Against All Enemies (30 page)

Up to this point the number of people in the U.S. government who knew that a retaliatory response was imminent was small, essentially those of us on the Principals Committee. Such a military operation, however, requires paperwork. There must be a presidential announcement, press briefings at several agencies, briefings for the Congress, a War Powers Notification to the Congress, explanations given at the U.N. and passed to our embassies for use with countries around the world, stepped-up security at U.S. facilities in Pakistan and elsewhere, and more. To do all of that before the attack, I needed the CSG members and some of their staffs to draft and approve the materials. The Principals, however, were worried about a leak getting out that an attack was imminent. The Principals finally agreed that I could pull together a meeting in the late afternoon, tell the CSG members what was about to happen, and put them to work drafting. The catch was that they could not leave the White House complex until the attack took place (or at least until after the news cycle and the next day's newspapers had gone to bed).

It was not the CSG members that anyone thought would leak word of the attack. Each of them, however, had staffs, which taken together numbered in the hundreds. Many of the staff had people in their lives that they trusted with exciting secrets like an upcoming military attack. None of the CSG members protested when I surprised them at the meeting by saying that they would be staying awhile and needed to come up with good excuses for their offices and families. Senior people like Under Secretary of State Tom Pickering (who had held eight Senate confirmation jobs in his illustrious career) merely rolled up their sleeves and asked for a computer to start drafting. One CIA officer, however, protested the inclusion of targets in Sudan. I explained that it was CIA and the Defense Department that had chosen the targets, that the Principals (including George Tenet) had nominated the targets, and that the President had approved them. Nonetheless, I could sense that he felt left out of the process by his own agency and would probably complain about the targets later, to the press or congressional staff.

While the night went on, I assumed the targets were locked in. The President, however, was still wondering about one commercial facility in Sudan owned by bin Laden. At the last possible minute, he pulled that target off the list because it had no military or offensive value to al Qaeda. He left on the list the Shifa chemical plant that CIA had linked to al Qaeda and to a unique chemical weapons compound.

It turned out my friends on the Joint Staff had given me hollow assurances about the Navy's plans. In the northern Arabian Sea, U.S. destroyers were lining up, their missiles spinning in their launch tubes; it wasn't just a single ship. Sure enough, the Pakistani navy noticed and alerted Islamabad. ISID received the alert. Then the first of seventy-five missiles were launched. Some circled until others were launched, and then they all flew toward the Pakistani coast at about four hundred miles an hour. Almost two hours later, they would hit the al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. Other Tomahawks were being fired from the Red Sea toward Shifa in Sudan.

Reports differ concerning how close the cruise missile attack came to hitting the al Qaeda leadership. Whatever the truth is, bin Laden was not killed in the raid. Apparently, however, Pakistani ISID officers were killed. The Pakistanis were reported by media sources to be present at the camp training Kashmiri terrorists. ISID had several offices around Afghanistan and was assisting the Taliban in its fight to gain control of the northern part of the country where the Northern Alliance still held out. I believed that if Pakistan's ISID wanted to capture bin Laden or tell us where he was, they could have done so with little effort. They did not cooperate with us because ISID saw al Qaeda as helpful to the Taliban. ISID also saw al Qaeda and its affiliates as helpful in pressuring India, particularly in Kashmir. Some, like General Hamid Gul, the former director of ISID, also appeared to share bin Laden's anti-Western ideology.

The American public's reaction to the U.S. retaliation over the next several days was about as adverse as we could have been imagined. According to the media and many in Congress, Clinton had launched a military strike to divert attention from the Monica scandal; CIA Chief Tenet was probably making up the story of an al Qaeda meeting because bin Laden was still alive; the Sudanese asserted that they had never made chemical weapons precursors at Shifa; the Defense Department had wasted valuable cruise missiles attacking huts and tents; and Clinton stopped the military from putting “boots on the ground” in Afghanistan and had insisted on the ineffectual cruise missiles; real men use commandos. Controversy over the Shifa plant was only heightened by reports that it was engaged in legitimate business activities (repackaging imported pharmaceuticals into finished consumer products) and was not capable of the manufacture of chemicals like EMPTA. Furthermore, it was reported that the plant had been acquired in March 1998 by Salah Idris, a Saudi businessman. The intelligence that I had seen never implicated Mr. Idris in any investment by the Sudan Military Industry Commission nor any involvement with Usama bin Laden nor any terrorist activities.

Our response to two deadly terrorist attacks was an attempt to wipe out al Qaeda leadership, yet it quickly became grist for the right-wing talk radio mill and part of the Get Clinton campaign. That reaction made it more difficult to get approval for follow-up attacks on al Qaeda, such as my later attempts to persuade the Principals to forget about finding bin Laden and just bomb the training camps.

What was particularly frustrating was that Clinton had pulled Joint Staff Chairman Hugh Shelton and me aside after the Cabinet Room meeting, saying to the former Special Forces commander, “Hugh, what I think would scare the shit out of these al Qaeda guys more than any cruise missile…would be the sight of U.S. commandos, Ninja guys in black suits, jumping out of helicopters into their camps, spraying machine guns. Even if we don't get the big guys, it will have a good effect.” Shelton looked pained. He explained that the camps were a long way away from anywhere we could launch a helicopter raid. Nonetheless, America's top military officer agreed to “look into it.”

O
N THE SAME DAY
that we sent cruise missiles into Afghanistan, President Clinton signed Executive Order 13099, imposing sanctions against Usama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Some months later these sanctions would be extended to the Taliban, as we determined that there was effectively little difference between their leadership and that of al Qaeda. With these orders, the focus of U.S. strategy to combat al Qaeda's financial network moved from a narrow approach focused primarily on law enforcement to a wider approach that aimed to bring into the fight all the varied tools and resources of the U.S. government.

We would need to improve and coordinate intelligence, diplomatic, law enforcement, and regulatory efforts across the dozens of government departments, agencies, and offices that would have to be involved. Most of these bureaucracies had little or no experience in focusing on terrorist financing. Many approached the issue from their own limited perspective, uninterested in a unified strategy. Some were involved in longstanding turf battles against what they saw as competing parts of the government. But the President wanted answers and actions, so these constraints would need to be pushed aside.

I asked Will Wechsler of my staff to lead a new CSG Sub-Group on Terrorist financing. Will came to my office from the Pentagon, where he had been a civilian aide to General Shalikashvili, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Will and I quickly came to the conclusion that the departments were generally doing a lousy job of tracking and disrupting international criminals' financial networks and had done little or nothing against terrorist financing. One of our few important victories against criminal financing had come a few years earlier when the President had invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act against the Cali drug cartel. Now we were going to take the same approach to al Qaeda.

Will began by meeting with Rick Newcomb, the quietly effective head of the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) and the architect of the effort against the Cali cartel. Together they asked all those in the intelligence community, law enforcement agencies, and the State Department who were supposed to know about terrorist financing what they knew about al Qaeda's finances.

Will came into my office looking worried after his first round of meetings. “This is insane,” he said. “FBI thinks we should just leave this to them, but they can't tell me anything I can't read in the newspapers. CIA has given us a data dump of everything they've ever come across on the subject and thinks that answers the question. There are no formal assessments at all, no understanding of the whole picture of where the money is coming from. As far as I can tell, there are only a handful of people at CIA who know anything about how bad guys move money around the world and none of them are part of the Counterterrorism Center. The general impression I get out there is that this is all a waste of time because, they keep saying, it doesn't take much money to blow something up and Usama's got all he needs from daddy.”

“You need to put together a small group of people who will get the answers,” I told him. “Use Rick and his staff and whoever you can find at the CIA who will be helpful. Keep the rest of the interagency involved, but don't let them slow you down. Ask the questions. I don't need precision, just some answers that can get us started. The CIA guys are crazy if they think bin Laden is doing this global network on the cheap.”

As it happened, not long after this conversation I had an opportunity to raise this issue at a Principals Committee meeting on terrorism. George Tenet gave the summary version of the CIA data dump. (If you overload people with a large number of small facts, sometimes they don't notice that it doesn't add up to anything.) “George,” I said, “that was a great briefing, but it didn't tell us everything about al Qaeda's finances. We still need to know how much money they have, where they get it, how they move it, and where they keep it.” George was not amused, but then again neither were the other Principals, nor the President, who had ordered CIA to go after terrorists' money in PDD-39 in 1995 and PDD-63 earlier in 1998.

Wechsler came back some weeks later with what they had come to call the new “theory of the case.” As too often happens in government, after they went through everything in CIA's data dump a picture emerged that was the exact opposite of the initial conventional wisdom: Although any one terrorist act might cost a little only, it took a lot of money to run everything that al Qaeda was up to. And while bin Laden's own personal fortune was undoubtedly useful in setting up al Qaeda, the organization's financial network was far beyond one man's wallet. Instead, we were looking at a vast, global fundraising machine.

This machine involved both legitimate businesses and criminal enterprises. But it was clear that the most important source of al Qaeda's money was its continuous fundraising efforts through Islamic charities and nongovernmental organizations. The terrorists moved their money though old-fashioned smuggling, but also by bank transfers through the unsuspecting (and often unregulated) holes in the global financial system, as well as the growing Islamic banking system. Some of the specifics were still uncertain, but the “theory of the case” looked very solid.

Will called my attention to reports that would vaguely reference “money exchange” offices without any real explanation of what kinds of businesses were being described. Smiling, he told me that he had found one person in the bowels of Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network who knew what the references meant. That's how we first learned all about the hawala system, an ancient underground system that offers money transfers without money movement—and virtually no paper trail.

CIA knew little about the system, but set about learning. FBI knew even less, and set about doing nothing. When I asked FBI to identify some hawalas in the United States, they at first said “What's a wala?” and, when told, came back with word that there were none. Wechsler found several in New York City by searching the Internet. Despite our repeated requests over the following years, nobody from FBI ever could answer even our most basic questions about the number, location, and activities of major hawalas in the U.S.—much less take action. And it eventually became clear that this subject was not a priority for FinCEN either, as they eventually let go the expert who had originally briefed us on the hawala system.

Once they had developed their theory of the case, Will, Rick, and their small team then set about strategizing what to do about it. We clearly needed more intelligence, but we couldn't afford to wait to act until we knew all the details. One thing was clear: a lot of the money being raised was coming from people in Saudi Arabia. Many Saudi charities being used by al Qaeda were quasi-governmental entities that the regime used to spread its version of Islam abroad. Moreover, the Saudi government seemed to have little in the way of laws or regulations that would help them know much about the money flows inside their country—even if they mustered the political will to want to know.