Against All Enemies (25 page)

“Really?” Sheehan asked, pretending not to know about the proposed snatch. “What happened? Why didn't you get to do it?”

“Fuckin' White House,” the Green Beret said in disgust. “Clinton said no.”

“How do you know that?” Mike innocently inquired.

“Pentagon told us all about it.”

Whether it was catching war criminals in Yugoslavia or terrorists in Africa and the Middle East, it was the same story. The White House wanted action. The senior military did not and made it almost impossible for the President to overcome their objections. When in 1993 the White House had leaned on the military to snatch Aideed in Somalia, they had bobbled the operation and blamed the White House in off-the-record conversations with reporters and Congressmen. What White House advisor would want a repeat of that? Often though, we learned, senior military officers let the word spread down the ranks that the politicians in the White House were the ones reluctant to act. The fact is, President Clinton approved every snatch that he was asked to review. Every snatch CIA, Justice, or Defense proposed during my tenure as CSG chairman, from 1992 to 2001, was approved.

Skipping ahead in the chronology, I should mention that CIA was able to operate near Khartoum in 1998. Reports had been reaching us for several years that Sudan sought to make chemical weapons. The reports from several sources, including UNSCOM, indicated that Sudan was making chemical bombs and artillery shells. There were few places in Sudan where the needed chemicals could be created. One was believed to be a chemical plant at Shifa. The intelligence reports indicated that the plant had benefited from investment by the Sudan Military Industry Commission, which in turn had received investments by bin Laden. Bin Laden had created an investment company, Taba Investments, upon moving to Khartoum. Separately, there were numerous sources reporting that bin Laden was seeking chemical weapons, even nuclear weapons. Prior to the reports of the plant in Sudan, it was not clear from where he might obtain the weapons.

Satellite photography of Shifa revealed a plant like many others in the world that may have been capable of compounding a variety of chemicals both innocent and military. In 1991 and 1992, I had worked with Arms Control Director Ron Lehman to write an international chemical ban with an inspection procedure that could verify compliance. In the process of that negotiation I had literally crawled through chemical plants and learned a lot from chemical engineers. In the international negotiation that followed in 1992, the nations participating had agreed that many chemical plants were capable of making nerve agent one day and paint, fertilizer, or medicine the next. The Chemical Weapons Convention Treaty, therefore, provided for international inspection of “innocent” chemical plants to insure they had not recently been used to make weapons material. The Treaty provided that the international inspectors could take soil samples from inside and outside the plants in order to do trace analysis. Sudan had refused to sign the Treaty.

There were also two other facilities near Shifa. One was a high-walled, heavily secured set of buildings that human sources said was a weapons-related facility. The other was an artillery shell storage site. It appeared plausible that chemical weapons precursor compounds could have been created at Shifa occasionally, and moved to the nearby development site for mixing into lethal agents and insertion into artillery shells, which were then moved to the storage dump down the road.

CIA sought to determine whether the Shifa plant might be spending some of its time making lethal gas for weapons. To do so, CIA sent an agent at the end of 1997 to collect trace material that could have floated away from the plants in the air or in liquid runoff. It was a risky mission to drive up to the plant and scoop up soil samples, but the CIA believed that it was successfully conducted. The samples were then taken to an independent, nongovernmental analysis laboratory with a well-established reputation for reliability. Their tests revealed a chemical substance known as EMPTA.

EMPTA is a compound that had been used as a prime ingredient in Iraqi nerve gas. It had no other known use, nor had any other nation employed EMPTA to our knowledge for any purpose. What was an Iraqi chemical weapons agent doing in Sudan? UNSCOM and other U.S. government sources had claimed that the Iraqis were working on something at a facility in northern Khartoum (not at Shifa). Could Sudan, using bin Laden's money, have hired some Iraqis to make chemical weapons? It seemed chillingly possible. The Khartoum regime was, after all, engaged in a campaign that seemed intended to eradicate the blacks who lived in southern Sudan. Numerous international relief organizations had provided evidence of such outrages as bombing feeding stations. Chemical weapons would allow Khartoum to accelerate the killing and to chase the survivors out of the country. It was also likely that bin Laden's friends in the Khartoum regime might provide the terrorists with some of the chemical weapons production.

In 2001 during questioning conducted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Pat Fitzgerald, al Qaeda operative Jamal al-Fadl matter-of-factly described his role in traveling to Sudan for his terrorist organization in 1993/1994. He said that his assignment was to follow the work al Qaeda had under way in Khartoum to develop chemical weapons. He did not mention Shifa, testifying that he visited a plant in the Hilat Koko neighborhood of northern Khartoum, which was a few miles from Shifa.

D
URING HIS FIRST FOUR YEARS IN
S
UDAN,
bin Laden had kept in the shadows, not overtly confronting the U.S. There were signs in 1995 of his money and support in Bosnia, Chechnya, the Philippines, Egypt, Morocco, and in Europe. Rumors connected him to attacks in New York, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. But they were only rumors. He might know Khalid Sheik Muhammad, who might be the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, who attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 and had tried to attack 747s over the Pacific. Perhaps one of bin Laden's brothers-in-law, Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, moved money to terrorist groups like the bag carrier in the 1950s television show
The Millionaire.
(In January 1995, Khalifa was detained by U.S. Customs at San Francisco International. Jim Reynolds at the Justice Department tried hard, at my request, to find grounds to indict Khalifa in connection with the World Trade Center attack or any other crime. Unfortunately, the Justice Department could not generate an indictment and Khalifa was extradited to Jordan, where he was subsequently released for lack of evidence there too.)

In the summer of 1995, bin Laden had written a public letter to Saudi King Fahd, denouncing the U.S. troop presence. CIA, under White House pressure and with the support of staff in its Counterterrorism Center, began to develop plans for a station dedicated to investigating what they now agreed was a “bin Laden network.” Not wanting to risk putting the station in Khartoum, where bin Laden was, they began to develop a proposal for an innovation, a “virtual station.” The virtual station would be structured like an overseas office. Physically, it would not even be in CIA headquarters.

Then in the spring of 1996, two chess pieces moved. Bin Laden flew to Afghanistan, closing some of his Khartoum companies and houses. After he left, Jamal al-Fadl, who had been privy to much of the “bin Laden network” based in Sudan, sought U.S. protection. He had been siphoning off funds and feared al Qaeda would kill him. Fadl's interrogation helped the new virtual station discover the size and shape of the network. What they found was widespread and active, with a presence through affiliate groups or sleeper cells in over fifty countries. Ramzi Yousef and the blind sheik had been part of it. Bin Laden was not just its financier, he was its mastermind.

The network also had a name, we learned: the foundation or base, as in the foundation of a building. Usama bin Laden, son of a building contractor, had called his terrorist network by an Arabic word, al Qaeda. It was the first piece, the necessary base for the edifice that would be a global theocracy, the great Caliphate.

The Taliban welcomed bin Laden enthusiastically back to Afghanistan. He had been funding terrorist training camps there while in Sudan. Fighters caught in Chechnya and Bosnia had been taught at these facilities. Now the camps expanded with new recruits from across the Islamic world. Those who did well graduated either to the 55th Brigade, a unit bin Laden created to help the Taliban fight its Afghan opponents, or were dispatched to sleeper cells around the world.

By 1996 and 1997 the CSG was developing plans to snatch bin Laden from Afghanistan. One plan called for an Afghan snatch team to drive a bound-and-gagged bin Laden to a dirt strip on which a CIA-owned aircraft would briefly land and then head back out of Afghanistan, flying low to evade radar. Although normally reluctant to operate inside Afghanistan, CIA made an exception long enough to inspect the dirt strip to see if it could support the aircraft's landing, turn-around, and takeoff. The unmarked aircraft was flown into position in a nearby country.

The flaw that developed in the snatch was our inability to know when it would occur. If the grab would take place when the opportunity arrived and not at a time of our choosing, the snatch team would have to hold him for almost a day until the aircraft arrived. During that day, bin Laden's men and the Taliban would be hunting for him. The chances of them detecting the aircraft, and perhaps capturing CIA staff, were large.

A variation on the plan was developed. The Afghan snatch team would not just wait for bin Laden to drive by, they would go pick him up at his “farm” at the same time the CIA aircraft was flying into the country. It sounded good. I asked to see photographs and maps.

Tarnak farm looked more like Gunga Din's fort than Dorothy's farm in
The Wizard of Oz.
It certainly wasn't in Kansas. The farm complex was several dozen houses surrounded by a twelve-foot wall. At each corner of the wall there was a machine gun nest. Parked outside were two T-55 tanks. A frontal assault by the Afghan team would probably have resulted in the deaths of the few assets the CIA had in that country. The CSG unanimously decided against an assault. (One of the many urban legends about al Qaeda that emerged after September 11 was that Attorney General Janet Reno had vetoed the operation. Not true. George Tenet and I did, to avoid getting all of our Afghan assets killed for nothing.) Instead, the CIA's Afghans would look for another way to get the leader of al Qaeda.

A
LTHOUGH WE FAILED TO SNATCH BIN
L
ADEN,
the CIA did succeed in another revenge snatch in 1997. Ever since Mir Amal Kansi had shot Agency employees on the doorstep of the Agency, the CIA had been promising revenge for the victims' families. Within a day of the shooting they had known Kansi's name. Yet he had calmly boarded a flight back to Pakistan, and no one stopped him. No one from CIA was waiting for him when he arrived in Pakistan. Like the much more significant Usama bin Laden, Kansi was the black sheep of a large and wealthy family. Although troubled by what he had done, the Kansis bought protection for Mir Amal from an Afghan warlord.

For four years CIA plotted, trying various schemes to track Kansi precisely and to snatch him. Despite real creativity, none of the plans worked. What was notable about the plans, however, was that in none of them did CIA decide simply to insert a CIA or Defense Department team into the Afghan fort in which Kansi was hiding out. Once again, CIA was reluctant to put its personnel into Afghanistan. After a while, however, Kansi started to assume that CIA had forgotten about him. He began to make trips into Pakistan. People in Pakistan talked. Finally, CIA lured Kansi to a meeting, a supposed business deal about gunrunning. The CSG went over the snatch plan in detail. We agreed that the suspect should be handed over to the Fairfax, Virginia, police for prosecution by the Commonwealth's Attorney. It would be faster than the federal courts. Then we waited for the night of the meeting.