Against All Enemies (29 page)

The room erupted in applause. Clinton plunged into the audience and shook hands. When he got to me, he grabbed me and whispered in my ear, “You liked that ending, didn't you?”

He had identified a new problem and was ramming through a major initiative to deal with it, even at a time of tight federal budgets. From having had no domestic capability to deal with the effects of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, we were funding training and equipment for public health departments, hospitals, fire departments, and emergency services units. We were buying specialized medicines and vaccines, stockpiling them secretly around the country, and arranging for on-call mass production of more. There would be research and development of new detection, diagnostic, and decontamination technologies, along with new pharmaceuticals.

There would also be even more funds for many departments to address terrorism. New agencies would be created and funded to protect the nation's cyber networks. After the speech, Attorney General Reno, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, and I briefed the White House press corps on all of the initiatives. I knew we had made the conceptual breakthrough when Shalala began by saying, “HHS is now a key part in the fight against terrorism.” Shalala would later join me and Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen on one of a five-part series of shows on
Nightline,
entitled
BioWar,
focusing on the need for homeland protection against terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.

Throughout the country exercises were held, both tabletops involving simulations in a room and field exercises with units actually deploying. In one field exercise, hundreds of FBI, Energy, and Defense Department personnel quickly set up a temporary camp outside Norfolk when simulated intelligence reports indicated that a terrorist cell would infiltrate a nuclear weapon into the headquarters of the Navy's fleet. The CSG members went to the exercise and played our real roles, as we had done so many times in tabletops in Washington. In a field exercise, however, counterterrorism action units actually assault targets. In the Norfolk exercise, Navy SEALs hit a boat playing the terrorist mother ship, while FBI's Hostage Rescue Team crashed into a house in which the sleeper cell was waiting. A special nuclear bomb squad moved in to defuse the weapon, while staff from several agencies pretended to be reporters and peppered officials with tough questions at a simulated press conference.

As part of the Annapolis announcements, I had become the National Coordinator and began emerging from the shadows of national security and intelligence to meet with the media and brief members of Congress. As I feared, having the world's press running profiles of the new American Terrorism Czar resulted in the kind of attention I did not want. Walking into my office one morning in 1999, I sensed something was wrong. It was the way that the normally cheery Coast Guard Chief Jack Robinson greeted me. It was the look that my assistant of over ten years, Beverly Roundtree, gave me as I walked by her desk. I no sooner sat down in front of my computer than Lisa Gordon-Hagerty walked in with that “this is really serious shit” expression on her face.

“Have you read the cable?” Lisa asked. I had no idea what she was talking about. She showed me. An Arab leader had called our consul general the night before, saying he had urgent and important information to share, the consul should drive over immediately. When he did, the Arab leader gave him an “intelligence report” that had a long, detailed account. The bottom line of the report was that Usama bin Laden had put out a contract on the American Terrorism Czar, Dick Clarke. I was to be killed in Washington.

“Well, that's an interesting way to start the day,” I joked, but Lisa did not see anything funny about the report. “Look, Lis, we get garbage reports all the time. That's probably what this is.”

She looked daggers at me and said softly and slowly, “And what if it's not?”

“Well, as Mr. Spock said to Captain Kirk, if you die we all move up one in rank.” I was still reading the details in the report, some of which looked plausible.

She was not amused. “Don't you get it, Dick, Usama is trying to get you killed.”

“Well, that's not surprising, since I'm trying to get him killed,” I replied as Lisa left the office with a purposeful stride. She was not going to let it go. Neither was Sandy Berger, whom I had earlier browbeaten into having a Secret Service protective detail with him twenty-four hours a day. By the end of the day at Berger's request, the President had signed a memo designating me as a “protectee,” which made me eligible for the same kind of Secret Service blanket. I called the Secret Service Director. “Look, having me run around in a bullet-proof Caddy with Suburbans front and back will only make it easier for someone to find me. Can't we try something else?”

After a few minutes trying to persuade me, he asked, “Well, are you willing to be a target, see if we can flush them out?” I agreed.

Being a target meant that it would appear as though nothing had changed, that I had no protection. In reality, there would be agents hiding around my neighborhood and staged along the routes that I drove. Unmarked cars would follow a few cars behind me, looking for someone looking for me. My house would be given new locks, alarms, and exterior lights. And I would go to Secret Service agent school to learn evasive driving and, more frightening for my staff, how to shoot the .357 Sig Sauer handgun. For someone who believed in greater gun control, walking around with a cannon under my coat seemed strange, but only at first.

I dined one night at a sidewalk café in Washington's Adams Morgan neighborhood with a visiting Arab cabinet minister who had said he wanted to see the real Washington. After a while of looking uncomfortable, he said, “Don't they give you protection, bodyguards?”

It had not occurred to me that he would have thought that being with me made him vulnerable too. I tried to make him feel better, telling him, “See that beggar on the sidewalk, that guy over at the bar—they are protecting us.” My Arab friend looked skeptical, until his limousine returned to pick him up after dinner, only to be blocked by a Suburban that appeared from nowhere with six serious-looking Secret Service agents.

After weeks of investigation and surveillance, we concluded the threat to me was probably bogus. Some of the security went away, but some of it stayed and my hatred for bin Laden grew even more personal, even though I was “safe” because I lived in America.

Despite the unwanted attention publicity brought, explaining to the press about terrorism was necessary to achieve Clinton's goal of preparing, but not frightening, the public. As part of a campaign of press briefings and speeches, I agreed to bring Lesley Stahl of
60 Minutes
to a secret location where we had stored tons of specialized medicines and equipment for dealing with a chemical or biological attack in the mid-Atlantic region. As the CBS cameras filmed, I broke open a crate and took out an auto-injector needle of atropine, a nerve gas antidote, and demonstrated how one would drive it into one's thigh. Stahl asked whether all of this would actually do any good. I replied that were there an attack, such as the use of anthrax, these secret stockpiles could save thousands of lives. Three years later, faced with an actual anthrax attack, we ordered the stockpiled medicines distributed.

Stahl and I also discussed Usama bin Laden on that
60 Minutes
segment. I acknowledged that al Qaeda sought weapons of mass destruction. For years we had been receiving raw intelligence reports and finished CIA analyses saying that al Qaeda was seeking chemical or nuclear weapons. When we asked for further details, however, there were none. Frustrated, in early 2001 I called Charlie Allen, who had become the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Collection, a kind of overall coordinator of what all U.S. intelligence agencies were doing to get information. We agreed to assemble everyone from every intelligence agency who had any responsibility for collecting or analyzing information about al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction. We met in a secret location in Virginia. There were a lot of people in attendance. Each agency briefed on what they knew. More rumors and shadows. Nothing specific, credible, or actionable.

To break the mold, Charlie Allen and I split the group into two teams. The first team was told to assume the role of al Qaeda and to develop plans for acquiring weapons of mass destruction without the Americans knowing it. They had the rest of the day to develop the plan and report back. The second team was told they were in charge of American intelligence. They were told to assume that al Qaeda did actually have chemical and nuclear activities under way and had been successful hiding them. The U.S. team could use any method or capability to find the activities, but they needed to do so quickly because, in the exercise, we knew that al Qaeda planned to use the weapons soon. Charlie asked the group: “Assume they have special weapons and they are well hidden so you can't see the weapons. What would you see? What would they be saying, doing? What are the collateral indicators?” Forcing the analysts from several agencies to work together and think differently about the problem reenergized them.

The exercise taught us three lessons: first, there had not been a coordinated U.S. intelligence effort to think creatively about how to find any al Qaeda weapons of mass destruction; second, it was easier to hide such a program than to discover it; and finally, it is impossible to prove a negative, i.e., we could not prove that al Qaeda had no weapons of mass destruction. The exercise resulted in a renewed intelligence effort. As part of that effort, a third-country national working for CIA made it into an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan where reports said chemical weapons were being made. The agent took samples, but analysis of them showed nothing. CIA took pride in the risks that the third-country national had run in going to the camp. (Later, Judy Miller of the
New York Times
would go to Afghanistan and drive up to the gate of an al Qaeda camp reputed to have chemical weapons, as part of her preparations for a week-long series on al Qaeda.)

The U.S. analysts playing al Qaeda in our exercise had identified one area as a good place to hide. As a result, it was photographed repeatedly and its cave entrances mapped. The region was a valley in Afghanistan called Tora Bora.

O
UR EMBASSIES IN
T
ANZANIA AND
K
ENYA,
in East Africa, were struck almost simultaneously on August 7, 1998. Our embassy in Tanzania was badly damaged. In Kenya, there was carnage. Two hundred fifty-seven were dead and five thousand wounded. Among the fatalities were twelve Americans. Al Qaeda had now followed up a fatwa, or religious ruling, earlier in 1998 declaring war on the United States with an actual act of war.

The CSG met by secure video conference at five in the morning. I asked Gayle Smith, Special Assistant to the President for Africa, to sit on my right. On the video screen we could see that at the State Department site Gayle's predecessor and now the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Susan Rice, joined the regular counterterrorism crew. Susan Rice was one of the rare breed of hands-on and “get it done” policy makers. On my left was Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, who had just joined my NSC team from Energy. She had come to the White House to help build the homeland protection program, but her first task was going to be relief and recovery in Africa.

“Let's begin. We are going to have to triage this, sequence it,” I started the meeting. “First, rescue. We need to get teams in there fast. Urban heavy search-and-rescue. We may still have people alive inside and I doubt there are local units that can handle this. FEMA, who is on deck? We need two.” The Federal Emergency Management Agency had paid for some local fire departments to hire extra staff, get specialized training, and procure equipment for searching through building collapses for bodies, dead and alive. That morning the Fairfax County, Virginia, fire department was the first that could roll. “We will need Air Force medical Nightingale flights to get our wounded out to Europe. Those hospitals can't handle this load.” In Europe, the Air Force kept medical teams on standby to fly into a disaster area and evacuate the injured on flying ambulances.

“Then we are going to have to get medical help in those countries for their wounded,” Rice added. “It's mainly their people who have been hurt because of an attack on us.”

“Second, security. DOD, what have you got nearby that can secure the two sites and the stuff we will be sending?” The Navy had created Fleet Anti-terrorism Support Teams (FAST)—units of Marines to do specialized security at sensitive sites. The Marines got the call.

“Third, investigation. I assume FBI will want to send Evidence Recovery Teams to both locations right away before the sites get trampled. And investigators to help the local police?” John O'Neill had teams on standby in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Washington. The New York unit had its equipment at a nearby Air Force base in New Jersey. They went out first.

“Fourth, coordination. We have no embassies in these countries now and we are descending upon them with hundreds of staff. State, can we launch two FESTs?” The FEST was the Foreign Emergency Support Team, an interagency response group led by a senior State Department official. Their mission was to go into a country where there had been a terrorist attack and provide highly trained staff to the U.S. ambassador. Most embassies did not have the numbers or type of people they needed to handle an emergency like this. The FEST did. A customized FEST aircraft was always on four-hour or less standby. Susan Rice wanted to get people from her bureau on the two FEST flights to relieve and assist her two ambassadors.

“Fifth, lift. We just agreed on enough people and equipment to fill up a dozen C-141s or C-5s. I know we have only two or three on standby, so we are going to have to pull priority here and cancel other flights. If we can get midair refueling for them that will get us there quicker. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty is going to serve as the overall mission controller for the President.” Lisa looked aghast at me and mouthed “Why me?” I continued, “She decides what goes first, how much we need. If there are problems in the flow of assets to Africa, Lisa decides.

“Sixth, stopping the next one. We can't assume this is it. There may be more attacks planned. Susan, let's shut down all embassies in Africa. Let's also button down all embassies around the world. If any ambassador thinks somebody is threatening their post, they can close it without calling Washington.

“Finally, attribution and response. CIA, let's meet in my office at 7:30 to go over the evidence. The senior officer from each CSG agency is invited. I suspect we all know what the evidence will show. We will need to give the President options.”

I was pleased that we had become adept at responding to terrorist attacks, but deeply bothered that we had had to do so. FEMA, FBI, State, CIA, the Marines, and the other agencies reacted with alacrity. The Air Force did not. Pilots needed crew rest. Aircraft broke down. Aerial tankers were unavailable. The first foreign rescue team to arrive on the scene was from Israel. When my Israeli counterpart had heard about the attack, he had launched an aircraft with a heavy search-and-rescue team on a dedicated aircraft they kept loaded with equipment and on constant alert. The Israelis had not called us to ask; they knew we would be busy.

The smaller, in-person meeting of the CSG that morning revealed initial evidence that al Qaeda had launched the attacks. CIA knew there had been an al Qaeda cell in Kenya, but they had thought that, working with the Kenyan police, the U.S. government had broken it up. More troublesome, the CIA brought reports to the meeting that suggested that al Qaeda planned more attacks. An attack in Albania seemed about to happen. Another in Uganda or Rwanda was possible, although we had just closed those two embassies. From my office, the CSG members called back to their departments on secure phones. The State Department closed our embassy in Tirana, Albania. The Defense Department agreed to dispatch a heavily armed Marine FAST unit to surround the embassy in Tirana. The U.S. government was working with the Albanian police to round up the al Qaeda cell.

Because we were all pretty certain where this was going, I asked CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to create a joint team to develop response options against al Qaeda. If it turned out to be somebody else that did the attacks, we would develop different plans. None of us thought that would be necessary.

That day and the next several were consumed with meetings with the President and the Principals, coordination of the “flow” to Africa, and preparation to receive the bodies of our dead. A week passed in a flash. Seven days after the attack, the Principals met again with the President. Just before going to the meeting, I read a CIA report from a source in Afghanistan that bin Laden and his top staff were planning a meeting on August 20 to review the results of their attacks and plan the next wave. Terrorist coordinators from outside Afghanistan had been summoned back for the session. As we sat down in the Cabinet Room, I slipped the report to George Tenet, who was sitting next to me. On it, I penned, “You thinking what I'm thinking?” He passed it back with a note on it, “You better believe I am.” We had both come to the conclusion that this report meant we had the opportunity not merely to stage a retaliatory bombing, but also a chance to get bin Laden and his top deputies, if the President would agree to a strike now during the white-hot “Monica” scandal press coverage. At that moment, Tenet and I were the only ones in the Cabinet Room that knew about the CIA report.

In the meeting, CIA and FBI provided detailed evidence that the operation had been al Qaeda. “This one is a slam dunk, Mr. President,” Tenet began. “There is no doubt that this was an al Qaeda operation. Both we and the bureau have plenty of evidence.” Some arrests had already been made. Tenet described the upcoming meeting in Afghanistan for the President and the other Principals, drawing nods around the table. The Principals were resolute: if al Qaeda could issue fatwas declaring war on us, we could do the same and more to them. Although we had been going after al Qaeda for several years, now it would be the top priority to eliminate the organization. The President asked National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to coordinate all of the moving parts necessary for a military response, tentatively planned for August 20, six days later. Any targets in addition to the al Qaeda meeting place were to be nominated by CIA and the Defense Department. Military assets had to be moved into place. Pakistan would have to be dealt with in some way.

Clinton also asked Berger to pull together an overall plan to deal with al Qaeda. “Listen, retaliating for these attacks is all well and good, but we gotta get rid of these guys once and for all,” Clinton said, looking seriously over his half glasses at Tenet, Cohen, and Berger. “You understand what I'm telling you?” We had been dealing with al Qaeda as one of several terrorist threats. Now, I hoped, we would gain interagency agreement that destroying al Qaeda was one of our top national security objectives, and an urgent one.

Although the Pakistanis were helping us with the investigation following the embassy attacks by looking for people who had fled Africa for Afghanistan before and after the attack, they had been less than helpful before. Al Qaeda members had moved freely through Pakistan to Afghanistan. Despite the fact that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate was training, equipping, and advising the Taliban in Afghanistan, they professed no ability to influence that group to close terrorist camps and hand over bin Laden. Any U.S. military strike on Afghanistan would have to cross Pakistani airspace. If they were not told in advance, they might shoot down our aircraft or cruise missiles. If they were told in advance, some of us believed that the ISID would alert the Taliban and possibly al Qaeda. The State Department Deputy Secretary, Strobe Talbott, also feared that the Pakistanis would see the U.S. attack coming and assume it was an Indian air raid. Talbott thought that Pakistan would not hesitate to launch an attack on India, even before confirming what was going on, and that could trigger a nuclear war between the two South Asian rivals (each of which now had nuclear bombs).

All of this was taking place against the backdrop of the continuing Monica scandal. Like most of his advisors, I was beyond mad that the President had not shown enough discretion or self-control, although from what I knew of presidential history, marital fidelity had also been a problem for several of his illustrious predecessors. I was angrier, almost incredulous, that the bitterness of Clinton's enemies knew no bounds, that they intended to hurt not just Clinton but the country by turning the President's personal problem into a global, public circus for their own political ends. Now I feared that the timing of the President's interrogation about the scandal, August 17, would get in the way of our hitting the al Qaeda meeting.

It did not. Clinton made clear that we were to give him our best national security advice, without regard to his personal problems. “Do you all recommend that we strike on the 20th? Fine. Do not give me political advice or personal advice about the timing. That's my problem. Let me worry about that.” If we thought this was the best time to hit the Afghan camps, he would order it and take the heat for “Wag the Dog” criticism that we all knew would happen, for the media and congressional reaction that would say that he was using a military strike to divert attention from his deposition in the investigation. (
Wag the Dog
was a movie that had been released that year, in which fictional presidential advisors create an artificial crisis with Albania to attack it and divert attention from domestic problems. Ironically, Clinton was blamed for a “Wag the Dog” strategy in 1998 dealing with the real threat from al Qaeda but no one labeled Bush's 2003 war on Iraq as a “Wag the Dog” move even though the “crisis” was manufactured and Bush political advisor Karl Rove was telling Republicans to “run on the war.”)

Clinton testified on the 17th and then flew to Martha's Vineyard. He had had one full day of vacation when Don Kerrick arrived. Kerrick was an Army general who had served several times on the NSC staff and had been a key player in the Bosnia crisis. Now, as the Deputy National Security Advisor, he was taking the final plans for the attack on al Qaeda to the little island off the Massachusetts coast.

CIA and the Joint Chiefs had nominated not just buildings at the al Qaeda camp scheduled to host the meetings, but also other al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and facilities in Sudan that they believed bin Laden had invested in. They recommended that the attack be conducted only with cruise missiles, not commandos or piloted aircraft, either of which could result in U.S. casualties or prisoners. Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Joe Ralston had agreed to fly to Pakistan, stopping at the airport allegedly for refueling en route from somewhere else. He had called the head of the Pakistani military and invited him to a one-on-one dinner meeting on the 20th, at the airport, to discuss the tensions between the United States and Pakistan. The Pakistani general, a friend of Ralston's, had accepted. The cruise missiles would hit Pakistan's airspace and be detected while the dinner was going on. Ralston would explain that they were our missiles and should not be shot at. The plan called for Ralston to get on his plane and leave before dessert was served.

The U.S. military are particularly sensitive to civilians telling them how to do their job, or even asking them how they intend to do it. The officer corps have all been taught to tell civilians “Just give me the objective. I'll figure out how to do it.” This response has its roots in Vietnam, when Lyndon Johnson sat in the Situation Room going over maps and pictures, ruling out bombing targets. It was this tradition that prevented us from knowing how the military would go after Aideed in Somalia—otherwise, we would have suggested that repeated daytime raids from helicopters in a city was not a good idea. It was this tradition that also meant I could not formally become involved in discussions about what platforms would be used to launch the cruise missiles. Nonetheless, I called my friends on the Joint Staff to raise the issue that the Pakistani military might detect strange U.S. Navy activity off their coast long before Joe Ralston was sipping curry soup. I was assured the missiles would be fired from submerged attack subs. There might be a destroyer employed, but there was often a U.S. destroyer passing by the Pakistani coast.