Against All Enemies (23 page)

The Secret Service and Customs had teamed up in Atlanta to provide some rudimentary air defense against an aircraft flying into the Olympic Stadium. They did so again during the subsequent National Security Special Events and they agreed to create a permanent air defense unit to protect Washington. Unfortunately, those two federal law enforcement agencies were housed in the Treasury Department and its leadership did not want to pay for such a mission or run the liability risks of shooting down the wrong aircraft. Treasury nixed the air defense unit, and my attempts within the White House to overrule them came to naught. The idea of aircraft attacking in Washington seemed remote to many people and the risks of shooting down aircraft in a city were thought to be far too high. Moreover, the opponents of our plan argued, the Air Force could always scramble fighter aircraft to protect Washington if there were a problem. On occasions when aircraft were hijacked (and in one case when we erroneously believed a Northwest flight had been seized), the Air Force did intercept the airliners with fighter jets. We succeeded only in getting Secret Service the permission to continue to examine air defense options, including the possibility of placing missile units near the White House. Most people who heard about our efforts to create some air defense system in case terrorists tried to fly aircraft into the Capitol, the White House, or the Pentagon simply thought we were nuts.

T
HE FIRST YEARS OF THE
C
LINTON ADMINISTRATION
had seen a staccato drum roll of terrorism. Eleven “terrorist” events rose to high-level attention in the United States, from the first World Trade Center attack, to the shootings outside CIA headquarters, to the Atlanta Olympics bomb, and others. Not one of them had been blamed on anything called al Qaeda by CIA or by FBI. The story of when, and how, the U.S. first began to focus on Al Qaeda has been garbled in various recent accounts. It is time to set the record straight.

A man named Usama bin Laden, a so-called financier, had been remotely and tentatively related to one or two events but not blamed for them. Maybe, CIA said, he was connected to a failed attack on Americans in Yemen in 1992 and perhaps there was some connection between him and Ramzi Yousef, who had attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 and then plotted in the Philippines. The supposedly known perpetrators of terrorist attacks discussed by the media were an unrelated hodgepodge of apparently containable threats: Iraqi intelligence for the attempt on former President Bush, Iranian intelligence for the attack on the U.S. Air Force at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, a lone wolf from Baluchistan for the attack on the CIA gatehouse, two odd ducks from the American right wing for the Oklahoma City bombing, an Egyptian cleric for the plot to blow up the New York City tunnels, a wannabe cop turned security guard for the Atlanta Olympics bomb, a crafty Palestinian-Kuwaiti for the World Trade Center attack, a group of now beheaded Saudis for the bombing of the U.S. military training mission in Riyadh, and a mystery man in a boat off Long Island or perhaps even a U.S. Navy pilot for the downing of TWA 800. By 1997, the two hostile intelligence services had been checkmated by our bombing of Iraq's service headquarters, and by the intelligence operation against Iran. Most of the other actors were in jail or dead, and the rent-a-cop and U.S. Navy had been exonerated of the Atlanta bomb and the TWA crash. If there was a pattern in all of this, U.S. intelligence and federal law enforcement did not see it.

Nonetheless, this regular diet of destruction and death was enough for us to generate a White House response. The Clinton administration had begun a steady escalation in counterterrorism funding. For the first time in forty years, an Administration had designed and funded a major program for homeland defense. Clinton had focused on terrorism in a string of major speeches: at the Air Force Academy, Oklahoma City, George Washington University, Annapolis, twice at the United Nations, twice at the Pan Am 103 cairn, at the White House, at Lyon, France, and Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Most of the media ignored the pattern of the administration's response and warnings. While some federal employees were alarmed at the rise of terrorism and worked diligently against it, others in the FBI, CIA, and the Defense Department did not see the urgency.

We now know that the World Trade Center attack in 1993 was an al Qaeda operation, as were the failed plots to attack New York landmarks and U.S. airliners over the Pacific. At the time, however, these events were attributed by FBI and CIA to Ramzi Yousef and the blind sheik, both of whom were behind bars by 1995. Rumors circulated of Arab involvement in the events against American troops in Somalia, but neither the Defense Department nor the CIA could verify them.

The details of the attack on the U.S. military training mission in Riyadh were not well established due to the lack of Saudi cooperation. The larger attack in Saudi Arabia at Khobar was conducted by Saudi Hezbollah under the close supervision of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Qods Force. Iran had also staged terrorist attacks in Israel, Bahrain, and Argentina.

Outside of New York the attacks in the U.S. were conducted by deranged loners. We had not been able to connect Mir Amal Kansi, the CIA gatehouse shooter, to any known group. The Oklahoma City and Atlanta attacks had been conducted by right-wing Americans, with tenuous ties to homegrown militias and religious extremists. Another, potentially devastating attack had involved Americans in a right-wing militia planning to explode a gas storage facility in Fresno. FBI surveillance of the militias had averted that calamity.

D
ESPITE THE LACK OF EVIDENCE
of a bin Laden hand in the series of terrorist events, Lake, Berger, Soderberg, and I had persisted in 1993 and 1994 in asking CIA to learn more about the man whose name kept appearing buried in CIA's raw reporting as “terrorist financier Usama bin Laden.” It just seemed unlikely to us that this man who had his hand in so many seemingly unconnected organizations was just a donor, a philanthropist of terror. There seemed to be some organizing force and maybe it was he. He was the one thing that we knew the various terrorist groups had in common. And we kept coming back to the incredible notion offered by CIA and FBI that the gang that bombed the World Trade Center had just come together as individual agents who happened upon one another and decided to go to America to blow things up.

In 1991 the Saudi government had given up trying to persuade Usama bin Laden to stop his criticism of the royal family, its military alliance with the United States, and the continuing presence of U.S. forces. Despite threats to the large, wealthy, and well-connected bin Laden family and construction company empire, Usama kept crossing the line. A frustrated Saudi government told him to leave the country.

He chose to go to Sudan, which at the time was the quintessential safe haven for terrorists of all stripes. The government of Sudan was dominated by the National Islamic Front, whose leader was Hasan al-Turabi. Although allegedly a religious scholar, Turabi preached a particularly violent flavor of hatred. Bin Laden and Turabi had known each other through the growing international network of radical Islamists. When bin Laden came under pressure from the Saudi government, Turabi invited him to set up shop in Sudan. Bin Laden came with his money and his men, the Arab veterans of the Afghan War. Most of these veterans faced jail cells if they returned home to Egypt, Kuwait, Algiers, or Morocco.

As is well known by now, Turabi and bin Laden set up several joint projects: a new construction company, a new investment firm, control of the Sudanese commodities markets, a new airport, a road between the two largest cities, new terrorist training camps, a leather factory, Arab Afghan War veterans housing, arms shipments to Bosnia, support to Egyptian terrorists plotting to overthrow President Mubarak, and development of an indigenous weapons industry (including chemical weapons). The two radical fundamentalists were soul mates, sharing a vision of a worldwide struggle to establish a pure Caliphate. The two also socialized together, taking meals at each other's homes. In bin Laden's spare time he went horseback riding with Turabi's son.

Before going to Sudan, bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, the site of his now widely acclaimed role in the war against the Soviets. He had found the post-Soviet Afghanistan factionalized by tribal groups unwilling to take his counsel or direction. Although fighting continued there, it was not jihad against non-Muslims. Jihad was available to a limited extent in the Philippines, where Muslims in the south had been fighting the Christian government for centuries. Bin Laden sent key lieutenants there, including his brother-in-law Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, Ramzi Yousef, and Yousef's uncle and mentor, Khalid Sheik Muhammad. Jihad was also available in Russia, where oppressed Muslims took advantage of the fall of the Soviet Union to seek independence for the province of Chechnya. Bin Laden sent Afghan Arab veterans, money, and arms to fellow Saudi ibn Khatab in Chechnya, which seemed like a perfect theater for jihad.

The ingredients al Qaeda dreamed of for propagating its movement were a Christian government attacking a weaker Muslim region, allowing the new terrorist group to rally jihadists from many countries to come to the aid of the religious brethren. After the success of the jihad, the Muslim region would become a radical Islamic state, a breeding ground for more terrorists, a part of the eventual network of Islamic states that would make up the great new Caliphate, or Muslim empire. Bosnia also seemed to fit the bill. The fall of Communism in Yugoslavia had sent the ethnic republics of that artificial union spinning off into their own orbits. The predominately Muslim province Bosnia had long been discriminated against by the Christian center, and Bosnia's attempt at independence in 1991 was brutally countered by the Serb-dominated Belgrade government. Despite an international outcry, the George H. W. Bush administration had done little to stop the slaughter. General Scowcroft and his close friend Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger judged the dissolution of Yugoslavia to be a hopeless quagmire best left to the European community to fix. (Eagleburger, a former U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, had almost unerring instincts in foreign policy, but his years in Belgrade made him reluctant to involve the U.S. too deeply in Balkan affairs. He became Secretary of State briefly in 1992 when President Bush virtually ordered a reluctant Jim Baker to manage the Bush reelection campaign.)

Unlike the jihad in Chechnya, which Russia tried to keep away from the scrutiny of the world, Bosnia was a center of attention during its struggle with Serbia. It was also a center for scrutiny by West European and American intelligence. What we saw unfold in Bosnia was a guidebook to the bin Laden network, though we didn't recognize it as such at the time. Beginning in 1992, Arabs who had been former Afghan mujahedeen began to arrive. With them came the arrangers, the money men, logisticians, and “charities.” They arranged front companies and banking networks. As they had done in Afghanistan, the Arabs created their own brigade, allegedly part of the Bosnian army but operating on its own. The muj, as they came to be known, were fierce fighters against the better-armed Serbs. They also engaged in ghastly torture, murder, and mutilation that seemed excessive even by Balkan standards.

The hard-pressed Bosnians clearly wished they could do without these uncontrollable savages, but Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic decided to take aid where he could. America talked a good game, but was doing little to stop the Serbian military. Iran sent guns. Better yet, al Qaeda sent men, trained, tough fighters. European and U.S. intelligence services began to trace the funding and support of the muj to bin Laden in Sudan, and to facilities that had already been established by the muj in Western Europe itself.

The ties led to the Finsbury Park Mosque in London, to the Islamic Cultural Center in Milan, to the Third World Relief Agency in Vienna. They also led to the Benevolence International Foundation in Chicago and to the International Islamic Relief Organization in Saudi Arabia. These charities were providing funds, jobs, identification papers, visas, offices, and other support to the international brigade of Arab combatants in and around Bosnia. Western governments, including our own, did not find adequate legal grounds prior to September 11 for closing these organizations.

Many of the names that we first encountered in Bosnia showed up later in other roles, working for al Qaeda. Among the top jihadists in the Bosnia fighting were: Abu Sulaiman al-Makki, who would later show up standing next to bin Laden in December 2001 as al Qaeda's leader extolled the September 11 attacks; Abu Zubair al-Haili, who would be arrested in Morocco in 2002 plotting to attack U.S. ships in the Straits of Gibraltar; Ali Ayed al-Shamrani, who was arrested in 1995 by Saudi police and quickly beheaded for involvement in attacking the U.S. military aid mission in Saudi Arabia; Khalil Deek, who would be arrested in December 1999 for his role in planning attacks on American facilities in Jordan at the Millennium; and Fateh Kamel, who would be fingered as part of the Millennium Plot cell in Canada. Although Western intelligence agencies never labeled the muj activity in Bosnia an al Qaeda jihad, it is now clear that is exactly what it was.

Although not seeing it entirely for what it was, the United States did begin to act against the jihadist presence in Bosnia. U.S. officials made clear to Izetbegovic that the jihadists would have to leave, that he was riding a tiger that would swallow him at some point. The Clinton administration also made stopping the war in the Balkans its highest foreign policy priority, introducing U.S. forces and hammering out the Dayton Accord. (That peace agreement took the dedicated and diligent labor of Clinton, Lake, Berger, Albright, Ambassador Dick Holbrooke, and General Wes Clark. In its pursuit, Holbrooke's team faced personal tragedy. An armored vehicle in their convoy careered off a ridgeline and burst into flames. Clark dragged out some of those inside before the vehicle exploded. Three died, including my NSC Staff colleague Nelson Drew.) A part of that Dayton Accord called for the eviction of the muj from Bosnia following the end of the fighting. We didn't know they were al Qaeda, but we knew they were international terrorists.