Rather than wage a smart intelligence war—increasing linguists and analysts, recruiting Americans whose appearance and background fit the part, and then developing creative ways for the Clandestine Service to penetrate Al Qaeda—Tenet simply turned again to the knuckle draggers: covert action. It was a route he himself had warned against at the time of his move into the director’s office. Using secret wars to prop up failed foreign policy leads only to disaster, Tenet cautioned. History books are filled with examples, from the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam to the Iran-contra scandal. Now the CIA would again be used to substitute for America’s failed and destructive Middle East policies.
The latest plan involved stationing two Los Angeles–class attack submarines, armed with cruise missiles, deep under the waves of the Arabian Sea off the coast of Pakistan. At the same time, Alec Station would continue to use its FD/Trodpint team to try to spot bin Laden and determine when he was in a location that was targetable by the missiles.
But after the team sent word that bin Laden had been spotted back at Tarnak Farm, again Clinton, Tenet, and the rest of the senior officials who made up what was known as the “Small Group” were faced with the same dilemma as before. How could they take out an individual with a cluster of highly explosive cruise missiles without killing dozens of innocent civilians, including women and children, nearby? Other questions involved the legality of assassinating someone who at that time hadn’t even been indicted for a crime, and the certainty of the identification, especially since Tenet was unable to get a second independent positive ID. Without that, he told the group, he could not recommend the strike.
If bin Laden’s goal was to create a sense of panic within the upper reaches of the American government, he appeared to be succeeding, as senior officials seemed to leap in desperation from plan to plan. During a December 1998 visit to Washington, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was asked for help in capturing bin Laden. He suggested that the CIA train a group of his commandos who could be stationed along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan and placed on the ready to help capture bin Laden.
Clinton agreed, but senior administration officials knowledgeable of the deal soon realized that what Sharif really was after was an elite commando unit for his own purposes. Always worried about a possible coup, the team could act as his personal bodyguards, trained and paid for by the CIA.
Weeks later, the CIA discovered that someone who
might
be bin Laden was falcon hunting in western Afghanistan with what appeared to be members of the royal family from the United Arab Emirates. To some in Alec Station, the attitude was “Let’s just blow the thing up. And if we kill bin Laden, and five sheikhs are killed, I’m sorry.” But both Tenet and the White House realized the international furor that would develop, especially if they made a mistake—which was likely because their only ground source was FD/Trodpint—and vetoed the plan.
Increasingly under Mike ______, its CIA chief, Alec Station began taking on the feel of the king’s executioner. After the decision against blowing up the Tarnak Farm and the hunting camp, Mike unleashed a blast of angry e-mails to an assortment of officials. Some saw him as an unkempt, tactless, annoying manager who had little understanding of the international ramifications of some of his suggestions. Killing innocent women, children, and members of royal families in harebrained, and likely to fail, cruise missile assassinations was the best way to increase, not decrease, hatred and terrorism directed at the United States.
Complaints began coming in, even from the White House. Mike later acknowledged that many even within his own agency believed he and his unit had gone off the deep end. “The rest of the CIA and the intelligence community looked on our efforts as eccentric and, at times, fanatic,” he said. In 1999, after three years as head of Alec Station, Mike transferred to another job at CIA headquarters.
As his replacement, Tenet picked one of his fast-rising executive assistants, Rich ______. Around the same time as the shakeup in Alec Station, Tenet also changed the guard at the top of the Counterterrorism Center. Jeff O’Connell was sent to Tel Aviv to become chief of station and was replaced by Cofer Black, who had previously served as chief of station in Khartoum, Sudan. While there he became the target of an abortive murder or kidnap plot by Osama bin Laden, so he had a personal as well as professional reason to go after him. Tenet wanted “action,” and he thought Black could get it for him.
Bespectacled and chunky, Black was a throwback to the old days of covert action. His vocabulary overflowed with the macho jargon of war. Black became the top person within the intelligence community charged with sounding the alarm before a terrorist attack—the lookout on the bridge of the
Titanic
.
Despite the change in leadership, the atmosphere within Alec Station remained highly charged and hell-bent to capture or kill bin Laden at almost any cost. But there were also internal frictions. Some DO case officers in the field resented the fact that of the two dozen people working in Alec Station, more than two-thirds were female and that most came from the DI—the Directorate of Intelligence, which is the analytical side of the agency. The DO, they believed, was a man’s world and they did not like to “take direction from the ladies of the Directorate of Intelligence,” said one manager in Alec Station.
And there was bitterness also between the FBI agents assigned to the unit and the CIA officials. They were two separate breeds, with different career paths, different objectives, different responsibilities, and different personalities. The FBI agents were interested not only in gathering intelligence but also collecting evidence for current or future cases, things the spooks had little interest in. Some of the CIA managers, on the other hand, who looked at their job as covert operators—plotting coups, paying off tribal warriors, arranging the shipments of explosives—wanted no interference from the G-men and -women.
The epicenter of the clash between the two cultures was the relationship between Rich and John P. O’Neill, the flashy, outspoken chief of the FBI’s National Security Division in New York. Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1952, O’Neill spent much of his special-agent career as a latter-day Eliot Ness, busting members of the Mafia in Chicago, before moving on to head the bureau’s Counterterrorism Division in Washington prior to New York. He wore wide-lapeled double-breasted Valentino suits and silky black “gangster socks,” was married but lived with another woman, and hung out with journalists at Manhattan’s celebrity-studded watering hole Elaine’s.
As the person in charge of counterterrorism and counterespionage for the New York area, he had regular dealings with Rich and other CIA officials in Alec Station. “They despised the FBI and they despised John O’Neill,” said one FBI friend of O’Neill with knowledge of the clash, “because of his personality, because of his style, because he was John, because they couldn’t be John.”
But it was also O’Neill’s ego, sharp elbows, and abrasiveness that got under the skins of the spooks at Alec Station. “If you get a guy that becomes a little bit too flashy or too full of himself, then sometimes he will promote himself at the expense of the agency,” said one of his colleagues. “By that, usually what happens is that an individual starts giving out information, or he starts doing favors that he shouldn’t be doing—he’s compromising himself, as far as being an FBI agent. So I think there was, sometimes, concern and worry about that with John.”
A CIA official acknowledged the problem. “The working relationships were difficult at times,” he said. “This had been a long-term, sort of systemic type of problem. There’s an underlying difference in mission between law enforcement and intelligence, and that affects the way the two organizations operate. You also have a difference in—‘It’s our stuff, it’s our information, it’s not your stuff and your information, and we’re concerned about how you’re going to use it,’ just generally.”
But the most serious problem was Rich’s lack of management, his myopic obsession with bin Laden, and his focus on the fun and adventure part of the job. While jetting off to secret meetings from Paris to the Hindu Kush, he overlooked the day-to-day routine of ensuring that critical information was shared, never followed up on important clues, and lost track of key members of Al Qaeda.
“Rich was seen by some of his colleagues as typical of the unyielding zealots the unit had seemed to produce one after another since about 1997,” noted
The Washington Post
managing editor Steve Coll. “The bin Laden team seemed to think theirs was the only national security problem that mattered, some of their colleagues felt. They talked about the Al Qaeda threat in apocalyptic terms. And if you weren’t with them, you were against them.”
Instead of engaging in the difficult and tedious work of recruiting and developing a network of sources to penetrate Al Qaeda in Europe, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, Rich and Cofer Black spent much of their time on covert operations. They flew to Tashkent, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, which borders Afghanistan to the north, and financed a strike force led by Uzbek military commanders.
The idea was to use them to kidnap bin Laden, but there was almost no likelihood that such an operation would ever be feasible. Uzbekistan was over a high mountain range and far away from bin Laden’s heavily defended base in southern Afghanistan, and triggering a war with the Taliban was not in their best interest.
Nevertheless, the brutal and corrupt leader of the country, former Communist boss Islam Karimov, was happy to accept the CIA’s bags of money to keep his torture chambers running. And the commando training would be useful to continue the repression of women and religious minorities. Amnesty International called the country’s record in human rights “dire,” with thousands of political prisoners in jail indefinitely and crackdowns on religious dissent and women. “Unfair trials, torture and ill-treatment were routinely associated with these cases,” said the report. “Torture was ‘systematic’ in Uzbekistan.” According to a forensic report commissioned by the British embassy, two prisoners were even boiled to death.
Another recipient of large bags of CIA cash was Ahmed Shah Massoud. The charismatic leader of the Northern Alliance, his principal income came from selling large amounts of quality heroin and opium to European and American drug kingpins. Rich and other DO case officers would fly in to airfields near Massoud’s mountain hideout with briefcases packed with a quarter of a million dollars.
But by December 1999, Massoud’s quixotic quest to retake Afghanistan from the Taliban had become a fantasy. And, far away from his archenemy bin Laden, he could also provide little useful intelligence. Nevertheless, apparently more out of emotion than logic, Alec Station continued to invest enormous energies and hopes that, with U.S. help, Massoud would someday overthrow the Taliban and capture bin Laden. Nothing could be further from reality.
While one part of the CIA was bankrolling Massoud’s group, another part, the CIA’s Counter-Narcotics Center, was warning that he posed a great danger. His people, they warned, were continuing to smuggle large amounts of opium and heroin into Europe. The British came to the same conclusion. White House counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke called Massoud’s Northern Alliance “not a very good group of people to begin with. They’re drug runners. They’re human rights abusers. They’re an ethnic minority. It’s just not something that you’re going to build a national government around.”
As Alec Station squandered its time and money building its secret army, George Tenet, Cofer Black, and Rich were forced to admit the embarrassing truth. After four years and hundreds of millions of dollars, Alec Station had yet to recruit a single source within bin Laden’s growing Afghanistan operation. It was more than embarrassing—it was a scandal.
On December 3, Black’s Counterterrorism Center made a presentation at the White House to the Small Group, the Clinton administration’s most senior national security officials. “At this time,” the briefer said, “we have no penetrations inside [bin Laden’s leadership].” In fact, as they later admitted, prior to September 11, 2001, “the CIA had no penetrations of Al Qaeda leadership, and the Agency never acquired intelligence from anyone that could be acted upon.”
It was George Tenet’s biggest secret. Not only was Al Qaeda never penetrated, neither the Counterterrorism Center nor Alec Station ever picked up a single piece of usable intelligence on bin Laden or his organization, the country’s greatest threat.
It was a dangerous time to be without intelligence. Within days, the 9/11 plotters began their operation.
Osama bin Laden and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed had agreed that four aircraft would be hijacked within the United States and then flown into major targets in New York and Washington. Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, both tested veterans of wars in Chechnya and Bosnia, had been selected to be the first two pilots. Mohamed Atta and his Hamburg team would also be pilots.
Then, that same month, the single clue appeared. NSA intercepted the telephone call to the Al Qaeda safe house in Yemen mentioning Khalid Almihdhar and the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. After an analyst wrote up a report, it was promptly sent off electronically to both FBI headquarters and the CIA. But the FBI dealt primarily with domestic terrorism matters and depended on the CIA for intelligence overseas. That left only Alec Station standing between the hijackers and the lives of 3,000 people.
The NSA intercept indicated that “Khalid,” “Nawaf,” “Salem,” and others were going to be traveling to Kuala Lumpur. CIA analysts later determined that “Khalid” was Khalid Almihdhar. “We knew that some guys that looked as though they were Al Qaeda–associated were traveling to KL,” said a senior intelligence official in a December 2003 interview. “We didn’t know what they were going to do there. We were trying to find that. And we were concerned that there might be an attack, because it wasn’t just Almihdhar and Alhazmi, it was also eleven young guys—which was a term that was used for operatives traveling. We didn’t have the names of the others, and on Alhazmi [who would also take part in the 9/11 attack] we only had his first name, ‘Nawaf.’ So the concern was: What are they doing? Is this a prelude to an attack in KL—what’s happening here?”