Also orbiting high in the heavens are imaging satellites, including two Advanced Crystal and a newer Enhanced Crystal with optical and infrared sensors. Three Lacrosse/Onyx imaging radar satellites have the capability to see at night and through clouds. Weighing about 15 tons apiece, the Crystals are similar to the Hubble Space Telescope with two-and-a-half-meter mirrors, only pointed down to earth instead of into deep space. From hundreds of miles above, orbiting from pole to pole, they were capable of seeing objects on the ground as small as ten centimeters across—about four inches—during the day. The Lacrosse satellites could “see” about two to three feet at night.
Twice a day, each of the school-bus-size spacecraft would pass overhead for about three minutes, peering down into Tarnak Farm. Even if not directly above, the sophisticated slant-range capability of the camera system would allow for quality imagery one hundred miles to the left or right of its ground track. As the NRO’s orbital engineers kept the satellites flying, imagery analysts from NIMA used powerful computers to turn the digital pixels into an interactive 3-D visualization of the back alleys and dusty passageways within the compound. This would give the agency a “fly-through” ability to virtually walk the streets of Tarnak Farm.
While the imagery was not detailed enough to actually spot bin Laden by appearance, and the brief fly-over time did not allow a capability to track his movements, the pictures clearly showed many families, children, women, and other innocent people constantly moving within the compound and in and out of its buildings.
Because there was no way to guarantee a successful surgical operation, and every likelihood that a raid by a motley collection of hired guns not known for their moderation could turn into a bloody massacre, the CIA’s FD/Trodpint kidnapping operation was stillborn. It was rejected by senior officials at both the CIA and White House and never even reached the desk of President Clinton.
The realization that bin Laden had declared war on the United States became obvious to everyone at least by August 7, 1998, when the American embassies in East Africa were blown up. Once again, the CIA was caught totally by surprise. Because the agency had spent most of its time and money on its band of Afghan soldiers of fortune, and no effort trying to actually penetrate the group, in Afghanistan or elsewhere, it picked up not a whisper of the long-planned and complex plot. The attacks followed two years of public threats by bin Laden, including a clear declaration of war only months earlier on network American television.
The surprise attack was a massive blow to an agency established following World War II specifically to prevent such surprises. George Tenet acknowledged as much in his confirmation hearings. The business of the intelligence community, he said, is “not to observe and report, but to warn and protect.”
For decades, pressing the government’s alarm bell has been the responsibility of a single CIA official with the title National Intelligence Officer for Warning. Such a concept began in 1953, when then CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith established a twenty-four-hour-a-day warning center known as the National Indications Center. The organization’s mandate was to monitor the world’s largest military forces and provide early warning of any mobilizations. It was created on the heels of the intelligence community’s spectacular failures to warn of the Berlin blockade, the North Korean invasion of the South, and the Chinese entry into the Korean War.
But more intelligence failures followed, including the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Arab-Israeli War of October 1973, and the surprise overthrow of the Shah’s government in Iran by the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini in 1979. This led to the establishment of the National Warning Staff and the National Intelligence Officer for Warning (NIO/W) as the single person with his or her finger on the buzzer. Since 1996 through at least 2004, that person was Robert D. Vickers, whose background was in imagery analysis.
In a little-known action in the mid-1990s, however, responsibility for terrorist warnings was removed from the NIO/W and placed in the lap of the head of the Counterintelligence Center, Jeff O’Connell.
In retaliation for the embassy bombings, Clinton ordered a cruise missile attack on a bin Laden camp at Zhawar Kili in eastern Afghanistan. It was a place bin Laden had occasionally used to meet with members of the international press, or to issue statements, such as his declaration of war against “Jews and Crusaders.” The CIA had received intelligence that a meeting was to take place there on August 20 and that bin Laden might be among those attending. But retired Marine General Anthony C. Zinni, responsible for the Middle East and Central Asia as chief of the Central Command at the time, said “the intelligence wasn’t that solid” and the odds of hitting bin Laden with a cruise missile “was a long shot, very iffy.”
When the smoke cleared following the hit by sixty-five U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles, costing about $750,000 each, there were about twenty-one people dead and scores wounded, most Pakistani. Bin Laden and top members of Al Qaeda were not among them. Another thirteen missiles streaked over the Indian Ocean and came down on a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. Known as the al Shifa plant, the CIA had claimed that intelligence showed that it was owned by bin Laden and was producing chemical weapons, neither of which proved to be true.
In fact, the CIA’s intelligence on Sudan was so bad that just two years before, the agency was forced to formally withdraw more than one hundred of its intelligence reports on the country after reaching the conclusion that their key source was a fabricator. In addition, the United States had closed its embassy in Sudan—and without an embassy, the CIA is without spies.
Thus, their information came from a mix of defectors and opposition groups, neither of which are traditionally very reliable, and several foreign liaison relationships. The agency had obtained a soil sample from outside the plant, revealing the presence of Empta, a chemical used to make VX nerve gas. But this also later proved suspect. Eventually, even officials within the State Department and CIA began admitting the obvious. “As an American citizen, I am not convinced of the evidence,” said one administration official who acknowledged that the intelligence may have been a mistake.
In the end, the only winner was Osama bin Laden. All along his goal, and that of his top leadership, was to draw the United States deeper and deeper into the sinkhole of a war in the Middle East. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s close associate and confidant, argued that Al Qaeda should bring the war to “the distant enemy” in order to provoke the Americans to strike back and “personally wage the battle against the Muslims.” It was that battle that bin Laden and al-Zawahiri wanted to spark. As they made clear in their declaration of war “against Jews and Crusaders,” they believed that the United States and Israel had been waging war against Muslims for decades. Now their hope was to draw the Americans into a desert Vietnam, with bin Laden in the role of North Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh.
“I think that raid really helped elevate bin Laden’s reputation in a big way, building him up in the Muslim world,” said Harlan Ullman, a defense analyst at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. “My sense is that because the attack was so limited and incompetent, we turned this guy into a folk hero.”
In an address to the nation explaining his military response in Afghanistan and Sudan, President Bill Clinton declared: “A few months ago, and again this week, bin Laden publicly vowed to wage a terrorist war against America.’’ About the same time, he signed a Top Secret “Memorandum of Notification” authorizing the agency to use lethal force if necessary to capture bin Laden and his top deputies.
Yet it was not until December 1998, four months later, that Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet finally came to the same conclusion and declared war on bin Laden. In an internal memorandum to senior CIA managers, he exclaimed: “We must now enter a new phase in our effort against bin Laden . . . We are at war . . . I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside [the] CIA or the [intelligence] community.”
By then it was becoming more and more clear that bin
Laden had his eyes on the ultimate prize—the United States. On December 1, an intelligence community assessment of bin Laden warned, “UBL is actively planning against U.S. targets . . . Multiple reports indicate UBL is keenly interested in striking the U.S. on its own soil . . . Al Qaeda is recruiting operatives for attacks in the U.S. but has not yet identified potential targets.” Soon thereafter, another report cautioned, “The intelligence community has strong indications that Bin Laden [
sic
] intends to conduct or sponsor attacks inside the United States.”
But the “wartime” CIA looked a lot like the “peacetime” CIA. Tenet’s “declaration of war” was so low-key that not even the assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division had even heard of it. Neither had senior officials in the Pentagon or the U.S. military. And despite his order that “I want no resources or people spared in this effort,” Tenet never even bothered to increase the personnel strength of the Counterterrorism Center (CTC) following his “declaration of war.” Nor did he increase the numbers after the December 1999 Millennium terrorism attempt, or after bin Laden’s deadly October 2000 attack on the USS
Cole
.
The failure to translate words to actions greatly angered many within the CTC. One former CTC chief said his organization, in the years leading up to the fall of 2001, constantly lacked adequate people, money, and authorization to undertake appropriate operations against Al Qaeda. He recalled a conversation with Deputy Director of Operations James Pavitt, who said “there were not enough personnel to go around and that CTC was already well-supplied with staff compared to other CIA divisions.” The feeling was the same within the bin Laden unit—Alec Station—according to a former chief of that organization. “We never had enough officers from the Directorate of Operations,” he said. “The officers we had were greatly overworked. . . . We also received marginal analytic support from the Directorate of Intelligence.”
“In hindsight,” Tenet now admits, “I wish I had said, ‘Let’s take the whole [bin Laden] enterprise down,’ and put five hundred more people there sooner.’’
But while Tenet can be blamed for not putting money and people where his mouth was, the real problem is simply the nature of the post–Cold War world. During the half-century when Moscow sat fixed at the center of a giant bull’s-eye of intelligence targets, prioritization was easy. The only question was how to divide people and resources between the Soviet military, diplomatic missions, and satellite countries. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, the giant bull’s-eye disappeared and was replaced by a shooting gallery with black silhouette targets popping up everywhere—in back, in front, behind rocks, under bushes. The public, the press, and the Congress were requiring the intelligence community to see everywhere at all times, which was not only impossible but also irrational.
Targeting went from a steady state to wild surges. With North Korea becoming a growing threat, much of the intelligence community trained its eyes, ears, and human agents in that direction. But that left India and Pakistan wide open, and the spy world was caught red-faced when India suddenly exploded its underground nuclear weapon. As more resources were redirected toward the subcontinent to make sure that didn’t happen again, a crisis would break out in another part of the world and the intelligence community would come up short and have to again surge in another direction. When American forces suddenly went into Haiti, NSA had only one person fluent in the local Haitian Creole dialect. Likewise with Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and on and on.
“As I declared war against Al Qaeda in 1998,” said Tenet, “in the aftermath of the East Africa embassy bombings—we were in our fifth year of round-the-clock support to Operation Southern Watch in Iraq. Just three months earlier, we were embroiled in answering questions on the India and Pakistan nuclear tests and trying to determine how we could surge more people to countering weapons of mass destruction proliferation. In early 1999, we surged more than eight hundred analysts and redirected collection assets from across the intelligence community to support the NATO bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.’’
Tenet also points a finger of blame at Congress for not giving him all the money he asked for. “Senator Kyl once asked me,” Tenet said, “‘How much money are you short?’ ‘I’m short $900 million to $1 billion every year for the next five years’ is what I answered. And we told that to everybody downtown for as long as anybody would listen and never got to first base. So you get what you pay for. . . . And everybody wonders why you can’t do all the things people say you need to do. Well, if you don’t pay at the front end, it ain’t going to be there at the back end.’’
But lack of funding is often a cop-out for other failures, such as moving more quickly from a Cold War mentality within the Clandestine Service to a real-world paradigm. That is a matter not of money but of leadership. Beyond retooling and rebuilding the CTC and the CIA, Tenet was faced with a major problem when it came to reorganizing the entire intelligence community to fight terrorism. Few realize that the Director of Central Intelligence has real direct control over only 15 percent of America’s total spy world. The man who controls the other 85 percent is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and he indicated early on in his current job that he expects to remain in control. Yet he was far more concerned with downsizing the Pentagon than reorganizing and reinvigorating the intelligence community.