Against All Enemies (22 page)

There was no pitting or tear, no indication of an inbound explosion from a Stinger-like missile and no indication that a bomb had been on board. (The engines, once raised from the ocean, would show nothing to suggest that they were hit by a missile either. A simulation of the crash would later indicate that what witnesses saw as a streak of a missile going up toward the aircraft was actually a column of jet fuel from the initial explosion and rupture, falling and then catching fire, sending flame ascending prior to a second, larger fuel explosion. The FBI concluded in November 1997 that there was no evidence of a criminal act. In May 1998, the NTSB ordered inspection and possible replacement of fuel tank wiring insulation on 747s.)

That summer day in 1996 I returned to the White House from Bethpage and asked to meet with Tony Lake and Leon Panetta. By now they had been conditioned to equate my asking for a meeting with the probability that something was about to explode. I sketched the 747 design and explained about the fuel tank. “Does NTSB agree with you, or does FBI?” Lake asked.

“Not yet,” I admitted. Nonetheless, we were all cautiously encouraged.

Unfortunately, the public debate over the incident was clouded by conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are a constant in counterterrorism. Conspiracy theorists simultaneously hold two contrary beliefs: a) that the U.S. government is so incompetent that it can miss explanations that the theorists can uncover, and b) that the U.S. government can keep a big and juicy secret. The first belief has some validity. The second idea is pure fantasy. Dismissing conspiracy theories out of hand, however, is dangerous. I learned early on in my government career not to believe that the government experts knew it all. The list of major intelligence failures and law enforcement errors is far too long to dismiss alternative views. Because I was personally skeptical about what agencies told me and always intrigued by the possibility of the unlikely explanation, I encouraged my analysts to have open minds and perform due diligence on every claim. For that reason we had always looked for Iraqi involvement in the World Trade Center attack of 1993, to no avail.

For that reason too, in 1996 I asked the Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the NSC Staff, Steve Simon, to drive over to the Georgetown townhouse of Pierre Salinger. The former White House Press Secretary had publicly claimed to have evidence that TWA 800 was shot down. Simon was gone a long time. When he returned, he looked like someone who had been on a far more difficult and frustrating mission than a two-mile drive to a fashionable Washington neighborhood.

“What the hell happened to you?” I asked after Simon stormed into my office and stood silently steaming, his arms folded across his chest, and a look of intense disgust on his face.

Finally he blurted out, “Plucky Pierre is whacked; he's lost it. The real world is a planet he left long ago.” With that Simon spun around and went back to the office that had once belonged to Ollie North. When he calmed down, I got a real debriefing. Salinger thought a U.S. Navy F-14 had shot down TWA 800 and he had a set of accompanying fantasies. Defense Department, FAA, and FBI evidence all convincingly proved that theory wrong.

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NOTHER CONSPIRACY THEORY
intrigued me because I could never disprove it. The theory seemed unlikely on its face: Ramzi Yousef or Khalid Sheik Muhammad had taught Terry Nichols how to blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building. The problem was that, upon investigation, we established that both Ramzi Yousef and Nichols had been in the city of Cebu on the same days. I had been to Cebu years earlier; it is on an island in the central Philippines. It was a town in which word could have spread that a local girl was bringing her American boyfriend home and that the American hated the U.S. government.

Yousef and Khalid Sheik Muhammad had gone there to help create an al Qaeda spinoff, a Philippine affiliate chapter, named after a hero of the Afghan war against the Soviets, Abu Sayaff. Could the al Qaeda explosives expert have been introduced to the angry American who proclaimed his hatred for the U.S. Government? We do not know, despite some FBI investigation. We do know that Nichols's bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned. We also know that Nichols continued to call Cebu long after his wife returned to the United States. The final coincidence is that several al Qaeda operatives had attended a radical Islamic conference a few years earlier in, of all places, Oklahoma City.

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Khobar, TWA 800, and the Atlanta Olympics bomb had given the impression of a renewed wave of terrorism against the United States, and even in the United States, even if some of that impression was mistaken. It was a good time to play the Washington game of seeking increased funding. I prepared an Emergency Supplemental request and took it to White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta.

Emergency Supplementals, budget requests sent up to Congress after the President's Budget, were anathema to another part of the White House, the Office of Management and Budget. The normal budget preparation process took months and OMB controlled the outcome. Getting money for counterterrorism was not easy in the normal process because the departments often did not ask for the funds. That meant that the NSC Staff then had to argue that we knew better than the Cabinet members what should be in their budgets. I had done well in pumping up the counterterrorism funds in the last two budgets, but had not gotten everything we needed. When OMB heard I was putting an Emergency request together, they were more than a little unhappy. They knew that if the Administration asked for counterterrorism money in a Presidential election year (which 1996 was), Congress would vote for every penny and more. The new level would then become a baseline for the next budget. OMB's chief concern was balancing the budget and driving down the deficit. They had been doing a good job of it.

The OMB staff, however, took solace in the fact that Leon Panetta had come to the Chief of Staff's job from having been Director of OMB. He would see things their way.

We met around Panetta's long conference table: the Chief of Staff, me, and six OMB officials. Panetta, doodling on a legal pad and half looking up at the group, asked, “What do you need, Dick?” The OMB staff shuffled papers; that was not the way they wanted to begin the meeting.

“Little over a billion.” There were both gasps and groans from OMB. I continued, “Four-thirty for airline security upgrades, four-thirty for force protection for DOD bases like Khobar, some more for FBI, some more for CIA.”

Panetta had sat through the meetings that summer thinking about war with Iran. OMB had not. Paying to prevent terrorism was a lot more attractive decision than those he had thought we might be faced with. “Okay, sounds good. Let's get it up to the Hill this week. Anything else, anyone?” Panetta rose from the table. Meeting over.

We had the money. We also did the intelligence operation against the Iranians.

Professor Crane Brinton's study of revolutions claimed that there were predictable phases in the life of any revolution. When the movement became the government, its ardor ultimately cooled, a stage that Britton called Thermidor. We have been waiting since 1979 for Tehran's Thermidor. It has been like waiting for Godot.

Following the intelligence operation, and perhaps because of it and the serious U.S. threats, among other reasons, Iran ceased terrorism against the U.S. War with Iran was averted, giving Thermidor more time to arrive, giving the Iranian people more time to take complete control of their government. Despite the election of “moderate” President Khatami in 1997, the Iranian security services continued to support escalating terrorism against Israel and allowed al Qaeda safe passage and other support.

Clinton had ended 1995, after the Oklahoma City attack, with a speech to the United Nations fiftieth General Assembly focusing on terrorism, the need to end sanctuaries, to go after their money, to deny them access to weapons of mass destruction. In November, he had gone back to Arlington Cemetery to unveil the finished Pan Am 103 cairn and speak again about the continuing threat of terrorism. In April 1996, after Khobar, he gave another address on terrorism at George Washington University, declaring a war on terror before the term became fashionable:

“This will be a long, hard struggle. There will be setbacks along the way. But just as no enemy could drive us from the fight to meet our challenges and protect our values in World War II and the Cold War, we will not be driven from the tough fight against terrorism today. Terrorism is the enemy of our generation, and we must prevail…. But I want to make it clear to the American people that while we can defeat terrorists, it will be a long time before we defeat terrorism. America will remain a target because we are uniquely present in the world, because we act to advance peace and democracy, because we have taken a tougher stand against terrorism, and because we are the most open society on earth. But to change any of that, to pull our troops back from the world's trouble spots, to turn our backs on those taking risks for peace, to weaken our opposition against terrorism, to curtail the freedom that is our birthright would be to give terrorism the victory it must not and will not have.”

Shortly thereafter, on September 9, 1996, Clinton formally requested $1.097 billion for counterterrorism-related activities. One month to the day after he filed the request, the funds were approved by Congress: money for more CIA and FBI counterterrorism agents, for Immigration to look for possible terrorists entering the country, for Rick Newcomb at Treasury to hire staff to go after terrorist financing, for the State Department and Department of Defense to harden overseas facilities, for improving security on federal buildings, for training and exercising counterterrorism disaster response units in major cities, and for weapons of mass destruction terrorism–related programs at the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Energy.

The Commission on Aviation Safety and Security (the Gore Commission) requested and got funding for programs involving baggage screening, carry-on luggage checks, passenger profiling, screener training, research on aircraft hardening, and to hire more FAA security agents. The Gore Commission did not, however, agree to recommend that the federal government assume the role of airport passenger and luggage screening. It would continue to be the job of the airlines, which in turn would continue contracting out the mission to firms using low-wage staff.

It was clear even at the time that the Gore Commission had not been sufficiently ambitious about the job of airport security and passenger screening. Having the federal government assume the mission of passenger screening would, however, have meant hiring fifty thousand new federal employees and spending billions more, at a time when both the Administration and the Congress were taking pride in cutting the number of federal employees and the federal budget. Instead, the Gore Commission agreed that there would be more testing and inspection of the rent-a-cops involved, new machines to screen bags, and a passenger-profiling system. The events of 1996 (the ValuJet crash from an exploding oxygen tank and the TWA crash from a worn wire in a fuel tank) had not provided the political circumstances needed for the massive change in how the federal government performed aviation security. No one in the Administration or Congress would have backed a new 50,000-person Transportation Security Administration.

One proposal that would actually have made things worse was narrowly averted. The FBI proposed eliminating the FAA's small Federal Air Marshal program. The Bureau was concerned that if an aircraft were hijacked, any Marshal on board would just get in the way of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, which was trained to seize a hijacked aircraft. The FBI was unable to say how the Marshals posed any greater risk to the Hostage Rescue Team than the hundreds of FBI, Secret Service, Drug Enforcement, State Police, and other law enforcement officers who flew armed every day. Nor did the FBI address the problem that for the Hostage Rescue Team to deal with a hijacked aircraft, the plane had to land first.