Against All Enemies (16 page)

My disappointment faded with time because it seemed that Saddam had gotten the message. Subsequent to that June 1993 retaliation, the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities never developed any evidence of further Iraqi support for terrorism directed against Americans. Until we invaded Iraq in 2003.

T
HE FIRST YEAR OF THE
C
LINTON ADMINISTRATION
also tested the new President's willingness to use force a second time, in Somalia. In retrospect, it is possible that the October Battle of Mogadishu may have been a second case of an al Qaeda role in an attack on Americans. President Bush had sent troops to Somalia to help end an enormous famine that had placed approximately 700,000 people on death's door. Their fellow Somalis with guns were stealing and selling relief supplies. International relief organizations could not obtain security for their operations. Following his defeat in a bid for reelection, President Bush had sent the troops into Somalia to insure the delivery of the relief supplies. Brent Scowcroft had asked me to be the White House coordinator for the operation, and in January 1993 he had asked me to brief his successor, Tony Lake, on the subject.

I found Lake in the Presidential Transition Office, a floor of a private office building on Vermont Avenue. I had never seen him before. He and the “National Security” area on the floor were the only indication of calm in a flurry of young staffers and a sea of résumés. “Well, thank you for coming, but I gather that we won't have to worry too much about Somalia because the U.S. will be largely out by Inauguration Day,” Lake said.

“Ah, no, actually, the U.S. troop movement into Somalia will not be complete until the end of January,” I replied, pulling out a Pentagon chart that showed the staged deployment of U.S. units.

Lake looked suspiciously at the chart. “We were told that the U.N. would take over. That the U.S. troops would be out.” He did not say precisely who told him, but I gathered it was my bosses at the White House.

“The U.N. is dragging its feet, Mr. Lake. Boutros-Ghali thinks it would strain the U.N. to take over.” Lake's reaction made him look like a man who had just been told he had cancer. In a way, he had.

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali grudgingly accepted a U.N. role, but the arrival of a U.N. peacekeeping force was slow in coming. He urged the United States to provide an American to be the head of the U.N. operation, to insure close coordination between the U.N. and the U.S. Lake persuaded Scowcroft's deputy, Admiral Jonathan Howe, to take the job. Shortly after Clinton came to office, coordination of the Somali operation shifted from the White House to the State Department and its Bureau of African Affairs. Howe was soon tested by the Somali warlords, particularly by Farah Aideed. In June, Aideed's men slaughtered two dozen Pakistani troops who were operating under the new U.N. command.

Howe's response was firm. If the Somalis thought they could get away with killing the Pakistanis, it would be all over for the international relief effort. Aideed needed to be arrested and his militia smashed. Howe had only recently retired as a four-star admiral. He knew U.S. military capability well. He drafted a detailed list of additional forces immediately, including Delta Force commandos to arrest Aideed and AC-130 aerial gunships to blow up the militia's infrastructure. He got the gunships, but only for a few strikes. Despite pressure from the NSC, the Pentagon refused to send the commandos or most of what Howe needed and the Pentagon stopped the AC-130 strikes before Aideed's militia infrastructure was destroyed.

Aideed was moving about Mogadishu openly with little or no security in June. A Delta team could have arrested him with little difficulty. Following the AC-130 attack on his arms warehouses, however, he went underground and ordered more attacks on the coalition, including American troops. In September, three American troops were killed by Aideed's forces.

Only then did the Pentagon agree to send in the commandos. The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which included what the public called Delta, had mastered the art and science of surprise nighttime operations and low-profile, covert operations. In Mogadishu, however, they acted in broad daylight with dozens of helicopters clattering into the city. The operations were repetitive and the Somalis learned by watching them. On October 3, 1993, in the famous
Black Hawk Down
incident, the Aideed militia responded and engaged JSOC, shooting down two helicopters with rocket-propelled grenades. Eighteen Americans and probably 1,200 Somalis were killed.

When the National Security Council cabinet members met with the President in the Cabinet Room, Clinton was irate. Somalia was not his idea of how to spend his first year in office. He had inherited it and the military had let him down. He had followed the Pentagon's advice, not Howe's, in June and they had been wrong. When Aideed could have been captured in June, they had let him go. When the military had finally agreed to send in JSOC to Mogadishu, they had acted as though there were no hostile forces operating against them, ignoring their usual tactics, and creating a disaster. Clinton sat silently, red-faced, in the Cabinet Room listening to Warren Christopher, Les Aspin, and Colin Powell. I realized that he was letting them have their time, but he had already decided something. He was done listening to them on Somalia.

When they had talked themselves out, Clinton stopped doodling and looked up. “Okay, here's what we're gonna do. We are not running away with our tail between our legs. I've already heard from Congress and that's what they all want to do, get out tomorrow. We're staying. We are also not gonna flatten Mogadishu to prove we are the big badass superpower. Everybody in the world knows we could do that. We don't have to prove that to anybody.

“We are going to send in more troops, with tanks and aircraft and anything else they need. We are going to show force. And we are going to keep delivering the food. If anybody fucks with us, we will respond, massively. And we are going to get the U.N. to finally show up and take over. Tell Boutros he has six months to do that, not one day more. Then…then we will leave.”

As the meeting broke up, Clinton indicated for Lake and me to follow him through the side door into the outer area of the Oval Office. “I want us running this, not the State Department or the Pentagon.” He looked at me. “No more U.S. troops get killed, none. Do what you have to do, whatever you have to do.”

In the days that followed, American snipers were placed on the roofs and walls of the U.S. compounds. When they saw any Somalis in the area with guns, they took them out. There was little or no publicity about these deaths. When the U.S. forces went back on the streets, they went with tanks. Six months later, the United States finally handed over the operation to the United Nations peacekeeping force. There had been no more American casualties.

During those six months I repeatedly pressed CIA to track down rumors in the foreign press about terrorists who might have trained Aideed's militia. They discounted them. I asked my friends Mike Sheehan and Roger Cressey, who had worked in Mogadishu in 1993, what they thought. “How the shit would CIA know,” Mike replied. “They had nobody in the country when the Marines landed. Then they sent in a few guys who had never been there before. They swapped people out every few weeks and they stayed holed up in the U.S. compound on the beach, in comfy trailer homes that they had flown in by the Air Force.”

Apparently Sheehan and Cressey were right. Although CIA did not know it in 1993 and 1994, evidence later emerged and was included in the U.S. indictment of bin Laden that al Qaeda had been sending advisors to Aideed and had helped to engineer the shoot-down of the U.S. helicopters. Indeed, al Qaeda had bombed a hotel in Yemen in December 1992, thinking that U.S. Air Force personnel supporting the Somalia operation were living there. (The Americans had been evacuated because Yemeni security had heard rumors of the plot.) CIA had not been able then to figure out who had bombed the hotel.

Thus, when the Clinton administration looked back on the terrorism of 1993, they did not include the events of Somalia in that category. Nor did they think about bin Laden or al Qaeda, because they had not yet been told that that terrorist or his organization existed.

Al Qaeda and bin Laden, however, thought about the United States. Even though the U.S. had not “cut and run” under congressional pressure, they perceived that it had. The additional six months stay and the orderly handoff to the U.N. had not impressed them. The failure to flatten Mogadishu had registered. Once again, they told one another, the United States had been humiliated by a Third World country. Just like Vietnam. Just like Lebanon. Just like the Soviets in Afghanistan.

What al Qaeda did not seem to understand is that the United States had never intended to stay in Somalia. It had gone there for a limited time until the creaky U.N. peacekeeping bureaucracy could field a force. By its own limited definition of an objective, the U.S. had done what it set out to do. Was Clinton right not to respond with some large-scale retaliation to the murder of the eighteen U.S. commandos? I was not sure then and I am not sure now. We had killed over a thousand Somalis in a day. Should we have done more? We could have kept up the hunt for Aideed, but that would have placed the prestige of the United States against the resourcefulness of one man hiding in his own country. Did our self-restraint reduce our deterrence? I feared then that it would, but I had no good idea about how to do anything about it. After the murder of 278 Marines in Beirut, Reagan had invaded Grenada in part to show that we were still able to exercise force. I had no doubt that Clinton would use force again soon, in Bosnia and maybe in Haiti, not just to demonstrate resolve but because those situations demanded it. In retrospect, I doubt that there was anything that could have been done then to deter al Qaeda. Killing more innocent Somalis would not have helped.

J
UST BEFORE
1993
CAME TO A CLOSE,
I received one last, memorable lesson in terrorism. Tony Lake and his Staff Director, Nancy Soderberg, had urged me and my staff to deal directly with the families of the victims of terrorism, especially the families of the Pan Am 103 attack. Pan Am 103 had been destroyed by Libyan terrorists in 1988. The families were upset with their handling by the Bush administration. In particular, they could not understand why their request for a memorial in Arlington National Cemetery had been turned down, especially when many of the victims were military personnel.

We met with the families. We heard their stories and we put pictures of their fallen children on our desks. The aircraft had exploded above and around Lockerbie, Scotland, killing some of the town's residents as well. The town had opened its hearts to the families of all of the victims. Lockerbie had donated stones for a cairn, a Scottish memorial rock pile, one rock for every victim. Joined by my colleague Randy Beers, we drove to the cemetery and selected a site for the cairn.

On the fifth anniversary of the attack, the President drove to the site to say a few words and turn the dirt to begin the construction of the cairn. It was just before Christmas, cold and wet and windy. The President asked a little boy who had lost his father on the plane to join him with the shovel. He kneeled by the boy and whispered to him. A lone piper from Lockerbie played “Amazing Grace.”

As people moved to their cars and out of the rain, I asked the boy's mother what the President had said. “He said, ‘My father died before I was born too. Be good to your Mom.' ”

That night the network news showed tape of the President heading out from the Oval Office for the cairn event, as the White House reporter talked over the tape about allegations of impropriety made by former Arkansas state troopers. They did not mention Pan Am 103.