But whereas the two Saudis successfully received visas to the United States in April 1999 from the American embassy in Jeddah and were undergoing training, the two Yemenis were turned down, leaving them short two pilots. By the fall, however, they had the solution to their problem. Among the applications received for guerrilla training at the camps were four from Germany that looked enormously promising—most were Western-educated, spoke English very well, had technical training, and were dedicated to the cause. On November 29, 1999, Mohamed Atta flew to Istanbul and then boarded Turkish Airlines Flight 1662 to Karachi, Pakistan, on his journey to Afghanistan. For security, the others departed on different days and took different routes.
When they arrived in Kandahar, according to a senior intelligence official who has access to the interrogation reports of Khalid Shaikh and others, they were welcomed with open arms. “They wanted to go off and do jihad, and their destination was Chechnya during the fall of ’99,” he said. “They show up in the camps and they’re manna from heaven, because they have lived in the West, they have good passports, they have good technical skills, speak English in varying degrees, and they were right at a time when this plot is being formulated, and they go, ‘Wow.’” In an unusual honor, they were invited in for a personal one-on-one meeting with bin Laden.
As the Hamburg four underwent intensive training at the camp, Khalid Shaikh was in the middle of planning another spectacular attack against the United States. Having previously hit at the State Department with the embassy bombings, he now intended to send the same message to the Pentagon, with a massive suicide bombing of a U.S. naval ship. Both Almihdhar and Alhazmi were scheduled to take part, and they were spending their days training for their roles in that as well as the air attacks.
In late December, however, plans were made to send them to the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur for a secret and important meeting the following month, a meeting that may have dealt with both plots, the USS
Cole
and September 11. The travel arrangements for Almihdhar and Alhazmi’s trip were being put together at a safe house in Yemen used by Al Qaeda for logistics, and as a sort of clearinghouse for information to be passed on to bin Laden.
The building was owned by Almihdhar’s father-in-law, Ahmed Al-Hada, a Yemeni and a follower of bin Laden. In a lucky break, the CIA had obtained the address and phone number as a result of an interrogation of one of the terrorists involved in the embassy bombing in Nairobi. NSA put the phone on its watchlist and began listening. Then, in late December, details of the meeting in Kuala Lumpur were mentioned on a cell phone call to the house, along with the name “Khalid Almihdhar” and Alhazmi’s first name, “Nawaf.” NSA was able to intercept the call and passed the details to a special CIA unit called Alec Station.
As Almihdhar’s name flowed into the agency’s giant ear, America’s spy world was getting the first tiny piece of a large and complex puzzle. It was a sudden and lucky break for the U.S. intelligence community—an organization set up following the attack on Pearl Harbor to never allow another surprise attack. Now the question was whether they would be able to complete the puzzle in time.
CHAPTER 8
KANDAHAR
In 1996, the Directorate of Operations named Gary Schroen, a veteran case officer with twenty-six years in the Clandestine Service, to be chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan. Stocky and graying, with a touch of the Midwest in his speech, he was an old Afghan hand who had twice before served tours in Islamabad and was fluent in Dari, which was spoken in Afghanistan.
With the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, Afghanistan had once again reverted to its position as an odd little country with a strange-sounding name. The only people still talking about it were a handful of retirees who would get together for long lunches in out-of-the-way restaurants in northern Virginia. There they would reminisce about the “good war,” the one they won, the one that can never be taken from them. In an agency where victories are rare, and acknowledging them even rarer, the time they beat the Russians in the snowcapped ridges and craggy pinnacles of Afghanistan is the CIA’s Normandy.
On the evening of February 15, 1989, a high-priority “Immediate” message from the CIA’s station in Islamabad, Pakistan, clanked out on a teletype in headquarters. It was just two words, made from X’s, but they covered the entire page: “WE WON.” The last Russian soldier had crossed the Termez Bridge into Uzbekistan. For the case officers in the DO, the sound of corks popping from bottles of young champagne replaced the bang of deadly mortar rounds.
With the American embassy in Kabul abandoned following the war with the Soviets, the CIA had a serious problem. In countries without U.S. embassies, the agency is virtually deaf and blind because nearly all Clandestine Service officers are hidden under the light cover of embassy diplomats. Without an embassy, the CIA was out in the proverbial cold.
Placed in charge of “Kabul station” in Islamabad during an earlier tour in the late 1980s, Gary Schroen’s first mission was to act as paymaster for the four dozen or so former Afghan commanders still on the agency’s payroll. One of those, Ahmed Shah Massoud, alone received a hefty $200,000 a month from the agency. But this was to be kept secret from the Pakistani ISI because he was also getting bags of cash from them.
Initially, the CIA targeted its highly paid Afghan agents against Muhammad Najibullah, the Soviet puppet left in charge of Afghanistan when the Russians pulled out. During secret meetings, preppy CIA officers would spread out satellite photographs in front of bearded Afghans and Pakistani intelligence officials wearing salwars. Jabbing their fingers, they would point out specific locations, such as Sarobi Road in Kabul, and explain where to place the explosives and how to set up the machine-gun nests to ambush Najibullah’s convoys.
In retrospect, one now wonders how much better off the United States would have been had the CIA stopped with the ouster of the Soviet military and simply left Muhammad Najibullah in office. But under the Reagan and George H. W. Bush presidencies, the CIA’s budget and secret mandate for covert action was considerable, as were their marching orders.
In the long CIA war to replace the Afghan leader with their own puppet, thousands were killed and maimed. Many of the proxies used to fight the battles were Islamic fundamentalists. Terror tactics were often employed. At one point, Najibullah warned, “If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan . . . Afghanistan will be turned into a center for terrorism.” He was right, but in the monochromatic world of the Reagan and Bush administrations, all that mattered was overthrowing pro-Communist leaders. Worrying who came after them was beyond their field of intellectual vision.
Thus, in 1992, the CIA succeeded. Najibullah was ousted. Like a child’s toy, the United States wanted Afghanistan only because the Russians wanted it; and when the Russians were gone, so were the United States and the CIA. But the victory would rapidly prove Pyrrhic.
What the CIA left behind, in the hands of feuding warlords, was a country in violent chaos, armed to the teeth with everything from Swiss antiaircraft cannons to American Stinger surface-to-air missiles. Of the 2,300 missiles delivered to the anti-Soviet mujahideen during the war, 600 still remained missing. According to some estimates, Afghanistan by then contained more personal weapons than all those in India and Pakistan combined. More such weapons had been smuggled, dropped, and trucked into Afghanistan during the 1980s than to any other country in the world.
When the CIA ousted Najibullah, they walked away and left the door wide open for Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, a group of radical Islamic fundamentalists, to walk right in. Bin Laden arrived by chartered Ariana Afghan Airlines jet in May 1996, and by the summer of that year the Taliban, promising an end to warlordism and a return to law and order, was building up its forces to take over the country.
Now in 1996, with bin Laden becoming a threat, the CIA had returned after its four-year absence and Gary Schroen was trying to pick up the pieces. In September 1996, Schroen began by attempting to reactivate his covert relationship with Ahmed Shah Massoud, the fearsome Afghan guerrilla commander who had helped force the Soviets, and later Najibullah, out of the country. Following Najibullah’s ouster, Massoud became the defense minister in the weak and crumbling Kabul government.
Schroen asked Massoud for his help in developing intelligence on bin Laden from his contacts in Afghanistan. But unlike in the war years, Schroen no longer had large bags of American dollars to offer him. Instead, he suggested to Massoud that if he could help recover some of the six hundred missing Stinger missiles, the CIA would pay him handsomely for them. Massoud was unenthusiastic but said he had eight of his own he could return and agreed to see what he could do to help with bin Laden.
But by then it was too late.
On September 25, less than a week after Schroen’s visit, Taliban forces financed largely by bin Laden made an aggressive push on Kabul. The next day, Massoud and his loyalists fled to the Panjshir Valley in the far northern part of the country. By nightfall, the Taliban was in control and bin Laden was more protected than ever. Once again, the news caught the CIA by surprise. The United States was left not only with the Taliban and bin Laden, but with the possibility that they were armed with many of the more than six hundred missing Stingers—each one capable of taking down a passenger jet. Some reports indicated that Mullah Mohammed Omar, leader of the Taliban, had at least fifty-three of the deadly weapons himself.
Seeing a possible disaster in the making, headquarters authorized Schroen to arrange a meeting with Taliban leaders, fly to the Afghan city of Kandahar, and negotiate for the return of the missiles. This would have meant providing the cash-strapped fundamentalists with between six and eight million dollars. Accompanied by other embassy officials, Schroen arrived on a chartered United Nations plane in February 1997. Leaving the airport, they traveled through the bleached and barren landscape of southern Afghanistan, passing mud-and-wattle buildings dusted with cinnamon-colored sand blown from the vast desert plains.
Rickety local jitneys crowded with bearded men in pancake hats filled the streets as they arrived in Kandahar. The second-largest city in the country, it sits at an important crossroads, the point where the main road from Kabul branches northwest to Herat and southeast to Quetta in Pakistan. They passed by the large octagonal Mausoleum of Ahmed Shah Durrani, with its coffee-colored brick exterior, delicately tiled in blue, green, yellow, and brown. Capped by a blue dome, it was built in honor of Durrani, considered the father of Afghanistan, who led Pashtun tribes to conquer lands from Mashad in Iran to Srinagar in Pakistan and created the first modern Afghan state in the eighteenth century.
The visit did not go well. Mullah Omar refused permission to meet with them and sent them instead to a local governor, who rejected the offer. By then bin Laden had fully moved to Kandahar and was living in a compound near where Schroen was staying, while organizing local construction projects.
It was a wilderness of mirrors. The CIA was after bin Laden, who was protected by the Taliban. The Taliban, in turn, received considerable covert military and financial support from Pakistan, which received considerable aid and support from the United States.
But it was loose missiles that remained the highest priority for the CIA in 1997. The image of an American passenger jet blown out of the sky by one of the agency’s Stingers was something no one wanted to contemplate. So, shortly after his failed mission to Kandahar, CIA station chief Schroen boarded another United Nations supply flight and hitched a ride to Taloqan in the remote far north, the redoubt of Ahmed Shah Massoud.
Once the battleground for Genghis Khan, Taloqan means “Lake of Blood.” It was a bustling town with wide avenues lined with trees and packed with horse-drawn taxicabs, firewood-laden donkeys, and colorfully painted trucks belching clouds of blue-gray exhaust. Sitting at the heart of the city was a sprawling bazaar that sold bubbling water-pipes, carved white tobacco pipes, and hand-woven carpets. Taloqan also provided access to nearby Tajikistan, the former Soviet republic, where Massoud would obtain shipments of arms and supplies.
Again Schroen asked for Massoud’s assistance in rounding up the missing weapons. He also asked for his help in providing intelligence on bin Laden, but given his distance from both Kabul and Kandahar, in addition to the fact that they were enemies, there was little likelihood that much information would be forthcoming. And again, except for some secure communications gear, the agency would provide him no money without producing some Stingers. Having lost his battle-scarred country and now reduced to life in a mountain hideout, Massoud wanted more from the CIA. Nevertheless, he agreed to help with the missiles in the hope that it would lead to greater support later on.
In addition to bin Laden, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center was also very interested in finding another person, one who topped the agency’s own Most Wanted list: Mir Amal Kasi. He achieved that ranking on the bitterly cold morning of January 25, 1993, when he parked his pickup truck near the entrance to CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and stepped out with an AK-47 assault rifle. At the height of morning rush-hour traffic, Kasi took aim at cars stopped at a red light, waiting to turn down the agency’s access road.
The first shot smashed through the rear window of a Volkswagen Golf driven by twenty-eight-year-old Frank Darling, an agency Clandestine Service employee. “Oh my God,” he yelled to his wife of three months, Judy Becker-Darling, who was sitting next to him. “I’ve been shot. Get down!”