COUNTERTERRORISM EVOLVES
In chapter 2, we described the growth of a new kind of terrorism, and a new terrorist
organization-especially from 1988 to 1998, when Usama Bin Ladin declared war and
organized the bombing of two U.S. embassies. In this chapter, we trace the parallel
evolution of government efforts to counter terrorism by Islamic extremists against
the United States.
We mention many personalities in this report. As in any study of the U.S. government,
some of the most important characters are institutions. We will introduce various
agencies, and how they adapted to a new kind of terrorism.
FROM THE OLD TERRORISM TO THE NEW: THE FIRST WORLD TRADE CENTER
BOMBING
At 18 minutes after noon on February 26,1993, a huge bomb went off beneath the two
towers of the World Trade Center. This was not a suicide attack. The terrorists
parked a truck bomb with a timing device on Level B-2 of the underground garage,
then departed. The ensuing explosion opened a hole seven stories up. Six people
died. More than a thousand were injured. An FBI agent at the scene described the
relatively low number of fatalities as a miracle.
President Bill Clinton ordered his National Security Council to coordinate the
response. Government agencies swung into action to find the culprits. The
Counterterrorist Center located at the CIA combed its files and queried sources
around the world. The National Security Agency (NSA), the huge Defense Department
signals collection agency, ramped up its communications intercept network and
searched its databases for clues.
The New York Field Office of the FBI took control of the local investigation and, in
the end, set a pattern for future management of terrorist incidents.
Four features of this episode have significance for the story of 9/11. First, the
bombing signaled a new terrorist challenge, one whose rage and malice had no limit.
Ramzi Yousef, the Sunni extremist who planted the bomb, said later that he had hoped
to kill 250,000 people.
Second, the FBI and the Justice Department did excellent work investigating the
bombing. Within days, the FBI identified a truck remnant as part of a Ryder rental
van reported stolen in Jersey City the day before the bombing.
Mohammed Salameh, who had rented the truck and reported it stolen, kept calling the
rental office to get back his $400 deposit. The FBI arrested him there on March 4,
1993. In short order, the Bureau had several plotters in custody, including Nidal
Ayyad, an engineer who had acquired chemicals for the bomb, and Mahmoud Abouhalima,
who had helped mix the chemicals.
The FBI identified another conspirator, Ahmad Ajaj, who had been arrested by
immigration authorities at John F. Kennedy International Airport in September 1992
and charged with document fraud. His traveling companion was Ramzi Yousef, who had
also entered with fraudulent documents but claimed political asylum and was
admitted. It quickly became clear that Yousef had been a central player in the
attack. He had fled to Pakistan immediately after the bombing and would remain at
large for nearly two years.
The arrests of Salameh, Abouhalima, and Ayyad led the FBI to the Farouq mosque in
Brooklyn, where a central figure was Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, an extremist Sunni
Muslim cleric who had moved to the United States from Egypt in 1990. In speeches and
writings, the sightless Rahman, often called the "Blind Sheikh," preached the
message of Sayyid Qutb's Milestones, characterizing the United States as the
oppressor of Muslims worldwide and asserting that it was their religious duty to
fight against God's enemies. An FBI informant learned of a plan to bomb major New
York landmarks, including the Holland and Lincoln tunnels. Disrupting this
"landmarks plot," the FBI in June 1993 arrested Rahman and various
confederates.
As a result of the investigations and arrests, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern
District of New York prosecuted and convicted multiple individuals, including Ajaj,
Salameh, Ayyad, Abouhalima, the Blind Sheikh, and Ramzi Yousef, for crimes related
to the World Trade Center bombing and other plots. An unfortunate consequence of
this superb investigative and prosecutorial effort was that it created an impression
that the law enforcement system was well-equipped to cope with terrorism. Neither
President Clinton, his principal advisers, the Congress, nor the news media felt
prompted, until later, to press the question of whether the procedures that put the
Blind Sheikh and Ramzi Yousef behind bars would really protect Americans against the
new virus of which these individuals were just the first symptoms.
Third, the successful use of the legal system to address the first World Trade Center
bombing had the side effect of obscuring the need to examine the character and
extent of the new threat facing the United States. The trials did not bring the Bin
Ladin network to the attention of the public and policymakers.
The FBI assembled, and the U.S. Attorney's office put forward, some evidence showing
that the men in the dock were not the only plotters. Materials taken from Ajaj
indicated that the plot or plots were hatched at or near the Khaldan camp, a
terrorist training camp on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Ajaj had left Texas in
April 1992 to go there to learn how to construct bombs. He had met Ramzi Yousef in
Pakistan, where they discussed bombing targets in the United States and assembled a
"terrorist kit" that included bomb-making manuals, operations guidance, videotapes
advocating terrorist action against the United States, and false identification
documents.
Yousef was captured in Pakistan following the discovery by police in the Philippines
in January 1995 of the Manila air plot, which envisioned placing bombs on board a
dozen trans-Pacific airliners and setting them off simultaneously. Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed-Yousef 's uncle, then located in Qatar-was a fellow plotter of Yousef 's in
the Manila air plot and had also wired him some money prior to the Trade Center
bombing. The U.S. Attorney obtained an indictment against KSM in January 1996, but
an official in the government of Qatar probably warned him about it. Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed evaded capture (and stayed at large to play a central part in the 9/11
attacks).10 The law enforcement process is concerned with proving the guilt of
persons apprehended and charged. Investigators and prosecutors could not present all
the evidence of possible involvement of individuals other than those charged,
although they continued to pursue such investigations, planning or hoping for later
prosecutions. The process was meant, by its nature, to mark for the public the
events as finished-case solved, justice done. It was not designed to ask if the
events might be harbingers of worse to come. Nor did it allow for aggregating and
analyzing facts to see if they could provide clues to terrorist tactics more
generally-methods of entry and finance, and mode of operation inside the United
States.
Fourth, although the bombing heightened awareness of a new terrorist danger,
successful prosecutions contributed to widespread underestimation of the threat. The
government's attorneys stressed the seriousness of the crimes, and put forward
evidence of Yousef 's technical ingenuity. Yet the public image that persisted was
not of clever Yousef but of stupid Salameh going back again and again to reclaim his
$400 truck rental deposit.
ADAPTATION-AND NONADAPTATION-IN THE LAW ENFORCEMENT COMMUNITY
Legal processes were the primary method for responding to these early manifestations
of a new type of terrorism. Our overview of U.S. capabilities for dealing with it
thus begins with the nation's vast complex of law enforcement agencies.
The Justice Department and the FBI At the federal level, much law enforcement
activity is concentrated in the Department of Justice. For countering terrorism, the
dominant agency under Justice is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI does
not have a general grant of authority but instead works under specific statutory
authorizations. Most of its work is done in local offices called field offices.
There are 56 of them, each covering a specified geographic area, and each quite
separate from all others. Prior to 9/11, the special agent in charge was in general
free to set his or her office's priorities and assign personnel accordingly.
The office's priorities were driven by two primary concerns. First, performance in
the Bureau was generally measured against statistics such as numbers of arrests,
indictments, prosecutions, and convictions. Counterterrorism and counterintelligence
work, often involving lengthy intelligence investigations that might never have
positive or quantifiable results, was not career-enhancing. Most agents who reached
management ranks had little counterterrorism experience. Second, priorities were
driven at the local level by the field offices, whose concerns centered on
traditional crimes such as white-collar offenses and those pertaining to drugs and
gangs. Individual field offices made choices to serve local priorities, not national
priorities.
The Bureau also operates under an "office of origin" system. To avoid duplication and
possible conflicts, the FBI designates a single office to be in charge of an entire
investigation. Because the New York Field Office indicted Bin Ladin prior to the
East Africa bombings, it became the office of origin for all Bin Ladin cases,
including the East Africa bombings and later the attack on the USS Cole. Most of the
FBI's institutional knowledge on Bin Ladin and al Qaeda resided there. This office
worked closely with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to
identify, arrest, prosecute, and convict many of the perpetrators of the attacks and
plots. Field offices other than the specified office of origin were often reluctant
to spend much energy on matters over which they had no control and for which they
received no credit.
The FBI's domestic intelligence gathering dates from the 1930s. With World War II
looming, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to
investigate foreign and foreign-inspired subversion-Communist, Nazi, and Japanese.
Hoover added investigation of possible espionage, sabotage, or subversion to the
duties of field offices. After the war, foreign intelligence duties were assigned to
the newly established Central Intelligence Agency. Hoover jealously guarded the
FBI's domestic portfolio against all rivals. Hoover felt he was accountable only to
the president, and the FBI's domestic intelligence activities kept growing. In the
1960s, the FBI was receiving significant assistance within the United States from
the CIA and from Army Intelligence. The legal basis for some of this assistance was
dubious.
Decades of encouragement to perform as a domestic intelligence agency abruptly ended
in the 1970s. Two years after Hoover's death in 1972, congresCOUNTERTERRORISM
sional and news media investigations of the Watergate scandals of the Nixon
administration expanded into general investigations of foreign and domestic
intelligence by the Church and Pike committees.
They disclosed domestic intelligence efforts, which included a covert action program
that operated from 1956 to 1971 against domestic organizations and, eventually,
domestic dissidents. The FBI had spied on a wide range of political figures,
especially individuals whom Hoover wanted to discredit (notably the Reverend Martin
Luther King, Jr.), and had authorized unlawful wiretaps and surveillance. The shock
registered in public opinion polls, where the percentage of Americans declaring a
"highly favorable" view of the FBI dropped from 84 percent to 37 percent. The FBI's
Domestic Intelligence Division was dissolved.
In 1976, Attorney General Edward Levi adopted domestic security guidelines to
regulate intelligence collection in the United States and to deflect calls for even
stronger regulation. In 1983, Attorney General William French Smith revised the Levi
guidelines to encourage closer investigation of potential terrorism. He also
loosened the rules governing authorization for investigations and their duration.
Still, his guidelines, like Levi's, took account of the reality that suspicion of
"terrorism," like suspicion of "subversion," could lead to making individuals
targets for investigation more because of their beliefs than because of their acts.
Smith's guidelines also took account of the reality that potential terrorists were
often members of extremist religious organizations and that investigation of
terrorism could cross the line separating state and church.
In 1986, Congress authorized the FBI to investigate terrorist attacks against
Americans that occur outside the United States. Three years later, it added
authority for the FBI to make arrests abroad without consent from the host country.
Meanwhile, a task force headed by Vice President George H.W. Bush had endorsed a
concept already urged by Director of Central Intelligence William Casey-a
Counterterrorist Center, where the FBI, the CIA, and other organizations could work
together on international terrorism. While it was distinctly a CIA entity, the FBI
detailed officials to work at the Center and obtained leads that helped in the
capture of persons wanted for trial in the United States.
The strengths that the FBI brought to counterterrorism were nowhere more brilliantly
on display than in the case of Pan American Flight 103, bound from London to New
York, which blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, killing 270 people.
Initial evidence pointed to the government of Syria and, later, Iran. The
Counterterrorist Center reserved judgment on the perpetrators of the attack.
Meanwhile, FBI technicians, working with U.K. security services, gathered and
analyzed the widely scattered fragments of the airliner. In 1991, with the help of
the Counterterrorist Center, they identified one small fragment as part of a timing
device-to the technicians, as distinctive as DNA. It was a Libyan device. Together
with other evidence, the FBI put together a case pointing conclusively to the Libyan
government. Eventually Libya acknowledged its responsibility.
Pan Am 103 became a cautionary tale against rushing to judgment in attributing
responsibility for a terrorist act. It also showed again how-given a case to
solve-the FBI remained capable of extraordinary investigative success.
FBI Organization and Priorities In 1993, President Clinton chose Louis Freeh as the
Director of the Bureau. Freeh, who would remain Director until June 2001, believed
that the FBI's work should be done primarily by the field offices. To emphasize this
view he cut headquarters staff and decentralized operations. The special agents in
charge gained power, influence, and independence.
Freeh recognized terrorism as a major threat. He increased the number of legal
attach� offices abroad, focusing in particular on the Middle East. He also urged
agents not to wait for terrorist acts to occur before taking action. In his first
budget request to Congress after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he stated that
"merely solving this type of crime is not enough; it is equally important that the
FBI thwart terrorism before such acts can be perpetrated." Within headquarters, he
created a Counterterrorism Division that would complement the Counterterrorist
Center at the CIA and arranged for exchanges of senior FBI and CIA counterterrorism
officials. He pressed for more cooperation between legal attach�s and CIA stations
abroad.
Freeh's efforts did not, however, translate into a significant shift of resources to
counterterrorism. FBI, Justice, and Office of Management and Budget officials said
that FBI leadership seemed unwilling to shift resources to terrorism from other
areas such as violent crime and drug enforcement; other FBI officials blamed
Congress and the OMB for a lack of political will and failure to understand the
FBI's counterterrorism resource needs. In addition, Freeh did not impose his views
on the field offices. With a few notable exceptions, the field offices did not apply
significant resources to terrorism and often reprogrammed funds for other
priorities.
In 1998, the FBI issued a five-year strategic plan led by its deputy director, Robert
"Bear" Bryant. For the first time, the FBI designated national and economic
security, including counterterrorism, as its top priority. Dale Watson, who would
later become the head of the new Counterterrorism Division, said that after the East
Africa bombings,"the light came on" that cultural change had to occur within the
FBI. The plan mandated a stronger intelligence collection effort. It called for a
nationwide automated system to facilitate information collection, analysis, and
dissemination. It envisioned the creation of a professional intelligence cadre of
experienced and trained agents and analysts. If successfully implemented, this would
have been a major step toward addressing terrorism systematically, rather than as
individual unrelated cases. But the plan did not succeed.
First, the plan did not obtain the necessary human resources. Despite
desCOUNTERTERRORISM
ignating "national and economic security" as its top priority in 1998, the FBI did
not shift human resources accordingly. Although the FBI's counterterrorism budget
tripled during the mid-1990s, FBI counterterrorism spending remained fairly constant
between fiscal years 1998 and 2001. In 2000, there were still twice as many agents
devoted to drug enforcement as to counterterrorism.
Second, the new division intended to strengthen the FBI's strategic analysis
capability faltered. It received insufficient resources and faced resistance from
senior managers in the FBI's operational divisions. The new division was supposed to
identify trends in terrorist activity, determine what the FBI did not know, and
ultimately drive collection efforts. However, the FBI had little appreciation for
the role of analysis. Analysts continued to be used primarily in a tactical
fashion-providing support for existing cases. Compounding the problem was the FBI's
tradition of hiring analysts from within instead of recruiting individuals with the
relevant educational background and expertise.
Moreover, analysts had difficulty getting access to the FBI and intelligence
community information they were expected to analyze. The poor state of the FBI's
information systems meant that such access depended in large part on an analyst's
personal relationships with individuals in the operational units or squads where the
information resided. For all of these reasons, prior to 9/11 relatively few
strategic analytic reports about counterterrorism had been completed. Indeed, the
FBI had never completed an assessment of the overall terrorist threat to the U.S.
homeland.
Third, the FBI did not have an effective intelligence collection effort. Collection
of intelligence from human sources was limited, and agents were inadequately
trained. Only three days of a 16-week agents' course were devoted to
counterintelligence and counterterrorism, and most subsequent training was received
on the job. The FBI did not have an adequate mechanism for validating source
reporting, nor did it have a system for adequately tracking and sharing source
reporting, either internally or externally. The FBI did not dedicate sufficient
resources to the surveillance and translation needs of counterterrorism agents. It
lacked sufficient translators proficient in Arabic and other key languages,
resulting in a significant backlog of untranslated intercepts.
Finally, the FBI's information systems were woefully inadequate. The FBI lacked the
ability to know what it knew: there was no effective mechanism for capturing or
sharing its institutional knowledge. FBI agents did create records of interviews and
other investigative efforts, but there were no reports officers to condense the
information into meaningful intelligence that could be retrieved and
disseminated.
In 1999, the FBI created separate Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence divisions.
Dale Watson, the first head of the new Counterterrorism Division, recognized the
urgent need to increase the FBI's counterterrorism capability. His plan, called
MAXCAP 05, was unveiled in 2000: it set the goal of bringing the Bureau to its
"maximum feasible capacity" in counterterrorism by 2005. Field executives told
Watson that they did not have the analysts, linguists, or technically trained
experts to carry out the strategy. In a report provided to Director Robert Mueller
in September 2001, one year after Watson presented his plan to field executives,
almost every FBI field office was assessed to be operating below "maximum capacity."
The report stated that "the goal to 'prevent terrorism' requires a dramatic shift in
emphasis from a reactive capability to highly functioning intelligence capability
which provides not only leads and operational support, but clear strategic analysis
and direction."
Legal Constraints on the FBI and "the Wall" The FBI had different tools for law
enforcement and intelligence.
For criminal matters, it could apply for and use traditional criminal warrants. For
intelligence matters involving international terrorism, however, the rules were
different. For many years the attorney general could authorize surveillance of
foreign powers and agents of foreign powers without any court review, but in 1978
Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.29This law regulated
intelligence collection directed at foreign powers and agents of foreign powers in
the United States. In addition to requiring court review of proposed surveillance
(and later, physical searches), the 1978 act was interpreted by the courts to
require that a search be approved only if its "primary purpose" was to obtain
foreign intelligence information. In other words, the authorities of the FISA law
could not be used to circumvent traditional criminal warrant requirements. The
Justice Department interpreted these rulings as saying that criminal prosecutors
could be briefed on FISA information but could not direct or control its
collection.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Justice prosecutors had informal arrangements
for obtaining information gathered in the FISA process, the understanding being that
they would not improperly exploit that process for their criminal cases. Whether the
FBI shared with prosecutors information pertinent to possible criminal
investigations was left solely to the judgment of the FBI.
But the prosecution of Aldrich Ames for espionage in 1994 revived concerns about the
prosecutors' role in intelligence investigations. The Department of Justice's Office
of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR) is responsible for reviewing and presenting
all FISA applications to the FISA Court. It worried that because of the numerous
prior consultations between FBI agents and prosecutors, the judge might rule that
the FISA warrants had been misused. If that had happened, Ames might have escaped
conviction. Richard Scruggs, the acting head of OIPR, complained to Attorney General
Janet Reno about the lack of information-sharing controls. On his own, he began
imposing informationsharing procedures for FISA material. The Office of Intelligence
Policy and Review became the gatekeeper for the flow of FISA information to criminal
prosecutors.
In July 1995, Attorney General Reno issued formal procedures aimed at managing
information sharing between Justice Department prosecutors and the FBI. They were
developed in a working group led by the Justice Department's Executive Office of
National Security, overseen by Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick.
These procedures-while requiring the sharing of intelligence information with
prosecutors-regulated the manner in which such information could be shared from the
intelligence side of the house to the criminal side.
These procedures were almost immediately misunderstood and misapplied. As a result,
there was far less information sharing and coordination between the FBI and the
Criminal Division in practice than was allowed under the department's procedures.
Over time the procedures came to be referred to as "the wall." The term "the wall"
is misleading, however, because several factors led to a series of barriers to
information sharing that developed.
The Office of Intelligence Policy and Review became the sole gatekeeper for passing
information to the Criminal Division. Though Attorney General Reno's procedures did
not include such a provision, the Office assumed the role anyway, arguing that its
position reflected the concerns of Judge Royce Lamberth, then chief judge of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The Office threatened that if it could not
regulate the flow of information to criminal prosecutors, it would no longer present
the FBI's warrant requests to the FISA Court. The information flow withered.
The 1995 procedures dealt only with sharing between agents and criminal prosecutors,
not between two kinds of FBI agents, those working on intelligence matters and those
working on criminal matters. But pressure from the Office of Intelligence Policy
Review, FBI leadership, and the FISA Court built barriers between agents-even agents
serving on the same squads. FBI Deputy Director Bryant reinforced the Office's
caution by informing agents that too much information sharing could be a career
stopper. Agents in the field began to believe-incorrectly-that no FISA information
could be shared with agents working on criminal investigations.
This perception evolved into the still more exaggerated belief that the FBI could not
share any intelligence information with criminal investigators, even if no FISA
procedures had been used. Thus, relevant information from the National Security
Agency and the CIA often failed to make its way to criminal investigators. Separate
reviews in 1999, 2000, and 2001 concluded independently that information sharing was
not occurring, and that the intent of the 1995 procedures was ignored
routinely.
We will describe some of the unfortunate consequences of these accumulated
institutional beliefs and practices in chapter 8.
There were other legal limitations. Both prosecutors and FBI agents argued that they
were barred by court rules from sharing grand jury information, even though the
prohibition applied only to that small fraction that had been presented to a grand
jury, and even that prohibition had exceptions. But as interpreted by FBI field
offices, this prohibition could conceivably apply to much of the information
unearthed in an investigation. There were also restrictions, arising from executive
order, on the commingling of domestic information with foreign intelligence. Finally
the NSA began putting caveats on its Bin Ladin-related reports that required prior
approval before sharing their contents with criminal investigators and prosecutors.
These developments further blocked the arteries of information sharing.
Other Law Enforcement Agencies The Justice Department is much more than the FBI. It
also has a U.S. Marshals Service, almost 4,000 strong on 9/11 and especially expert
in tracking fugitives, with much local police knowledge. The department's Drug
Enforcement Administration had, as of 2001, more than 4,500 agents.
There were a number of occasions when DEA agents were able to introduce sources to
the FBI or CIA for counterterrorism use.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), with its 9,000 Border Patrol
agents, 4,500 inspectors, and 2,000 immigration special agents, had perhaps the
greatest potential to develop an expanded role in counterterrorism. However, the INS
was focused on the formidable challenges posed by illegal entry over the southwest
border, criminal aliens, and a growing backlog in the applications for naturalizing
immigrants. The White House, the Justice Department, and above all the Congress
reinforced these concerns. In addition, when Doris Meissner became INS Commissioner
in 1993, she found an agency seriously hampered by outdated technology and
insufficient human resources. Border Patrol agents were still using manual
typewriters; inspectors at ports of entry were using a paper watchlist; the asylum
and other benefits systems did not effectively deter fraudulent applicants.
Commissioner Meissner responded in 1993 to the World Trade Center bombing by
providing seed money to the State Department's Consular Affairs Bureau to automate
its terrorist watchlist, used by consular officers and border inspectors. The INS
assigned an individual in a new "lookout" unit to work with the State Department in
watchlisting suspected terrorists and with the intelligence community and the FBI in
determining how to deal with them when they appeared at ports of entry. By 1998, 97
suspected terrorists had been denied admission at U.S. ports of entry because of the
watchlist.
How to conduct deportation cases against aliens who were suspected terrorists caused
significant debate. The INS had immigration law expertise and authority to bring the
cases, but the FBI possessed the classified information sometimes needed as
evidence, and information-sharing conflicts resulted. New laws in 1996 authorized
the use of classified evidence in removal hearings, but the INS removed only a
handful of the aliens with links to terrorist activity (none identified as
associated with al Qaeda) using classified evidence.
Midlevel INS employees proposed comprehensive counterterrorism proCOUNTERTERRORISM
posals to management in 1986, 1995, and 1997. No action was taken on them. In 1997, a
National Security Unit was set up to handle alerts, track potential terrorist cases
for possible immigration enforcement action, and work with the rest of the Justice
Department. It focused on the FBI's priorities of Hezbollah and Hamas, and began to
examine how immigration laws could be brought to bear on terrorism. For instance, it
sought unsuccessfully to require that CIA security checks be completed before
naturalization applications were approved.
Policy questions, such as whether resident alien status should be revoked upon the
person's conviction of a terrorist crime, were not addressed. Congress, with the
support of the Clinton administration, doubled the number of Border Patrol agents
required along the border with Mexico to one agent every quarter mile by 1999. It
rejected efforts to bring additional resources to bear in the north. The border with
Canada had one agent for every 13.25 miles. Despite examples of terrorists entering
from Canada, awareness of terrorist activity in Canada and its more lenient
immigration laws, and an inspector general's report recommending that the Border
Patrol develop a northern border strategy, the only positive step was that the
number of Border Patrol agents was not cut any further.
Inspectors at the ports of entry were not asked to focus on terrorists. Inspectors
told us they were not even aware that when they checked the names of incoming
passengers against the automated watchlist, they were checking in part for
terrorists. In general, border inspectors also did not have the information they
needed to make fact-based determinations of admissibility. The INS initiated but
failed to bring to completion two efforts that would have provided inspectors with
information relevant to counterterrorism-a proposed system to track foreign student
visa compliance and a program to establish a way of tracking travelers' entry to and
exit from the United States.
In 1996, a new law enabled the INS to enter into agreements with state and local law
enforcement agencies through which the INS provided training and the local agencies
exercised immigration enforcement authority. Terrorist watchlists were not available
to them. Mayors in cities with large immigrant populations sometimes imposed limits
on city employee cooperation with federal immigration agents. A large population
lives outside the legal framework. Fraudulent documents could be easily obtained.
Congress kept the number of INS agents static in the face of the overwhelming
problem.
The chief vehicle for INS and for state and local participation in law enforcement
was the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), first tried out in New York City in 1980
in response to a spate of incidents involving domestic terrorist organizations. This
task force was managed by the New York Field Office of the FBI, and its existence
provided an opportunity to exchange information and, as happened after the first
World Trade Center bombing, to enlist local officers, as well as other agency
representatives, as partners in the FBI investigation. The FBI expanded the number
of JTTFs throughout the 1990s, and by 9/11 there were 34. While useful, the JTTFs
had limitations. They set priorities in accordance with regional and field office
concerns, and most were not fully staffed. Many state and local entities believed
they had little to gain from having a full-time representative on a JTTF.
Other federal law enforcement resources, also not seriously enlisted for
counterterrorism, were to be found in the Treasury Department. Treasury housed the
Secret Service, the Customs Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and
Firearms. Given the Secret Service's mission to protect the president and other high
officials, its agents did become involved with those of the FBI whenever terrorist
assassination plots were rumored. The Customs Service deployed agents at all points
of entry into the United States. Its agents worked alongside INS agents, and the two
groups sometimes cooperated. In the winter of 1999-2000, as will be detailed in
chapter 6, questioning by an especially alert Customs inspector led to the arrest of
an al Qaeda terrorist whose apparent mission was to bomb Los Angeles International
Airport.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was used on occasion by the FBI as a
resource. The ATF's laboratories and analysis were critical to the investigation of
the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the April 1995 bombing of
the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Before 9/11, with the exception of one portion of the FBI, very little of the
sprawling U.S. law enforcement community was engaged in countering terrorism.
Moreover, law enforcement could be effective only after specific individuals were
identified, a plot had formed, or an attack had already occurred. Responsible
individuals had to be located, apprehended, and transported back to a U.S. court for
prosecution. As FBI agents emphasized to us, the FBI and the Justice Department do
not have cruise missiles. They declare war by indicting someone. They took on the
lead role in addressing terrorism because they were asked to do so.
. . . AND IN THE FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) within the Department of Transportation had
been vested by Congress with the sometimes conflicting mandate of regulating the
safety and security of U.S. civil aviation while also promoting the civil aviation
industry. The FAA had a security mission to protect the users of commercial air
transportation against terrorism and other criminal acts. In the years before 9/11,
the FAA perceived sabotage as a greater threat to aviation than hijacking. First, no
domestic hijacking had occurred in a decade. Second, the commercial aviation system
was perceived as more vulnerable to explosives than to weapons such as firearms.
Finally, explosives were perceived as deadlier than hijacking and therefore of
greater consequence. In 1996, a presidential commission on aviation safety and
security chaired by Vice President Al Gore reinforced the prevailing concern about
sabotage and explosives on aircraft. The Gore Commission also flagged, as a new
danger, the possibility of attack by surface-to-air missiles. Its 1997 final report
did not discuss the possibility of suicide hijackings.
The FAA set and enforced aviation security rules, which airlines and airports were
required to implement. The rules were supposed to produce a "layered" system of
defense. This meant that the failure of any one layer of security would not be
fatal, because additional layers would provide backup security. But each layer
relevant to hijackings-intelligence, passenger prescreening, checkpoint screening,
and onboard security-was seriously flawed prior to 9/11. Taken together, they did
not stop any of the 9/11 hijackers from getting on board four different aircraft at
three different airports.
The FAA's policy was to use intelligence to identify both specific plots and general
threats to civil aviation security, so that the agency could develop and deploy
appropriate countermeasures. The FAA's 40-person intelligence unit was supposed to
receive a broad range of intelligence data from the FBI, CIA, and other agencies so
that it could make assessments about the threat to aviation. But the large volume of
data contained little pertaining to the presence and activities of terrorists in the
United States. For example, information on the FBI's effort in 1998 to assess the
potential use of flight training by terrorists and the Phoenix electronic
communication of 2001 warning of radical Middle Easterners attending flight school
were not passed to FAA headquarters. Several top FAA intelligence officials called
the domestic threat picture a serious blind spot.
Moreover, the FAA's intelligence unit did not receive much attention from the
agency's leadership. Neither Administrator Jane Garvey nor her deputy routinely
reviewed daily intelligence, and what they did see was screened for them. She was
unaware of a great amount of hijacking threat information from her own intelligence
unit, which, in turn, was not deeply involved in the agency's policymaking process.
Historically, decisive security action took place only after a disaster had occurred
or a specific plot had been discovered.
The next aviation security layer was passenger prescreening. The FAA directed air
carriers not to fly individuals known to pose a "direct" threat to civil aviation.
But as of 9/11, the FAA's "no-fly" list contained the names of just 12 terrorist
suspects (including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), even though government
watchlists contained the names of many thousands of known and suspected terrorists.
This astonishing mismatch existed despite the Gore Commission's having called on the
FBI and CIA four years earlier to provide terrorist watchlists to improve
prescreening. The longtime chief of the FAA's civil aviation security division
testified that he was not even aware of the State Department'sTIPOFF list of known
and suspected terrorists (some 60,000 before 9/11) until he heard it mentioned
during the Commission's January 26, 2004, public hearing. The FAA had access to some
TIPOFF data, but apparently found it too difficult to use.
The second part of prescreening called on the air carriers to implement an
FAA-approved computerized algorithm (known as CAPPS, for Computer Assisted Passenger
Prescreening System) designed to identify passengers whose profile suggested they
might pose more than a minimal risk to aircraft. Although the algorithm included
hijacker profile data, at that time only passengers checking bags were eligible to
be selected by CAPPS for additional scrutiny. Selection entailed only having one's
checked baggage screened for explosives or held off the airplane until one had
boarded. Primarily because of concern regarding potential discrimination and the
impact on passenger throughput, "selectees" were no longer required to undergo
extraordinary screening of their carry-on baggage as had been the case before the
system was computerized in 1997.55 This policy change also reflected the perception
that nonsuicide sabotage was the primary threat to civil aviation.
Checkpoint screening was considered the most important and obvious layer of security.
Walk-through metal detectors and X-ray machines operated by trained screeners were
employed to stop prohibited items. Numerous government reports indicated that
checkpoints performed poorly, often failing to detect even obvious FAA test items.
Many deadly and dangerous items did not set off metal detectors, or were hard to
distinguish in an X-ray machine from innocent everyday items.
While FAA rules did not expressly prohibit knives with blades under 4 inches long,
the airlines' checkpoint operations guide (which was developed in cooperation with
the FAA), explicitly permitted them. The FAA's basis for this policy was (1) the
agency did not consider such items to be menacing, (2) most local laws did not
prohibit individuals from carrying such knives, and (3) such knives would have been
difficult to detect unless the sensitivity of metal detectors had been greatly
increased. A proposal to ban knives altogether in 1993 had been rejected because
small cutting implements were difficult to detect and the number of innocent
"alarms" would have increased significantly, exacerbating congestion problems at
checkpoints.
Several years prior to 9/11, an FAA requirement for screeners to conduct "continuous"
and "random" hand searches of carry-on luggage at checkpoints had been replaced by
explosive trace detection or had simply become ignored by the air carriers.
Therefore, secondary screening of individuals and their carry-on bags to identify
weapons (other than bombs) was nonexistent, except for passengers who triggered the
metal detectors. Even when small knives were detected by secondary screening, they
were usually returned to the traveler. Reportedly, the 9/11 hijackers were
instructed to use items that would be undetectable by airport checkpoints.
In the pre-9/11 security system, the air carriers played a major role. As the
Inspector General of the Department ofTransportation told us, there were great
pressures from the air carriers to control security costs and to "limit the impact
of security requirements on aviation operations, so that the industry could
concentrate on its primary mission of moving passengers and aircraft. . . . [T]hose
counterpressures in turn manifested themselves as significant weaknesses in
security." A longtime FAA security official described the air carriers' approach to
security regulation as "decry, deny and delay" and told us that while "the air
carriers had seen the enlightened hand of self-interest with respect to safety, they
hadn't seen it in the security arena."
The final layer, security on board commercial aircraft, was not designed to counter
suicide hijackings. The FAA-approved "Common Strategy" had been elaborated over
decades of experience with scores of hijackings, beginning in the 1960s. It taught
flight crews that the best way to deal with hijackers was to accommodate their
demands, get the plane to land safely, and then let law enforcement or the military
handle the situation. According to the FAA, the record had shown that the longer a
hijacking persisted, the more likely it was to end peacefully. The strategy operated
on the fundamental assumption that hijackers issue negotiable demands (most often
for asylum or the release of prisoners) and that, as one FAA official put
it,"suicide wasn't in the game plan" of hijackers. FAA training material provided no
guidance for flight crews should violence occur.
This prevailing Common Strategy of cooperation and nonconfrontation meant that even a
hardened cockpit door would have made little difference in a hijacking. As the
chairman of the Security Committee of the Air Line Pilots Association observed when
proposals were made in early 2001 to install reinforced cockpit doors in commercial
aircraft, "Even if you make a vault out of the door, if they have a noose around my
flight attendant's neck, I'm going to open the door." Prior to 9/11, FAA regulations
mandated that cockpit doors permit ready access into and out of the cockpit in the
event of an emergency. Even so, rules implemented in the 1960s required air crews to
keep the cockpit door closed and locked in flight. This requirement was not always
observed or vigorously enforced.
As for law enforcement, there were only 33 armed and trained federal air marshals as
of 9/11. They were not deployed on U.S. domestic flights, except when in transit to
provide security on international departures. This policy reflected the FAA's view
that domestic hijacking was in check-a view held confidently as no terrorist had
hijacked a U.S.commercial aircraft anywhere in the world since 1986.
In the absence of any recent aviation security incident and without "specific and
credible" evidence of a plot directed at civil aviation, the FAA's leadership
focused elsewhere, including on operational concerns and the ever-present issue of
safety. FAA Administrator Garvey recalled that "every day in 2001 was like the day
before Thanksgiving." Heeding calls for improved air service, Congress concentrated
its efforts on a "passenger bill of rights," to improve capacity, efficiency, and
customer satisfaction in the aviation system. There was no focus on terrorism.
. . . AND IN THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY
The National Security Act of 1947 created the position of Director of Central
Intelligence (DCI). Independent from the departments of Defense, State, Justice, and
other policy departments, the DCI heads the U.S.intelligence community and provides
intelligence to federal entities.
The sole element of the intelligence community independent from a cabinet agency is
the CIA. As an independent agency, it collects, analyzes, and disseminates
intelligence from all sources. The CIA's number one customer is the president of the
United States, who also has the authority to direct it to conduct covert
operations.
Although covert actions represent a very small fraction of the Agency's entire
budget, these operations have at times been controversial and over time have
dominated the public's perception of the CIA. The DCI is confirmed by the Senate but
is not technically a member of the president's cabinet. The director's power under
federal law over the loose, confederated "intelligence community" is limited.
He or she states the community's priorities and coordinates development of
intelligence agency budget requests for submission to Congress.
This responsibility gives many the false impression that the DCI has line authority
over the heads of these agencies and has the power to shift resources within these
budgets as the need arises. Neither is true. In fact, the DCI's real authority has
been directly proportional to his personal closeness to the president, which has
waxed and waned over the years, and to others in government, especially the
secretary of defense.
Intelligence agencies under the Department of Defense account for approximately 80
percent of all U.S. spending for intelligence, including some that supports a
national customer base and some that supports specific Defense Department or
military service needs.
As they are housed in the Defense Department, these agencies are keenly attentive to
the military's strategic and tactical requirements.
One of the intelligence agencies in Defense with a national customer base is the
National Security Agency, which intercepts and analyzes foreign communications and
breaks codes. The NSA also creates codes and ciphers to protect government
information. Another is the recently renamed National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
(NGA), which provides and analyzes imagery and produces a wide array of products,
including maps, navigation tools, and surveillance intelligence. A third such agency
in Defense is the National Reconnaissance Office. It develops, procures, launches,
and maintains in orbit information-gathering satellites that serve other government
agencies. The Defense Intelligence Agency supports the secretary of defense, Joint
Chiefs of Staff, and military field commanders. It does some collection through
human sources as well as some technical intelligence collection. The Army, Navy, Air
Force, and Marine Corps have their own intelligence components that collect
information, help them decide what weapons to acquire, and serve the tactical
intelligence needs of their respective services.
In addition to those from the Department of Defense, other elements in the
intelligence community include the national security parts of the FBI; the Bureau of
Intelligence and Research in the State Department; the intelligence component of the
Treasury Department; the Energy Department's Office of Intelligence and
Counterintelligence, the former of which, through leveraging the expertise of the
national laboratory system, has special competence in nuclear weapons; the Office of
Intelligence of the Coast Guard; and, today, the Directorate of Intelligence
Analysis and Infrastructure Protection in the Department of Homeland Security.
The National Security Agency The National Security Agency's intercepts of terrorist
communications often set off alarms elsewhere in the government. Often, too, its
intercepts are conclusive elements in the analyst's jigsaw puzzle. NSA engineers
build technical systems to break ciphers and to make sense of today's complex
signals environment. Its analysts listen to conversations between foreigners not
meant for them. They also perform "traffic analysis"-studying technical
communications systems and codes as well as foreign organizational structures,
including those of terrorist organizations.
Cold War adversaries used very hierarchical, familiar, and predictable military
command and control methods. With globalization and the telecommunications
revolution, and with loosely affiliated but networked adversaries using commercial
devices and encryption, the technical impediments to signals collection grew at a
geometric rate. At the same time, the end of the Cold War and the resultant cuts in
national security funding forced intelligence agencies to cut systems and seek
economies of scale. Modern adversaries are skilled users of communications
technologies. The NSA's challenges, and its opportunities, increased exponentially
in "volume, variety, and velocity."
The law requires the NSA to not deliberately collect data on U.S. citizens or on
persons in the United States without a warrant based on foreign intelligence
requirements. Also, the NSA was supposed to let the FBI know of any indication of
crime, espionage, or "terrorist enterprise" so that the FBI could obtain the
appropriate warrant. Later in this story, we will learn that while the NSA had the
technical capability to report on communications with suspected terrorist facilities
in the Middle East, the NSA did not seek FISA Court warrants to collect
communications between individuals in the United States and foreign countries,
because it believed that this was an FBI role. It also did not want to be viewed as
targeting persons in the United States and possibly violating laws that governed
NSA's collection of foreign intelligence.
An almost obsessive protection of sources and methods by the NSA, and its focus on
foreign intelligence, and its avoidance of anything domestic would, as will be seen,
be important elements in the story of 9/11.
Technology as an Intelligence Asset and Liability The application of newly developed
scientific technology to the mission of U.S. war fighters and national security
decisionmakers is one of the great success stories of the twentieth century. It did
not happen by accident. Recent wars have been waged and won decisively by brave men
and women using advanced technology that was developed, authorized, and paid for by
conscientious and diligent executive and legislative branch leaders many years
earlier.
The challenge of technology, however, is a daunting one. It is expensive, sometimes
fails, and often can create problems as well as solve them. Some of the advanced
technologies that gave us insight into the closed-off territories of the Soviet
Union during the Cold War are of limited use in identifying and tracking individual
terrorists.
Terrorists, in turn, have benefited from this same rapid development of communication
technologies. They simply could buy off the shelf and harvest the products of a $3
trillion a year telecommunications industry. They could acquire without great
expense communication devices that were varied, global, instantaneous, complex, and
encrypted.
The emergence of the World Wide Web has given terrorists a much easier means of
acquiring information and exercising command and control over their operations. The
operational leader of the 9/11 conspiracy, Mohamed Atta, went online from Hamburg,
Germany, to research U.S. flight schools. Targets of intelligence collection have
become more sophisticated. These changes have made surveillance and threat warning
more difficult.
Despite the problems that technology creates, Americans' love affair with it leads
them to also regard it as the solution. But technology produces its best results
when an organization has the doctrine, structure, and incentives to exploit it. For
example, even the best information technology will not improve information sharing
so long as the intelligence agencies' personnel and security systems reward
protecting information rather than disseminating it. The CIA The CIA is a descendant
of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which President Roosevelt created early
in World War II after having first thought the FBI might take that role. The father
of the OSS was William J." Wild Bill" Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer. He recruited
into the OSS others like himself-well traveled, well connected, well-to-do
professional men and women.
An innovation of Donovan's, whose legacy remains part of U.S. intelligence today, was
the establishment of a Research and Analysis Branch. There large numbers of scholars
from U.S.universities pored over accounts from spies, communications intercepted by
the armed forces, transcripts of radio broadcasts, and publications of all types,
and prepared reports on economic, political, and social conditions in foreign
theaters of operation.
At the end of World War II, to Donovan's disappointment, President Harry Truman
dissolved the Office of Strategic Services. Four months later, the President
directed that "all Federal foreign intelligence activities be planned, developed and
coordinated so as to assure the most effective accomplishment of the intelligence
mission related to the national security," under a National Intelligence Authority
consisting of the secretaries of State, War, and the Navy, and a personal
representative of the president. This body was to be assisted by a Central
Intelligence Group, made up of persons detailed from the departments of each of the
members and headed by a Director of Central Intelligence.
Subsequently, President Truman agreed to the National Security Act of 1947, which,
among other things, established the Central Intelligence Agency, under the Director
of Central Intelligence. Lobbying by the FBI, combined with fears of creating a U.S.
Gestapo, led to the FBI's being assigned
responsibility for internal security functions and counterespionage. The CIA was
specifically accorded "no police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal
security functions." This structure built in tensions
between the CIA and the Defense Department's intelligence agencies, and between the
CIA and the FBI.
Clandestine and Covert Action.
With this history, the CIA brought to the era of 9/11 many attributes of an elite
organization, viewing itself as serving on the nation's front lines to engage
America's enemies. Officers in its Clandestine Service, under what became the
Directorate of Operations, fanned out into stations abroad. Each chief of station
was a very important person in the organization, given the additional title of the
DCI's representative in that country. He (occasionally she) was governed by an
operating directive that listed operational priorities issued by the relevant
regional division of the Directorate, constrained by centrally determined
allocations of resources.
Because the conduct of espionage was a high-risk activity, decisions on the
clandestine targeting, recruitment, handling, and termination of secret sources and
the dissemination of collected information required Washington's approval and
action. But in this decentralized system, analogous in some ways to the culture of
the FBI field offices in the United States, everyone in the Directorate of
Operations presumed that it was the job of headquarters to support the field, rather
than manage field activities.
In the 1960s, the CIA suffered exposure of its botched effort to land Cuban exiles at
the Bay of Pigs. The Vietnam War brought on more criticism. A prominent feature of
the Watergate era was investigations of the CIA by committees headed by Frank Church
in the Senate and Otis Pike in the House. They published evidence that the CIA had
secretly planned to assassinate Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. The
President had not taken plain responsibility for these judgments. CIA officials had
taken most of the blame, saying they had done so in order to preserve the
President's "plausible deniability."
After the Watergate era, Congress established oversight committees to ensure that the
CIA did not undertake covert action contrary to basic American law. Case officers in
the CIA's Clandestine Service interpreted legislation, such as the Hughes-Ryan
Amendment requiring that the president approve and report to Congress any covert
action, as sending a message to them that covert action often leads to trouble and
can severely damage one's career. Controversies surrounding Central American covert
action programs in the mid-1980s led to the indictment of several senior officers of
the Clandestine Service. During the 1990s, tension sometimes arose, as it did in the
effort against al Qaeda, between policymakers who wanted the CIA to undertake more
aggressive covert action and wary CIA leaders who counseled prudence and making sure
that the legal basis and presidential authorization for their actions were
undeniably clear.
The Clandestine Service felt the impact of the post-Cold War peace dividend, with
cuts beginning in 1992. As the number of officers declined and overseas facilities
were closed, the DCI and his managers responded to developing crises in the Balkans
or in Africa by "surging," or taking officers from across the service to use on the
immediate problem. In many cases the surge officers had little familiarity with the
new issues. Inevitably, some parts of the world and some collection targets were not
fully covered, or not covered at all. This strategy also placed great emphasis on
close relations with foreign liaison services, whose help was needed to gain
information that the United States itself did not have the capacity to collect.
The nadir for the Clandestine Service was in 1995, when only 25 trainees became new
officers.
In 1998, the DCI was able to persuade the administration and the Congress to endorse
a long-range rebuilding program. It takes five to seven years of training, language
study, and experience to bring a recruit up to full performance.
Analysis.
The CIA's Directorate of Intelligence retained some of its original character of a
university gone to war. Its men and women tended to judge one another by the
quantity and quality of their publications (in this case, classified publications).
Apart from their own peers, they looked for approval and guidance to policymakers.
During the 1990s and today, particular value is attached to having a contribution
included in one of the classified daily "newspapers"- the Senior Executive
Intelligence Brief-or, better still, selected for inclusion in the President's Daily
Brief.
The CIA had been created to wage the Cold War. Its steady focus on one or two primary
adversaries, decade after decade, had at least one positive effect: it created an
environment in which managers and analysts could safely invest time and resources in
basic research, detailed and reflective. Payoffs might not be immediate. But when
they wrote their estimates, even in brief papers, they could draw on a deep base of
knowledge.
When the Cold War ended, those investments could not easily be reallocated to new
enemies. The cultural effects ran even deeper. In a more fluid international
environment with uncertain, changing goals and interests, intelligence managers no
longer felt they could afford such a patient, strategic approach to long-term
accumulation of intellectual capital. A university culture with its versions of
books and articles was giving way to the culture of the newsroom.
During the 1990s, the rise of round-the-clock news shows and the Internet reinforced
pressure on analysts to pass along fresh reports to policymakers at an ever-faster
pace, trying to add context or supplement what their customers were receiving from
the media. Weaknesses in all-source and strategic analysis were highlighted by a
panel, chaired by Admiral David Jeremiah, that critiqued the intelligence
community's failure to foresee the nuclear weapons tests by India and Pakistan in
1998, as well as by a 1999 panel, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, that discussed the
community's limited ability to assess the ballistic missile threat to the United
States. Both reports called attention to the dispersal of effort on too many
priorities, the declining attention to the craft of strategic analysis, and security
rules that prevented adequate sharing of information. Another Cold War craft had
been an elaborate set of methods for warning against surprise attack, but that too
had faded in analyzing new dangers like terrorism.
Security. Another set of experiences that would affect the capacity of the CIA to
cope with the new terrorism traced back to the early Cold War, when the Agency
developed a concern, bordering on paranoia, about penetration by the Soviet KGB.
James Jesus Angleton, who headed counterintelligence in the CIA until the early
1970s, became obsessed with the belief that the Agency harbored one or more Soviet
"moles." Although the pendulum swung back after Angleton's forced retirement, it did
not go very far. Instances of actual Soviet penetration kept apprehensions
high.
Then, in the early 1990s, came the Aldrich Ames espionage case, which intensely
embarrassed the CIA. Though obviously unreliable, Ames had been protected and
promoted by fellow officers while he paid his bills by selling to the Soviet Union
the names of U.S. operatives and agents, a number of whom died as a result.
The concern about security vastly complicated information sharing. Information was
compartmented in order to protect it against exposure to skilled and technologically
sophisticated adversaries. There were therefore numerous restrictions on handling
information and a deep suspicion about sending information over newfangled
electronic systems, like email, to other agencies of the U.S. government.
Security concerns also increased the difficulty of recruiting officers qualified for
counterterrorism. Very few American colleges or universities offered programs in
Middle Eastern languages or Islamic studies. The total number of undergraduate
degrees granted in Arabic in all U.S. colleges and universities in 2002 was
six.
Many who had traveled much outside the United States could expect a very long wait
for initial clearance. Anyone who was foreign-born or had numerous relatives abroad
was well-advised not even to apply. With budgets for the CIA shrinking after the end
of the Cold War, it was not surprising that, with some notable exceptions, new hires
in the Clandestine Service tended to have qualifications similar to those of serving
officers: that is, they were suited for traditional agent recruitment or for
exploiting liaison relationships with foreign services but were not equipped to seek
or use assets inside the terrorist network.
Early Counterterrorism Efforts In the 1970s and 1980s, terrorism had been tied to
regional conflicts, mainly in the Middle East. The majority of terrorist groups
either were sponsored by governments or, like the Palestine Liberation Organization,
were militants trying to create governments.
In the mid-1980s, on the basis of a report from a task force headed by Vice President
George Bush and after terrorist attacks at airports in Rome and Athens, the DCI
created a Counterterrorist Center to unify activities across the Directorate of
Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence. The Counterterrorist Center had
representation from the FBI and other agencies. In the formal table of organization
it reported to the DCI, but in fact most of the Center's chiefs belonged to the
Clandestine Service and usually looked for guidance to the head of the Directorate
of Operations.
The Center stimulated and coordinated collection of information by CIA stations,
compiled the results, and passed selected reports to appropriate stations, the
Directorate of Intelligence analysts, other parts of the intelligence community, or
to policymakers. The Center protected its bureaucratic turf. The Director of Central
Intelligence had once had a national intelligence officer for terrorism to
coordinate analysis; that office was abolished in the late 1980s and its duties
absorbed in part by the Counterterrorist Center. Though analysts assigned to the
Center produced a large number of papers, the focus was support to operations. A CIA
inspector general's report in 1994 criticized the Center's capacity to provide
warning of terrorist attacks.
Subsequent chapters will raise the issue of whether, despite tremendous talent,
energy, and dedication, the intelligence community failed to do enough in coping
with the challenge from Bin Ladin and al Qaeda. Confronted with such questions,
managers in the intelligence community often responded that they had meager
resources with which to work.
Cuts in national security expenditures at the end of the Cold War led to budget cuts
in the national foreign intelligence program from fiscal years 1990 to 1996 and
essentially flat budgets from fiscal years 1996 to 2000 (except for the so-called
Gingrich supplemental to the FY1999 budget and two later, smaller supplementals).
These cuts compounded the difficulties of the intelligence agencies. Policymakers
were asking them to move into the digitized future to fight against
computer-to-computer communications and modern communication systems, while
maintaining capability against older systems, such as high-frequency radios and
ultra-high- and very-high-frequency (line of sight) systems that work like old-style
television antennas. Also, demand for imagery increased dramatically following the
success of the 1991 Gulf War. Both these developments, in turn, placed a premium on
planning the next generation of satellite systems, the cost of which put great
pressure on the rest of the intelligence budget. As a result, intelligence agencies
experienced staff reductions, affecting both operators and analysts.
Yet at least for the CIA, part of the burden in tackling terrorism arose from the
background we have described: an organization capable of attracting extraordinarily
motivated people but institutionally averse to risk, with its capacity for covert
action atrophied, predisposed to restrict the distribution of information, having
difficulty assimilating new types of personnel, and accustomed to presenting
descriptive reportage of the latest intelligence. The CIA, to put it another way,
needed significant change in order to get maximum effect in counterterrorism.
President Clinton appointed George Tenet as DCI in 1997, and by all accounts
terrorism was a priority for him. But Tenet's own assessment, when questioned by the
Commission, was that in 2004, the CIA's clandestine service was still at least five
years away from being fully ready to play its counterterrorism role.
And while Tenet was clearly the leader of the CIA, the intelligence community's
confederated structure left open the question of who really was in charge of the
entire U.S. intelligence effort. 3.5 . . . AND IN THE STATE DEPARTMENT AND THE
DEFENSE DEPARTMENT The State Department The Commission asked Deputy Secretary of
State Richard Armitage in 2004 why the State Department had so long pursued what
seemed, and ultimately proved, to be a hopeless effort to persuade the Taliban
regime in Afghanistan to deport Bin Ladin. Armitage replied: "We do what the State
Department does, we don't go out and fly bombers, we don't do things like that[;] .
. . we do our part in these things."
Fifty years earlier, the person in Armitage's position would not have spoken of the
Department of State as having such a limited role. Until the late 1950s, the
department dominated the processes of advising the president and Congress on U.S.
relations with the rest of the world. The National Security Council was created in
1947 largely as a result of lobbying from the Pentagon for a forum where the
military could object if they thought the State Department was setting national
objectives that the United States did not have the wherewithal to pursue.
The State Department retained primacy until the 1960s, when the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations turned instead to Robert McNamara's Defense Department, where a
mini-state department was created to analyze foreign policy issues. President
Richard Nixon then concentrated policy planning and policy coordination in a
powerful National Security Council staff, overseen by Henry Kissinger.
In later years, individual secretaries of state were important figures, but the
department's role continued to erode. State came into the 1990s overmatched by the
resources of other departments and with little support for its budget either in the
Congress or in the president's Office of Management and Budget. Like the FBI and the
CIA's Directorate of Operations, the State Department had a tradition of emphasizing
service in the field over service in Washington. Even ambassadors, however, often
found host governments not only making connections with the U.S. government through
their own missions in Washington, but working through the CIA station or a Defense
attach�. Increasingly, the embassies themselves were overshadowed by powerful
regional commanders in chief reporting to the Pentagon.
Counterterrorism In the 1960s and 1970s, the State Department managed
counterterrorism policy. It was the official channel for communication with the
governments presumed to be behind the terrorists. Moreover, since terrorist
incidents of this period usually ended in negotiations, an ambassador or other
embassy official was the logical person to represent U.S. interests.
Keeping U.S. diplomatic efforts against terrorism coherent was a recurring challenge.
In 1976, at the direction of Congress, the department elevated its coordinator for
combating terrorism to the rank equivalent to an assistant secretary of state. As an
"ambassador at large," this official sought to increase the visibility of
counterterrorism matters within the department and to help integrate U.S. policy
implementation among government agencies. The prolonged crisis of 1979-1981, when 53
Americans were held hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, ended the State
Department leadership in counterterrorism. President Carter's assertive national
security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, took charge, and the coordination function
remained thereafter in the White House. President Reagan's second secretary of
state, George Shultz, advocated active U.S. efforts to combat terrorism, often
recommending the use of military force. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger
opposed Shultz, who made little headCOUNTERTERRORISM
way against Weinberger, or even within his own department. Though Shultz elevated the
status and visibility of counterterrorism coordination by appointing as coordinator
first L. Paul Bremer and then Robert Oakley, both senior career ambassadors of high
standing in the Foreign Service, the department continued to be dominated by
regional bureaus for which terrorism was not a first-order concern.
Secretaries of state after Shultz took less personal interest in the problem. Only
congressional opposition prevented President Clinton's first secretary of state,
Warren Christopher, from merging terrorism into a new bureau that would have also
dealt with narcotics and crime. The coordinator under Secretary Madeleine Albright
told the Commission that his job was seen as a minor one within the department.
Although the description of his status has been disputed, and Secretary Albright
strongly supported the August 1998 strikes against Bin Ladin, the role played by the
Department of State in counterterrorism was often cautionary before 9/11. This was a
reflection of the reality that counterterrorism priorities nested within broader
foreign policy aims of the U.S. government.
State Department consular officers around the world, it should not be forgotten, were
constantly challenged by the problem of terrorism, for they handled visas for travel
to the United States. After it was discovered that Abdel Rahman, the Blind Sheikh,
had come and gone almost at will, State initiated significant reforms to its
watchlist and visa-processing policies. In 1993, Congress passed legislation
allowing State to retain visa-processing fees for border security; those fees were
then used by the department to fully automate the terrorist watchlist. By the late
1990s, State had created a worldwide, real-time electronic database of visa, law
enforcement, and watchlist information, the core of the post-9/11 border screening
systems. Still, as will be seen later, the system had many holes.
The Department of Defense The Department of Defense is the behemoth among federal
agencies. With an annual budget larger than the gross domestic product of Russia, it
is an empire. The Defense Department is part civilian, part military. The civilian
secretary of defense has ultimate control, under the president. Among the uniformed
military, the top official is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is
supported by a Joint Staff divided into standard military staff compartments-J-2
(intelligence), J-3 (operations), and so on.
Because of the necessary and demanding focus on the differing mission of each
service, and their long and proud traditions, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine
Corps have often fought ferociously over roles and missions in war fighting and over
budgets and posts of leadership. Two developments diminished this competition.
The first was the passage by Congress in 1986 of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which,
among other things, mandated that promotion to high rank required some period of
duty with a different service or with a joint (i.e., multiservice) command. This had
strong and immediate effects, loosening the loyalties of senior officers to their
separate services and causing them to think more broadly about the military
establishment as a whole.
However, it also may have lessened the diversity of military advice and options
presented to the president. The Goldwater-Nichols example is seen by some as having
lessons applicable to lessening competition and increasing cooperation in other
parts of the federal bureaucracy, particularly the law enforcement and intelligence
communities.
The second, related development was a significant transfer of planning and command
responsibilities from the service chiefs and their staffs to the joint and unified
commands outside of Washington, especially those for Strategic Forces and for four
regions: Europe, the Pacific, the Center, and the South. Posts in these commands
became prized assignments for ambitious officers, and the voices of their five
commanders in chief became as influential as those of the service chiefs.
Counterterrorism The Pentagon first became concerned about terrorism as a result of
hostage taking in the 1970s. In June 1976, Palestinian terrorists seized an Air
France plane and landed it at Entebbe in Uganda, holding 105 Israelis and other Jews
as hostages. A special Israeli commando force stormed the plane, killed all the
terrorists, and rescued all but one of the hostages. In October 1977, a West German
special force dealt similarly with a Lufthansa plane sitting on a tarmac in
Mogadishu: every terrorist was killed, and every hostage brought back safely. The
White House, members of Congress, and the news media asked the Pentagon whether the
United States was prepared for similar action. The answer was no. The Army
immediately set about creating the Delta Force, one of whose missions was hostage
rescue.
The first test for the new force did not go well. It came in April 1980 during the
Iranian hostage crisis, when Navy helicopters with Marine pilots flew to a site
known as Desert One, some 200 miles southeast of Tehran, to rendezvous with Air
Force planes carrying Delta Force commandos and fresh fuel. Mild sandstorms disabled
three of the helicopters, and the commander ordered the mission aborted. But
foul-ups on the ground resulted in the loss of eight aircraft, five airmen, and
three marines. Remembered as "Desert One,"this failure remained vivid for members of
the armed forces. It also contributed to the later Goldwater-Nichols reforms.
In 1983 came Hezbollah's massacre of the Marines in Beirut. President Reagan quickly
withdrew U.S. forces from Lebanon-a reversal later routinely cited by jihadists as
evidence of U.S. weakness. A detailed investigation produced a list of new
procedures that would become customary for forces deployed abroad. They involved a
number of defensive measures, including caution not only about strange cars and
trucks but also about unknown aircraft overhead. "Force protection" became a
significant claim on the time and resources of the Department of Defense.
A decade later, the military establishment had another experience that evoked both
Desert One and the withdrawal from Beirut. The first President Bush had authorized
the use of U.S. military forces to ensure humanitarian relief in war-torn Somalia.
Tribal factions interfered with the supply missions. By the autumn of 1993, U.S.
commanders concluded that the main source of trouble was a warlord, Mohammed Farrah
Aidid. An Army special force launched a raid on Mogadishu to capture him. In the
course of a long night, two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down, 73 Americans were
wounded, 18 were killed, and the world's television screens showed images of an
American corpse dragged through the streets by exultant Somalis. Under pressure from
Congress, President Clinton soon ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces. "Black Hawk
down" joined "Desert One" as a symbol among Americans in uniform, code phrases used
to evoke the risks of daring exploits without maximum preparation, overwhelming
force, and a well-defined mission.
In 1995-1996, the Defense Department began to invest effort in planning how to handle
the possibility of a domestic terrorist incident involving weapons of mass
destruction (WMD). The idea of a domestic command for homeland defense began to be
discussed in 1997, and in 1999 the Joint Chiefs developed a concept for the
establishment of a domestic Unified Command. Congress killed the idea. Instead, the
Department established the Joint Forces Command, located at Norfolk, Virginia,
making it responsible for military response to domestic emergencies, both natural
and man-made.
Pursuant to the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici Domestic Preparedness Program, the Defense
Department began in 1997 to train first responders in 120 of the nation's largest
cities. As a key part of its efforts, Defense created National Guard WMD Civil
Support Teams to respond in the event of a WMD terrorist incident. A total of 32
such National Guard teams were authorized by fiscal year 2001. Under the command of
state governors, they provided support to civilian agencies to assess the nature of
the attack, offer medical and technical advice, and coordinate state and local
responses.
The Department of Defense, like the Department of State, had a coordinator who
represented the department on the interagency committee concerned with
counterterrorism. By the end of President Clinton's first term, this official had
become the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity
conflict.
The experience of the 1980s had suggested to the military establishment that if it
were to have a role in counterterrorism, it would be a traditional military role-to
act against state sponsors of terrorism. And the military had what seemed an
excellent example of how to do it. In 1986, a bomb went off at a disco in Berlin,
killing two American soldiers. Intelligence clearly linked the bombing to Libya's
Colonel Muammar Qadhafi. President Reagan ordered air strikes against Libya. The
operation was not cost free: the United States lost two planes. Evidence accumulated
later, including the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103, clearly showed that the operation
did not curb Qadhafi's interest in terrorism. However, it was seen at the time as a
success. The lesson then taken from Libya was that terrorism could be stopped by the
use of U.S. air power that inflicted pain on the authors or sponsors of terrorist
acts.
This lesson was applied, using Tomahawk missiles, early in the Clinton
administration. George H.W. Bush was scheduled to visit Kuwait to be honored for his
rescue of that country in the Gulf War of 1991. Kuwaiti security services warned
Washington that Iraqi agents were planning to assassinate the former president.
President Clinton not only ordered precautions to protect Bush but asked about
options for a reprisal against Iraq. The Pentagon proposed 12 targets for Tomahawk
missiles. Debate in the White House and at the CIA about possible collateral damage
pared the list down to three, then to one- Iraqi intelligence headquarters in
central Baghdad. The attack was made at night, to minimize civilian casualties.
Twenty-three missiles were fired. Other than one civilian casualty, the operation
seemed completely successful: the intelligence headquarters was demolished. No
further intelligence came in about terrorist acts planned by Iraq.
The 1986 attack in Libya and the 1993 attack on Iraq symbolized for the military
establishment effective use of military power for counterterrorism- limited
retaliation with air power, aimed at deterrence. What remained was the hard question
of how deterrence could be effective when the adversary was a loose transnational
network.
. . . AND IN THE WHITE HOUSE
Because coping with terrorism was not (and is not) the sole province of any component
of the U.S. government, some coordinating mechanism is necessary. When terrorism was
not a prominent issue, the State Department could perform this role. When the
Iranian hostage crisis developed, this procedure went by the board: National
Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski took charge of crisis management.
The Reagan administration continued and formalized the practice of having
presidential staff coordinate counterterrorism. After the killing of the marines in
Beirut, President Reagan signed National Security Directive 138, calling for a
"shift . . . from passive to active defense measures" and reprogramming or adding
new resources to effect the shift. It directed the State Department "to intensify
efforts to achieve cooperation of other governments" and the CIA to "intensify use
of liaison and other intelligence capabilities and also to develop plans and
capability to preempt groups and individuals planning strikes against U.S.
interests."
Speaking to the American Bar Association in July 1985, the President characterized
terrorism as "an act of war" and declared:"There can be no place on earth left where
it is safe for these monsters to rest, to train, or practice their cruel and deadly
skills. We must act together, or unilaterally, if necessary to ensure that
terrorists have no sanctuary-anywhere." The air strikes
against Libya were one manifestation of this strategy.
Through most of President Reagan's second term, the coordination of counterterrorism
was overseen by a high-level interagency committee chaired by the deputy national
security adviser. But the Reagan administration closed with a major scandal that
cast a cloud over the notion that the White House should guide counterterrorism.
President Reagan was concerned because Hezbollah was taking Americans hostage and
periodically killing them. He was also constrained by a bill he signed into law that
made it illegal to ship military aid to anticommunist Contra guerrillas in
Nicaragua, whom he strongly supported. His national security adviser, Robert
McFarlane, and McFarlane's deputy, Admiral John Poindexter, thought the hostage
problem might be solved and the U.S. position in the Middle East improved if the
United States quietly negotiated with Iran about exchanging hostages for modest
quantities of arms. Shultz and Weinberger, united for once, opposed McFarlane and
Poindexter.
A staffer for McFarlane and Poindexter, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North,
developed a scheme to trade U.S. arms for hostages and divert the proceeds to the
Contras to get around U.S. law. He may have had encouragement from Director of
Central Intelligence William Casey.
When the facts were revealed in 1986 and 1987, it appeared to be the 1970s all over
again: a massive abuse of covert action. Now, instead of stories about poisoned
cigars and Mafia hit men, Americans heard testimony about a secret visit to Tehran
by McFarlane, using an assumed name and bearing a chocolate cake decorated with
icing depicting a key. An investigation by a special counsel resulted in the
indictment of McFarlane, Poindexter, North, and ten others, including several
high-ranking officers from the CIA's Clandestine Service. The investigations
spotlighted the importance of accountability and official responsibility for
faithful execution of laws. For the story of 9/11, the significance of the
Iran-Contra affair was that it made parts of the bureaucracy reflexively skeptical
about any operating directive from the White House.
As the national security advisor's function expanded, the procedures and structure of
the advisor's staff, conventionally called the National Security Council staff,
became more formal. The advisor developed recommendations for presidential
directives, differently labeled by each president. For President Clinton, they were
to be Presidential Decision Directives; for President George W. Bush, National
Security Policy Directives. These documents and many others requiring approval by
the president worked their way through interagency committees usually composed of
departmental representatives at the assistant secretary level or just below it. The
NSC staff had senior directors who would sit on these interagency committees, often
as chair, to facilitate agreement and to represent the wider interests of the
national security advisor. When President Clinton took office, he decided right away
to coordinate counterterrorism from the White House. On January 25, 1993, Mir Amal
Kansi, an Islamic extremist from Pakistan, shot and killed two CIA employees at the
main highway entrance to CIA headquarters in Virginia. (Kansi drove away and was
captured abroad much later.) Only a month afterward came the World Trade Center
bombing and, a few weeks after that, the Iraqi plot against former President Bush.
President Clinton's first national security advisor, Anthony Lake, had retained from
the Bush administration the staffer who dealt with crime, narcotics, and terrorism
(a portfolio often known as "drugs and thugs"), the veteran civil servant Richard
Clarke. President Clinton and Lake turned to Clarke to do the staff work for them in
coordinating counterterrorism. Before long, he would chair a midlevel interagency
committee eventually titled the Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG). We will later
tell of Clarke's evolution as adviser on and, in time, manager of the U.S.
counterterrorist effort. When explaining the missile strike against Iraq provoked by
the plot to kill President Bush, President Clinton stated:"From the first days of
our Revolution, America's security has depended on the clarity of the message: Don't
tread on us. A firm and commensurate response was essential to protect our
sovereignty, to send a message to those who engage in state-sponsored terrorism, to
deter further violence against our people, and to affirm the expectation of
civilized behavior among nations."
In his State of the Union message in January 1995, President Clinton promised
"comprehensive legislation to strengthen our hand in combating terrorists, whether
they strike at home or abroad." In February, he sent Congress proposals to extend
federal criminal jurisdiction, to make it easier to deport terrorists, and to act
against terrorist fund-raising. In early May, he submitted a bundle of strong
amendments. The interval had seen the news from Tokyo in March that a doomsday cult,
Aum Shinrikyo, had released sarin nerve gas in a subway, killing 12 and injuring
thousands. The sect had extensive properties and laboratories in Japan and offices
worldwide, including one in New York. Neither the FBI nor the CIA had ever heard of
it. In April had come the bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City;
immediate suspicions that it had been the work of Islamists turned out to be wrong,
and the bombers proved to be American antigovernment extremists named Timothy Mc
Veigh and Terry Nichols. President Clinton proposed to amend his earlier proposals
by increasing wiretap and electronic surveillance authority for the FBI, requiring
that explosives carry traceable taggants, and providing substantial new money not
only for the FBI and CIA but also for local police.
President Clinton issued a classified directive in June 1995, Presidential Decision
Directive 39, which said that the United States should "deter, defeat and respond
vigorously to all terrorist attacks on our territory and against our citizens." The
directive called terrorism both a matter of national security and a crime, and it
assigned responsibilities to various agencies. Alarmed by the incident in Tokyo,
President Clinton made it the very highest priority for his own staff and for all
agencies to prepare to detect and respond to terrorism that involved chemical,
biological, or nuclear weapons.
During 1995 and 1996, President Clinton devoted considerable time to seeking
cooperation from other nations in denying sanctuary to terrorists. He proposed
significantly larger budgets for the FBI, with much of the increase designated for
counterterrorism. For the CIA, he essentially stopped cutting allocations and
supported requests for supplemental funds for counterterrorism.
When announcing his new national security team after being reelected in 1996,
President Clinton mentioned terrorism first in a list of several challenges facing
the country.
In 1998, after Bin Ladin's fatwa and other alarms, President Clinton accepted a
proposal from his national security advisor, Samuel "Sandy" Berger, and gave Clarke
a new position as national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection, and
counterterrorism. He issued two Presidential Decision Directives, numbers 62 and 63,
that built on the assignments to agencies that had been made in Presidential
Decision Directive 39; laid out ten program areas for counterterrorism; and
enhanced, at least on paper, Clarke's authority to police these assignments. Because
of concerns especially on the part of Attorney General Reno, this new authority was
defined in precise and limiting language. Clarke was only to "provide advice"
regarding budgets and to "coordinate the development of interagency agreed
guidelines" for action.
Clarke also was awarded a seat on the cabinet-level Principals Committee when it met
on his issues-a highly unusual step for a White House staffer. His interagency body,
the CSG, ordinarily reported to the Deputies Committee of subcabinet officials,
unless Berger asked them to report directly to the principals. The complementary
directive, number 63, defined the elements of the nation's critical infrastructure
and considered ways to protect it. Taken together, the two directives basically left
the Justice Department and the FBI in charge at home and left terrorism abroad to
the CIA, the State Department, and other agencies, under Clarke's and Berger's
coordinating hands. Explaining the new arrangement and his concerns in another
commencement speech, this time at the Naval Academy, in May 1998, the President
said: First, we will use our new integrated approach to intensify the fight against
all forms of terrorism: to capture terrorists, no matter where they hide; to work
with other nations to eliminate terrorist sanctuaries overseas; to respond rapidly
and effectively to protect Americans from terrorism at home and abroad. Second, we
will launch a comprehensive plan to detect, deter, and defend against attacks on our
critical infrastructures, our power systems, water supplies, police, fire, and
medical services, air traffic control, financial services, telephone systems, and
computer networks. . . . Third, we will undertake a concerted effort to prevent the
spread and use of biological weapons and to protect our people in the event these
terrible weapons are ever unleashed by a rogue state, a terrorist group, or an
international criminal organization. . . . Finally, we must do more to protect our
civilian population from biological weapons.
Clearly, the President's concern about terrorism had steadily risen. That heightened
worry would become even more obvious early in 1999, when he addressed the National
Academy of Sciences and presented his most somber account yet of what could happen
if the United States were hit, unprepared, by terrorists wielding either weapons of
mass destruction or potent cyberweapons.
. . . AND IN THE CONGRESS
Since the beginning of the Republic, few debates have been as hotly contested as the
one over executive versus legislative powers. At the Constitutional Convention, the
founders sought to create a strong executive but check its powers. They left those
powers sufficiently ambiguous so that room was left for Congress and the president
to struggle over the direction of the nation's security and foreign policies.
The most serious question has centered on whether or not the president needs
congressional authorization to wage war. The current status of that debate seems to
have settled into a recognition that a president can deploy military forces for
small and limited operations, but needs at least congressional support if not
explicit authorization for large and more open-ended military operations.
This calculus becomes important in this story as both President Clinton and President
Bush chose not to seek a declaration of war on Bin Ladin after he had declared and
begun to wage war on us, a declaration that they did not acknowledge publicly. Not
until after 9/11 was a congressional authorization sought.
The most substantial change in national security oversight in Congress took place
following World War II. The Congressional Reorganization Act of 1946 created the
modern Armed Services committees that have become so powerful today. One especially
noteworthy innovation was the creation of the Joint House-Senate Atomic Energy
Committee, which is credited by many with the development of our nuclear deterrent
capability and was also criticized for wielding too much power relative to the
executive branch.
Ironically, this committee was eliminated in the 1970s as Congress was undertaking
the next most important reform of oversight in response to the Church and Pike
investigations into abuses of power. In 1977, the House and Senate created select
committees to exercise oversight of the executive branch's conduct of intelligence
operations.
The Intelligence Committees The House and Senate select committees on intelligence
share some important characteristics. They have limited authorities. They do not
have exclusive authority over intelligence agencies. Appropriations are ultimately
determined by the Appropriations committees. The Armed Services committees exercise
jurisdiction over the intelligence agencies within the Department of Defense (and,
in the case of the Senate, over the Central Intelligence Agency). One consequence is
that the rise and fall of intelligence budgets are tied directly to trends in
defense spending.
The president is required by law to ensure the congressional Intelligence committees
are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United
States. The committees allow the CIA to some extent to withhold information in order
to protect sources, methods, and operations. The CIA must bring presidentially
authorized covert action Findings and Memoranda of Notification to the Intelligence
committees, and it must detail its failures. The committees conduct their most
important work in closed hearings or briefings in which security over classified
material can be maintained. Members of the Intelligence committees serve for a
limited time, a restriction imposed by each chamber. Many members believe these
limits prevent committee members from developing the necessary expertise to conduct
effective oversight.
Secrecy, while necessary, can also harm oversight. The overall budget of the
intelligence community is classified, as are most of its activities. Thus, the
Intelligence committees cannot take advantage of democracy's best oversight
mechanism: public disclosure. This makes them significantly different from other
congressional oversight committees, which are often spurred into action by the work
of investigative journalists and watchdog organizations. Adjusting to the Post-Cold
War Era The unexpected and rapid end of the Cold War in 1991 created trauma in the
foreign policy and national security community both in and out of government. While
some criticized the intelligence community for failing to forecast the collapse of
the Soviet Union (and used this argument to propose drastic cuts in intelligence
agencies), most recognized that the good news of being relieved of the substantial
burden of maintaining a security structure to meet the Soviet challenge was
accompanied by the bad news of increased insecurity. In many directions, the
community faced threats and intelligence challenges that it was largely unprepared
to meet.
So did the intelligence oversight committees. New digitized technologies, and the
demand for imagery and continued capability against older systems, meant the need to
spend more on satellite systems at the expense of human efforts. In addition, denial
and deception became more effective as targets learned from public sources what our
intelligence agencies were doing. There were comprehensive reform proposals of the
intelligence community, such as those offered by Senators Boren and McCurdy. That
said, Congress still took too little action to address institutional
weaknesses.
With the Cold War over, and the intelligence community roiled by the Ames spy
scandal, a presidential commission chaired first by former secretary of defense Les
Aspin and later by former secretary of defense Harold Brown examined the
intelligence community's future. After it issued recommendations addressing the
DCI's lack of personnel and budget authority over the intelligence community, the
Intelligence committees in 1996 introduced implementing legislation to remedy these
problems.
The Department of Defense and its congressional authorizing committees rose in
opposition to the proposed changes. The President and DCI did not actively support
these changes. Relatively small changes made in 1996 gave the DCI consultative
authority and created a new deputy for management and assistant DCIs for collection
and analysis. These reforms occurred only after the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence took the unprecedented step of threatening to bring down the defense
authorization bill. Indeed, rather than increasing the DCI's authorities over
national intelligence, the 1990s witnessed movement in the opposite direction
through, for example, the transfer of the CIA's imaging analysis capability to the
new imagery and mapping agency created within the Department of Defense.
Congress Adjusts Congress as a whole, like the executive branch, adjusted slowly to
the rise of transnational terrorism as a threat to national security. In particular,
the growing threat and capabilities of Bin Ladin were not understood in Congress. As
the most representative branch of the federal government, Congress closely tracks
trends in what public opinion and the electorate identify as key issues. In the
years before September 11, terrorism seldom registered as important. To the extent
that terrorism did break through and engage the attention of the Congress as a
whole, it would briefly command attention after a specific incident, and then return
to a lower rung on the public policy agenda.
Several points about Congress are worth noting. First, Congress always has a strong
orientation toward domestic affairs. It usually takes on foreign policy and national
security issues after threats are identified and articulated by the administration.
In the absence of such a detailed-and repeated-articulation, national security tends
not to rise very high on the list of congressional priorities. Presidents are
selective in their use of political capital for international issues.
In the decade before 9/11, presidential discussion of and congressional and public
attention to foreign affairs and national security were dominated by other
issues-among them, Haiti, Bosnia, Russia, China, Somalia, Kosovo, NATO enlargement,
the Middle East peace process, missile defense, and globalization. Terrorism
infrequently took center stage; and when it did, the context was often terrorists'
tactics-a chemical, biological, nuclear, or computer threat-not terrorist
organizations.
Second, Congress tends to follow the overall lead of the president on budget issues
with respect to national security matters. There are often sharp arguments about
individual programs and internal priorities, but by and large the overall funding
authorized and appropriated by the Congress comes out close to the president's
request. This tendency was certainly illustrated by the downward trends in spending
on defense, intelligence, and foreign affairs in the first part of the 1990s. The
White House, to be sure, read the political signals coming from Capitol Hill, but
the Congress largely acceded to the executive branch's funding requests. In the
second half of the decade, Congress appropriated some 98 percent of what the
administration requested for intelligence programs. Apart from the Gingrich
supplemental of $1.5 billion for overall intelligence programs in fiscal year 1999,
the key decisions on overall allocation of resources for national security issues in
the decade before 9/11-including counterterrorism funding-were made in the
president's Office of Management and Budget.
Third, Congress did not reorganize itself after the end of the Cold War to address
new threats. Recommendations by the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress
were implemented, in part, in the House of Representatives after the 1994 elections,
but there was no reorganization of national security functions. The Senate undertook
no appreciable changes. Traditional issues-foreign policy, defense,
intelligence-continued to be handled by committees whose structure remained largely
unaltered, while issues such as transnational terrorism fell between the cracks.
Terrorism came under the jurisdiction of at least 14 different committees in the
House alone, and budget and oversight functions in the House and Senate concerning
terrorism were also splintered badly among committees. Little effort was made to
consider an integrated policy toward terrorism, which might range from identifying
the threat to addressing vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure; and the
piecemeal approach in the Congress contributed to the problems of the executive
branch in formulating such a policy.
Fourth, the oversight function of Congress has diminished over time. In recent years,
traditional review of the administration of programs and the implementation of laws
has been replaced by "a focus on personal investigations, possible scandals, and
issues designed to generate media attention." The unglamorous but essential work of
oversight has been neglected, and few members past or present believe it is
performed well. DCI Tenet told us: "We ran from threat to threat to threat. . . .
[T]here was not a system in place to say,'You got to go back and do this and this
and this.'" Not just the DCI but the entire executive branch needed help from
Congress in addressing the questions of counterterrorism strategy and policy,
looking past day-to-day concerns. Members of Congress, however, also found their
time spent on such everyday matters, or in looking back to investigate mistakes, and
often missed the big questions-as did the executive branch. Staff tended as well to
focus on parochial considerations, seeking to add or cut funding for individual
(often small) programs, instead of emphasizing comprehensive oversight
projects.
Fifth, on certain issues, other priorities pointed Congress in a direction that was
unhelpful in meeting the threats that were emerging in the months leading up to
9/11. Committees with oversight responsibility for aviation focused overwhelmingly
on airport congestion and the economic health of the airlines, not aviation
security. Committees with responsibility for the INS focused on the Southwest
border, not on terrorists. Justice Department officials told us that committees with
responsibility for the FBI tightly restricted appropriations for improvements in
information technology, in part because of concerns about the FBI's ability to
manage such projects. Committees responsible for South Asia spent the decade of the
1990s imposing sanctions on Pakistan, leaving presidents with little leverage to
alter Pakistan's policies before 9/11. Committees with responsibility for the
Defense Department paid little heed to developing military responses to terrorism
and stymied intelligence reform. All committees found themselves swamped in the
minutiae of the budget process, with little time for consideration of longer-term
questions, or what many members past and present told us was the proper conduct of
oversight.
Each of these trends contributed to what can only be described as Congress's slowness
and inadequacy in treating the issue of terrorism in the years before 9/11. The
legislative branch adjusted little and did not restructure itself to address
changing threats.
Its attention to terrorism was episodic and splintered across several committees.
Congress gave little guidance to executive branch agencies, did not reform them in
any significant way, and did not systematically perform oversight to identify,
address, and attempt to resolve the many problems in national security and domestic
agencies that became apparent in the aftermath of 9/11.
Although individual representatives and senators took significant steps, the overall
level of attention in the Congress to the terrorist threat was low. We examined the
number of hearings on terrorism from January 1998 to September 2001. The Senate
Armed Services Committee held nine-four related to the attack on the USS Cole. The
House Armed Services Committee also held nine, six of them by a special oversight
panel on terrorism. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee and its House counterpart
both held four. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in addition to its
annual worldwide threat hearing, held eight; its House counterpart held perhaps two
exclusively devoted to counterterrorism, plus the briefings by its terrorist working
group. The Senate and House intelligence panels did not raise public and
congressional attention on Bin Ladin and al Qaeda prior to the joint inquiry into
the attacks of September 11, perhaps in part because of the classified nature of
their work. Yet in the context of committees that each hold scores of hearings every
year on issues in their jurisdiction, this list is not impressive. Terrorism was a
second- or third-order priority within the committees of Congress responsible for
national security.
In fact, Congress had a distinct tendency to push questions of emerging national
security threats off its own plate, leaving them for others to consider. Congress
asked outside commissions to do the work that arguably was at the heart of its own
oversight responsibilities.
Beginning in 1999, the reports of these commissions made scores of recommendations to
address terrorism and homeland security but drew little attention from Congress.
Most of their impact came after 9/11.
4 RESPONSES TO AL QAEDA'S INITIAL ASSAULTS
BEFORE THE BOMBINGS IN KENYA AND TANZANIA
Although the 1995 National Intelligence Estimate had warned of a new type of
terrorism, many officials continued to think of terrorists as agents of states
(Saudi Hezbollah acting for Iran against Khobar Towers) or as domestic criminals
(Timothy Mc Veigh in Oklahoma City). As we pointed out in chapter 3, the White House
is not a natural locus for program management. Hence, government efforts to cope
with terrorism were essentially the work of individual agencies.
President Bill Clinton's counterterrorism Presidential Decision Directives in 1995
(no. 39) and May 1998 (no. 62) reiterated that terrorism was a national security
problem, not just a law enforcement issue. They reinforced the authority of the
National Security Council (NSC) to coordinate domestic as well as foreign
counterterrorism efforts, through Richard Clarke and his interagency
Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG). Spotlighting new concerns about
unconventional attacks, these directives assigned tasks to lead agencies but did not
differentiate types of terrorist threats. Thus, while Clarke might prod or push
agencies to act, what actually happened was usually decided at the State Department,
the Pentagon, the CIA, or the Justice Department. The efforts of these agencies were
sometimes energetic and sometimes effective. Terrorist plots were disrupted and
individual terrorists were captured. But the United States did not, before 9/11,
adopt as a clear strategic objective the elimination of al Qaeda. Early Efforts
against Bin Ladin Until 1996, hardly anyone in the U.S. government understood that
Usama Bin Ladin was an inspirer and organizer of the new terrorism. In 1993, the CIA
noted that he had paid for the training of some Egyptian terrorists in Sudan. The
State Department detected his money in aid to the Yemeni terrorists who set a bomb
in an attempt to kill U.S. troops in Aden in 1992. State Department sources even saw
suspicious links with Omar Abdel Rahman, the "Blind Sheikh" in the New York area,
commenting that Bin Ladin seemed "committed to financing 'Jihads' against 'anti
Islamic' regimes worldwide." After the department designated Sudan a state sponsor
of terrorism in 1993, it put Bin Ladin on its TIPOFF watchlist, a move that might
have prevented his getting a visa had he tried to enter the United States. As late
as 1997, however, even the CIA's Counterterrorist Center continued to describe him
as an "extremist financier."
In 1996, the CIA set up a special unit of a dozen officers to analyze intelligence on
and plan operations against Bin Ladin. David Cohen, the head of the CIA's
Directorate of Operations, wanted to test the idea of having a "virtual station"-a
station based at headquarters but collecting and operating against a subject much as
stations in the field focus on a country. Taking his cue from National Security
Advisor Anthony Lake, who expressed special interest in terrorist finance, Cohen
formed his virtual station as a terrorist financial links unit. He had trouble
getting any Directorate of Operations officer to run it; he finally recruited a
former analyst who was then running the Islamic Extremist Branch of the
Counterterrorist Center. This officer, who was especially knowledgeable about
Afghanistan, had noticed a recent stream of reports about Bin Ladin and something
called al Qaeda, and suggested to Cohen that the station focus on this one
individual. Cohen agreed. Thus was born the Bin Ladin unit.
In May 1996, Bin Ladin left Sudan for Afghanistan. A few months later, as the Bin
Ladin unit was gearing up, Jamal Ahmed al Fadl walked into a U.S. embassy in Africa,
established his bona fides as a former senior employee of Bin Ladin, and provided a
major breakthrough of intelligence on the creation, character, direction, and
intentions of al Qaeda. Corroborating evidence came from another walk-in source at a
different U.S.embassy. More confirmation was supplied later that year by
intelligence and other sources, including material gathered by FBI agents and Kenyan
police from an al Qaeda cell in Nairobi.
By 1997, officers in the Bin Ladin unit recognized that Bin Ladin was more than just
a financier. They learned that al Qaeda had a military committee that was planning
operations against U.S. interests worldwide and was actively trying to obtain
nuclear material. Analysts assigned to the station looked at the information it had
gathered and "found connections everywhere," including links to the attacks on U.S.
troops in Aden and Somalia in 1992 and 1993 and to the Manila air plot in the
Philippines in 1994-1995.
The Bin Ladin station was already working on plans for offensive operations against
Bin Ladin. These plans were directed at both physical assets and sources of finance.
In the end, plans to identify and attack Bin Ladin's money sources did not go
forward.
In late 1995, when Bin Ladin was still in Sudan, the State Department and the CIA
learned that Sudanese officials were discussing with the Saudi government the
possibility of expelling Bin Ladin.U.S. Ambassador Timothy Carney encouraged the
Sudanese to pursue this course. The Saudis, however, did not want Bin Ladin, giving
as their reason their revocation of his citizenship.
Sudan's minister of defense, Fatih Erwa, has claimed that Sudan offered to hand Bin
Ladin over to the United States. The Commission has found no credible evidence that
this was so. Ambassador Carney had instructions only to push the Sudanese to expel
Bin Ladin. Ambassador Carney had no legal basis to ask for more from the Sudanese
since, at the time, there was no indictment outstanding.
The chief of the Bin Ladin station, whom we will call "Mike," saw Bin Ladin's move to
Afghanistan as a stroke of luck. Though the CIA had virtually abandoned Afghanistan
after the Soviet withdrawal, case officers had reestablished old contacts while
tracking down Mir Amal Kansi, the Pakistani gunman who had murdered two CIA
employees in January 1993. These contacts contributed to intelligence about Bin
Ladin's local movements, business activities, and security and living arrangements,
and helped provide evidence that he was spending large amounts of money to help the
Taliban. The chief of the Counterterrorist Center, whom we will call "Jeff," told
Director George Tenet that the CIA's intelligence assets were "near to providing
real-time information about Bin Ladin's activities and travels in Afghanistan." One
of the contacts was a group associated with particular tribes among Afghanistan's
ethnic Pashtun community.
By the fall of 1997, the Bin Ladin unit had roughed out a plan for these Afghan
tribals to capture Bin Ladin and hand him over for trial either in the United States
or in an Arab country. In early 1998, the cabinet-level Principals Committee
apparently gave the concept its blessing.
On their own separate track, getting information but not direction from the CIA, the
FBI's New York Field Office and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New
York were preparing to ask a grand jury to indict Bin Ladin. The Counterterrorist
Center knew that this was happening.
The eventual charge, conspiring to attack U.S. defense installations, was finally
issued from the grand jury in June 1998-as a sealed indictment. The indictment was
publicly disclosed in November of that year.
When Bin Ladin moved to Afghanistan in May 1996, he became a subject of interest to
the State Department's South Asia bureau. At the time, as one diplomat told us,
South Asia was seen in the department and the government generally as a low
priority. In 1997, as Madeleine Albright was beginning her tenure as secretary of
state, an NSC policy review concluded that the United States should pay more
attention not just to India but also to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
With regard to Afghanistan, another diplomat said, the United States at the time had
"no policy."
In the State Department, concerns about India-Pakistan tensions often crowded out
attention to Afghanistan or Bin Ladin. Aware of instability and RESPONSES TO AL
QAEDA'S INITIAL ASSAULTS 111 growing Islamic extremism in Pakistan, State Department
officials worried most about an arms race and possible war between Pakistan and
India. After May 1998, when both countries surprised the United States by testing
nuclear weapons, these dangers became daily first-order concerns of the State
Department.
In Afghanistan, the State Department tried to end the civil war that had continued
since the Soviets' withdrawal. The South Asia bureau believed it might have a carrot
for Afghanistan's warring factions in a project by the Union Oil Company of
California (UNOCAL) to build a pipeline across the country. While there was probably
never much chance of the pipeline actually being built, the Afghan desk hoped that
the prospect of shared pipeline profits might lure faction leaders to a conference
table.U.S. diplomats did not favor the Taliban over the rival factions. Despite
growing concerns, U.S. diplomats were willing at the time, as one official said, to
"give the Taliban a chance."
Though Secretary Albright made no secret of thinking the Taliban "despicable," the
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, led a delegation to South
Asia-including Afghanistan-in April 1998. No U.S. official of such rank had been to
Kabul in decades. Ambassador Richardson went primarily to urge negotiations to end
the civil war. In view of Bin Ladin's recent public call for all Muslims to kill
Americans, Richardson asked the Taliban to expel Bin Ladin. They answered that they
did not know his whereabouts. In any case, the Taliban said, Bin Ladin was not a
threat to the United States.
In sum, in late 1997 and the spring of 1998, the lead U.S. agencies each pursued
their own efforts against Bin Ladin. The CIA's Counterterrorist Center was
developing a plan to capture and remove him from Afghanistan. Parts of the Justice
Department were moving toward indicting Bin Ladin, making possible a criminal trial
in a New York court. Meanwhile, the State Department was focused more on lessening
Indo-Pakistani nuclear tensions, ending the Afghan civil war, and ameliorating the
Taliban's human rights abuses than on driving out Bin Ladin. Another key actor,
Marine General Anthony Zinni, the commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command,
shared the State Department's view.
The CIA Develops a Capture Plan Initially, the DCI's Counterterrorist Center and its
Bin Ladin unit considered a plan to ambush Bin Ladin when he traveled between
Kandahar, the Taliban capital where he sometimes stayed the night, and his primary
residence at the time, Tarnak Farms. After the Afghan tribals reported that they had
tried such an ambush and failed, the Center gave up on it, despite suspicions that
the tribals' story might be fiction. Thereafter, the capture plan focused on a
nighttime raid on Tarnak Farms.
A compound of about 80 concrete or mud-brick buildings surrounded by a 10-foot wall,
Tarnak Farms was located in an isolated desert area on the outskirts of the Kandahar
airport. CIA officers were able to map the entire site, identifying the houses that
belonged to Bin Ladin's wives and the one where Bin Ladin himself was most likely to
sleep. Working with the tribals, they drew up plans for the raid. They ran two
complete rehearsals in the United States during the fall of 1997.
By early 1998, planners at the Counterterrorist Center were ready to come back to the
White House to seek formal approval. Tenet apparently walked National Security
Advisor Sandy Berger through the basic plan on February 13. One group of tribals
would subdue the guards, enter Tarnak Farms stealthily, grab Bin Ladin, take him to
a desert site outside Kandahar, and turn him over to a second group. This second
group of tribals would take him to a desert landing zone already tested in the 1997
Kansi capture. From there, a CIA plane would take him to New York, an Arab capital,
or wherever he was to be arraigned. Briefing papers prepared by the Counterterrorist
Center acknowledged that hitches might develop. People might be killed, and Bin
Ladin's supporters might retaliate, perhaps taking U.S. citizens in Kandahar
hostage. But the briefing papers also noted that there was risk in not acting.
"Sooner or later," they said, "Bin Ladin will attack U.S. interests, perhaps using
WMD [weapons of mass destruction]."
Clarke's Counterterrorism Security Group reviewed the capture plan for Berger. Noting
that the plan was in a "very early stage of development," the NSC staff then told
the CIA planners to go ahead and, among other things, start drafting any legal
documents that might be required to authorize the covert action. The CSG apparently
stressed that the raid should target Bin Ladin himself, not the whole compound.
The CIA planners conducted their third complete rehearsal in March, and they again
briefed the CSG. Clarke wrote Berger on March 7 that he saw the operation as
"somewhat embryonic" and the CIA as "months away from doing anything."
"Mike" thought the capture plan was "the perfect operation." It required minimum
infrastructure. The plan had now been modified so that the tribals would keep Bin
Ladin in a hiding place for up to a month before turning him over to the United
States-thereby increasing the chances of keeping the U.S. hand out of sight." Mike"
trusted the information from the Afghan network; it had been corroborated by other
means, he told us. The lead CIA officer in the field, Gary Schroen, also had
confidence in the tribals. In a May 6 cable to CIA headquarters, he pronounced their
planning "almost as professional and detailed . . . as would be done by any U.S.
military special operations element." He and the other officers who had worked
through the plan with the tribals judged it "about as good as it can be." (By that,
Schroen explained, he meant that the chance of capturing or killing Bin Ladin was
about 40 percent.) Although the tribals thought they could pull off the raid, if the
operation were approved by headquarters and the policymakers, Schroen wrote there
was going to be a point when "we step back and keep our fingers crossed that the
[tribals] prove as good (and as lucky) as they think they will be."
Military officers reviewed the capture plan and, according to "Mike," "found no
showstoppers." The commander of Delta Force felt "uncomfortable" with having the
tribals hold Bin Ladin captive for so long, and the commander of Joint Special
Operations Forces, Lieutenant General Michael Canavan, was worried about the safety
of the tribals inside Tarnak Farms. General Canavan said he had actually thought the
operation too complicated for the CIA-"out of their league"-and an effort to get
results "on the cheap." But a senior Joint Staff officer described the plan as
"generally, not too much different than we might have come up with ourselves." No
one in the Pentagon, so far as we know, advised the CIA or the White House not to
proceed.
In Washington, Berger expressed doubt about the dependability of the tribals. In his
meeting with Tenet, Berger focused most, however, on the question of what was to be
done with Bin Ladin if he were actually captured. He worried that the hard evidence
against Bin Ladin was still skimpy and that there was a danger of snatching him and
bringing him to the United States only to see him acquitted.
On May 18, CIA's managers reviewed a draft Memorandum of Notification (MON), a legal
document authorizing the capture operation. A 1986 presidential finding had
authorized worldwide covert action against terrorism and probably provided adequate
authority. But mindful of the old "rogue elephant" charge, senior CIA managers may
have wanted something on paper to show that they were not acting on their own.
Discussion of this memorandum brought to the surface an unease about paramilitary
covert action that had become ingrained, at least among some CIA senior managers.
James Pavitt, the assistant head of the Directorate of Operations, expressed concern
that people might get killed; it appears he thought the operation had at least a
slight flavor of a plan for an assassination. Moreover, he calculated that it would
cost several million dollars. He was not prepared to take that money "out of hide,"
and he did not want to go to all the necessary congressional committees to get
special money. Despite Pavitt's misgivings, the CIA leadership cleared the draft
memorandum and sent it on to the National Security Council.
Counterterrorist Center officers briefed Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director
Louis Freeh, telling them that the operation had about a 30 percent chance of
success. The Center's chief, "Jeff," joined John O'Neill, the head of the FBI's New
York Field Office, in briefing Mary Jo White, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern
District of New York, and her staff. Though "Jeff " also used the 30 percent success
figure, he warned that someone would surely be killed in the operation. White's
impression from the New York briefing was that the chances of capturing Bin Ladin
alive were nil.
From May 20 to 24, the CIA ran a final, graded rehearsal of the operation, spread
over three time zones, even bringing in personnel from the region. The FBI also
participated. The rehearsal went well. The Counterterrorist Center planned to brief
cabinet-level principals and their deputies the following week, giving June 23 as
the date for the raid, with Bin Ladin to be brought out of Afghanistan no later than
July 23.
On May 20, Director Tenet discussed the high risk of the operation with Berger and
his deputies, warning that people might be killed, including Bin Ladin. Success was
to be defined as the exfiltration of Bin Ladin out of Afghanistan.
A meeting of principals was scheduled for May 29 to decide whether the operation
should go ahead.
The principals did not meet. On May 29, "Jeff " informed "Mike" that he had just met
with Tenet, Pavitt, and the chief of the Directorate's Near Eastern Division. The
decision was made not to go ahead with the operation." Mike" cabled the field that
he had been directed to "stand down on the operation for the time being." He had
been told, he wrote, that cabinet-level officials thought the risk of civilian
casualties-"collateral damage"-was too high. They were concerned about the tribals'
safety, and had worried that "the purpose and nature of the operation would be
subject to unavoidable misinterpretation and misrepresentation-and probably
recriminations-in the event that Bin Ladin, despite our best intentions and efforts,
did not survive."
Impressions vary as to who actually decided not to proceed with the operation. Clarke
told us that the CSG saw the plan as flawed. He was said to have described it to a
colleague on the NSC staff as "half-assed" and predicted that the principals would
not approve it. "Jeff " thought the decision had been made at the cabinet level.
Pavitt thought that it was Berger's doing, though perhaps on Tenet's advice. Tenet
told us that given the recommendation of his chief operations officers, he alone had
decided to "turn off " the operation. He had simply informed Berger, who had not
pushed back. Berger's recollection was similar. He said the plan was never presented
to the White House for a decision.
The CIA's senior management clearly did not think the plan would work. Tenet's deputy
director of operations wrote to Berger a few weeks later that the CIA assessed the
tribals' ability to capture Bin Ladin and deliver him to U.S. officials as low. But
working-level CIA officers were disappointed. Before it was canceled, Schroen
described it as the "best plan we are going to come up with to capture [Bin Ladin]
while he is in Afghanistan and bring him to justice."
No capture plan before 9/11 ever again attained the same level of detail and
preparation. The tribals' reported readiness to act diminished. And Bin Ladin's
security precautions and defenses became more elaborate and formidable. At this
time, 9/11 was more than three years away. It was the duty of Tenet and the CIA
leadership to balance the risks of inaction against jeopardizing the lives of their
operatives and agents. And they had reason to worry about failure: millions of
dollars down the drain; a shoot-out that could be seen as an assassination; and, if
there were repercussions in Pakistan, perhaps a coup. The decisions of the U.S.
government in May 1998 were made, as Berger has put RESPONSES TO AL QAEDA'S INITIAL
ASSAULTS 115 it, from the vantage point of the driver looking through a muddy
windshield moving forward, not through a clean rearview mirror.
Looking for Other Options The Counterterrorist Center continued to track Bin Ladin
and to contemplate covert action. The most hopeful possibility seemed now to lie in
diplomacy- but not diplomacy managed by the Department of State, which focused
primarily on India-Pakistan nuclear tensions during the summer of 1998. The CIA
learned in the spring of 1998 that the Saudi government had quietly disrupted Bin
Ladin cells in its country that were planning to attack U.S. forces with
shoulder-fired missiles. They had arrested scores of individuals, with no publicity.
When thanking the Saudis, Director Tenet took advantage of the opening to ask them
to help against Bin Ladin. The response was encouraging enough that President
Clinton made Tenet his informal personal representative to work with the Saudis on
terrorism, and Tenet visited Riyadh in May and again in early June.
Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, who had taken charge from the ailing King Fahd, promised
Tenet an all-out secret effort to persuade the Taliban to expel Bin Ladin so that he
could be sent to the United States or to another country for trial. The Kingdom's
emissary would be its intelligence chief, Prince Turki bin Faisal. Vice President Al
Gore later added his thanks to those of Tenet, both making clear that they spoke
with President Clinton's blessing. Tenet reported that it was imperative to get an
indictment against Bin Ladin. The New York grand jury issued its sealed indictment a
few days later, on June 10. Tenet also recommended that no action be taken on other
U.S. options, such as the covert action plan.
Prince Turki followed up in meetings during the summer with Mullah Omar and other
Taliban leaders. Apparently employing a mixture of possible incentives and threats,
Turki received a commitment that Bin Ladin would be expelled, but Mullah Omar did
not make good on this promise.
On August 5, Clarke chaired a CSG meeting on Bin Ladin. In the discussion of what
might be done, the note taker wrote, "there was a dearth of bright ideas around the
table, despite a consensus that the [government] ought to pursue every avenue it can
to address the problem."
CRISIS: AUGUST 1998
On August 7, 1998, National Security Advisor Berger woke President Clinton with a
phone call at 5:35 A.M. to tell him of the almost simultaneous bombings of the U.S.
embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Suspicion quickly focused
on Bin Ladin. Unusually good intelligence, chiefly from the yearlong monitoring of
al Qaeda's cell in Nairobi, soon firmly fixed responsibility on him and his
associates.
Debate about what to do settled very soon on one option: Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Months earlier, after cancellation of the covert capture operation, Clarke had
prodded the Pentagon to explore possibilities for military action. On June 2,
General Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had directed
General Zinni at Central Command to develop a plan, which he had submitted during
the first week of July. Zinni's planners surely considered the two previous times
the United States had used force to respond to terrorism, the 1986 strike on Libya
and the 1993 strike against Iraq. They proposed firing Tomahawks against eight
terrorist camps in Afghanistan, including Bin Ladin's compound at Tarnak Farms.
After the embassy attacks, the Pentagon offered this plan to the White House.
The day after the embassy bombings, Tenet brought to a principals meeting
intelligence that terrorist leaders were expected to gather at a camp near Khowst,
Afghanistan, to plan future attacks. According to Berger, Tenet said that several
hundred would attend, including Bin Ladin. The CIA described the area as effectively
a military cantonment, away from civilian population centers and overwhelmingly
populated by jihadists. Clarke remembered sitting next to Tenet in a White House
meeting, asking Tenet "You thinking what I'm thinking?" and his nodding "yes." The principals quickly reached a consensus on attacking
the gathering. The strike's purpose was to kill Bin Ladin and his chief
lieutenants.
Berger put in place a tightly compartmented process designed to keep all planning
secret. On August 11, General Zinni received orders to prepare detailed plans for
strikes against the sites in Afghanistan. The Pentagon briefed President Clinton
about these plans on August 12 and 14. Though the principals hoped that the missiles
would hit Bin Ladin, NSC staff recommended the strike whether or not there was firm
evidence that the commanders were at the facilities.
Considerable debate went to the question of whether to strike targets outside of
Afghanistan, including two facilities in Sudan. One was a tannery believed to belong
to Bin Ladin. The other was al Shifa, a Khartoum pharmaceutical plant, which
intelligence reports said was manufacturing a precursor ingredient for nerve gas
with Bin Ladin's financial support. The argument for hitting the tannery was that it
could hurt Bin Ladin financially. The argument for hitting al Shifa was that it
would lessen the chance of Bin Ladin's having nerve gas for a later attack.
Ever since March 1995, American officials had had in the backs of their minds Aum
Shinrikyo's release of sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway. President Clinton
himself had expressed great concern about chemical and biological terrorism in the
United States. Bin Ladin had reportedly been heard to speak of wanting a
"Hiroshima"and at least 10,000 casualties. The CIA reported RESPONSES TO AL QAEDA'S
INITIAL ASSAULTS 117 that a soil sample from the vicinity of the al Shifa plant had
tested positive for EMPTA, a precursor chemical for VX, a nerve gas whose lone use
was for mass killing. Two days before the embassy bombings, Clarke's staff wrote
that Bin Ladin "has invested in and almost certainly has access to VX produced at a
plant in Sudan." Senior State Department officials
believed that they had received a similar verdict independently, though they and
Clarke's staff were probably relying on the same report. Mary McCarthy, the NSC
senior director responsible for intelligence programs, initially cautioned Berger
that the "bottom line" was that "we will need much better intelligence on this
facility before we seriously consider any options." She added that the link between
Bin Ladin and al Shifa was "rather uncertain at this point." Berger has told us that
he thought about what might happen if the decision went against hitting al Shifa,
and nerve gas was used in a New York subway two weeks later.
By the early hours of the morning of August 20, President Clinton and all his
principal advisers had agreed to strike Bin Ladin camps in Afghanistan near Khowst,
as well as hitting al Shifa. The President took the Sudanese tannery off the target
list because he saw little point in killing uninvolved people without doing
significant harm to Bin Ladin. The principal with the most qualms regarding al Shifa
was Attorney General Reno. She expressed concern about attacking two Muslim
countries at the same time. Looking back, she said that she felt the "premise kept
shifting."
Later on August 20, Navy vessels in the Arabian Sea fired their cruise missiles.
Though most of them hit their intended targets, neither Bin Ladin nor any other
terrorist leader was killed. Berger told us that an after-action review by Director
Tenet concluded that the strikes had killed 20-30 people in the camps but probably
missed Bin Ladin by a few hours. Since the missiles headed for Afghanistan had had
to cross Pakistan, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was sent to meet with
Pakistan's army chief of staff to assure him the missiles were not coming from
India. Officials in Washington speculated that one or another Pakistani official
might have sent a warning to the Taliban or Bin Ladin.
The air strikes marked the climax of an intense 48-hour period in which Berger
notified congressional leaders, the principals called their foreign counterparts,
and President Clinton flew back from his vacation on Martha's Vineyard to address
the nation from the Oval Office. The President spoke to the congressional leadership
from Air Force One, and he called British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Pakistani Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak from the White
House.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott initially supported
the President. The next month, Gingrich's office dismissed the cruise missile
attacks as "pinpricks."
At the time, President Clinton was embroiled in the Lewinsky scandal, which continued
to consume public attention for the rest of that year and the first months of 1999.
As it happened, a popular 1997 movie, Wag the Dog, features a president who fakes a
war to distract public attention from a domestic scandal. Some Republicans in
Congress raised questions about the timing of the strikes. Berger was particularly
rankled by an editorial in the Economist that said that only the future would tell
whether the U.S. missile strikes had "created 10,000 new fanatics where there would
have been none."
Much public commentary turned immediately to scalding criticism that the action was
too aggressive. The Sudanese denied that al Shifa produced nerve gas, and they
allowed journalists to visit what was left of a seemingly harmless facility.
President Clinton, Vice President Gore, Berger, Tenet, and Clarke insisted to us
that their judgment was right, pointing to the soil sample evidence. No independent
evidence has emerged to corroborate the CIA's assessment.
Everyone involved in the decision had, of course, been aware of President Clinton's
problems. He told them to ignore them. Berger recalled the President saying to him
"that they were going to get crap either way, so they should do the right
thing." All his aides testified to us that they based
their advice solely on national security considerations. We have found no reason to
question their statements.
The failure of the strikes, the "wag the dog" slur, the intense partisanship of the
period, and the nature of the al Shifa evidence likely had a cumulative effect on
future decisions about the use of force against Bin Ladin. Berger told us that he
did not feel any sense of constraint.
The period after the August 1998 embassy bombings was critical in shaping U.S. policy
toward Bin Ladin. Although more Americans had been killed in the 1996 KhobarTowers
attack, and many more in Beirut in 1983, the overall loss of life rivaled the worst
attacks in memory. More ominous, perhaps, was the demonstration of an operational
capability to coordinate two nearly simultaneous attacks on U.S. embassies in
different countries.
Despite the availability of information that al Qaeda was a global network, in 1998
policymakers knew little about the organization. The reams of new information that
the CIA's Bin Ladin unit had been developing since 1996 had not been pulled together
and synthesized for the rest of the government. Indeed, analysts in the unit felt
that they were viewed as alarmists even within the CIA. A National Intelligence
Estimate on terrorism in 1997 had only briefly mentioned Bin Ladin, and no
subsequent national estimate would authoritatively evaluate the terrorism danger
until after 9/11. Policymakers knew there was a dangerous individual, Usama Bin
Ladin, whom they had been trying to capture and bring to trial. Documents at the
time referred to Bin Ladin "and his associates" or Bin Ladin and his "network." They
did not emphasize the existence of a structured worldwide organization gearing up to
train thousands of potential terrorists.
In the critical days and weeks after the August 1998 attacks, senior policymakers in
the Clinton administration had to reevaluate the threat posed by Bin RESPONSES TO AL
QAEDA'S INITIAL ASSAULTS 119 Ladin. Was this just a new and especially venomous
version of the ordinary terrorist threat America had lived with for decades, or was
it radically new, posing a danger beyond any yet experienced?
Even after the embassy attacks, Bin Ladin had been responsible for the deaths of
fewer than 50 Americans, most of them overseas. An NSC staffer working for Richard
Clarke told us the threat was seen as one that could cause hundreds of casualties,
not thousands.
Even officials who acknowledge a vital threat intellectually may not be ready to act
on such beliefs at great cost or at high risk.
Therefore, the government experts who believed that Bin Ladin and his network posed
such a novel danger needed a way to win broad support for their views, or at least
spotlight the areas of dispute. The Presidential Daily Brief and the similar, more
widely circulated daily reports for high officials-consisting mainly of brief
reports of intelligence "news" without much analysis or context- did not provide
such a vehicle. The national intelligence estimate has often played this role, and
is sometimes controversial for this very reason. It played no role in judging the
threat posed by al Qaeda, either in 1998 or later. In the late summer and fall of
1998, the U.S. government also was worrying about the deployment of military power
in two other ongoing conflicts. After years of war in the Balkans, the United States
had finally committed itself to significant military intervention in 1995-1996.
Already maintaining a NATO-led peacekeeping force in Bosnia, U.S. officials were
beginning to consider major combat operations against Serbia to protect Muslim
civilians in Kosovo from ethnic cleansing. Air strikes were threatened in October
1998; a full-scale NATO bombing campaign against Serbia was launched in March
1999.
In addition, the Clinton administration was facing the possibility of major combat
operations against Iraq. Since 1996, the UN inspections regime had been increasingly
obstructed by Saddam Hussein. The United States was threatening to attack unless
unfettered inspections could resume. The Clinton administration eventually launched
a large-scale set of air strikes against Iraq, Operation Desert Fox, in December
1998. These military commitments became the context in which the Clinton
administration had to consider opening another front of military engagement against
a new terrorist threat based in Afghanistan.
A Follow-On Campaign?
Clarke hoped the August 1998 missile strikes would mark the beginning of a sustained
campaign against Bin Ladin. Clarke was, as he later admitted, "obsessed" with Bin
Ladin, and the embassy bombings gave him new scope for pursuing his obsession.
Terrorism had moved high up among the President's concerns, and Clarke's position
had elevated accordingly. The CSG, unlike most standing interagency committees, did
not have to report through the Deputies Committee. Although such a reporting
relationship had been prescribed in the May 1998 presidential directive (after
expressions of concern by Attorney General Reno, among others), that directive
contained an exception that permitted the CSG to report directly to the principals
if Berger so elected. In practice, the CSG often reported not even to the full
Principals Committee but instead to the so-called Small Group formed by Berger,
consisting only of those principals cleared to know about the most sensitive issues
connected with counterterrorism activities concerning Bin Ladin or the Khobar Towers
investigation.
For this inner cabinet, Clarke drew up what he called "Political-Military Plan
Delenda." The Latin delenda, meaning that something "must be destroyed," evoked the
famous Roman vow to destroy its rival, Carthage. The overall goal of Clarke's paper
was to "immediately eliminate any significant threat to Americans" from the "Bin
Ladin network."57The paper called for diplomacy to deny Bin Ladin sanctuary; covert
action to disrupt terrorist activities, but above all to capture Bin Ladin and his
deputies and bring them to trial; efforts to dry up Bin Ladin's money supply; and
preparation for follow-on military action. The status of the document was and
remained uncertain. It was never formally adopted by the principals, and
participants in the Small Group now have little or no recollection of it. It did,
however, guide Clarke's efforts. The military component of Clarke's plan was its
most fully articulated element. He envisioned an ongoing campaign of strikes against
Bin Ladin's bases in Afghanistan or elsewhere, whenever target information was ripe.
Acknowledging that individual targets might not have much value, he cautioned Berger
not to expect ever again to have an assembly of terrorist leaders in his sights. But
he argued that rolling attacks might persuade the Taliban to hand over Bin Ladin
and, in any case, would show that the action in August was not a "oneoff " event. It
would show that the United States was committed to a relentless effort to take down
Bin Ladin's network.
Members of the Small Group found themselves unpersuaded of the merits of rolling
attacks. Defense Secretary William Cohen told us Bin Ladin's training camps were
primitive, built with "rope ladders"; General Shelton called them "jungle gym"
camps. Neither thought them worthwhile targets for very expensive missiles.
President Clinton and Berger also worried about the Economist's point-that attacks
that missed Bin Ladin could enhance his stature and win him new recruits. After the
United States launched air attacks against Iraq at the end of 1998 and against
Serbia in 1999, in each case provoking worldwide criticism, Deputy National Security
Advisor James Steinberg added the argument that attacks in Afghanistan offered
"little benefit, lots of blowback against [a] bomb-happy U.S."
During the last week of August 1998, officials began considering possible follow-on
strikes. According to Clarke, President Clinton was inclined to launch further
strikes sooner rather than later. On August 27, Under Secretary of Defense for
Policy Walter Slocombe advised Secretary Cohen that the availRESPONSES TO AL QAEDA'S
INITIAL ASSAULTS 121 able targets were not promising. The experience of the previous
week, he wrote, "has only confirmed the importance of defining a clearly articulated
rationale for military action" that was effective as well as justified. But Slocombe
worried that simply striking some of these available targets did not add up to an
effective strategy.
Defense officials at a lower level, in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for
Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, tried to meet Slocombe's objections.
They developed a plan that, unlike Clarke's, called not for particular strikes but
instead for a broad change in national strategy and in the institutional approach of
the Department of Defense, implying a possible need for large-scale operations
across the whole spectrum of U.S. military capabilities. It urged the department to
become a lead agency in driving a national counterterrorism strategy forward, to
"champion a national effort to take up the gauntlet that international terrorists
have thrown at our feet." The authors expressed concern that "we have not
fundamentally altered our philosophy or our approach" even though the terrorist
threat had grown. They outlined an eight-part strategy "to be more proactive and
aggressive." The future, they warned, might bring "horrific attacks," in which case
"we will have no choice nor, unfortunately, will we have a plan." The assistant
secretary, Allen Holmes, took the paper to Slocombe's chief deputy, Jan Lodal, but
it went no further. Its lead author recalls being told by Holmes that Lodal thought
it was too aggressive. Holmes cannot recall what was said, and Lodal cannot remember
the episode or the paper at all.
DIPLOMACY
After the August missile strikes, diplomatic options to press the Taliban seemed no
more promising than military options. The United States had issued a formal warning
to the Taliban, and also to Sudan, that they would be held directly responsible for
any attacks on Americans, wherever they occurred, carried out by the Bin Ladin
network as long as they continued to provide sanctuary to it.
For a brief moment, it had seemed as if the August strikes might have shocked the
Taliban into thinking of giving up Bin Ladin. On August 22, the reclusive Mullah
Omar told a working-level State Department official that the strikes were
counterproductive but added that he would be open to a dialogue with the United
States on Bin Ladin's presence in Afghanistan.
Meeting in Islamabad with William Milam, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Taliban
delegates said it was against their culture to expel someone seeking sanctuary but
asked what would happen to Bin Ladin should he be sent to Saudi Arabia.
Yet in September 1998, when the Saudi emissary, Prince Turki, asked Mullah Omar
whether he would keep his earlier promise to expel Bin Ladin, the Taliban leader
said no. Both sides shouted at each other, with Mullah Omar denouncing the Saudi
government. Riyadh then suspended its diplomatic relations with the Taliban regime.
(Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates were the only countries that
recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.) Crown Prince
Abdullah told President Clinton and Vice President Gore about this when he visited
Washington in late September. His account confirmed reports that the U.S. government
had received independently.
Other efforts with the Saudi government centered on improving intelligence sharing
and permitting U.S. agents to interrogate prisoners in Saudi custody. The history of
such cooperation in 1997 and 1998 had been strained.
Several officials told us, in particular, that the United States could not get direct
access to an important al Qaeda financial official, Madani al Tayyib, who had been
detained by the Saudi government in 1997.67Though U.S. officials repeatedly raised
the issue, the Saudis provided limited information. In his September 1998 meeting
with Crown Prince Abdullah, Vice President Gore, while thanking the Saudi government
for their responsiveness, renewed the request for direct U.S. access to Tayyib.
The United States never obtained this access. An NSC staff-led working group on
terrorist finances asked the CIA in November 1998 to push again for access to Tayyib
and to see "if it is possible to elaborate further on the ties between Usama bin
Ladin and prominent individuals in Saudi Arabia, including especially the Bin Ladin
family." One result was two NSC-led interagency trips
to Persian Gulf states in 1999 and 2000. During these trips the NSC, Treasury, and
intelligence representatives spoke with Saudi officials, and later interviewed
members of the Bin Ladin family, about Usama's inheritance. The Saudis and the Bin
Ladin family eventually helped in this particular effort and U.S. officials
ultimately learned that Bin Ladin was not financing al Qaeda out of a personal
inheritance.
But Clarke was frustrated about how little the Agency knew, complaining to Berger
that four years after "we first asked CIA to track down [Bin Ladin]'s finances" and
two years after the creation of the CIA's Bin Ladin unit, the Agency said it could
only guess at how much aid Bin Ladin gave to terrorist groups, what were the main
sources of his budget, or how he moved his money.
The other diplomatic route to get at Bin Ladin in Afghanistan ran through Islamabad.
In the summer before the embassy bombings, the State Department had been heavily
focused on rising tensions between India and Pakistan and did not aggressively
challenge Pakistan on Afghanistan and Bin Ladin. But State Department
counterterrorism officials wanted a stronger position; the department's acting
counterterrorism coordinator advised Secretary Albright to designate Pakistan as a
state sponsor of terrorism, noting that despite high-level Pakistani assurances, the
country's military intelligence service continued "activities in support of
international terrorism"by supporting attacks on civilian targets in Kashmir. This
recommendation was opposed by the State Department's South Asia bureau, which was
concerned that it would damage already RESPONSES TO AL QAEDA'S INITIAL ASSAULTS 123
sensitive relations with Pakistan in the wake of the May 1998 nuclear tests by both
Pakistan and India. Secretary Albright rejected the recommendation on August 5,
1998, just two days before the embassy bombings.
She told us that, in general, putting the Pakistanis on the terrorist list would
eliminate any influence the United States had over them.
In October, an NSC counterterrorism official noted that Pakistan's pro-Taliban
military intelligence service had been training Kashmiri jihadists in one of the
camps hit by U.S. missiles, leading to the death of Pakistanis.
After flying to Nairobi and bringing home the coffins of the American dead, Secretary
Albright increased the department's focus on counterterrorism. According to
Ambassador Milam, the bombings were a "wake-up call," and he soon found himself
spending 45 to 50 percent of his time working the Taliban- Bin Ladin portfolio.
But Pakistan's military intelligence service, known as the ISID (Inter-Services
Intelligence Directorate), was the Taliban's primary patron, which made progress
difficult.
Additional pressure on the Pakistanis-beyond demands to press theTaliban on Bin
Ladin-seemed unattractive to most officials of the State Department. Congressional
sanctions punishing Pakistan for possessing nuclear arms prevented the
administration from offering incentives to Islamabad.
In the words of Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, Washington's Pakistan
policy was "stick-heavy." Talbott felt that the only remaining sticks were
additional sanctions that would have bankrupted the Pakistanis, a dangerous move
that could have brought "total chaos" to a nuclear-armed country with a significant
number of Islamic radicals.
The Saudi government, which had a long and close relationship with Pakistan and
provided it oil on generous terms, was already pressing Sharif with regard to the
Taliban and Bin Ladin. A senior State Department official concluded that Saudi Crown
Prince Abdullah put "a tremendous amount of heat" on the Pakistani prime minister
during the prince's October 1998 visit to Pakistan.
The State Department urged President Clinton to engage the Pakistanis. Accepting this
advice, President Clinton invited Sharif to Washington, where they talked mostly
about India but also discussed Bin Ladin. After Sharif went home, the President
called him and raised the Bin Ladin subject again. This effort elicited from Sharif
a promise to talk with the Taliban.
Mullah Omar's position showed no sign of softening. One intelligence report passed to
Berger by the NSC staff quoted Bin Ladin as saying that Mullah Omar had given him a
completely free hand to act in any country, though asking that he not claim
responsibility for attacks in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. Bin Ladin was described as
grabbing his beard and saying emotionally, "By Allah, by God, the Americans will
still be amazed. The so-called United States will suffer the same fate as the
Russians. Their state will collapse, too."
Debate in the State Department intensified after December 1998, when Michael Sheehan
became counterterrorism coordinator. A onetime special forces officer, he had worked
with Albright when she was ambassador to the United Nations and had served on the
NSC staff with Clarke. He shared Clarke's obsession with terrorism, and had little
hesitation about locking horns with the regional bureaus. Through every available
channel, he repeated the earlier warning to the Taliban of the possible dire
consequences-including military strikes-if Bin Ladin remained their guest and
conducted additional attacks. Within the department, he argued for designating the
Taliban regime a state sponsor of terrorism. This was technically difficult to do,
for calling it a state would be tantamount to diplomatic recognition, which the
United States had thus far withheld. But Sheehan urged the use of any available
weapon against the Taliban. He told us that he thought he was regarded in the
department as "a one-note Johnny nutcase."
In early 1999, the State Department's counterterrorism office proposed a
comprehensive diplomatic strategy for all states involved in the Afghanistan
problem, including Pakistan. It specified both carrots and hard-hitting sticks-
among them, certifying Pakistan as uncooperative on terrorism. Albright said the
original carrots and sticks listed in a decision paper for principals may not have
been used as "described on paper" but added that they were used in other ways or in
varying degrees. But the paper's author, Ambassador Sheehan, was frustrated and
complained to us that the original plan "had been watered down to the point that
nothing was then done with it."
The cautiousness of the South Asia bureau was reinforced when, in May 1999, Pakistani
troops were discovered to have infiltrated into an especially mountainous area of
Kashmir. A limited war began between India and Pakistan, euphemistically called the
"Kargil crisis," as India tried to drive the Pakistani forces out. Patience with
Pakistan was wearing thin, inside both the State Department and the NSC. Bruce
Riedel, the NSC staff member responsible for Pakistan, wrote Berger that Islamabad
was "behaving as a rogue state in two areas-backing Taliban/UBL terror and provoking
war with India."
Discussion within the Clinton administration on Afghanistan then concentrated on two
main alternatives. The first, championed by Riedel and Assistant Secretary of State
Karl Inderfurth, was to undertake a major diplomatic effort to end the Afghan civil
war and install a national unity government. The second, favored by Sheehan, Clarke,
and the CIA, called for labeling the Taliban a terrorist group and ultimately
funneling secret aid to its chief foe, the Northern Alliance. This dispute would go
back and forth throughout 1999 and ultimately become entangled with debate about
enlisting the Northern Alliance as an ally for covert action.
Another diplomatic option may have been available: nurturing Afghan exile groups as a
possible moderate governing alternative to theTaliban. In late 1999, Washington
provided some support for talks among the leaders of exile Afghan groups, including
the ousted Rome-based King Zahir Shah and Hamid Karzai, about bolstering
anti-Taliban forces inside Afghanistan and linking the RESPONSES TO AL QAEDA'S
INITIAL ASSAULTS 125 Northern Alliance with Pashtun groups. One U.S. diplomat later
told us that the exile groups were not ready to move forward and that coordinating
fractious groups residing in Bonn, Rome, and Cyprus proved extremely difficult.
Frustrated by the Taliban's resistance, two senior State Department officials
suggested asking the Saudis to offer the Taliban $250 million for Bin Ladin. Clarke
opposed having the United States facilitate a "huge grant to a regime as heinous as
the Taliban" and suggested that the idea might not seem attractive to either
Secretary Albright or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton-both critics of the
Taliban's record on women's rights.
The proposal seems to have quietly died.
Within the State Department, some officials delayed Sheehan and Clarke's push either
to designateTaliban-controlled Afghanistan as a state sponsor of terrorism or to
designate the regime as a foreign terrorist organization (thereby avoiding the issue
of whether to recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan's government). Sheehan and Clarke
prevailed in July 1999, when President Clinton issued an executive order effectively
declaring the Taliban regime a state sponsor of terrorism.
In October, a UN Security Council Resolution championed by the United States added
economic and travel sanctions.
With UN sanctions set to come into effect in November, Clarke wrote Berger that "the
Taliban appear to be up to something." Mullah Omar had
shuffled his "cabinet" and hinted at Bin Ladin's possible departure. Clarke's staff
thought his most likely destination would be Somalia; Chechnya seemed less appealing
with Russia on the offensive. Clarke commented that Iraq and Libya had previously
discussed hosting Bin Ladin, though he and his staff had their doubts that Bin Ladin
would trust secular Arab dictators such as Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qadhafi. Clarke
also raised the "remote possibility" of Yemen, which offered vast uncontrolled
spaces. In November, the CSG discussed whether the sanctions had rattled the
Taliban, who seemed "to be looking for a face-saving way out of the Bin Ladin
issue."
In fact none of the outside pressure had any visible effect on Mullah Omar, who was
unconcerned about commerce with the outside world. Omar had virtually no diplomatic
contact with the West, since he refused to meet with non- Muslims. The United States
learned that at the end of 1999, theTaliban Council of Ministers unanimously
reaffirmed that their regime would stick by Bin Ladin. Relations between Bin Ladin
and theTaliban leadership were sometimes tense, but the foundation was deep and
personal.
Indeed, Mullah Omar had executed at least one subordinate who opposed his pro-Bin
Ladin policy.
The United States would try tougher sanctions in 2000. Working with Russia (a country
involved in an ongoing campaign against Chechen separatists, some of whom received
support from Bin Ladin), the United States persuaded the United Nations to adopt
Security Council Resolution 1333, which included an embargo on arms shipments to the
Taliban, in December 2000.
The aim of the resolution was to hit the Taliban where it was most sensitive- on the
battlefield against the Northern Alliance-and criminalize giving them arms and
providing military "advisers," which Pakistan had been doing.
Yet the passage of the resolution had no visible effect on Omar, nor did it halt the
flow of Pakistani military assistance to the Taliban.
U.S. authorities had continued to try to get cooperation from Pakistan in pressing
the Taliban to stop sheltering Bin Ladin. President Clinton contacted Sharif again
in June 1999, partly to discuss the crisis with India but also to urge Sharif, "in
the strongest way I can," to persuade the Taliban to expel Bin Ladin.
The President suggested that Pakistan use its control over oil supplies to the
Taliban and over Afghan imports through Karachi. Sharif suggested instead that
Pakistani forces might try to capture Bin Ladin themselves. Though no one in
Washington thought this was likely to happen, President Clinton gave the idea his
blessing.
The President met with Sharif in Washington in early July. Though the meeting's main
purpose was to seal the Pakistani prime minister's decision to withdraw from the
Kargil confrontation in Kashmir, President Clinton complained about Pakistan's
failure to take effective action with respect to the Taliban and Bin Ladin. Sharif
came back to his earlier proposal and won approval for U.S. assistance in training a
Pakistani special forces team for an operation against Bin Ladin. Then, in October
1999, Sharif was deposed by General Pervez Musharraf, and the plan was
terminated.
At first, the Clinton administration hoped that Musharraf 's coup might create an
opening for action on Bin Ladin. A career military officer, Musharraf was thought to
have the political strength to confront and influence the Pakistani military
intelligence service, which supported the Taliban. Berger speculated that the new
government might use Bin Ladin to buy concessions from Washington, but neither side
ever developed such an initiative.
By late 1999, more than a year after the embassy bombings, diplomacy with Pakistan,
like the efforts with the Taliban, had, according to Under Secretary of State Thomas
Pickering, "borne little fruit."
COVERT ACTION
As part of the response to the embassy bombings, President Clinton signed a
Memorandum of Notification authorizing the CIA to let its tribal assets use force to
capture Bin Ladin and his associates. CIA officers told the tribals that the plan to
capture Bin Ladin, which had been "turned off " three months earlier, was back on.
The memorandum also authorized the CIA to attack Bin Ladin in other ways. Also, an
executive order froze financial holdings that could be linked to Bin Ladin.
The counterterrorism staff at CIA thought it was gaining a better understanding of
Bin Ladin and his network. In preparation for briefing the Senate RESPONSES TO AL
QAEDA'S INITIAL ASSAULTS 127 Select Committee on Intelligence on September 2, Tenet
was told that the intelligence community knew more about Bin Ladin's network"than
about any other top tier terrorist organization."
The CIA was using this knowledge to disrupt a number of Bin Ladin-associated cells.
Working with Albanian authorities, CIA operatives had raided an al Qaeda forgery
operation and another terrorist cell in Tirana. These operations may have disrupted
a planned attack on the U.S. embassy in Tirana, and did lead to the rendition of a
number of al Qaeda-related terrorist operatives. After the embassy bombings, there
were arrests in Azerbaijan, Italy, and Britain. Several terrorists were sent to an
Arab country. The CIA described working with FBI operatives to prevent a planned
attack on the U.S. embassy in Uganda, and a number of suspects were arrested. On
September 16, Abu Hajer, one of Bin Ladin's deputies in Sudan and the head of his
computer operations and weapons procurement, was arrested in Germany. He was the
most important Bin Ladin lieutenant captured thus far. Clarke commented to Berger
with satisfaction that August and September had brought the "greatest number of
terrorist arrests in a short period of time that we have ever
arranged/facilitated."
Given the President's August Memorandum of Notification, the CIA had already been
working on new plans for using the Afghan tribals to capture Bin Ladin. During
September and October, the tribals claimed to have tried at least four times to
ambush Bin Ladin. Senior CIA officials doubted whether any of these ambush attempts
had actually occurred. But the tribals did seem to have success in reporting where
Bin Ladin was.
This information was more useful than it had been in the past; since the August
missile strikes, Bin Ladin had taken to moving his sleeping place frequently and
unpredictably and had added new bodyguards. Worst of all, al Qaeda's senior
leadership had stopped using a particular means of communication almost immediately
after a leak to the Washington Times.
This made it much more difficult for the National Security Agency to intercept his
conversations. But since the tribals seemed to know where Bin Ladin was or would be,
an alternative to capturing Bin Ladin would be to mark his location and call in
another round of missile strikes.
On November 3, the Small Group met to discuss these problems, among other topics.
Preparing Director Tenet for a Small Group meeting in mid- November, the
Counterterrorist Center stressed, "At this point we cannot predict when or if a
capture operation will be executed by our assets."
U.S. counterterrorism officials also worried about possible domestic attacks. Several
intelligence reports, some of dubious sourcing, mentioned Washington as a possible
target. On October 26, Clarke's CSG took the unusual step of holding a meeting
dedicated to trying "to evaluate the threat of a terrorist attack in the United
States by the Usama bin Ladin network."107The CSG members were "urged to be as
creative as possible in their thinking" about preventing a Bin Ladin attack on U.S.
territory. Participants noted that while the FBI had been given additional resources
for such efforts, both it and the CIA were having problems exploiting leads by
tracing U.S. telephone numbers and translating documents obtained in cell
disruptions abroad. The Justice Department reported that the current guidelines from
the Attorney General gave sufficient legal authority for domestic investigation and
surveillance.
Though intelligence gave no clear indication of what might be afoot, some
intelligence reports mentioned chemical weapons, pointing toward work at a camp in
southern Afghanistan called Derunta. On November 4, 1998, the U.S. Attorney's Office
for the Southern District of New York unsealed its indictment of Bin Ladin, charging
him with conspiracy to attack U.S. defense installations. The indictment also
charged that al Qaeda had allied itself with Sudan, Iran, and Hezbollah. The
original sealed indictment had added that al Qaeda had "reached an understanding
with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and
that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda
would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq."
This passage led Clarke, who for years had read intelligence reports on
Iraqi-Sudanese cooperation on chemical weapons, to speculate to Berger that a large
Iraqi presence at chemical facilities in Khartoum was "probably a direct result of
the Iraq-Al Qida agreement." Clarke added that VX precursor traces found near al
Shifa were the "exact formula used by Iraq."110This language about al Qaeda's
"understanding" with Iraq had been dropped, however, when a superseding indictment
was filed in November 1998.
On Friday, December 4, 1998, the CIA included an article in the Presidential Daily
Brief describing intelligence, received from a friendly government, about a
threatened hijacking in the United States. This article was declassified at our
request.
The following is the text of an item from the Presidential Daily Brief received
by President William J. Clinton on December 4, 1998. Redacted material is
indicated in brackets.
SUBJECT: Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks
1. Reporting [-] suggests Bin Ladin and his allies are preparing for attacks in
the US, including an aircraft hijacking to obtain the release of Shaykh 'Umar
'Abd al-Rahman, Ramzi Yousef, and Muhammad Sadiq 'Awda. One source quoted a
senior member of the Gama'at al-Islamiyya (IG) saying that, as of late October,
the IG had completed planning for RESPONSES TO AL QAEDA'S INITIAL ASSAULTS 129
an operation in the US on behalf of Bin Ladin, but that the operation was on
hold. A senior Bin Ladin operative from Saudi Arabia was to visit IG
counterparts in the US soon thereafter to discuss options-perhaps including an
aircraft hijacking.
IG leader Islambuli in late September was planning to hijack a US airliner
during the "next couple of weeks" to free 'Abd al- Rahman and the other
prisoners, according to what may be a different source.
The same source late last month said that Bin Ladin might implement plans
to hijack US aircraft before the beginning of Ramadan on 20 December and
that two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a
recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport. [-]
2. Some members of the Bin Ladin network have received hijack training, according
to various sources, but no group directly tied to Bin Ladin's al-Qa'ida
organization has ever carried out an aircraft hijacking. Bin Ladin could be
weighing other types of operations against US aircraft. According to [-] the IG
in October obtained SA-7 missiles and intended to move them from Yemen into
Saudi Arabia to shoot down an Egyptian plane or, if unsuccessful, a US military
or civilian aircraft.
A [-] in October told us that unspecified "extremist elements" in Yemen
had acquired SA-7s. [-]
3. [-] indicate the Bin Ladin organization or its allies are moving closer to
implementing anti-US attacks at unspecified locations, but we do not know
whether they are related to attacks on aircraft. A Bin Ladin associate in Sudan
late last month told a colleague in Kandahar that he had shipped a group of
containers to Afghanistan. Bin Ladin associates also talked about the movement
of containers to Afghanistan before the East Africa bombings.
In other [-] Bin Ladin associates last month discussed picking up a
package in Malaysia. One told his colleague in Malaysia that "they" were in
the "ninth month [of pregnancy]."
An alleged Bin Ladin supporter in Yemen late last month remarked to his
mother that he planned to work in "commerce" from abroad and said his
impending "marriage," which would take place soon, would be a
"surprise.""Commerce" and "marriage" often are codewords for terrorist
attacks.
The same day, Clarke convened a meeting of his CSG to discuss both the hijacking
concern and the antiaircraft missile threat. To address the hijacking warning, the
group agreed that New York airports should go to maximum security starting that
weekend. They agreed to boost security at other East coast airports. The CIA agreed
to distribute versions of the report to the FBI and FAA to pass to the New York
Police Department and the airlines. The FAA issued a security directive on December
8, with specific requirements for more intensive air carrier screening of passengers
and more oversight of the screening process, at all three New York City area
airports.
The intelligence community could learn little about the source of the information.
Later in December and again in early January 1999, more information arrived from the
same source, reporting that the planned hijacking had been stalled because two of
the operatives, who were sketchily described, had been arrested near Washington,
D.C. or New York. After investigation, the FBI could find no information to support
the hijack threat; nor could it verify any arrests like those described in the
report. The FAA alert at the New York area airports ended on January 31, 1999.
On December 17, the day after the United States and Britain began their Desert Fox
bombing campaign against Iraq, the Small Group convened to discuss intelligence
suggesting imminent Bin Ladin attacks on the U.S. embassies in Qatar and Ethiopia.
The next day, Director Tenet sent a memo to the President, the cabinet, and senior
officials throughout the government describing reports that Bin Ladin planned to
attack U.S. targets very soon, possibly over the next few days, before Ramadan
celebrations began. Tenet said he was "greatly concerned."
With alarms sounding, members of the Small Group considered ideas about how to
respond to or prevent such attacks. Generals Shelton and Zinni came up with military
options. Special Operations Forces were later told that they might be ordered to
attempt very high-risk in-and-out raids either in Khartoum, to capture a senior Bin
Ladin operative known as Abu Hafs the Mauritanian- who appeared to be engineering
some of the plots-or in Kandahar, to capture Bin Ladin himself. Shelton told us that
such operations are not risk free, invoking the memory of the 1993 "Black Hawk down"
fiasco in Mogadishu.
The CIA reported on December 18 that Bin Ladin might be traveling to Kandahar and
could be targeted there with cruise missiles. Vessels with Tomahawk cruise missiles
were on station in the Arabian Sea, and could fire within a few hours of receiving
target data.
On December 20, intelligence indicated Bin Ladin would be spending the night at the
Haji Habash house, part of the governor's residence in Kandahar. The chief of the
Bin Ladin unit, "Mike," told us that he promptly briefed Tenet and his deputy, John
Gordon. From the field, the CIA's Gary Schroen advised:"Hit him tonight-we may not
get another chance." An urgent teleconference of principals was arranged.
The principals considered a cruise missile strike to try to kill Bin Ladin. One issue
they discussed was the potential collateral damage-the number of innocent bystanders
who would be killed or wounded. General Zinni predicted a number well over 200 and
was concerned about damage to a nearby mosque. The senior intelligence officer on
the Joint Staff apparently made a different calculation, estimating half as much
collateral damage and not predicting damage to the mosque. By the end of the
meeting, the principals decided against recommending to the President that he order
a strike. A few weeks later, in January 1999, Clarke wrote that the principals had
thought the intelligence only half reliable and had worried about killing or
injuring perhaps 300 people. Tenet said he remembered doubts about the reliability
of the source and concern about hitting the nearby mosque." Mike" remembered Tenet
telling him that the military was concerned that a few hours had passed since the
last sighting of Bin Ladin and that this persuaded everyone that the chance of
failure was too great.
Some lower-level officials were angry." Mike" reported to Schroen that he had been
unable to sleep after this decision. "I'm sure we'll regret not acting last night,"
he wrote, criticizing the principals for "worrying that some stray shrapnel might
hit the Habash mosque and 'offend' Muslims." He commented that they had not shown
comparable sensitivity when deciding to bomb Muslims in Iraq. The principals, he
said, were "obsessed" with trying to get others- Saudis, Pakistanis, Afghan
tribals-to "do what we won't do." Schroen was disappointed too." We should have done
it last night," he wrote." We may well come to regret the decision not to go
ahead." The Joint Staff 's deputy director for
operations agreed, even though he told us that later intelligence appeared to show
that Bin Ladin had left his quarters before the strike would have occurred. Missing
Bin Ladin, he said, "would have caused us a hell of a problem, but it was a shot we
should have taken, and we would have had to pay the price."
The principals began considering other, more aggressive covert alternatives using the
tribals. CIA officers suggested that the tribals would prefer to try a raid rather
than a roadside ambush because they would have better control, it would be less
dangerous, and it played more to their skills and experience. But everyone knew that
if the tribals were to conduct such a raid, guns would be blazing. The current
Memorandum of Notification instructed the CIA to capture Bin Ladin and to use lethal
force only in self-defense. Work now began on a new memorandum that would give the
tribals more latitude. The intention was to say that they could use lethal force if
the attempted capture seemed impossible to complete successfully.
Early drafts of this highly sensitive document emphasized that it authorized only a
capture operation. The tribals were to be paid only if they captured Bin Ladin, not
if they killed him. Officials throughout the government approved this draft. But on
December 21, the day after principals decided not to launch the cruise missile
strike against Kandahar, the CIA's leaders urged strengthening the language to allow
the tribals to be paid whether Bin Ladin was captured or killed. Berger and Tenet
then worked together to take this line of thought even further.
They finally agreed, as Berger reported to President Clinton, that an extraordinary
step was necessary. The new memorandum would allow the killing of Bin Ladin if the
CIA and the tribals judged that capture was not feasible (a judgment it already
seemed clear they had reached). The Justice Department lawyer who worked on the
draft told us that what was envisioned was a group of tribals assaulting a location,
leading to a shoot-out. Bin Ladin and others would be captured if possible, but
probably would be killed. The administration's position was that under the law of
armed conflict, killing a person who posed an imminent threat to the United States
would be an act of self-defense, not an assassination. On Christmas Eve 1998, Berger
sent a final draft to President Clinton, with an explanatory memo. The President
approved the document.
Because the White House considered this operation highly sensitive, only a tiny
number of people knew about this Memorandum of Notification. Berger arranged for the
NSC's legal adviser to inform Albright, Cohen, Shelton, and Reno. None was allowed
to keep a copy. Congressional leaders were briefed, as required by law. Attorney
General Reno had sent a letter to the President expressing her concern: she warned
of possible retaliation, including the targeting of U.S. officials. She did not pose
any legal objection. A copy of the final document, along with the carefully crafted
instructions that were to be sent to the tribals, was given to Tenet.
A message from Tenet to CIA field agents directed them to communicate to the tribals
the instructions authorized by the President: the United States preferred that Bin
Ladin and his lieutenants be captured, but if a successful capture operation was not
feasible, the tribals were permitted to kill them. The instructions added that the
tribals must avoid killing others unnecessarily and must not kill or abuse Bin Ladin
or his lieutenants if they surrendered. Finally, the tribals would not be paid if
this set of requirements was not met.
The field officer passed these instructions to the tribals word for word. But he
prefaced the directions with a message:"From the American President down to the
average man in the street, we want him [Bin Ladin] stopped." If the tribals captured
Bin Ladin, the officer assured them that he would receive a fair trial under U.S.
law and be treated humanely. The CIA officer reported that the tribals said they
"fully understand the contents, implications and the spirit of the message" and that
that their response was,"We will try our best to capture Bin Ladin alive and will
have no intention of killing or harming him on purpose." The tribals explained that
they wanted to prove that their standards of behavior were more civilized than those
of Bin Ladin and his band of terrorists. In an additional note addressed to Schroen,
the tribals noted that if they were to adopt Bin Ladin's ethics,"we would have
finished the job long before," RESPONSES TO AL QAEDA'S INITIAL ASSAULTS 133 but they
had been limited by their abilities and "by our beliefs and laws we have to
respect."
Schroen and "Mike" were impressed by the tribals' reaction. Schroen cabled that the
tribals were not in it for the money but as an investment in the future of
Afghanistan. "Mike" agreed that the tribals' reluctance to kill was not a
"showstopper." "From our view," he wrote, "that seems in character and fair
enough."
Policymakers in the Clinton administration, including the President and his national
security advisor, told us that the President's intent regarding covert action
against Bin Ladin was clear: he wanted him dead. This intent was never well
communicated or understood within the CIA. Tenet told the Commission that except in
one specific case (discussed later), the CIA was authorized to kill Bin Ladin only
in the context of a capture operation. CIA senior managers, operators, and lawyers
confirmed this understanding." We always talked about how much easier it would have
been to kill him," a former chief of the Bin Ladin unit said.
In February 1999, another draft Memorandum of Notification went to President Clinton.
It asked him to allow the CIA to give exactly the same guidance to the Northern
Alliance as had just been given to the tribals: they could kill Bin Ladin if a
successful capture operation was not feasible. On this occasion, however, President
Clinton crossed out key language he had approved in December and inserted more
ambiguous language. No one we interviewed could shed light on why the President did
this. President Clinton told the Commission that he had no recollection of why he
rewrote the language.
Later in 1999, when legal authority was needed for enlisting still other
collaborators and for covering a wider set of contingencies, the lawyers returned to
the language used in August 1998, which authorized force only in the context of a
capture operation. Given the closely held character of the document approved in
December 1998, and the subsequent return to the earlier language, it is possible to
understand how the former White House officials and the CIA officials might disagree
as to whether the CIA was ever authorized by the President to kill Bin Ladin.
The dispute turned out to be somewhat academic, as the limits of available legal
authority were not tested. Clarke commented to Berger that "despite 'expanded'
authority for CIA's sources to engage in direct action, they have shown no
inclination to do so." He added that it was his impression that the CIA thought the
tribals unlikely to act against Bin Ladin and hence relying on them was
"unrealistic." Events seemed to bear him out, since
the tribals did not stage an attack on Bin Ladin or his associates during 1999. The
tribals remained active collectors of intelligence, however, providing good but not
predictive information about Bin Ladin's whereabouts. The CIA also tried to improve
its intelligence reporting on Bin Ladin by what Tenet's assistant director for
collection, the indefatigable Charles Allen, called an "allout, all-agency,
seven-days-a-week" effort.
The effort might have had an effect. On January 12, 1999, Clarke wrote Berger that
the CIA's confidence in the tribals' reporting had increased. It was now higher than
it had been on December 20.
In February 1999, Allen proposed flying a U-2 mission over Afghanistan to build a
baseline of intelligence outside the areas where the tribals had coverage. Clarke
was nervous about such a mission because he continued to fear that Bin Ladin might
leave for someplace less accessible. He wrote Deputy National Security Advisor
Donald Kerrick that one reliable source reported Bin Ladin's having met with Iraqi
officials, who "may have offered him asylum." Other intelligence sources said that
some Taliban leaders, though not Mullah Omar, had urged Bin Ladin to go to Iraq. If
Bin Ladin actually moved to Iraq, wrote Clarke, his network would be at Saddam
Hussein's service, and it would be "virtually impossible" to find him. Better to get
Bin Ladin in Afghanistan, Clarke declared.
Berger suggested sending one U-2 flight, but Clarke opposed even this. It would
require Pakistani approval, he wrote; and "Pak[istan's] intel[ligence service] is in
bed with" Bin Ladin and would warn him that the United States was getting ready for
a bombing campaign: "Armed with that knowledge, old wily Usama will likely boogie to
Baghdad."135Though told also by Bruce Riedel of the NSC staff that Saddam Hussein
wanted Bin Ladin in Baghdad, Berger conditionally authorized a single U-2 flight.
Allen meanwhile had found other ways of getting the information he wanted. So the
U-2 flight never occurred.
SEARCHING FOR FRESH OPTIONS
"Boots on the Ground?"
Starting on the day the August 1998 strikes were launched, General Shelton had issued
a planning order to prepare follow-on strikes and think beyond just using cruise
missiles.
The initial strikes had been called Operation Infinite Reach. The follow-on plans
were given the code name Operation Infinite Resolve.
At the time, any actual military action in Afghanistan would have been carried out by
General Zinni's Central Command. This command was therefore the locus for most
military planning. Zinni was even less enthusiastic than Cohen and Shelton about
follow-on cruise missile strikes. He knew that the Tomahawks did not always hit
their targets. After the August 20 strikes, President Clinton had had to call
Pakistani Prime Minister Sharif to apologize for a wayward missile that had killed
several people in a Pakistani village. Sharif had been understanding, while
commenting on American "overkill."
Zinni feared that Bin Ladin would in the future locate himself in cities, where U.S.
missiles could kill thousands of Afghans. He worried also lest Pakistani authorities
not get adequate warning, think the missiles came from India, RESPONSES TO AL
QAEDA'S INITIAL ASSAULTS 135 and do something that everyone would later regret.
Discussing potential repercussions in the region of his military responsibility,
Zinni said, "It was easy to take the shot from Washington and walk away from it. We
had to live there."
Zinni's distinct preference would have been to build up counterterrorism capabilities
in neighboring countries such as Uzbekistan. But he told us that he could not drum
up much interest in or money for such a purpose from Washington, partly, he thought,
because these countries had dictatorial governments.
After the decision-in which fear of collateral damage was an important factor- not to
use cruise missiles against Kandahar in December 1998, Shelton and officers in the
Pentagon developed plans for using an AC-130 gunship instead of cruise missile
strikes. Designed specifically for the special forces, the version of the AC-130
known as "Spooky"can fly in fast or from high altitude, undetected by radar; guided
to its zone by extraordinarily complex electronics, it is capable of rapidly firing
precision-guided 25, 40, and 105 mm projectiles. Because this system could target
more precisely than a salvo of cruise missiles, it had a much lower risk of causing
collateral damage. After giving Clarke a briefing and being encouraged to proceed,
Shelton formally directed Zinni and General Peter Schoomaker, who headed the Special
Operations Command, to develop plans for an AC-130 mission against Bin Ladin's
headquarters and infrastructure in Afghanistan. The Joint Staff prepared a decision
paper for deployment of the Special Operations aircraft.
Though Berger and Clarke continued to indicate interest in this option, the AC-130s
were never deployed. Clarke wrote at the time that Zinni opposed their use, and John
Maher, the Joint Staff 's deputy director of operations, agreed that this was
Zinni's position. Zinni himself does not recall blocking the option. He told us that
he understood the Special Operations Command had never thought the intelligence good
enough to justify actually moving AC-130s into position. Schoomaker says, on the
contrary, that he thought the AC-130 option feasible.
The most likely explanation for the two generals' differing recollections is that
both of them thought serious preparation for any such operations would require a
long-term redeployment of Special Operations forces to the Middle East or South
Asia. The AC-130s would need bases because the aircraft's unrefueled range was only
a little over 2,000 miles. They needed search-and-rescue backup, which would have
still less range. Thus an AC-130 deployment had to be embedded in a wider political
and military concept involving Pakistan or other neighboring countries to address
issues relating to basing and overflight. No one ever put such an initiative on the
table. Zinni therefore cautioned about simply ordering up AC-130 deployments for a
quick strike; Schoomaker planned for what he saw as a practical strike option; and
the underlying issues were not fully engaged. The Joint Staff decision paper was
never turned into an interagency policy paper.
The same was true for the option of using ground units from the Special Operations
Command. Within the command, some officers-such as Schoomaker-wanted the mission of
"putting boots on the ground" to get at Bin Ladin and al Qaeda. At the time, Special
Operations was designated as a "supporting command," not a "supported command": that
is, it supported a theater commander and did not prepare its own plans for dealing
with al Qaeda. Schoomaker proposed to Shelton and Cohen that Special Operations
become a supported command, but the proposal was not adopted. Had it been accepted,
he says, he would have taken on the al Qaeda mission instead of deferring to Zinni.
Lieutenant General William Boykin, the current deputy under secretary of defense for
intelligence and a founding member of Delta Force, told us that "opportunities were
missed because of an unwillingness to take risks and a lack of vision and
understanding."
President Clinton relied on the advice of General Shelton, who informed him that
without intelligence on Bin Ladin's location, a commando raid's chance of failure
was high. Shelton told President Clinton he would go forward with "boots on the
ground" if the President ordered him to do so; however, he had to ensure that the
President was completely aware of the large logistical problems inherent in a
military operation.
The Special Operations plans were apparently conceived as another quick strike
option-an option to insert forces after the United States received actionable
intelligence. President Clinton told the Commission that "if we had had really good
intelligence about . . . where [Usama Bin Ladin] was, I would have done it." Zinni
and Schoomaker did make preparations for possible very high risk in-and-out
operations to capture or kill terrorists. Cohen told the Commission that the notion
of putting military personnel on the ground without some reasonable certitude that
Bin Ladin was in a particular location would have resulted in the mission's failure
and the loss of life in a fruitless effort.
None of these officials was aware of the ambitious plan developed months earlier by
lower-level Defense officials.
In our interviews, some military officers repeatedly invoked the analogy of Desert
One and the failed 1980 hostage rescue mission in Iran.
They were dubious about a quick strike approach to using Special Operations Forces,
which they thought complicated and risky. Such efforts would have required bases in
the region, but all the options were unappealing. Pro-Taliban elements of Pakistan's
military might warn Bin Ladin or his associates of pending operations. With nearby
basing options limited, an alternative was to fly from ships in the Arabian Sea or
from land bases in the Persian Gulf, as was done after 9/11. Such operations would
then have to be supported from long distances, overflying the airspace of nations
that might not have been supportive or aware of U.S. efforts.
However, if these hurdles were addressed, and if the military could then operate
regularly in the region for a long period, perhaps clandestinely, it might RESPONSES
TO AL QAEDA'S INITIAL ASSAULTS 137 attempt to gather intelligence and wait for an
opportunity. One Special Operations commander said his view of actionable
intelligence was that if you "give me the action, I will give you the
intelligence." But this course would still be risky,
in light both of the difficulties already mentioned and of the danger that U.S.
operations might fail disastrously. We have found no evidence that such a long-term
political-military approach for using Special Operations Forces in the region was
proposed to or analyzed by the Small Group, even though such capability had been
honed for at least a decade within the Defense Department. Therefore the debate
looked to some like bold proposals from civilians meeting hypercaution from the
military. Clarke saw it this way. Of the military, he said to us,"They were very,
very, very reluctant." But from another perspective,
poorly informed proposals for bold action were pitted against experienced
professional judgment. That was how Secretary of Defense Cohen viewed it. He said to
us:"I would have to place my judgment call in terms of, do I believe that the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs, former commander of Special Forces command, is in a
better position to make a judgment on the feasibility of this than, perhaps, Mr.
Clarke?"
Beyond a large-scale political-military commitment to build up a covert or
clandestine capability using American personnel on the ground, either military or
CIA, there was a still larger option that could have been considered-invading
Afghanistan itself. Every official we questioned about the possibility of an
invasion of Afghanistan said that it was almost unthinkable, absent a provocation
such as 9/11, because of poor prospects for cooperation from Pakistan and other
nations and because they believed the public would not support it. Cruise missiles
were and would remain the only military option on the table.
The Desert Camp, February 1999
Early in 1999, the CIA received reporting that Bin Ladin was spending much of his
time at one of several camps in the Afghan desert south of Kandahar. At the
beginning of February, Bin Ladin was reportedly located in the vicinity of the
Sheikh Ali camp, a desert hunting camp being used by visitors from a Gulf state.
Public sources have stated that these visitors were from the United Arab
Emirates.
Reporting from the CIA's assets provided a detailed description of the hunting camp,
including its size, location, resources, and security, as well as of Bin Ladin's
smaller, adjacent camp.
Because this was not in an urban area, missiles launched against it would have less
risk of causing collateral damage. On February 8, the military began to ready itself
for a possible strike.
The next day, national technical intelligence confirmed the location and description
of the larger camp and showed the nearby presence of an official aircraft of the
United Arab Emirates. But the location of Bin Ladin's quarters could not be pinned
down so precisely.
The CIA did its best to answer a host of questions about the larger camp and its
residents and about Bin Ladin's daily schedule and routines to support military
contingency planning. According to reporting from the tribals, Bin Ladin regularly
went from his adjacent camp to the larger camp where he visited the Emiratis; the
tribals expected him to be at the hunting camp for such a visit at least until
midmorning on February 11.
Clarke wrote to Berger's deputy on February 10 that the military was then doing
targeting work to hit the main camp with cruise missiles and should be in position
to strike the following morning.
Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert appears to have been briefed on the
situation.
No strike was launched. By February 12 Bin Ladin had apparently moved on, and the
immediate strike plans became moot.
According to CIA and Defense officials, policymakers were concerned about the danger
that a strike would kill an Emirati prince or other senior officials who might be
with Bin Ladin or close by. Clarke told us the strike was called off after
consultations with Director Tenet because the intelligence was dubious, and it
seemed to Clarke as if the CIA was presenting an option to attack America's best
counterterrorism ally in the Gulf. The lead CIA official in the field, Gary Schroen,
felt that the intelligence reporting in this case was very reliable; the Bin Ladin
unit chief, "Mike," agreed. Schroen believes today that this was a lost opportunity
to kill Bin Ladin before 9/11.
Even after Bin Ladin's departure from the area, CIA officers hoped he might return,
seeing the camp as a magnet that could draw him for as long as it was still set up.
The military maintained readiness for another strike opportunity.
On March 7, 1999, Clarke called a UAE official to express his concerns about possible
associations between Emirati officials and Bin Ladin. Clarke later wrote in a
memorandum of this conversation that the call had been approved at an interagency
meeting and cleared with the CIA.
When the former Bin Ladin unit chief found out about Clarke's call, he questioned CIA
officials, who denied having given such a clearance.
Imagery confirmed that less than a week after Clarke's phone call the camp was
hurriedly dismantled, and the site was deserted.
CIA officers, including Deputy Director for Operations Pavitt, were irate." Mike"
thought the dismantling of the camp erased a possible site for targeting Bin
Ladin.
The United Arab Emirates was becoming both a valued counterterrorism ally of the
United States and a persistent counterterrorism problem. From 1999 through early
2001, the United States, and President Clinton personally, pressed the UAE, one of
the Taliban's only travel and financial outlets to the outside world, to break off
its ties and enforce sanctions, especially those relating to flights to and from
Afghanistan.
These efforts achieved little before 9/11. In July 1999, UAE Minister of State for
Foreign Affairs Hamdan bin Zayid threatened to break relations with the Taliban over
Bin Ladin.
The Taliban did not take him seriously, however. Bin Zayid later told an American
diploRESPONSES TO AL QAEDA'S INITIAL ASSAULTS 139 mat that the UAE valued its
relations with the Taliban because the Afghan radicals offered a counterbalance to
"Iranian dangers" in the region, but he also noted that the UAE did not want to
upset the United States.
Looking for New Partners
Although not all CIA officers had lost faith in the tribals' capabilities-many judged
them to be good reporters-few believed they would carry out an ambush of Bin Ladin.
The chief of the Counterterrorist Center compared relying on the tribals to playing
the lottery.
He and his associates, supported by Clarke, pressed for developing a partnership with
the Northern Alliance, even though doing so might bring the United States squarely
behind one side in Afghanistan's long-running civil war.
The Northern Alliance was dominated by Tajiks and drew its strength mainly from the
northern and eastern parts of Afghanistan. In contrast, Taliban members came
principally from Afghanistan's most numerous ethnic group, the Pashtuns, who are
concentrated in the southern part of the country, extending into the North-West
Frontier and Baluchistan provinces of Pakistan.
Because of the Taliban's behavior and its association with Pakistan, the Northern
Alliance had been able at various times to obtain assistance from Russia, Iran, and
India. The alliance's leader was Afghanistan's most renowned military commander,
Ahmed Shah Massoud. Reflective and charismatic, he had been one of the true heroes
of the war against the Soviets. But his bands had been charged with more than one
massacre, and the Northern Alliance was widely thought to finance itself in part
through trade in heroin. Nor had Massoud shown much aptitude for governing except as
a ruthless warlord. Nevertheless, Tenet told us Massoud seemed the most interesting
possible new ally against Bin Ladin.
In February 1999, Tenet sought President Clinton's authorization to enlist Massoud
and his forces as partners. In response to this request, the President signed the
Memorandum of Notification whose language he personally altered. Tenet says he saw
no significance in the President's changes. So far as he was concerned, it was the
language of August 1998, expressing a preference for capture but accepting the
possibility that Bin Ladin could not be brought out alive." We were plowing the same
ground,"Tenet said.
CIA officers described Massoud's reaction when he heard that the United States wanted
him to capture and not kill Bin Ladin. One characterized Massoud's body language as
"a wince." Schroen recalled Massoud's response as "You guys are crazy-you haven't
changed a bit." In Schroen's opinion, the capture proviso inhibited Massoud and his
forces from going after Bin Ladin but did not completely stop them.
The idea, however, was a long shot. Bin Ladin's usual base of activity was near
Kandahar, far from the front lines ofTaliban operations against the Northern
Alliance.
Kandahar, May 1999
It was in Kandahar that perhaps the last, and most likely the best, opportunity arose
for targeting Bin Ladin with cruise missiles before 9/11. In May 1999, CIA assets in
Afghanistan reported on Bin Ladin's location in and around Kandahar over the course
of five days and nights. The reporting was very detailed and came from several
sources. If this intelligence was not "actionable," working-level officials said at
the time and today, it was hard for them to imagine how any intelligence on Bin
Ladin in Afghanistan would meet the standard. Communications were good, and the
cruise missiles were ready." This was in our strike zone," a senior military officer
said. "It was a fat pitch, a home run." He expected the missiles to fly. When the
decision came back that they should stand down, not shoot, the officer said,"we all
just slumped." He told us he knew of no one at the Pentagon or the CIA who thought
it was a bad gamble. Bin Ladin "should have been a dead man" that night, he
said.
Working-level CIA officials agreed. While there was a conflicting intelligence report
about Bin Ladin's whereabouts, the experts discounted it. At the time, CIA
working-level officials were told by their managers that the strikes were not
ordered because the military doubted the intelligence and worried about collateral
damage. Replying to a frustrated colleague in the field, the Bin Ladin unit chief
wrote:"having a chance to get [Bin Ladin] three times in 36 hours and foregoing the
chance each time has made me a bit angry. . . . [T]he DCI finds himself alone at the
table, with the other princip[als] basically saying 'we'll go along with your
decision Mr. Director,' and implicitly saying that the Agency will hang alone if the
attack doesn't get Bin Ladin." But the military officer
quoted earlier recalled that the Pentagon had been willing to act. He told us that
Clarke informed him and others that Tenet assessed the chance of the intelligence
being accurate as 50-50. This officer believed that Tenet's assessment was the key
to the decision.
Tenet told us he does not remember any details about this episode, except that the
intelligence came from a single uncorroborated source and that there was a risk of
collateral damage. The story is further complicated by Tenet's absence from the
critical principals meeting on this strike (he was apparently out of town); his
deputy, John Gordon, was representing the CIA. Gordon recalled having presented the
intelligence in a positive light, with appropriate caveats, but stating that this
intelligence was about as good as it could get.
Berger remembered only that in all such cases, the call had been Tenet's. Berger felt
sure that Tenet was eager to get Bin Ladin. In his view, Tenet did his job
responsibly." George would call and say,'We just don't have it,'" Berger said.
The decision not to strike in May 1999 may now seem hard to understand. In fairness,
we note two points: First, in December 1998, the principals' wariness about ordering
a strike appears to have been vindicated: Bin Ladin left his room unexpectedly, and
if a strike had been ordered he would not have been RESPONSES TO AL QAEDA'S INITIAL
ASSAULTS 141 hit. Second, the administration, and the CIA in particular, was in the
midst of intense scrutiny and criticism in May 1999 because faulty intelligence had
just led the United States to mistakenly bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during
the NATO war against Serbia. This episode may have made officials more cautious than
might otherwise have been the case.
From May 1999 until September 2001, policymakers did not again actively consider a
missile strike against Bin Ladin.
The principals did give some further consideration in 1999 to more general strikes,
reviving Clarke's "Delenda" notion of hitting camps and infrastructure to disrupt al
Qaeda's organization. In the first months of 1999, the Joint Staff had developed
broader target lists to undertake a "focused campaign" against the infrastructure of
Bin Ladin's network and to hit Taliban government sites as well. General Shelton
told us that the Taliban targets were "easier" to hit and more substantial.
Part of the context for considering broader strikes in the summer of 1999 was renewed
worry about Bin Ladin's ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In May and
June, the U.S. government received a flurry of ominous reports, including more
information about chemical weapons training or development at the Derunta camp and
possible attempts to amass nuclear material at Herat.
By late June, U.S. and other intelligence services had concluded that al Qaeda was in
pre-attack mode, perhaps again involving Abu Hafs the Mauritanian. On June 25, at
Clarke's request, Berger convened the Small Group in his office to discuss the
alert, Bin Ladin's WMD programs, and his location. "Should we pre-empt by attacking
UBL facilities?" Clarke urged Berger to ask his colleagues.
In his handwritten notes on the meeting paper, Berger jotted down the presence of 7
to 11 families in the Tarnak Farms facility, which could mean 60-65 casualties.
Berger noted the possible "slight impact" on Bin Ladin and added, "if he responds,
we're blamed."
The NSC staff raised the option of waiting until after a terrorist attack, and then
retaliating, including possible strikes on the Taliban. But Clarke observed that Bin
Ladin would probably empty his camps after an attack.
The military route seemed to have reached a dead end. In December 1999, Clarke urged
Berger to ask the principals to ask themselves:"Why have there been no real options
lately for direct US military action?"185There are no notes recording whether the
question was discussed or, if it was, how it was answered. Reports of possible
attacks by Bin Ladin kept coming in throughout 1999. They included a threat to blow
up the FBI building in Washington, D.C. In September, the CSG reviewed a possible
threat to a flight out of Los Angeles or New York.
These warnings came amid dozens of others that flooded in. With military and
diplomatic options practically exhausted by the summer of 1999, the U.S. government
seemed to be back where it had been in the summer of 1998-relying on the CIA to find
some other option. That picture also seemed discouraging. Several disruptions and
renditions aimed against the broader al Qaeda network had succeeded.
But covert action efforts in Afghanistan had not been fruitful.
In mid-1999, new leaders arrived at the Counterterrorist Center and the Bin Ladin
unit. The new director of CTC, replacing "Jeff," was Cofer Black. The new head of
the section that included the Bin Ladin unit was "Richard." Black, "Richard," and
their colleagues began working on a new operational strategy for attacking al Qaeda;
their starting point was to get better intelligence, relying more on the CIA's own
sources and less on the tribals.
In July 1999, President Clinton authorized the CIA to work with several governments
to capture Bin Ladin, and extended the scope of efforts to Bin Ladin's principal
lieutenants. The President reportedly also authorized a covert action under
carefully limited circumstances which, if successful, would have resulted in Bin
Ladin's death.
Attorney General Reno again expressed concerns on policy grounds. She was worried
about the danger of retaliation. The CIA also developed the short-lived effort to
work with a Pakistani team that we discussed earlier, and an initiative to work with
Uzbekistan. The Uzbeks needed basic equipment and training. No action could be
expected before March 2000, at the earliest.
In fall 1999, DCI Tenet unveiled the CIA's new Bin Ladin strategy. It was called,
simply, "the Plan." The Plan proposed continuing disruption and rendition operations
worldwide. It announced a program for hiring and training better officers with
counterterrorism skills, recruiting more assets, and trying to penetrate al Qaeda's
ranks. The Plan aimed to close gaps in technical intelligence collection (signal and
imagery) as well. In addition, the CIA would increase contacts with the Northern
Alliance rebels fighting the Taliban.
With a new operational strategy, the CIA evaluated its capture options. None scored
high marks. The CIA had no confidence in the Pakistani effort. In the event that Bin
Ladin traveled to the Kandahar region in southern Afghanistan, the tribal network
there was unlikely to attack a heavily guarded Bin Ladin; the Counterterrorist
Center rated the chance of success at less than 10 percent. To the northwest, the
Uzbeks might be ready for a cross-border sortie in six months; their chance of
success was also rated at less than 10 percent.
In the northeast were Massoud's Northern Alliance forces-perhaps the CIA's best
option. In late October, a group of officers from the Counterterrorist Center flew
into the Panjshir Valley to meet up with Massoud, a hazardous journey in rickety
helicopters that would be repeated several times in the future. Massoud appeared
committed to helping the United States collect intelligence on Bin Ladin's
activities and whereabouts and agreed to try to capture him if the opportunity
arose. The Bin Ladin unit was satisfied that its reporting on Bin Ladin would now
have a second source. But it also knew that Massoud would act against Bin Ladin only
if his own interests and those of the RESPONSES TO AL QAEDA'S INITIAL ASSAULTS 143
United States intersected. By early December, the CIA rated this possibility at less
than 15 percent.
Finally, the CIA considered the possibility of putting U.S. personnel on the ground
in Afghanistan. The CIA had been discussing this option with Special Operations
Command and found enthusiasm on the working level but reluctance at higher levels.
CIA saw a 95 percent chance of Special Operations Command forces capturing Bin Ladin
if deployed-but less than a 5 percent chance of such a deployment. Sending CIA
officers into Afghanistan was to be considered "if the gain clearly outweighs the
risk"-but at this time no such gains presented themselves to warrant the risk.
As mentioned earlier, such a protracted deployment of U.S. Special Operations Forces
into Afghanistan, perhaps as part of a team joined to a deployment of the CIA's own
officers, would have required a major policy initiative (probably combined with
efforts to secure the support of at least one or two neighboring countries) to make
a long-term commitment, establish a durable presence on the ground, and be prepared
to accept the associated risks and costs. Such a military plan was never developed
for interagency consideration before 9/11. As 1999 came to a close, the CIA had a
new strategic plan in place for capturing Bin Ladin, but no option was rated as
having more than a 15 percent chance of achieving that objective.
