If a friendly country wants to get rid of someone they suspect as a CIA spy, there are a number of ways they can go about it. “Liaison [the local country’s intelligence service] will come in and put a photograph down—the chief or somebody. The locals will come in and say we think this guy’s a criminal, what do you think? And the [CIA] chief [of station] will send you a message saying you need to go home, we’ll straighten this out.
“If the liaison service want to be hostile and want to make a point, then they do. In Tokyo, a couple of times they went in and tore up offices and dumped over files belonging to two or three unrelated NOCs at the same time because they thought they were NOCs—and they were correct. Making the point that we could do this if we wanted to. And when you tear up three offices of seemingly disconnected, unconnected people in the same day, you’re making a point there. I think that’s about as muscular as they got. But that’s still pretty benign. They haven’t detained anybody, haven’t made a big scene about it, they’ve gone very privately and said we understand what you’re doing, you need to stop.”
Some NOCs spend their entire careers without ever setting foot in the CIA’s headquarters building. “From the time I became a NOC, I wasn’t allowed anywhere near headquarters,” said the NOC. On the rare occasions they do have to go into the agency offices, they would use an alias and put on a disguise. About once a year, many of them get together for meetings to discuss common problems and exchange ideas on different techniques.
“You’ll come back here for a conference once a year—to Denver or San Antonio or Minneapolis or some place and get together as a group and talk about techniques and updates,” said the NOC. “Sometimes it’s in a secure place, sometimes someone’s working on agency programs as a contractor—TRW or Lockheed—someone from the agency will come in and say they need a meeting room, not really explain what it’s for, but they’ll host a meeting and everyone will come in in alias and spend a week on a business meeting there, ostensibly meeting with that company. And the management will come out and talk to you about various things. They’ll bring out the administrative people to talk to you and things like that.”
One of the major irritants for the NOCs who were very successful in their cover jobs was giving back the money they earn over their government salary. “You don’t get any more than a government paycheck, and for many months you don’t even get that if you’re out of sight, out of mind,” said the NOC. “I had a four-month TDY to a place, and when I got back and talked to my wife for the first time, she hadn’t been paid the entire time I had been gone. That’s obviously quite disturbing, more so to younger people who are closer to the edge than I am, but the money you get from your company, you pay back the difference between one salary and the other. Sometimes very painfully, depending on certain issues. There are a few people who turned back seven-figure commissions for arranging very large deals, and I’m sure that must have been very painful to them. And the company on occasion must have gone to higher-ups at the agency and said, this guy really earned this, how can I make this happen. And the answer is it can’t. It’s not going to happen.”
But, he said, the biggest problem throughout the post-Cold War period was not complaints about money, but a serious lack of enthusiasm for the NOC program by the agency’s top leadership. “It went from miserable to horrible in relative terms. It’s been kind of stuck at horrible for the past ten years,” he said. Even DO case officers in the field would often look down at the NOCs and view them not as highly trained fellow agency employees, but simply as locally recruited spies, or “assets.” “Internal to the NOC program, you were told you guys are the best, that’s why we’re keeping you separate, and all these things, and you’ll handle the most sensitive cases and all this,” he said. “Once you got into the field, it was very different—you got the last choice of cases and the least attention and the most administrative problems. And they had to train the case officers who worked with us to quit saying they were our handlers, because we weren’t assets, we weren’t there for their pleasure.”
According to another senior intelligence official familiar with the NOC program, “They [senior CIA officials] looked at it as a second-class operation, traditionally. They look down at the NOC program. That’s why they shuffle these guys around. . . . I think part of it is out of sight, out of mind.” Like their DO counterparts, the NOCs report to the CIA chief of station in whatever country they are assigned. But unlike the DO case officers, they seldom actually meet with the chief of station, for reasons of security.
Even the critical decision of matching the right experienced NOC to the right country and position was handled haphazardly. “In my time, there was this very nice man—but he was also the doddering old grandfather type who forgot why he came to see you and should have retired twenty years before,” said the NOC. “He would come out and have a discussion with you and he would go back in and represent you. I remember distinctly this guy coming out, and he had Mexico City written on an index card, and I think it was to remind him that there was a need in Mexico City. And he came out and he said Mexico City, and we talked for a long time and we determined that that was not the right place for me and that there was a greater need for me in [an important country in another part of the world] and that I should go into the language program there and go off to [that country]. And two weeks later I got a message saying I was all set to go to Mexico City. And I’m sure what he did was he got back and he took his card out and he said, ‘Oh, Mexico City,’ and went to work on that.”
By the end of the decade, the fact that morale within the agency was bottoming out was a secret senior officials wanted to keep from the public. “There was a lot of conscious ignorance about the outflow of talent in the late nineties,” he said. “There were articles in the newspapers about people leaving in droves, and we got messages on a weekly basis saying people are not leaving in droves. And we’d all look at each other and say, ‘Well, I know four people who have left, and if everyone knows four people who have left, I’d call it a drove. People are definitely leaving.’ Unfortunately, they were good people. A lot of very good people left, and we were told there’s not really a problem, morale is good. Very different from the bottom-up perspective.”
The former NOC said he didn’t understand why the agency never tried to penetrate Al Qaeda with the program, and said it could have been used like the FBI uses undercover agents to penetrate the Mafia. “Is it any riskier than putting a guy into the mob in New York?” he asked. “There are people that will do that, and we just haven’t asked them to. . . . It requires a lot of dedication and sacrifice on the parts of the particular people involved in it. You can parallel the NOC and the embassy-covered operations officer to law enforcement, where you have people in uniform and you have an undercover agent. The person in uniform projects strength and protection and all these things, so that people are deterred. So that if someone wants to approach you and give you something, they know where to find you, because you’re wearing a uniform. But the undercover guys are the ones that are out there, not only collecting information about what’s going on, but able to understand and anticipate what’s going to happen. There’s no reason the intelligence community operations side can’t operate the same way.”
Speaking about his experience in the Middle East, he noted that he had met a number of Americans who had converted to Islam, changed their names, and integrated into the culture in Saudi Arabia and other locations. “People really do truly convert and integrate into that society,” he said, “and there’s no reason that we can’t have—even starting from a purebred white—a guy that does that. But we also have the large number of people who are from the region who are patriotic Americans who you could ask and they’ve got a leg up on doing some of this. It’s very common in law enforcement, and it’s dangerous and people get killed, but the benefits are very great.”
He added, “The agency is only a step away from where they could be. In my own particular instance, in the mid to late nineties, I was going in and out of [a dangerous foreign country hostile to the United States] in alias. And there were a number of times when I had skirmishes at the border that were ugly and that were potentially very damaging and dangerous, and you’re trained well, you know what you’re doing, and everyone understands the risk before they do these things. And so there’s no reason why you can’t just carry that one step further because you’ve got guys who realize this is for the greater good. And anyone out there on the front lines today that’s got a weapon in their hand is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. It’s a different form of it, but there’s no shortage of people ready to make that sacrifice.”
The NOC said he left the CIA at the dawn of the new century because of the lack of risk taking and innovation he found within the agency in general and the NOC program in particular. “Did you ever hear the phrase that they were looking for the real CIA?” he asked, rhetorically. “Because it couldn’t be what we see here, because this is too mundane and well within the ordinary, and so they must have a really supersecret place somewhere doing all that good stuff that you’ve heard about. This must be a cover. And I’ve heard about that. And that really is one of the reasons I left. I went to [a company in private industry] from the agency, and in talking to people there they said, ‘Why did you leave?’ and I said, ‘I wanted the chance to be creative, innovative, take risks, and do something new.’ And the agency should be the place that people go to do those things, rather than flee from it in order to do those things.”
He added, “We’re not the Department of Agriculture, we’re the CIA, we need to be doing things in a different way, and if I can’t get you because it’s four
P.M.
and you’ve gone home and that’s really all you care about, then you need to be working at the Post Office. The Post Office serves a wonderful purpose, but it’s different. They have perfected the bureaucracy at CIA such that you don’t have the climate of esprit de corps that you had in the sixties and pre-’75 era. It’s now another—slightly different—but another government institution. And for all the criticisms and faults that it had pre-’75, I think you did have a real feeling that people were accomplishing things, they were dedicated to their work, it wasn’t just a job. And today I think it’s just a job, which is a shame.”
CHAPTER 9
ALEC STATION
As the threats from bin Laden began to grow, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in January 1996 established a separate unit with the sole mission of collecting intelligence on the Al Qaeda leader and disrupting his network. In an unprecedented action, the unit became a separate CIA “station”—the only one focused on a single individual rather than a country.
Code-named Alec Station, after the son of its founder, the organization was located within the Counterterrorism Center’s warren of cubicles and offices on the first floor of the New Headquarters Building. It began with ten to fifteen case officers and analysts, plus a few FBI agents and analysts. While the chief of the station was from the CIA, his deputy was from the FBI. Three years later, the FBI also created a bin Laden unit at its downtown Washington headquarters.
In addition to its own piece of real estate at CIA headquarters, Alec Station also had the firm backing of the White House. National Security Advisor Anthony Lake had personally approved the creation of the unit, and months earlier President Clinton had signed Presidential Decision Directive 39, titled “U.S. Policy on Counterterrorism.” It was a secret order that instructed the CIA to undertake “an aggressive program of foreign intelligence collection, analysis, counterintelligence, and covert action.” Authority was granted to capture—“render,” in legalese—terrorist suspects “by force . . . without the cooperation of the host government” and bring them to the United States to face justice.
By the summer of 1998, bin Laden was dividing much of his time between a small compound in downtown Kandahar and a much larger one in an isolated part of the desert about three miles from the airport. Known as Tarnak Farm, it was where many of his followers, as well as some family members, were housed. He would also spend some nights there with one of his wives. The walled facility of about one hundred acres had previously served as a government agricultural cooperative and contained about eighty living quarters, many made of baked mud or concrete, and a six-story office building. Eventually, bin Laden also built a training camp for mujahideen within the ten-foot crumbling brown walls of the compound.
The CIA had never developed a capability to infiltrate Al Qaeda with its own trusted officers. Nor did the agency develop any NOCs who could blend in and collect intelligence on the ground in Afghanistan, or supervise the agency’s FD/Trodpint team of tribal fighters. Thus, the agency was left with only a few dozen veteran mujahideen from a war that had ended a decade earlier, a group that had already raised skepticism regarding its veracity and was ridiculed by a number of senior officials. The ridicule increased when officials discovered that the clan lived on a CIA-rented vineyard growing grapes.
Nevertheless, the scheme that called for FD/Trodpint to kidnap bin Laden was the best they could come up with and the decision was made to develop a plan to capture him in the middle of the night from Tarnak Farm. But because the tribal team could not see over the ten-foot wall of bin Laden’s desert compound, the CIA turned from their horseback mercenaries to the highly secret space-borne spies of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
Orbiting in the heavens around the earth was a constellation of spy satellites, each costing more than a billion dollars. Eavesdropping from 22,330 miles in space, a point where they can “hover” over one spot, are several signals intelligence satellites. The Vortex/Mercury systems listen in on microwave communications, including telephone calls; and the Magnum/Orion satellites suck in a variety of other frequencies.