Against All Enemies (15 page)

The New York investigation soon revealed a network that had supported the plotters. Spread across Brooklyn, Queens, and north Jersey, the network seemed to center on Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian, who served as a spiritual leader to Egyptian radicals. Rahman had been sentenced in absentia for terrorism in Egypt. He was on the State Department visa lookout list, but somehow he had managed to get a visa at the U.S. embassy in Sudan and had moved to New York. Egyptian government requests that he be extradited had apparently been made and rejected.

By keeping a close eye on Rahman, within months the FBI uncovered another cell planning bombings in New York. This time it would be the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations headquarters, and other landmarks. By the end of June 1993, the plotters and Rahman were in the federal government's Manhattan Metropolitan Detention Center. It seemed like the counterterrorism machinery was working well.

It wasn't. The FBI and CIA should have been able to answer my question, “Who
are
these guys?” but they still could not.

The real answer was a group that the FBI and CIA had not yet heard of: al Qaeda. The first member of al Qaeda arrested in the United States—as we later discovered—was El Sayyid Nosair, who assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane, the fiery leader of the radical Jewish Defense League, in New York in 1992. The FBI's investigation into the World Trade Center suspects connected them to Nosair. Nosair's legal bills were ultimately paid by bin Laden. His apartment had materials connecting him to something called the Afghan Services Bureau; yet many of the Arabic-language materials would go untranslated by the FBI for years after his arrest. The four initially arrested for the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 were quickly linked to the Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn. That center was funded by and openly affiliated with the Afghan Services Bureau (Mahktab al Kiddimah), run by bin Laden. The blind sheik had spent time in Afghanistan with bin Laden. The blind sheik was a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was already tied to bin Laden. Ahmed Ajaj had been detained at JFK Airport for carrying bomb-related materials, including a manual on the cover of which was the phrase “al Qaeda.” Ramzi Yousef had even called bin Laden from New York.

Usama bin Laden had formed al Qaeda three years earlier. Not only had no one in the CIA or FBI ever heard of it, apparently they had never heard of bin Laden either. His name never came up in our meetings in 1993 as a suspect in the World Trade Center attack. We did hear about someone who appeared to be Ramzi Yousef's uncle. He went by various names, and he appeared to be behind Yousef's mysterious money. One name he used was Khalid Sheik Muhammad. It was not clear exactly what his role was, but he was connected, and therefore the FBI wanted him, wherever he was.

A
S IT HAPPENED
, I was the one in Washington who first saw evidence of a true act of terrorism by Saddam against us, and the irony is that President Clinton's response to it successfully deterred Saddam from ever again using terror against us.

I had the daily habit of reading hundreds of intelligence reports, embassy messages, and translations of foreign media that the Situation Room dutifully forwarded to my office computer. During the week, I skimmed many of them. On weekends, however, I had more time. One Sunday in April, I saw a subject line that grabbed my eye. An Arab-language newspaper in London was reporting that the Kuwaiti police had prevented an assassination attempt on former President Bush.

There had been no such report from the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, or the embassy. Nonetheless, something suggested to me that I should not dismiss the report. Instead, I called our ambassador in Kuwait, Ryan Crocker, a career officer and expert on the Arab world.

“Ryan, have you seen this report in a London paper about an attempted assassination on former President Bush?”

He had not seen it, but did tell me what a great time Bush had in Kuwait. Then he paused, “Dick, knowing you, you could not possibly be instructing me to ask the Kuwaitis about the report…because you know, of course, that we are told never to accept instructions directly from the White House staff.” One of the continuing legacies of Ollie North's excesses was a ban on NSC Staff directly ordering ambassadors to do things.

“No, no, of course not, Ryan. Thought never crossed my mind,” I chuckled back across the secure line.

“As it happens, now that I know about the story, I might just ask someone I happen to be seeing tonight…”

The next morning there was a sealed envelope on my desk, a message so sensitive that it could not be sent to me electronically from the Situation Room. It was a report from our Ambassador in Kuwait which stated that the Kuwaitis were covering up a plot that they had foiled. The plot was aimed at killing former President Bush and had almost succeeded. Several people were being held and they had implicated the Iraqi intelligence service.

I called Lake: “Saddam tried to kill Bush.”

After I explained, the National Security Advisor gave me instructions: “Tell State to make it clear to the Kuwaitis. They have to come clean with us.”

That allowed me to draft an instruction cable to Crocker and ask if the State Department would send it to him on its behalf. Crocker then confronted the Kuwaiti government with our knowledge of the plot and formally asked for access to the prisoners. There were sixteen. Two were Iraqi nationals, who admitted that they had been recruited in Basra by the Iraqi intelligence service and given a Toyota Land Cruiser, in which a sophisticated bomb had been installed. They were to park it near the university in Kuwait City and then detonate it by radio when President Bush and the Emir drove by. It would have killed everything up to four hundred yards away. The Iraqi assassination plot failed only because a Kuwaiti policeman discovered the bomb-laden SUV after it was involved in a traffic accident and the Kuwaitis started to make arrests.

On instructions from Tony Lake, I asked Secret Service, FBI, and CIA to send teams to Kuwait. Attorney General Janet Reno and CIA Director Woolsey agreed to conduct two separate but parallel investigations, one in law enforcement and one in intelligence channels. It took over a month, but in early June the two reports were in draft. Both agencies had corroborated the prisoners' story. The bomb materials were also definitely from Iraqi intelligence.

On June 23, Lake had his usual Wednesday lunch with Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and Secretary of State Warren Christopher in Lake's West Wing office. During the lunch, he called and asked me to join them. “We'd like you to plan a retaliation mission against Iraq. Only you, and one person each from Defense and State. When can we have the plan, the checklist?”

Someone from CIA was added to the circle, and in a day we had a target list developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA. Secretary Christopher argued strongly on legal grounds that the list be limited to one facility, the Iraqi intelligence headquarters. He also wanted it hit on Saturday night, to minimize casualties. Christopher won.

We developed the plan. The ships would move into firing position. An “execute order” from the Joint Chiefs to CENTCOM (the U.S. military regional command for the Middle East and the successor to the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force) had been prepared. Personal messages would go out in staggered fashion from the President to the Emir of Kuwait, the King of Saudi Arabia, the British Prime Minister. To avoid leaks, they would be sent from the White House rather than through the State Department. Instructions would be sent to the U.S. mission at the United Nations to ask for an emergency session of the Security Council. Justice and CIA would have detailed white papers to release to the press and foreign embassies, outlining the evidence. Congressional leaders would be called individually by the President. Former President Bush would be told. American embassies and troops in the region would be placed on heightened alert against Iraqi countermoves. CIA stations and FBI offices would place Iraqi agents under surveillance. The President would make a short announcement from the Oval Office. A stark warning would be passed to the Iraqis, threatening dire consequences for any further terrorism against the United States.

I put the checklist, a timeline, and the implementing documents in a book and gave it to Lake on Friday. He looked at it and said, “That's good. Take it down and show the President. I'll tell him you're coming. Then, do it.”

NSC Staff, even Special Assistants to the President like me, had not popped in on the President in my experience. Brent Scowcroft had talked to the President for us. Sometimes Brent had allowed a staff member to sit in for a while. Now, I was being asked to go see the President about the first use of force in his administration. There had been a secretive Principals meeting with the President on the subject earlier and Clinton had seemed resolute. But there were doubts among the right wing that Clinton would ever use force.

Presented with the detailed plan, Clinton was pragmatic. “Well, this may teach him a lesson, but if it doesn't, we will have to do more.” Saturday morning, White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, who did not know what was about to happen, told the White House press corps that “the lid” was on, that nothing would happen the rest of the day. A group of White House reporters then left for a baseball game in Baltimore. As they did, I began sending the messages out from the Situation Room.

Shortly after 6:00 p.m. a small group of senior administration officials began assembling in Lake's office. I went to the Oval Office to help the President with his last few calls notifying congressional leaders. The cruise missiles had just been launched.

“So when will we get the pictures from the missiles?” the President asked me.

“Well, we don't get pictures from the missiles, sir, but we will have bomb damage images from satellites available to show you first thing in the morning,” I explained.

“Tomorrow morning? I'm going on TV in an hour to say we blew up this building—I want to know first that we did. Why don't the missiles have cameras in them?” the President insisted.

“Well, if the missiles communicated, someone might see them coming or interfere with them. But we know how many we fired and when, so we can calculate how many will hit and when—”

“We can't communicate with the missiles? What if I wanted to turn them back?” the President asked.

“You don't want to sir, do you?…because you can't…there is no mechanism to…” I stammered.

“No I don't, but I do want to know for certain that we blew this place up before I go telling the world that I did.”

I went back to Lake's office with the news. Admiral Bill Studeman, the number two man at CIA, began making calls. Satellites were redirected. “We got nothin',” he reported. “The missiles should have hit several minutes ago, but nothing we have can tell us that…not for a while.”

A glum mood settled over the office as we wondered how we would get the President to go on national television. Then, as we talked, he did it. On all networks, the Saturday evening news anchors were told something and announced a surprise address by the President. “We don't know why,” one said.

Clinton read the short statement and then, almost immediately, showed up in Lake's office with Vice President Al Gore. “We thought you were not going to go on,” Lake confessed. “We thought you needed proof that the missiles hit.”

Gore urged the President to tell us something that the two highest leaders in the land clearly found funny. “Okay, okay,” Clinton agreed. “I needed relative certainty that the missiles had hit and none of you guys could give me that…so I called CNN…they didn't have anybody in Baghdad tonight, but their cameraman in their Jordan bureau had a cousin or some relative who lived near the intelligence headquarters, so they called him.” Most of the room looked horrified. “The cousin said, yeah, the whole place blew up. He was certain…so I figured we had relative certainty.”

Clinton using force was not going to be a problem. The next day, however, he was clearly upset with reports that some of the missiles had fallen short and killed the leading female artist of the Arab world, who happened to have a house across the street from the Muhabarat—Iraqi intelligence.

I was initially disappointed that the retaliation had been so small, that targets had been taken off the list, and that the raid was scheduled in the middle of the night when few Iraqi intelligence officers would be present. My friends from the Bush administration told me vaguely that they heard that the Bush family were also upset that the response was so limited.