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

by Michael Morell

  On the surface Libya would not seem to be of much interest to the intelligence community. The country, while large in size, is primarily desert. In terms of population, Libya is not even in the top one hundred among the nations on the planet. But mere numbers can be deceiving. Throughout my thirty-three years at the Agency, Libya demanded a disproportionately large share of our attention. Most of that focus can be attributed to just one of the country’s six million people: Muammar Qadhafi. Qadhafi made himself an international pariah with the course he chose for his nation—the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, and the practice of terrorism as a tool of statecraft, including the bombing of Pan Am 103 flying over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, an act of terrorism that killed 259 people on board and eleven on the ground. Qadhafi was also behind the 1986 bombing of a Berlin discotheque frequented by US servicemen, which killed two.

  Then, in early 2003, just as the United States and its allies were beginning the invasion of Iraq, representatives of the Libyan government reached out to our British counterparts suggesting that Qadhafi might be willing to discuss voluntarily ridding his country of its weapons of mass destruction. CIA and British intelligence officials met secretly with Qadhafi and his senior leadership, eventually brokering a deal designed to remove Libyan weapons of mass destruction without firing a shot.

  Once that deal was negotiated, the United States and its allies engaged in an awkward resumption of relations with Libya—ties that had been strained since Qadhafi seized control of the country in 1969. By 2006 the United States had reestablished diplomatic relations and sent an ambassador to Tripoli for the first time in twenty-seven years.

  While we had no illusions about the harsh, authoritarian nature of the regime led by the “Brother Leader,” as Qadhafi liked to be called, in the aftermath of 9/11 we were more than prepared to work with his regime if it would help in our efforts to prevent attacks and defeat al Qa‘ida and similar organizations. And help it did. For very different reasons, the most important being that al Qa‘ida wanted to overthrow secular Arab regimes, Qadhafi hated and feared al Qa‘ida as much as we did. Since a number of top leaders of Bin Ladin’s organization were Libyans, his assistance proved quite useful.

  The world of intelligence is packed with strange bedfellows—and few stranger than the Libyans. But due to this “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” mind-set, we found ourselves working with them. I made a trip to Libya in late 2010, just weeks before their revolution began. As deputy director of CIA, I was visiting to ensure that the Libyans continued to work with us against al Qa‘ida.

  My principal point of contact in Libya—and my host for the visit—was Abdullah Senussi, Qadhafi’s domestic intelligence chief. Senussi was known for being ruthless. He had been implicated in bombing airplanes, massacring prisoners, and possibly trying to assassinate foreign leaders. I did not know what to expect when I walked into his office, but what I found was a strangely personable interlocutor.

  While it was clear to me that Senussi was a tough guy (he was also Qadhafi’s brother-in-law), I was able to see another side of him. I found Senussi to be smart, straightforward, and funny. We had an intense meeting in his office, where protocol—that is, his boss—demanded that he lecture me on his view that the United States was moving too slowly to restore full diplomatic relations with Libya. Once we got over that box-checking, we settled into a detailed discussion on al Qa‘ida and what we could do together against the group. It was almost as if Senussi flipped a light switch to go from the first topic to the second.

  Near the end of the meeting, we found common ground in talking about our families. We told each other about our children, and it was clear to me that the light of his life was his daughter, Anoud, who was in her late teens. He was enormously proud of her—and I could relate on a human level by telling him about my own kids, who were not far from her age. By the end of the meeting, I had to remind myself of the horrible deeds Senussi had undertaken for the sake of the “Leader.”

  My next stop was a three-hour lunch with the head of Libya’s external spy agency, Abuzed Omar Dorda. Set next to a Roman ruin, the restaurant was one of Tripoli’s finest. We had a large table in the middle of the restaurant, with Dorda sitting across from me. Security agents—mine and his—filled the tables around us. Dorda smoked nonstop before, during, and after lunch. It was like a scene from The Sopranos.

  During the meal I learned that lecturing was part of the personality of senior Libyan officials. The intelligence chief used most of the lunch to tell me that everyone in the world was a Muslim but not everyone knew it yet. He said, “Michael, you are a Muslim. You have just not yet acceded to Allah’s will.” But he pleasantly suggested that I would someday. When I mentioned that this was not what I’d learned in eight years of Catholic school, he proceeded to tell me about the great significance of Jesus in Islam. To me his lecture was not just rhetoric. Dorda actually believed deeply what he was telling me, and I found his sincerity and his interest in my personal relationship with God endearing.

  Intelligence cooperation between any two countries is based largely on personal relationships and trust. And from that perspective, my visit to Libya paid off. Within a day Senussi and I had developed a relationship. On a very basic level, there was trust established between us. I departed Libya with the relationship between our two services stronger and with the knowledge that I could at minimum pick up the phone and call him if I needed. This was important because Libya had a very effective intelligence service.

  Very soon I had to do just that. Early in 2011, protests and clashes with security forces broke out across wide swaths of Libya. The bloodiest clashes occurred in the country’s second-largest city, Benghazi. In late February a decision was made at the State Department that the US embassy in Tripoli should be temporarily closed and its employees—as well as any other American citizens who wanted out—evacuated. The only way to get all of them out quickly was to charter a ferry to Malta. The State Department set up the ferry—as well as a follow-on air flight to take out the last few Americans—but there was still concern about the safety of Americans as they moved from the embassy to the Port of Tripoli, where the ferry was docked.

  White House officials, aware that I had established a relationship with Senussi, asked me to reach out to him and seek his assistance in ensuring that the State Department employees were allowed to safely withdraw. I called Senussi on February 24 and asked him to provide security for our diplomats as they moved to the dock. He promised me that he would ensure their safety, and he was as good as his word. Nearly two hundred Americans managed to depart without incident.

  Whenever I talked to Senussi during this period he would go out of his way to try to convince me that the people rising up against Qadhafi were not freedom seekers but wholly owned agents of al Qa‘ida. There was no doubt that mixed among the various rebel factions were some extremists loyal to Bin Ladin’s ideology, but the vast majority had no agenda other than to rid their country of the oppression imposed over four decades by their “Brother Leader.”

  It was the policy of the US government at the time to be supportive of the goals of the rebels, and we gave them considerable assistance—short of lethal arms. Eventually military support was provided to the resistance through NATO and other allies.

  A second opportunity to employ my back channel to Senussi came in March 2011 when four New York Times employees were captured by Qadhafi’s forces outside the town of Ajdabiya. The group included a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, a videographer, and two still photographers (one of whom was a woman). We later learned that they had been badly beaten by their captors and were convinced they would likely not survive captivity.

  As is often the case with media operating in a war zone, low-level soldiers holding the journalists thought they might be spies. Again the White House asked me to help, and I picked up the phone and called Senussi. After another lecture about how the rebels were really al Qa‘ida operatives and
how we should be working with the Libyan government against them, I was able to turn the conversation to the reporters. I told Senussi that the four were exactly what they said they were—reporters, not spies—and that they should be released. Two days after my call, they were let go. I am not sure that the leadership of the Times was ever told of the role CIA played in making the release possible.

  Senussi’s cooperation was not the result of our personal relationship. That got me in the door. No, the cooperation resulted from Senussi’s belief that if he assisted me on these tactical matters, it would make it easier for him to convince me that Libya was indeed under assault from al Qa‘ida and we would see the error in our ways. His was a strategic play.

  My third encounter with Senussi was designed to be a wake-up call. It was May, and the NATO and Arab coalition had been active for a number of weeks under the banner of protecting the Libyan people from their own government. No senior official in Washington had yet publicly demanded Qadhafi’s departure. The White House thought that needed to change and asked me to speak with Senussi again—this time to make it clear that there was only one solution to the ongoing violence: Qadhafi had to go. Once I passed on the message, Senussi said over and over again, “This is a very important message. This is a very big deal.”

  My final encounter with Senussi was the most dramatic. The conflict had been dragging on for months and there had been considerable bloodshed on both sides. It was apparent that the Qadhafi regime’s days were numbered and that its end would be violent and perhaps protracted. In an effort to speed up the inevitable collapse of the dictator’s rule, my fellow participants in the Deputies Committee asked me if I could convince Senussi to do the right thing, to join the future of Libya, not remain in its past. The thinking was that if someone of Senussi’s stature in the regime changed sides it could lead others to do the same, perhaps resulting in a rapid collapse of the regime and the saving of thousands of Libyan lives.

  The last thing I wanted to do was discuss this with him over the phone, however. There was a high probability that a call such as mine would be intercepted and my suggestion alone might be sufficient to get Senussi killed. So I reached out to him and offered a personal meeting in either Egypt or Tunisia. He agreed, and we set the Tunisian island of Jerba as the meeting place. But just two days later, he sent word that the meeting had to take place at a border crossing on the Libyan-Tunisian border. I thought perhaps the Leader did not want Senussi venturing too far from home. So I said OK and dispatched a security team to Tunisia to quietly assess the proposed meeting location. The team reported back that in order to reach the proposed meeting site it had had to pass through more than a hundred thousand Libyan refugees who had swarmed across the border to avoid the fighting. Still I insisted that the planning for the trip continue.

  But a week before the proposed meeting I received word that Senussi would not attend. I later learned that Qadhafi had refused to let him travel to the border—perhaps correctly guessing my intent, fearing that his intelligence chief was looking for a way out of the crisis.

  Of course, I never lost sight of the fact that Senussi was far from a good guy. That’s not a surprise when you’re dealing with the intelligence chief of a totalitarian dictatorship. My interest in talking with him at this point was to speed the demise of a brutal regime and minimize the loss of life in the process.

  Since I’d failed to lure him to a face-to-face meeting, my next-best option was to have my discussion with him over an open phone line and hope for the best. “Abdullah,” I said, “you must know that the Leader’s days are numbered. You must know that it is just a matter of time now. The most important thing now is to think about your country and what will be best for you and your family.” He knew exactly what I was saying, and he said, “No, Michael, I could never leave the Leader’s side in difficult times like these.” He was holding firm, so I played my trump card.

  “Abdullah, my friend,” I said, “think about your daughter. Think about her future. By choosing the right side, you can save her, she can have a future in Libya.” What he said next sent chills down my spine. “Michael,” he said, “the Leader is more important to me than my family.” From the tone of his voice I could tell that this was not something meant for anyone listening in—he was deadly serious. The discussion was over. Senussi wasn’t going to change. It was the last time I ever spoke with him.

  Qadhafi’s regime collapsed in August 2011, and Senussi went on the run. He was arrested in Mauritania in March 2012. The International Criminal Court in The Hague sought custody so that he could be tried for crimes against humanity. But on September 5, 2012, he was returned to Libya instead. Subsequently his daughter Anoud was also arrested—later released, and then kidnapped by gunmen just as she stepped outside of the prison gates after a visit to see her father. She was eventually freed by her captors. In December 2013 she publicly called for her father to be tried by the ICC in The Hague—not because she knew him to be guilty, she said, but because he faced a show trial and almost certain death if he was tried in Libya. Nonetheless, Senussi and thirty-six other former Libyan officials were placed on trial in Tripoli in the spring of 2014. (As of this writing there has been no verdict.)

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  The aftermath of the fall of Qadhafi was chaotic. The institutions of the state withered away—most important, the security services responsible for dealing with terrorists. A power vacuum swept the country, and it was filled by militias that could not agree on anything beyond getting rid of Qadhafi. Some of those militias had extremist views of the world—giving al Qa‘ida an opportunity. The defeat of the Libyan military also resulted in the spread of a huge number of conventional weapons not only in Libya but also around the region, strengthening al Qa‘ida affiliates from Mali to Egypt.

  With our concerns about al Qa‘ida growing, the White House sent me to Libya in January 2012 (I took with me Mike Vickers, the under secretary of defense for intelligence; Vickers was a frequent traveling companion of mine due to the critically important collaboration between CIA and DOD). My objective was to convince the new Libyan prime minister of the urgent need for him to build an intelligence service capable of dealing with the al Qa‘ida problem (the previous Qadhafi-era service had collapsed and no longer existed). I was only in the country from nine a.m. to five p.m. For safety reasons my security detail would not allow me spend the night.

  With the ambassador and Vickers at my side, I made my argument, pointing out that al Qa‘ida had its sights set on Libya and that an intelligence service was an absolute must for dealing with it. I explained to the prime minister that a leader of al Qa‘ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) was at that very moment in Tripoli purchasing as many weapons as he could get his hands on. The prime minister pushed back—saying that he was only leading an interim government, that he had a lot to do, and that it would take time to figure out how to build a service the “right way.” I told him that if he was referring to the excesses of Qadhafi’s former service, he needed to know that there were many democracies in the world with intelligence services that operated within the law and upheld human rights and that this could certainly be the case in Libya.

  Still nothing. In frustration I emphasized to the prime minister that I was certain al Qa‘ida’s growing strength in Libya would result in attacks against Libyan interests, European interests, and American interests. The meeting ended—with only the vaguest of commitments to building a service. I knew it was not going to happen.

  My warning would become a tragic reality in less than a year.

  * * *

  In both Libya and Egypt there were important lessons to be learned.

  The day that the Egyptian military moved against President Morsi, I received a call from a senior Arab ambassador to the United States. He simply said, “Michael, what do you think about Egypt?” I said, “This is a good thing. Morsi was leading the country to ruin, to instability, and to extremism. Now Egypt has a chance again.” I knew that I was being incons
istent with US policy, but I had been trained all my life to speak the truth as I saw it. The ambassador said to me, “I have made similar phone calls all morning. You are the first to say that this is a good thing. You are right.”

  Not every country is ready for democracy, and democracy—to work effectively—is much more than free and fair elections. It certainly includes those—along with the freedom to form political parties, compete for political support, and vote—but it also includes freedom of expression, the availability of multiple sources of information, and institutions that make and carry out the preferences of the electorate as expressed in elections. And to force democracy on countries that do not have these characteristics, and cannot develop them quickly, is almost always a recipe for instability and a set of outcomes that are inimical to US national security interests. The poster child is Gaza, where, in 2006, voters elected a terrorist group to lead them. And Hamas has led its fellow Gazans exactly where you would think a terrorist group would—to ruin.

  CHAPTER 9

  9/11/2012

  Eight months after my hurried visit to Tripoli to warn the Libyan government about the dangers within its borders, tragedy struck in the country’s second-largest city. I want to stress that much of what transpired in Benghazi became fully known to us only some time later—with some things still not known with certainty. As is so often the case in crisis situations, it was only after the smoke cleared—literally, in this case—that one could understand what had happened. And while Benghazi would ultimately unleash a political firestorm, the most important context for understanding the incident has largely been missed—it was the first manifestation of the Arab Spring–induced spread of al Qa‘ida’s ideology and franchise.

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