Against All Enemies (26 page)

The CIA parking lot was almost empty that weekend. The front door was locked. I went around and entered by a side door with a sleepy guard. Instead of going to the Operations Center, with its War Room flat screens, I went to the Counterterrorism Center's communications room, a darkened closet filled with racks of electronics. There, a small group huddled around a radio console. It was a scene reminiscent of London calling a French underground unit in World War II.

The radio man was instead calling a Chevy Suburban that had pulled up outside a Chinese restaurant and hotel in a Pakistani city not far from the Afghan border. In the Suburban a joint CIA-FBI team was getting ready for the morning call to prayer.

Our source had placed Mir Amal Kansi on the third floor of the hotel. Kansi expected a knock on the door around 4:00 a.m., from a friend who would accompany him to the mosque. We expected something else.

The clock in the radio room rolled past 4:00 a.m. Pakistani time. The radio remained silent. I looked around in the red-lighted room and noticed George Tenet in a sweat suit chomping a cigar. George had suffered a mild heart attack when we worked together at the White House, thus ending our occasional escapes to walk together to a nearby cigar store. Now, he just chewed on them. His deputy, General John Gordon, hovered by the door. Although Gordon had learned patience commanding a wing of MX missiles, where there never was any real action (thank God), his patience was obviously wearing thin. With tension building in the crowded, overheated room, Tenet could not take it anymore: “Where the shit are they? Ask them where they are, it's 4:15 there.”

“Red Rover, Red Rover, come in, over.” The radio operator tried to hail the field team.

Nothing.

By 4:30 people were pacing in the corridor outside the radio room. Finally, the radio crackled. “Base, base, this is Red Rover. The package is aloft. Repeat, the package is aloft.” Instantly champagne bottles appeared from under seats and were popped amid cheers and embraces. Tenet lit the cigar, looked at me, and said, “Don't tell my wife.”

Kansi had answered the knock on the door and suddenly found himself lying facedown on the floor of his small room, hearing not the call to prayer but the Miranda rights statement from the FBI. Within two minutes the Suburban was whipping through the empty city streets to the airport, where a C-12 waited, engines running.

For four years the Agency had tried everything it knew to get one man, one man who had embarrassed them by attacking their very headquarters and killing their own people. Now it had finally partially erased the embarrassment. There was a light ground fog as I left the building. As I drove out the gate onto Route 123, I saw the crosses by the road where they had died. It would be some solace to their families that the killer was now in custody and would probably die on Virginia's death row. George Tenet was calling the families now as I drove home. It had meant a lot to the Agency to get this guy, but it had taken a very long time even when the entire Agency was motivated.

T
HE
K
ANSI SNATCH
made the Agency feel good about itself, four years after he had attacked its headquarters. In addition to Kansi, the CSG was routinely reviewing, arranging, and implementing renditions of terrorists to the United States and elsewhere. Unfortunately, we failed in another attempted snatch, one that might have prevented 9/11. All but one of those directly involved in the World Trade Center attack in 1993 had been brought back to the U.S. The ringleader was Ramzi Yousef, who was linked to another al Qaeda operative, Khalid Sheik Muhammad. In 1996 a New York federal grand jury had indicted Muhammad for supporting that plot from overseas, and for indirect involvement in the plan to attack 747s over the Pacific. The FBI told the CSG that he was the uncle of Yousef, but they portrayed Yousef as the mastermind and Muhammad as merely the bad influence in his life. Still, we wanted Muhammad. Within a year of the indictment, we learned that Khalid Sheik Muhammad was located in Doha, Qatar, where he allegedly worked in the Water Ministry.

Having spent some time in Qatar, I was not eager to allow the local police to try to arrest him. I remembered them as a comedy act. In 1991, Qatari police cars that were escorting my motorcade managed to crash into each other in a city with almost no traffic. I also recalled their duplicity in 1990 over how they had obtained Stinger missiles (they had bought them in Afghanistan, but refused to admit it) and their later attempts to engage in diplomacy with Iran at a time when Tehran was engaged in anti-U.S. operations throughout the region. Given all of that, I wanted to know if we could perform the rendition without the knowledge of the Qatari government. Unfortunately, both the CIA and FBI claimed to have no capability to operate a covert snatch in Qatar. The Defense Department's plans for their version of a snatch, as usual, involved a force more appropriate for conquering the entire nation than for arresting one man.

Our ambassador to Qatar was a professional, and an alumnus of the CSG, Patrick Theros. I asked Theros if it would be possible for him to go to the Chamberlain, the Emir's Minister of Palace Affairs, and obtain the Emir's approval for a snatch, without that word getting to anyone else. He thought it could be done, but gave no guarantee. Nonetheless, with no other option available, the CSG agreed to try an approach in which an FBI arrest team would go in with permission, with a small number of senior Qatari security officials accompanying them to the arrest.

Despite Qatari assurances that only a few senior officials knew about our plan, Khalid Sheik Muhammad learned of it and fled the country ahead of the FBI arrest team's arrival. We were, of course, outraged at Qatari security and assumed the leak came from within the palace. One report said that Khalid Sheik Muhammad had fled the country on a passport provided by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Unfortunately, the CSG knew much less than the full story. Khalid Sheik Muhammad was not merely a bad influence on his mastermind nephew, it was the uncle who was the terrorist mastermind. Not only did he plan the World Trade Center attack in 1993 and the 747 plot in 1995, Khalid Sheik Muhammad was a close associate of bin Laden and al Qaeda's chief operational leader. Had the CSG been told that, the NSC would have insisted on a CIA or military snatch team, despite their protestation of inability. Had we been told of Khalid Sheik Muhammad's role even after he escaped, we would have insisted on an all-out effort to find him. Instead, the role of this key al Qaeda figure did not become clear to CIA or FBI until after the September 11 attacks.

Other countries also reportedly failed to cooperate in snatches. Adam Garfinkle in the Spring 2002
National Interest
reported that in 1997 Imad Mugniyah was the subject of a U.S. arrest attempt when he was aboard an aircraft scheduled to land in Saudi Arabia, but the Saudi government waved the aircraft off rather than cooperate with the U.S. in apprehending the Hezbollah leader.

A
S
1998
DAWNED,
al Qaeda grew stronger thanks to a merger with Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The FBI had uncovered the role of Egyptian Sheik Abdul Rahman in plans to commit terrorism in New York in 1993. By 1996, he was sentenced to life in prison in the United States. His friends, including Usama bin Laden and Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader Ayman Zawahiri, had planned revenge and plotted to gain his release. In 1997, they struck tourists at Luxor, Egypt, killing sixty-two. Egyptian police found bodies slit open, stuffed with leaflets demanding the release of the blind sheik. Faced with the collapse of the tourism industry, Egypt cracked down against the jihadists with even greater ferocity than it had employed after the attempt on President Mubarak's life in Ethiopia.

Weakened, Egyptian Islamic Jihad grew closer to bin Laden. The blind sheik's son attached himself to bin Laden and promised revenge on the United States. In February 1998, EIJ and al Qaeda were among several groups that jointly issued a declaration of war against Egypt, the United States, and other governments. It did not come as a shock to us. We had considered ourselves at war with al Qaeda even before we knew its name or its reach. We had been working with friendly governments for at least three years to identify and destroy sleeper cells in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. We had arranged snatches of many al Qaeda operatives and had been planning to snatch bin Laden himself. In the spring of 1998, bin Laden was indicted by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White's federal grand jury. The CSG wanted to add bin Laden to our list of snatched terrorists. In early 1998, we wanted to go on the offensive against al Qaeda. We also wanted to begin a major program to protect the homeland against terrorism, whether from al Qaeda or other groups. The events of 1998 would make it easier to persuade the Congress and the media that we needed to do both.

W
HEN THE
S
ITUATION
R
OOM
called me on a Sunday night in 1995 with the word that something had happened in Tokyo, the first reports had indicated chemical weapons. First reports are usually wrong, but I drove in to the Situation Room just in case. The media accounts were pretty convincing that some chemical weapon had been released by somebody. My calls to CIA, FBI, and State told me nothing more than CNN had. So I called the Department of Health and Human Services.

I had earlier formed an interagency working group on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Two people had stood out as can-do activists who were as worried as I was at the possibility of Ramzi Yousef's mysterious organization getting its hands on a chemical weapon or a nuclear device. One was Lisa Gordon-Hagerty at the Department of Energy. She had linked up the scientists at the department's nuclear labs with the commandos of the Joint Special Operations Command and was conducting field exercises on what you do when you have to get a nuclear bomb away from terrorists.

The other impressive member of the group was Frank Young at the Public Health Service of HHS. The Public Health Service is a bizarre civilian-military hybrid. Part of HHS, the officers of the Public Health Service wear Navy uniforms and use Navy ranks. So Frank was not just a doctor, he was also an admiral. In his spare time, he was a Protestant minister. Frank had created a nationwide network of chemical and biological weapons experts and medical personnel to investigate whether any unusual medical reports that might come in from time to time were actually reflecting covert terrorist use of chemical or biological weapons.

On that Sunday night in March 1995, I called Frank from the Situation Room. “Admiral, Doctor, Reverend, Frank,” I began. “Something funny going on in Tokyo.”

“From the press reports it sounds like a nerve agent gas was released,” Frank replied. “Not the kind of thing that the Japanese military has. If it's all right, I am putting together a team to fly out there as soon as possible and help the Japanese figure it out. I'm also calling my Japanese counterparts. It's Monday there now.”

“Sounds good, Frank. I will tell State to get Embassy Tokyo to help your team. See what you can find out and we will have a CSG in the morning.” That Monday morning was the first time Health and Human Services had ever attended a meeting of the core Counterterrorism Security Group in the Situation Room.

Frank Young, sitting at the opposite end of the table from the chair, in his admiral's uniform, had a full report ready: “The agent employed was sarin nerve gas, but apparently not at full military dose. The group responsible was a religious cult known as the Aum Shin-rikyo.”

By now I had enough experience with CIA and FBI to doubt that they would ever have even heard of the Aum. I was not disappointed. Except for press reports from the previous twelve hours, they had nothing in their files on the Aum. I had come to respect the new FBI representative on the CSG, John O'Neill. He had worked closely with me to coordinate the previous month's arrest of Ramzi Yousef. That arrest occurred during O'Neill's first week on the job, after arriving in Washington from an organized crime assignment in Chicago. He had worked straight through for days without going home and he had thought of every detail. O'Neill was obviously very bright and activist, but also playful. Like me, he was from a working-class background and he tended to straight talk that some found abrasive.

I decided to push a little to see how he'd respond. “How can you be so sure there are no Aum here, John, just because you don't have an FBI file on them? Did you look them up in the Manhattan phone book to see if they're there?”

“You serious?” O'Neill asked, not sure whether I was being funny. When I assured him that I meant it, he directed his deputy to leave the conference room and call FBI New York. A while later the FBI agent returned to the room and handed O'Neill a note.

O'Neill glanced at it and said, “Fuck. They're in the phone book, on East 48th Street at Fifth.”

Everyone in that CSG meeting had the same thought at the same moment: sarin in the New York City subway. O'Neill called for backup. “We need some chemical weapons decon guys up there quick. Some guys who can detect and diagnose chemicals. The Army.”

The Pentagon representatives at the meeting were not keen on the idea of olive green Army trucks rumbling through Midtown, disgorging troops in space suits while the lunch crowd at Rockefeller Center watched in growing panic. Besides, the nearest chemical unit was in Maryland, four hours down Interstate 95. The Pentagon guys also raised the same mantra in Latin that Defense Department representatives chanted whenever asked to do something in the United States,
posse comitatus.
The phrase refers to an 1876 law, passed at the end of Reconstruction, that prohibited federal military authorities from exercising civilian police powers inside the United States (as they had in the occupied Confederacy from 1865 to 1876). The law contains a clause allowing the President to waive it in an emergency. I had drafted a fill-in-the-blanks waiver in my desk drawer, unsigned.

I did not have to deploy the
posse comitatus
waiver. O'Neill persuaded the Pentagon to stage the unit to a National Guard armory in Manhattan, while the U.S. Attorney tried to develop enough of a story to get a search warrant. In the meantime, a “fire marshal” conducted a surprise inspection of the building. He found that the Aum were moving out, carrying boxes into a rental van. An FBI surveillance car followed the van out onto Fifth Avenue for several blocks, but then lost the truck in Midtown traffic. When that news got to us in the Situation Room, it looked like O'Neill's veins were going to pop: chemical weapons lost in Manhattan, on his watch. I thought I should go see the National Security Advisor. While Tony Lake and I were contemplating the mechanics of evacuating large portions of New York, O'Neill called. They had the van. They had a warrant. They had found nothing but boxes of books. The office on 48th Street was clean.

We later learned that the Aum had made not only sarin nerve gas, but also an anthrax weapon. They had sprayed their homemade anthrax at a U.S. military facility in Japan, but they had the spore size wrong and the attack failed to sicken anyone. It also failed to be noticed.

I had insisted that the Presidential Decision Directive on terrorism issued in 1995 address the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on chemical, biological, or nuclear materials. It was now the President's policy that there was no higher priority than the prevention of such acquisition, or if terrorists were actually found to have such weapons, no greater priority than removing that capability. The policy also called for planning on how to handle a situation in which such weapons were used.

In 1996, however, we had no capability to deal with a chemical or biological weapon being used in the United States. The old Cold War–era Civil Defense program had withered and died even before the Cold War itself had ended. Senators Sam Nunn, Dick Lugar, and Pete Domenici had been focusing on the disposition of Soviet nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, now that the Soviet Union had dissolved. The three senators had sponsored money to account for, secure, and destroy the weapons. They had sought to fund alternative employment for the Soviet weapons scientists. Finally, they put aside a small amount of federal dollars to begin to train emergency responders in big U.S. cities to deal with such weapons, just in case some fell into the wrong hands and ended up here.

The three senators' program, my own interest, and Bill Clinton's reading habits came together to begin to create some domestic preparedness capability.

My interest stemmed from experiences in the Cold War and the Gulf War. In the last year of the Cold War, as an Assistant Secretary of State, I was visited by a State Department Intelligence Bureau officer carrying a locked case, the kind approved by CIA for carrying the most sensitive intelligence documents. I did not know what I was about to read, only that I was to be one of five people in the State Department allowed to read it. Inside the bag was the debriefing of a senior Soviet official who had defected to the British. He told about something that the U.S. intelligence community had believed did not exist, a massive Soviet program to develop and deploy biological weapons.

The Soviet Union, the United States, and other nations had signed a treaty outlawing biological weapons in 1973. We had proceeded to destroy ours. The Soviet Union had claimed to have done the same. They had lied. Not only had they not destroyed their bioweapons program, they had expanded it and developed weapons with truly horrific capability. Their labs had worked on Marburg and Ebola, strains that made the victim bleed to death from every orifice and organ. They had perfected bombs, artillery shells, and other weapons to disperse such agents as anthrax, botulinum, smallpox, and antibiotic-resistant strains of the plague. Then they had actually filled weapons with these agents and stockpiled them. Over 100,000 Soviets were employed in the secret program at facilities throughout the Soviet Union. Moreover, the friendly senior Soviet officials with whom we were negotiating arms control treaties had known all about the illegal program and the efforts to keep it secret from us.

It was not the kind of news that any of us had wanted to hear, but it was definitely not what Secretary of State Jim Baker needed. Baker had told the Pentagon, the Congress, and the President that we could safely sign several major arms control agreements with the Soviets. He had said it was highly unlikely that these Soviet leaders would risk getting caught violating an international arms control agreement and, moreover, if they did, U.S. intelligence would catch a violation using “national technical means.” Now he was faced with the reality that the same Soviets had risked getting caught in a big violation and that U.S. “national technical means” had failed to find a major nationwide program. Were it not for one senior Soviet scientist's faith in British intelligence, we would not have known about an enormous biological weapons threat.

Baker's first reaction had been to keep the knowledge about the Soviet program restricted, until he could get the Soviet leadership to admit it existed and promise to destroy the program in front of U.S. observers. Unfortunately, the Soviets were not quite so ready to cooperate when confronted. They claimed that the U.S. must have such a program too. They wanted to inspect our facilities. Discussions went on for some time until the Soviets did agree to destroy everything and permit limited reciprocal “visits,” but I was never satisfied that the Soviets had given us the two things we really needed: first, a complete list of everything they had developed (and destroyed), and second, the antidotes they had developed to whatever new strains of disease had festered up in their pots.

Two years later, when the First Gulf War was looming after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, I had been asked to develop our policy for dealing with Iraqi chemical and other “special” weapons. The CIA knew Iraq had chemical weapons then; they had used them by the ton on the Iranians. Iraq was one of two dozen nations that the U.S. government said had nuclear, chemical, and/or biological weapons.

With my British counterparts in a joint U.K.-U.S. working group in the fall of 1990, we tried to assess how many chemical-protective suits and gas masks we needed for our troops, and for the several hundred thousand other allied troops from over thirty countries, not to mention the civilians in the region, that could be hit by Iraqi Scud missiles. It was a hopeless task. There were probably not enough protective suits in the world to cover the population at risk. We agreed to recommend that “nonessential” British and American civilians fly home. My Deputy, Bill Rope, doggedly tried to steal masks from state-side military units to send to U.S. embassies' staffs. Years before, Israel had equipped its entire population with gas masks and had hundreds of thousands of special medicine kits in the hands of its citizens. We weren't even prepared to do that for our armed forces.

The policy on inoculating U.S. and U.K. front-line troops was also problematic. There was no agreement about which diseases troops should be vaccinated against, and there were concerns about the side effects of some medicines. I asked to be briefed by the Army's experts from Fort Dietrich on the state of our vaccination supply. A colonel, who was also a medical doctor, came to the State Department with his team of experts.

“Well, Colonel, let's start with anthrax. What is the size of our supply of vaccines?”

“We have a horse,” he replied with evident embarrassment. Noting my puzzlement, he continued. “We have gradually shot this poor horse up with a lot of anthrax and she is now totally immune. We could use her blood to make tens of thousands of shots.”

There was only one response I thought possible. “We need you to get some more horses, Colonel.”

Worse than its absence of infected horses, our Army had no modern chem-bio detection vehicles and so had borrowed some Fox armored vehicles from the German Bundeswehr for that purpose. The Foxes had the unfortunate habit of triggering false alarms with some regularity, to the point where troops were no longer responding by jumping into their heavy, sweaty, uncomfortable protective gear. The fact was we could not assemble a decent defensive capability in time for the war.

We therefore turned to deterrence and retaliation. What would we do if Iraq used chemical or biological weapons? We had one report that they were planning to scare us with a simulated nuclear weapon. The alleged plan was to set off several truckloads of high explosives, mixed with radiological material. The U.S. would detect both the major explosion and then the radioactivity and assume Iraq had just tested a nuclear weapon. That, according to the reported Iraqi plan, was supposed to deter us from invading.