Marriott hotel in Islamabad on September 20, 2008, killing more than fifty and wounding nearly three hundred people. And the Marriott attack was followed in 2009 by an attempted attack on the New York City subway system that was foiled by the excellent work of the intelligence community and the FBI.

  One of the myths about the more aggressive CT operations against the al Qa‘ida leadership is that they began when President Obama came to office. This is inaccurate. President Bush started them six months before leaving office, and President Obama kept them going—both for good reason. The United States was facing the most significant threat environment since 9/11. The country was at risk.

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  The annual CIA holiday party—held in the lobby of our main headquarters building—is the party in town. Senior US government officials and ambassadors and intelligence officers from many countries attend. If you are in the national security business, it is the place to be. People arrive early and stay late. And Leon Panetta’s first holiday party, in December 2009, was something special—Italian food of all kinds and the wines to go with it. The smell of garlic filled t
he hall. People talked about the food for weeks. It helped to cement our ties to many of our foreign partners. The party was fully consistent with the coffee cup that Panetta used every day in his office. On one side it read “C.I.A.” On the other, “California Italian American.”

  Near the end of the party, Director Panetta’s talented chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, took me aside and told me that Steve Kappes, the Agency’s deputy director, was planning to step down in the spring and that I—the head of analysis—was at the top of the director’s short list of potential successors. Kappes—a legend in the clandestine service and a national hero for helping to convince Muammar Qadhafi to give up his weapons of mass destruction—had served as deputy for four years and thought it was time to move on. Bash said, “I’m rooting for you.” A couple of months later I found myself in Panetta’s office being interviewed for the job. It was much more of a chat than an interview—about the issues, about working together, about the people we would be managing together. He told me that I was at the top of his list but that he wanted to talk with a few other people as well. Then radio silence for several weeks. I was wondering what was going on.

  Panetta had gotten off to a rough start with the Agency by referring to the practice of waterboarding as torture in his confirmation hearing, leading some insiders to worry that the new administration would demonize them for doing things approved by the last administration. However, as time went on he became beloved within CIA. He was seen as having clout with the White House, using his ties to Vice President Biden and to Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, to win a bureaucratic turf battle with Director for National Intelligence Denny Blair over who has final approval for naming chiefs of stations overseas. Panetta was also seen as caring deeply about the men and women of CIA, having brought us through the crisis of the attack on our base in Khost in 2009, when seven Americans, one Jordanian, and one Afghan were killed in a suicide bombing perpetrated by someone we had believed was working for us.

  Most of all, though, Panetta was seen as a normal guy, full of fun and with a great sense of humor. He told jokes—most of them slightly off-color—he laughed at the jokes of others, and he made fun of himself. His speeches to employees would be filled with jokes—most of them not put there by the speechwriters. He figuratively put his arms around CIA, and the Agency returned the gesture.

  At one event, in front of hundreds of people, Panetta announced that he was going to tell a joke that his speechwriters had suggested he not tell. He said, “I have decided to ignore their advice.” He went on: “There was a farmer that was really protective of his three daughters. In fact, he always met their boyfriends at the front door with a shotgun. At five thirty on Friday night, there was a knock at the door. The farmer answered it with his gun. The young man at the door said, ‘Hello, my name is Eddie, I’m here for Betty, we’re going for spaghetti. Is she ready?’ The farmer paused, then said, ‘OK, she’s ready.’ Another half hour passed and there was a second knock. The farmer answered it with his gun in hand again. The guy at the door said, ‘Hello, my name is Joe, I’m here for Flo, we’re going to the show. She ready to go?’ The farmer paused again and said, ‘Yeah, she’s ready.’ A half hour later there was another knock. The farmer went to the door with his shotgun. The guy at the door said, ‘Hello, my name is Chuck, I’m here for Puck’—and the farmer shot him.” If almost anyone else in the room had told the same story, the political correctness police would have pounced. But there is a twinkle in Leon’s eye and a warmth to his spirit that causes people to instead think, “That was really cute.”

  Panetta and I became friends—even before I became his deputy. We shared a love of the game of golf, in particular his two-putt rule—the second putt is automatically good no matter how far from the pin the first putt ends up—a rule that keeps the score down and the game moving along. It is not a rule appreciated by purists. On those rare occasions when Panetta did not go home to his beloved Carmel Valley ranch for the weekend, he would go to noon mass, followed by golf, and then dinner at our home.

  Once, when invited to watch his San Francisco 49ers in the NFC Championship Game that started at six thirty p.m., he called at three p.m. and asked, “Do you mind if I come early to watch the AFC Championship Game as well?” When I hung up and told Mary Beth, “Leon is coming early.” She responded, “Let’s get the place straightened up—fast—and I am so happy that he feels comfortable enough here to ask us to come early.”

  Panetta would not only watch sports at our home, he would share his strongly held political views with my children and their friends. The kids would gather around the table after dinner and ask Panetta questions. It was like a graduate school seminar. Mary Beth and I listened carefully as well to his candid and commonsense approach to politics, policy, and people. Panetta’s main message around the dinner table was “People of different political ideologies can—indeed, have to—come together to find an agreed-upon approach to the tough problems facing our nation.” He told the kids, “My time in Congress was characterized by a willingness to compromise, by a willingness to fight it out during the day and get a drink and a steak together in the evening.” He said he was deeply frustrated by today’s gridlock and he told the kids, “I fear for the future of the republic.” I found his message sobering.

  As he was leaving one Sunday evening in the early spring of 2010, he paused on my front porch as I walked him out and said, “Oh, I forgot, let’s go ahead and announce tomorrow that you will succeed Steve as deputy.” On May 7, 2010, I was sworn in as the twenty-fourth deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

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  A typical day for me as deputy director started at 4:45 a.m. I would pull on my gym clothes, grab a suit and tie for the day, and jump into my armored SUV to be driven to work—just a few short miles away. There I would work out, shower, dress, and be at my desk by six a.m., catching up on any overnight e-mails from overseas.

  At six fifteen a.m. my intelligence briefer would show up at my office door. This was the best meeting of my day. As I had done a decade earlier, the briefer would spend most of the night putting together a thick notebook of hundreds of pages of analytic pieces and raw intelligence to review. It was my way of keeping up with what was going on in the world and what we were saying about it. It also enabled me to press the analysts for more insights. Through conversation with my briefer and my chief of staff and executive assistants—who would join me for the briefing—I would come up with a number of questions each day that I would ask the analysts to answer, preferably within twenty-four hours.

  When Leon Panetta was director, I had to finish my daily intelligence briefing by seven thirty a.m. so I could join him for his briefing. He liked to have me there, along with his chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, and his head of analysis, my replacement as the director of intelligence, so we could discuss the issues with him from both an analytic and an operational perspective. I often left the director’s briefing with a list of to-do items.

  Under both Panetta and his successor, David Petraeus, the director’s intelligence briefing was followed by a morning meeting with the entire Agency leadership team. The director would brief the key issues that had come up in his meetings the day before, let us know about important meetings he was having that day, and ask any number of questions. We then went around the room with the individual senior leaders briefing us on one issue or another. It was a great way to keep the director and me informed of what was going on and a great way for the director to drive his agenda.

  The rest of my day was largely broken into three pieces. The first involved attending deputies’ meetings at the White House (often multiple meetings a day), being pre-briefed by Agency experts before going to those meetings, and then giving those experts a summary of what transpired at the meeting after I returned. The second involved completing all the paperwork that came into my office. I tried to finish as much of this as I could before I left for the day, but invariably I ended up taking home a good two to
three hours of work each night. And the third involved internal meetings that were focused on solving immediate problems or trying to push the Agency forward in the future.

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  As the deputy director of CIA I found myself handling a mind-boggling array of threats and challenges daily, not to mention helping to run an Agency that is roughly the size of a large Fortune 500 company. The substantive issues on my plate included our support for the war effort in Afghanistan, the evolution of the Arab Spring, and the behavior of Iran and North Korea, just to name a few. But by far the issue that dominated my time as deputy, just as it had dominated my time as George Tenet’s executive assistant fifteen years before, was international terrorism. At least half of my thick morning briefing book was filled with terrorism-related issues—every day. And at least a third of my meetings “downtown” related to terrorism.

  This issue also dominated the time of my colleagues in the executive branch, whose work was guided and overseen by the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council, of which I was a member. We met frequently to deal with issues related to terrorism, led by White House counterterrorism and homeland security advisor John Brennan.

  I saw my counterparts in these CT meetings more than I saw my own family. On the intelligence side, the key players besides me were Chris Inglis, the deputy director of the NSA, and Mike Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. On the operations side, the key players were me, Sean Joyce, the deputy director of the FBI, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs—first James “Hoss” Cartwright and then Admiral Sandy Winnefeld—and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike Vickers. It always struck me that CIA was the only agency that routinely found itself on both the intelligence and operational sides of the terrorism problem, underscoring the importance of CIA on the issue.