Against All Enemies (14 page)

We then received a report that the records of the Iraqi nuclear program had been removed and hidden in the Agricultural Ministry. Working through the Special Commission, we and the British overtly planned an inspection on another nearby site, but at the last minute it would turn into a surprise raid on the ministry. U.S. and British Special Forces would be among the inspectors and would smash locks and break into files quickly before the Iraqis could react. The problem with the plan, we knew, was how the inspectors would get out once they discovered the nuclear bomb records. Gallucci and I agreed on a standoff; the U.N. inspectors would not leave the site or give up the documents. Meanwhile, the U.S. would prepare a renewed bombing campaign. I gave Gallucci a satellite phone and promised him that we would use it to instruct him to leave the records and depart the area before the bombing started.

The raid worked. Nuclear records were found before the Iraqis figured out what was going on. Iraqi security units arrived quickly, however, and surrounded the ministry. They demanded the documents be returned to them. Gallucci refused and the standoff we anticipated ensued. When Gallucci called in on the satellite phone, I gave him the telephone numbers of U.S. television news organizations, which interviewed him live during the standoff. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft approved a plan to renew bombing and sent it to the President. Scowcroft seemed pleased at the prospect of renewed bombing, perhaps thinking that it might create another chance for the Iraqi military to topple Saddam. The targets were Special Republican Guard units and other units that propped up Saddam.

Gallucci, from the parking lot in Baghdad, called me again in the State Ops Center. I told him how proud we all were: “Bob, this is working. You were great on CNN. Remember, ‘The whole world is watching!' ” Gallucci and I had both been anti–Vietnam War protesters in the 1960s.

“Yeah, I remember that well,” Bob whispered over the satellite telephone, “but Dick, we've found the smoking gun here. These guys almost had the bomb. But the Iraqis are never going to let me out of here with this document.”

Arabic translators on the inspection team had found the annual report of the nuclear weapon program and rendered it into English. It revealed that the design was complete and that enriched material would soon be available in sufficient quantity to conduct the first nuclear explosion. Prior to the outbreak of the war, Iraqi scientists estimated that they were less than a year from that detonation.

“Well, can you hook up a fax machine to the sat phone? We have to get the proof out to the world, to the U.N.” I could taste success, but there were still risks. The standoff in the fenced-in parking lot could get out of hand. The Iraqis surrounding it were well armed.

“No. The fax doesn't work with the satellite phone.” Gallucci and his team had already looked at the options. “We have what they call a digital camera, no film, but we can't get that to work well enough either.” Digital cameras were something very new to us.

“Okay, Bob, you know Beverly Roundtree pretty well, you worked together in PM?” My assistant, Bev, had previously worked for Gallucci when he directed an office in the Pol-Mil Bureau. “She can take dictation for hours. I'm going to put her on the sat phone.”

It did take hours. With the world's television cameras and the Iraqis' guns pointed at the UNSCOM team, a relay of inspectors read Beverly Roundtree the smoking-gun document, which was on the desk of the President and the U.N. Secretary General when they came to work in the morning. As they did, Beverly left the State Department Operations Center and went home to sleep.

Faced with the prospect of renewed U.S. bombing, however, Secretary Baker returned to Washington and convinced President Bush to accept a negotiated settlement of the standoff. Baker held a strong influence over Bush. He had a dedicated telephone on his State Department desk that ran directly to the Oval Office. By my own observation, Baker did not hesitate to initiate calls on that line. In private, Baker did not treat Bush with all the deference a Secretary of State usually accords a President. Baker thought that he had made Bush the President, through Baker's political maneuvering.

Baker also sometimes doubted Bush's skills. At a NATO summit in London early in the administration, Baker had stunned me by coming to sit next to me in an auditorium, as I listened to President Bush's press conference. As Bush batted the reporter's questions, the Secretary of State provided me with a personal color commentary whispering in my ear: “Damn he flubbed that answer…I told him how to handle that one…Oh, no, he'll never know how to deal with that…” I was one of Baker's Assistant Secretaries, but I could not understand why he would go out of his way to disdain the President to an audience of one, me. Over time I came to understand that Baker often doubted the President's judgment. Baker would never have gone to war in the Gulf and made that clear at several points in the months after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The two friends and rivals did, together, demonstrate how an international coalition should be built and how America can get done what it needs without creating self-inflicted wounds. They did, however, fail to manage the postwar challenges, as their successors would also fail to do twelve years on.

After the Gulf War, with Saddam still in power and his army reconstituting, it would be necessary for large-scale U.S. forces to remain in the region, especially in Saudi Arabia where most of the residual forces were based. I was given a Gulfstream jet and told by Baker to fly around the Gulf locking down new agreements with the six Gulf states so we could keep some of our military forces in their countries.

Shuttling up and down the Gulf, we obtained basing agreements with Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman. No longer would we have only secret access arrangements with limited and hidden pre-positioned equipment. A temporary arrangement was also struck with the United Arab Emirates, pending agreement on how to handle U.S. personnel who might break local laws, but U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups could regularly dock near Dubai.

Saudi Arabia, however, would not negotiate a basing agreement. Neither, however, did the King order all U.S. forces to leave as Cheney had said he could. The continued presence of Saddam and his army had changed the King's prewar calculus that the Americans could and would leave when the war in Kuwait was done. The enormous American military presence rapidly dwindled after the war, but it gradually became clear to the Saudi public that some would remain. Fighter squadrons and support aircraft would stay at several air bases. The U.S. military headquarters would also stay active, although at smaller levels. The Saudis also went on a shopping spree for new U.S. arms. With each arms deal came more American civilians to make the weapons work.

Saudi dissidents who had protested the original U.S. presence now complained again that the American forces in the Kingdom were a sacrilege. CIA did not know much about these dissidents, who they were, what they said. The Saudis kept us well away from their internal debates. Among the dissidents was bin Laden, who grew more critical of the King. The Saudi government moved against the dissidents, threatening them with legal and economic punishments. Despite his past work for Prince Turki in Afghanistan and Yemen, bin Laden was no exception to the government's crackdown. In bin Laden's case the government also threatened his extended family and its vast economic holdings. Invited to Khartoum by Hasan al-Turabi, the fundamentalist fanatic who had taken charge in Sudan, a bitter bin Laden decamped across the Red Sea. Soon thereafter, he summoned his Afghan Arabs to join him.

Saddam was still in power. U.N. inspections were being more restricted. U.S. forces were settling in throughout the Gulf. Usama bin Laden had broken with the Saudi regime and moved in with a radical state sponsor of terrorism. It was 1991. As the year ended, the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a legal entity. During the Cold War every military action by one superpower had drawn a reaction by the other. Thus, large-scale shifts of military assets such as the movement of a half million American troops to the Persian Gulf would have risked some dramatic Soviet countermove. Moreover, nations that significantly increased their military relationship with one superpower knew they risked subversion from the other. Thus, the kind of cooperation the United States enjoyed in the First Gulf War would have been impossible during the Cold War.

The Cold War had also served to suppress some traditional ethnic and religious rivalries beneath the heavy glacier of the Communist totalitarian state, particularly in the Balkans and Central Asia where there were many Muslims. To the extent that religion was a political force during the Cold War, it was a weak one promoted by the United States as a counterpoint to the anti-religious ideology of the Soviet Union.

When the Cold War ended, the United States could move massively into the Persian Gulf during a crisis there, ethnic and religious tensions could erupt in the Balkans and Central Asia, and religious fervor could no longer be directed at the Communists. Those feeling disadvantaged by the global system and wishing to blame their lot on foreign forces had only one world-dominant nation to blame for their troubles, one major target to motivate their followers: America.

I
N
1993
THE
C
LINTON ADMINISTRATION
came to office with an agenda to deal with the post–Cold War era, and terrorism was not on it. Terrorism had not been a major issue in the preceding Bush administration either. George H. W. Bush had issued no formal policy on counterterrorism and had chosen to deal with the single major anti-U.S. act of terrorism during his tenure (the bombing of Pan Am 103) through diplomacy, not the use of force. America seemed to be enjoying a period largely free of anti-American terrorism after the tumultuous years of the Reagan administration and its bombings of Lebanon and Libya.

In January 1993 the new National Security Advisor, Tony Lake, had taken the unusual step of asking me to stay on in the White House when the Bush team left. Lake, on Madeleine Albright's advice, asked me to work on post–Cold War issues such as peacekeeping and failed states. While terrorism was in my portfolio of “Global Issues,” it was far down on the new team's priority list. All that was about to change, quickly.

T
HE LARGE, WHITE TELEPHONE CONSOLE BLURTED.
I had never heard it ring before and wasn't initially sure what the noise was. In the little window on the console a name popped up: “Scowcroft.” Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Advisor to the first President Bush, had left the White House the month before, along with almost all of his staff except me and a few other holdovers. How was he calling me now on this highly secure phone? I reached for the handset.

“Did the Serbs do it?” It was Tony. I had no idea what he was talking about. “Did the Serbs bomb it? Was it a bomb?”

“I don't know yet, Tony.” I faked it. “We're checking. Let me get back to you as soon as we have something, soon.”

My next call was to the Situation Room. “Did something just get bombed?”

“Well, something just exploded, we don't know if it was a bomb, sir. The World Trade Center,” a young Navy officer replied. “I know you handle terrorism, sir, and we're supposed to tell you when something happens that might be terrorism, but do you want to know when things happen in the United States too? Do you guys handle domestic crises too?”

The notion that terrorism might occur in the United States was completely new to us then. The National Security Council staff, which I had joined in 1992, had only ever concerned itself with foreign policy, defense, and intelligence issues. “Yes, yes we do,” I vamped, making up my view as I answered. “Anything that happens in the U.S. that could involve foreign agents is our job. Just like the shooting at CIA.” A month earlier, only four days into the Clinton administration, a young Pakistani named Mir Amal Kansi had walked down Virginia Route 123 and shot motorists stopped at a traffic light, waiting to drive into CIA headquarters. Three people had died. Kansi had successfully flown out of the country after the shooting. Neither CIA nor FBI had found out anything interesting about who Kansi was or to what group he belonged. “So what do we know about this explosion in New York?” I asked.

“Well, sir, we're hearing that it was a transformer that erupted, but we will keep you posted. And, sir, we will let you know right away in the future when things blow up, anywhere.”

I turned to Richard Canas, a DEA agent on my staff. “You know anyone in NYPD?”

I
HAD JOINED THE
N
ATIONAL
S
ECURITY
C
OUNCIL STAFF
in 1992 under President Bush and his National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, whom I had come to know during the Gulf War and its aftermath. Scowcroft had been brought back from retirement to do a second tour as National Security Advisor (he had held the position under President Gerald Ford) to clean up the mess that Ollie North and others had made of the NSC Staff. North had been a junior staffer assigned to worry about terrorism. Terrorism had shot to the top of the agenda after the Beirut bombings of our embassy and the Marine barracks, the kidnapping of Americans in Lebanon, the hijackings of American aircraft in the Middle East, and Libya's bombing of a U.S. Army hangout in Berlin.

North had responded vigorously to the problem—a little too vigorously. He and National Security Advisor John Poindexter had crossed the line into secret policies and procedures that were shortsighted and, in some cases, probably illegal, when they arranged to sell arms to Iran in hopes of the release of American hostages held there, and then diverted some of the proceeds to the anti-Communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Congress had outlawed aid to the Contras, and trading arms for hostages violated Reagan's oft-stated insistence that we never negotiate with terrorists. President Reagan and Vice President Bush had escaped, barely, without being shown to be personally culpable. When Bush became President in 1989, he had asked Scowcroft to run a less-activist NSC Staff and to play down the U.S. response to terrorism. Luckily for Scowcroft, with the exception of the attack on Pan Am 103, there had been little anti-American terrorism on his watch. Bush's and Scowcroft's response to Pan Am 103 had been muted, at best. Despite the death of 259 passengers at the hands of Libyan intelligence agents, the United States had not retaliated with force. Instead, it had sought U.N. sanctions on Libya.

When I went to the NSC Staff, it had been to head up a new office to worry about proliferation of missiles and chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Secretary Baker didn't like the idea of that increasingly important issue being run out of the NSC Staff, however, and told Scowcroft so. My assignment was changed to “International Programs,” issues that did not fit into any of the regional offices of the NSC. Among those issues was terrorism, and it was still there, and still a low priority, when Tony called about the explosion at the World Trade Center.

M
EANWHILE,
R
ICHARD
C
ANAS HAD USED
his law enforcement skills and White House clout to call through to the police commander on the scene at the World Trade Center. “Dick, I've got a Deputy Commissioner on the line. NYPD has had its bomb guys get down into the hole. They say it's definitely a bomb.” I convened the Counterterrorism Security Group in the Situation Room. Six people were dead in New York, hundreds wounded.

Within days of the World Trade Center bombing, FBI made an arrest. The FBI's magicians, the forensics specialists, had gone through the wreckage in the basement of the tower and determined which vehicle had held the bomb. They had earlier amazed us all by rebuilding Pan Am 103 from pieces scattered over hundreds of square miles, and then determining which suitcase had held the bomb. Now they were able to identify the specific Ryder rental truck and trace it back to a franchise in nearby northern New Jersey. Incredibly, the rental agency said that the person who had rented the truck was scheduled to return the next day to collect the deposit on what he said was a stolen truck.

With the arrest of Muhammad Salameh, the case broke open. A suspicious rental storage facility operator called the FBI to suggest that the terrorists might have used one of his lockers to prepare the bomb. Pulling on those strings of information, the FBI developed a list of the cell that had performed the bombing: Egyptians, a Jordanian, an Iraqi, a Pakistani—it was not the Serbs. The CSG met again.

“Okay,” I started, “so you know the names of the guys who did it. What is the group? Or to quote from a great movie, who
are
these guys?” I was asking Bob Blitzer, who represented the FBI in the meeting.

“Nobody we know,” Blitzer answered, obviously chagrined. “New York thinks there may be some links to the guy who shot a rabbi up there last fall. They all seem to be related to a Muslim preacher from Egypt, a guy in Brooklyn or Jersey City.”

CIA's representative, Winston Wiley, had compared all the names with those in a database. “They are not known members of Hezbollah or Abu Nidal or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or any other terrorist group. The bureau gave us some overseas telephone numbers these guys called and we're trying to run them down, but we didn't recognize any of the numbers.”

“So, what are you telling me,” I asked. “That these guys met at a pickup basketball game at the Y in Brooklyn or Jersey City and decided to blow up the World Trade Center 'cuz they were bored? You expect me to believe that?”

“Could be.” Wiley shrugged.

“How did they get in?” I wondered. “What does their visa application say, terrorist?”

Blitzer explained: “Well, two of them just showed up at JFK last year without any documents or even false docs. One of the two was detained because he had ‘How to Make a Bomb' manuals on him.” The other man was Ramzi Yousef.

“So, let me get this straight, we let a guy go who was with a bomb builder, we let him get into a cab at JFK even though he shows up here without a passport?” I could not believe it. Immigration had given Yousef a citation to appear before an immigration magistrate at a later date and let him walk into the country. Ramzi Yousef was now the one FBI was fingering as the cell's leader. He had disappeared overseas after the attack.

“Don't worry, Dick, we'll pick them all up,” Blitzer assured me. “We'll track them down. We'll find out who they worked for.”

The New York City FBI Office is so big that the head of it is an Assistant Director of the FBI, not a Special Agent in Charge, as is the title in most cities. In fact, the head of the New York Office actually has three special agents in charge, or SACs, reporting to him. One of the SACs was responsible for national security cases. Although that had once meant keeping track of Soviet spies, it also involved the supervision of a Terrorism Task Force. As in every city, the FBI in New York works closely with the local federal prosecutor, the U.S. Attorney, and the Assistant U.S. Attorneys on the staff. Following the World Trade Center attack, the New York FBI Office and the U.S. Attorney's Office set to finding out exactly what we were facing.

Within two weeks of the bombing, FBI had taken four of the cell into custody. Ahmed Ajaj had been held since he arrived at JFK Airport the previous year. Muhammad Salameh was arrested while seeking his deposit at the Ryder office on March 4. Nidal Ayyad, a U.S. citizen, was arrested on March 10. Abdul Yasim, interrogated on March 4, was released because he convinced the FBI he was not involved and would cooperate. He flew immediately to Iraq, where, we believe, he was incarcerated by Saddam Hussein's regime. Eyad Ismoil fled to Jordan and stayed out of sight until he was arrested two years later. The cell leader, Ramzi Yousef, disappeared and became the CSG's most wanted terrorist, only later showing up in the Philippines.