Another former agency officer who worked in the DO during the 1990s and into the new century thought the reason the agency refused to attempt to penetrate Middle Eastern terrorist groups was the CIA’s need for total control over its officers. “I think the biggest issue is control—can you control your employees,” the person said. “You can’t communicate with them for a couple of months, and who knows what’s going on, and again it’s this mentality of being risk-averse—if something happens, who’s going to pay for it? I don’t want to be accountable.” The person added, “I don’t think they went out and recruited Middle Eastern types—they just relied on applications.”
In interviews with numerous CIA operations and case officers who spent years in the Clandestine Service, and who were serving at headquarters and overseas assignments in September 2001, there was great anger and frustration that many of the agency’s past problems had never been corrected. They were also very critical of the agency leadership, the absence of professionalism within the Clandestine Service, and the lack of seriousness when it came to the war on terrorism. While some of the officials eventually quit the agency in sadness and disgust, others continue to work there.
By September 2001, promotions continued to be based primarily on the recruitment of agents—local residents or officials—regardless of the quality of intelligence they were providing. “One case I ran for a long time, and kept trying to turn it in,” said one case officer at an overseas station. Despite complaining to the chief of station that the agent was providing useless intelligence, the officer was forced to continue running him:
They didn’t want to terminate it. This is one of the reasons that I left—because I went into the agency with a sort of grand sense of mission, really wanted to serve. But there was not a lot of emphasis on the quality of your recruitment. It all was kind of like a big game—you have to get a certain number of recruitments. And I was developing a couple of cases, and I had sort of made a decision that if I didn’t feel like a recruitment was worth it, I wasn’t going to pursue it. Worth it meaning that I didn’t feel that we were really going to get valuable intelligence from this person. And routinely my immediate boss would say to me, “Well, you can make it look good to headquarters—it’s good for you to get just as many scalps as you can.”
And all of us were kind of trained in a way to make things sound good to headquarters. But headquarters, meanwhile, was a big void. There’s nobody at the helm back there, really. So it’s all kind of this elaborate game where the chief of station is looking out for himself and his station, his little fiefdom, which he wants to look good.
Another case officer who also served in the Directorate of Operations before, during, and after September 2001 agreed. The officer said that despite the shuffle at the top with the arrival of Tenet and Pavitt, by September 2001 nothing much had changed in terms of the excessive focus on recruitments, many of which were phony:
I saw a lot of backbiting and backstabbing and a lot of self-promotion, and a lot of fabricating of cables overseas that turned into nothing. And the reason why they were portraying these cases as active cases was because they were getting promotions based on how many cases they ran.
They were either making them up out of whole cloth, or sending cable after cable saying this person is so wonderful and he’s doing this and he’s doing that and he’s recruited and he’s agreed to X, Y, and Z, and then when the case gets turned over to somebody else, the person that was supposedly the recruitment sits down with this other person, saying, “You’re who? I never agreed to work for the CIA, what are you talking about?”
There’s a warm turnover, which is when officers are together and they are introduced together, and there are cold turnovers, when for whatever reason they can’t have that introduction. So basically the next person calls them up—can you meet me, I’m Joe Blow’s best friend, and now I’m your best friend. So in a lot of these cases it would be a cold turnover. The reason that would happen was that promotions were tied to recruitment number.
Still another case officer, who was working at the agency during that same time period, was shocked at how amateurish the recruitment operations were:
It’s absolutely appalling. We knew this wasn’t the way to do business. We knew that times had changed. But you still do a little role-playing—it was silly. To go to little parties. I had a boss whose goal was to see how many business cards you were able to take back. And you’d get little kudos for how many cards you would get. I would just go up to people and say, “I’m having a contest, I need business cards,” and I would come back with thirty business cards. And my boss would say, “That’s fantastic.”
But you know none of these people had anything useful. It didn’t matter, it was just numbers. It’s all quantity—It’s just how many reports, how many numbers. As much as they say that it’s not, it really is. So the people you end up getting and learning a lot about are worthless. I used to make cases and cases and complain and complain and say these people are worthless, they’re taking your money, they’re taking your time, they’re taking your resources. It just didn’t matter.
It’s such a numbers game, it was shocking. I had one case I was running and I knew it was bad—he wasn’t a bad guy, he was just giving us crap. And nobody cared. I said let’s just get rid of this—take the money and put it toward a more useful program. But they won’t because it looks good. It could be two thousand dollars a month, it could be five thousand dollars a month. And there were so many cases like this. People liked to joke, “It’s like spending three thousand dollars to have coffee with somebody. It’s like a three-thousand-dollar coffee day.”
I was in one domestic office where the person who put out the most reports got a paper crown from Burger King and a little prize, like a gift certificate at an Olive Garden restaurant. They would cut their reports so they would have more numbers or they would just put out crap, and no one would care, just so they could say I got the dinner this month. And it was a way to get promoted. Can you imagine people running around with Burger King crowns on—giving them an Olive Garden gift certificate? I think it is so ingrained.
The decision to keep CIA employees at arm’s length from the terrorist organizations was a serious mistake. At the same moment the CIA was convinced Al Qaeda was impenetrable, a number of American citizens and other westerners were secretly joining Al Qaeda in Afghanistan—and being welcomed with open arms. Among them was John Walker Lindh, who eventually, without even trying, began to hear bits and pieces of the September 11 plot against the United States. A twenty-year-old college dropout from Marin County, California, whose only preparation was to grow a beard, study the Koran, and learn a little Arabic.
In May 1996, Israel’s Grapes of Wrath invasion of Lebanon came to its violent conclusion with the massacre at Qana. At about the same time, bin Laden moved back to Afghanistan. For his hideout, he picked a site deep in the remote and rugged Hindu Kush mountain range in the eastern part of the country. Then under the control of Yunis Khalis, an influential warlord who would later join the Taliban, it was an appropriate choice. “Kush” in Persian is derived from the verb “to slaughter.” Almost impenetrable, the chain of cloud-piercing peaks and deep stony valleys is nearly a thousand miles long and two hundred miles wide, with over two dozen perpetually snow-covered summits more than four miles high.
As bin Laden was planning his move to the remote mountains of Afghanistan, where communications would be a serious problem, his man in London, Khalid al Fawwaz, had a solution. “To solve the problem of communication,” he wrote to bin Laden in 1996, “it is indispensable to buy the satellite phone.” Bin Laden agreed, and al Fawwaz, who would later be charged with conspiring with bin Laden to murder American citizens abroad (he is awaiting extradition from England), turned to a student at the University of Missouri at Columbia, Ziyad Khalil. Khalil had become a spokesman for the rights of Muslim students at the university and he agreed to help al Fawwaz purchase the $7,500 satellite phone, although there is no evidence that he knew he was procuring it on behalf of bin Laden. After doing some research, Khalil then bought the phone from a firm on New York’s Long Island.
Over the next two years, the phone was used for hundreds of calls, to London, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Sudan. Bin Laden’s telephone number—00873-682505331—also turned up in the private phone books and date-planners of terrorists in Egypt and Kenya. It was even used to disseminate a February 1998 declaration of war which declared that American civilians should be killed. From 1996 through 1998, Khalil ordered more than 2,000 minutes of telephone airtime for bin Laden’s phone.
In a lucky break, NSA obtained bin Laden’s phone number and was able to secretly eavesdrop on it as the signals transited communications satellites.
Hidden away with a small circle of supporters in the caves of the Hindu Kush, bin Laden had the motive for his war, but what he lacked was the means to carry it out. Within a month he would have his answer. For nearly a decade, the United States had largely been immune from major, organized terrorism overseas. But that was about to change.
On June 25, 1996, a monstrous explosion ripped through the Khobar Towers, a high-rise housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. It was home to the USAF 4404th Wing—an occupying force in the eyes of many Muslims. A later investigation by the Defense Special Weapons Agency determined that the truck bomb was the largest terrorist device ever directed at Americans up until that time. Estimated to have the explosive force of 20,000 pounds of TNT, it was bigger than the bombs used in Oklahoma City, the World Trade Center, and even the Marine Corps compound in Beirut, which was estimated to be about 12,000 pounds of force. In all, nineteen Americans were killed and 372 were wounded.
After a long investigation, the Justice Department charged fourteen members of the Saudi Hezbollah with, among other things, use of weapons of mass destruction against American nationals.
Although bin Laden, according to the Justice Department, had nothing to do with the attack, it appears to have had a major impact on him. Soon afterward, he frequently pointed to the operation with pride. Bin Laden would tell a reporter from CNN, “We look upon those heroes, those men who undertook to kill the American occupiers in Riyadh and Khobar. We describe those as heroes and describe them as men. They have pulled down the disgrace and submissiveness off the forehead of their nation.”
For bin Laden, dripping with hatred and looking for a way to fight back, the massive bombing at Khobar Towers may have provided him with the answer. The problem was lack of knowledge and experience with international terrorism. As bin Laden sought to expand Al Qaeda from a local guerrilla organization into an international terrorist network, he needed someone with both technical know-how and international experience. The man with the perfect résumé was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
Following the arrest of Abdul Hakim Murad on January 7, 1995, as he and Ramzi Yousef were cooking chemicals for Bojinka in the Philippines, Yousef managed to escape back to Pakistan. But just a month later, he was located, arrested, and brought to the United States. His uncle, Khalid Shaikh, however, was far more careful—constantly using different aliases—and managed to elude the worldwide manhunt that followed an indictment for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
After remaining in the Philippines for a number of months, Khalid Shaikh departed for the wealthy Gulf state of Qatar in late 1995. There, under an assumed name, he was provided living accommodations on a large farm outside Doha, the capital. It was owned by Interior Minister Abdullah bin Khalida Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family. Hearing of plans by the United States to request Qatar’s foreign minister to hand Khalid Shaikh over to U.S. officials, Khalid Shaikh fled Qatar, once again escaping capture. From Qatar, Khalid Shaikh flew into the welcoming arms of Osama bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
To some extent they were an odd team—the rail-thin ascetic used to flowing white robes and quoting the Koran, and the chubby high-flyer with a fondness for white tuxedos and ladies of the night. Their common denominator was a shared hatred for Israel and the United States. Al Qaeda would also reflect a similar mix among its members—worshipers and womanizers, drinkers and devotees. The glue that kept them together was their deep-seated belief that the United States and Israel had declared war on the Muslim world, and that it was time to defend both their religion and their homelands.
Now, with Khalid Shaikh, a terrorist mastermind, directing Al Qaeda’s worldwide operations, bin Laden had his “know-how” and decided it was time to launch his war. On August 23, 1996, he issued his call to action: “My Muslim Brothers of The World . . . Your brothers in Palestine and in the land of the two Holy Places [Saudi Arabia] are calling upon your help and asking you to take part in fighting against the enemy—your enemy and their enemy—the Americans and the Israelis. They are asking you to do whatever you can, with your own means and ability, to expel the enemy, humiliated and defeated, out of the sanctities of Islam.”
“It should not be hidden from you,” he wrote, “that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims’ blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon, are still fresh in our memory . . . the people of the cross [Americans] had come with their horses [soldiers] and occupied the land of the two Holy Places [Saudi Arabia]. And the Zionist Jews fiddling as they wish with the Al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem].”