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

by Michael Morell

  At almost exactly the same time that Father Mychal fell, Kevin Shaeffer, a young officer in the Naval Operations Center in the Pentagon, was following the terrible events in New York. With no warning, his workplace exploded in an orange fireball as Flight 77 crashed through the building. At the moment of impact, Kevin was thrown across the room. He would later learn that all twenty-nine of his coworkers had perished in that instant. The intense heat melted his name tag, but, perhaps foreshadowing what was to come, did not touch the ribbons on his uniform. Remembering his emergency training, Kevin smothered the flames engulfing his clothes and hair. Breathing in jet fuel and thick black smoke, Kevin crawled through water gushing from pipes and past live electrical wires toward the blue sky he glimpsed through gaps in the wreckage. He called out for help, and, at first, no one answered.

  Nearby, an army sergeant first class named Steve Workman heard the explosion and ran toward the burning Ops Center. He found Kevin and immediately recognized the severity of his injuries. Steve helped Kevin to safety, and he prevented Kevin from going into shock by raising his legs. Steve helped Kevin into one of the first ambulances on the scene and rode with him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Along the way, Steve asked Kevin about his life, his family, and his hobbies, anything to keep him conscious. At the hospital, the best trauma doctors on the planet gave Kevin a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. He had third-degree burns over almost half his body and extreme difficulty breathing. In the following weeks, Kevin battled infections, fluid buildup in his lungs, and the pain of the burns. During surgery in early October, Kevin went into cardiac arrest and died twice on the operating table, but he was brought back to life each time. After many months, seventeen operations, and countless hours of torturous physical therapy, Kevin recovered. He was among the last of those injured on 9/11 to be released from the hospital.

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  Why tell these stories? Because they underscore two extremely important points: one, the world is a very dangerous place, and two, it takes heroes to protect us from those dangers—US diplomats, intelligence officers, military personnel, and federal law enforcement officers, not to mention local police officers and fire fighters. And there is little doubt in my mind that the world is going to become an even more dangerous place in terms of international terrorism, and that our need for heroes—like Father Mychal, Kevin, and Steve—is, unfortunately, only going to continue to grow.

  * * *

  In February 2013, as President Obama was considering options for a US military presence in Afghanistan after 2014, Tom Donilon, the president’s national security advisor, had a request for Matt Olsen, the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and me, the acting director of CIA. He asked that we have a conversation with the president about what the threat from international terrorists—primarily al Qa‘ida—would look like in the years ahead, so that the president could think about Afghanistan in a broader context. It was a great question, and to prepare for the meeting I huddled for two hours in my office with CIA’s best and brightest experts on international terrorism.

  As always, the smartest and most insightful person in the room was the director of the Counterterrorism Center, Roger (because he is undercover I cannot use his real name). Roger is the hardest-working and most dedicated officer with whom I have worked at the Agency. He has run the center for several years—longer than anyone before him—and he has produced results. He is tough to work with because he sets the bar very high, but there is no better person to be protecting the country from al Qa‘ida. My last official act—literally five minutes before my successor took over as deputy director—was to call Roger and simply tell him that I thought he was the most talented operations officer with whom I had ever worked. There was a long silence on the other end of the phone, then a quiet “Thank you.”

  Roger presented the most insightful ideas during the prep session, and I went home that night and wrote out what I wanted to tell the president. I presented CIA’s thoughts to the president on February 21, 2013. I talked about how we saw the extremist threat at the moment, how it had changed since 9/11, and how we thought it would evolve in the years ahead. In addition, I outlined the state of our overseas partnerships that are so critical to dealing with the threat. The overarching theme of my presentation—almost two years ago to the day of the writing of this book and well before the rise of ISIS—was that the war against Islamic extremism was far from over and that this war would be one that would be fought by multiple generations. I told the president that my children’s generation and my grandchildren’s generation would still be fighting this fight.

  * * *

  Twenty years into my career I was asked to be George W. Bush’s first intelligence briefer, and I spent several months of that time providing unspecified warnings that al Qa‘ida was about to hit us somewhere. Those briefings, of course, included the August 6, 2001, piece Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in the United States. Thirty years into my career I was asked to become a member of the Deputies Committee of Barack Obama’s National Security Council by serving as the deputy director of CIA. In that capacity I would provide many briefings to the president over the next three and a half years about al Qa‘ida, our successes against it, and the many threats it still posed. This included the February 21, 2013, briefing requested by Tom Donilon.

  In this chapter I want to give you—the readers of this book—a briefing on the terrorist threat we are facing, and I will do it as if I were speaking to a president of the United States, albeit with unclassified information. The key questions are what is the threat today, where is it going, and what should the United States do about all of this? Because CIA does not recommend policy, this latter question is not something an intelligence officer would normally brief to a president, but, given the importance of the issue, I will do it here in this book.

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  Let’s start the briefing with two overarching points. First, extremists inspired by Usama Bin Ladin’s ideology consider themselves to be at war with the United States and they want to attack us—and neither one of these two facts will change anytime soon. It is important to never forget that—no matter how long it has been since the last attack here in the homeland.

  Second, in the post-9/11 fight against these terrorists, we have scored a great victory but so have the extremists. Our great victory has been the severe degradation and near defeat of al Qa‘ida’s core leadership, still located in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the group responsible for the terror that occurred on that beautiful, bright sunny day in September 2001. The degradation has been so severe that al Qa‘ida in Pakistan no longer has the capability to conduct a 9/11 style attack—multiple, simultaneous, complex attacks that kill thousands.

  Al Qa‘ida’s great victory has been the spread of its ideology, its franchising, across a geographic area that now runs from northern Nigeria north into the Sahel, primarily in northern Mali, and across North Africa from Morocco to Algeria to Tunisia to Libya and Egypt; that includes parts of East Africa, primarily in Somalia but also in Kenya; that stretches across the Gulf of Aden into Yemen and up to Iraq and Syria, still in South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh), and in some parts of Southeast Asia. All told, some 20 countries now have groups of terrorists inside their borders espousing the jihadist ideology.

  This spread began because of Bin Ladin’s successes in East Africa, Yemen, and the United States (the embassy bombings in 1998, the Cole bombing in 2000, and 9/11). These al Qa‘ida victories created a following for Bin Ladin across the Muslim world. He became a role model. The spread was given a boost by the operatives who fled South Asia after 9/11 and by Muslim opposition to the Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan—just as Bin Ladin had hoped. But the spread of the al Qa‘ida brand has been given perhaps its most significant lift as a result of the Arab Spring, which created safe havens in which al Qa‘ida could operate and that provided the franchises with much-needed recruits, money, and weapons.

  This geograph
ic dispersion is important because it stretches the diplomatic, intelligence, and military resources of the United States—at a time when the available resources are shrinking. The State Department has never been given—by any of a number of administrations and different Congresses—the resources it needs to do its job around the globe. The intelligence community and the US military were given an infusion of resources in the aftermath of 9/11, but those budgets have been falling for the last few years and they will likely continue to fall. But these cuts are in no way automatic. They are a conscious choice that the administration, Congress, and the American people are making.

  These two “victories”—one for the good guys and one for the bad guys—have altered the threat landscape in significant ways. The change is defined by a reduction of the threat from the original al Qa‘ida organization but a significant expansion of the threat from the emerging groups, a reduction in the threat of large, spectacular attacks but a skyrocketing rise in the threat of small-scale attacks. And this is playing out. Jim Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, told Congress in July 2015 that “when the final accounting is done, 2014 will have been the most lethal year for global terrorism in the 45 years such data has been compiled.”

  * * *

  So, this is the threat from a general perspective. What about the threat posed by individual terrorist groups? That is the next issue to cover in this briefing

  ISIS. The Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) is a very good place to start because the group has grown faster than any terrorist group we can remember and because the threat it poses to us is as wide-ranging as any we have seen.

  ISIS was born of al Qa‘ida. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, al Qa‘ida made a calculated choice to confront us there. It built its organization in Iraq around Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, who trained with al Qa‘ida in Afghanistan before 9/11 and who led an Islamic extremist organization in northern Iraq prior to the war. He had an on-again, off-again relationship with Bin Ladin: he did not like being managed from Pakistan, but he shared Bin Ladin’s ideology fully. He also had the benefit of the many foreign nationals who raced to Iraq to join the jihadist fight against the West.

  Zarqawi’s organization, called al Qa‘ida in Iraq (AQI), pursued a fiendish strategy of attacking not only coalition and Iraqi government targets but also Shi’a targets. The goal was to start a civil war and to significantly undercut the stability of Iraq, making our job that much more difficult. Regrettably, AQI was assisted by two decisions by the Coalition Provisional Authority (the temporary governing entity established by the United States following the invasion of Iraq). The edicts were made in the early weeks after the cessation of combat operations. The decisions—to remove anyone who had been a member of Saddam’s Baath Party from a position inside the Iraqi government, and to disband any organization with close ties to the Baath Party—resulted in the collapse of the Iraqi military and security services. The resulting vacuum was filled by Iraqi Sunni insurgents, Shi’a militias, and AQI.

  The United States, together with its coalition partners and the Iraqis, worked over a period of years to get Iraq under control in general and to destroy AQI in particular. Great success was achieved by the end of the Bush administration in January 2009, with AQI on the ropes. That progress continued through the end of 2011, when the last US troops were withdrawn from Iraq. AQI, however, benefited from the military vacuum—both because there was less military and intelligence pressure on the group but also because Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, without the United States in the country, felt emboldened to move even more aggressively in an authoritarian direction, alienating and disenfranchising Sunnis at every turn. Moderate Sunnis began to support AQI.

  AQI also benefited from its involvement in Syria (it was when AQI joined the fight in Syria that the group changed its name to ISIS). ISIS added Syrians and foreign fighters to its ranks, built its supply of arms and money, and gained significant battlefield experience fighting the Assad regime. Together with the security vacuum in Iraq and Maliki’s alienation of the Sunnis, this culminated in ISIS’s successful blitzkrieg across western Iraq in the spring and summer of 2014, seizing large amounts of territory. ISIS now controls more territory—in Iraq and Syria—than any other terrorist group anywhere in the world.

  It is interesting to note that ISIS is not the first extremist group to take and hold territory. Al-Shabab in Somalia did so a number of years ago and still holds territory there, al Qa‘ida in the Islamic Maghreb did so in Mali in 2012, and al Qa‘ida in Yemen did so there at roughly the same time. I fully expect extremist groups to attempt to take—and sometimes to be successful in taking—territory in the years ahead. But no group has taken so much territory so quickly as ISIS has.

  Although there is a deep rift between the leadership of al Qa‘ida and the leadership of ISIS, it is important to note that ISIS is effectively al Qa‘ida. ISIS shares Bin Ladin’s long-term goal of establishing a global caliphate, it sees both the West and its allies in the Middle East as it its primary enemies, and it sees violence as the most effective means of achieving its goals. The only reason that ISIS is not formally part of al Qa‘ida is that the group does not want to have to follow the guidance of Zawahiri. It’s an issue of “who should be calling the shots,” not an issue of a different vision.

  ISIS poses four significant threats to the United States. First, ISIS is a threat to the stability of the entire Middle East. ISIS is putting the territorial integrity of both Iraq and Syria at risk. And a collapse of either or both of these states could easily spread throughout the region, bringing with it sectarian and religious strife, humanitarian crises, and the violent redrawing of borders, all in a part of the world that remains critical to US national security.

  Second, ISIS’s success on the battlefield and its Madison-Avenue quality messaging on the internet is attracting vulnerable young men and women to travel to Syria and Iraq to join its cause. At this writing, at least twenty thousand foreign nationals from roughly ninety countries have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the fight. Most have joined ISIS. This flow of foreigners has outstripped the flow of fighters into Iraq during the war there a decade ago. And there are more foreign fighters in Syria today than there were in Afghanistan in the 1980s working to drive the Soviet Union out of that country. These foreign nationals are getting experience on the battlefield, and they are becoming increasingly radicalized to ISIS’s cause.

  There is a particular subset of these fighters to worry about. Somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 jihadist wannabes have traveled to Syria and Iraq from Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and the United States. They all have easy access to the U.S. homeland.

  There are two possibilities here to worry about. One is that these fighters will leave the Middle East and either conduct an attack on their own or conduct an attack at the direction of the ISIS leadership. The former has already happened in Europe but not yet in the United States (but it will). In spring 2014, a young Frenchman, Mehdi Nemmouche, who went to fight in Syria, returned to Europe and shot three people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels.

  The latter—an ISIS-directed attack—has not yet occurred either, but it will as well. Today, such an attack would be relatively unsophisticated (small scale) but over time ISIS’s capability to conduct a more complex attack will grow. This is what long-term safe haven in Iraq and Syria would give ISIS, and it is exactly what the group is planning to do. They have announced their intentions to attack us—just like Bin Ladin did in the years prior to 9/11.

  Third, ISIS is building a following among other extremist groups around the world—again, at a more rapid pace than al Qa‘ida ever enjoyed. This has occurred in Algeria, Libya, Egypt, and Afghanistan. More will follow. This makes these groups, which are already dangerous even more dangerous because they will increasingly target ISIS’s enemies (including us) and they will increasingly take-on ISIS’s brutality. We saw the former play out in early 2015 when an ISIS-associated group in
Libya killed an American—in an attack on a hotel in Tripoli frequented by diplomats and international businessmen. We saw the second play out just a few weeks later when another ISIS-affiliated group in Libya beheaded twenty-one Egyptian Coptic Christians.

  And, fourth, ISIS’s message is radicalizing young men and women around the globe who have never traveled to Syria or Iraq but who want to commit an attack to demonstrate their solidarity with ISIS. Such an ISIS-inspired attack has already occurred in the United States—an individual with sympathies for ISIS attacked two New York City police officers with a hatchet. Al Qa‘ida has inspired such attacks here—the Fort Hood shootings in late 2009 that killed thirteen and the Boston Marathon bombing in spring 2013 that killed five and injured nearly three hundred.

  We can expect more of these kinds of attacks in the United States. Attacks by ISIS-inspired individuals are occurring at a rapid pace around the world—roughly ten since ISIS took control of so much terriroty. Two such attacks have occurred in Canada—including the October 2014 attack on the Parliament building. And another occurred in Sydney, Australia, in December 2014. Many planning such attacks—in Australia, Western Europe, and the United States—have been arrested before they could carry out their terrorist plans.

  AQAP. Al Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula, al Qa‘ida in Yemen—the group most tightly aligned to the al Qa‘ida leadership in Pakistan—poses an even greater threat to the US homeland than does ISIS, at least for now. The last three attempted attacks by an al Qa‘ida group against the United States—the Christmas day bomber in 2009, the printer cartridge plot in 2010, and the nonmetallic bomb plot in 2012—were all AQAP plots. Two of these came close to being great successes for al Qa‘ida. To put it bluntly, I would not be surprised if AQAP tomorrow brought down a US airliner traveling from London to New York or from New York to Los Angeles or anywhere else in the United States. Not surprised at all.