Against All Enemies (33 page)

This institutional response was in sharp contrast with George Tenet's personal fixation with al Qaeda. Tenet often called me alarmed about raw intelligence reports of al Qaeda activity. He testified before congressional committees that al Qaeda was the major threat to the United States. It was also in sharp contrast to the attitude in the Counterterrorism Center at CIA, which by 1997 was led by the hard-charging Cofer Black. Black wanted to destroy al Qaeda as much as I did, if only the Directorate of Operations would let him.

W
HEN
B
LACK CALLED THAT DAY IN
1999, we quickly convened a CSG meeting and sent out warnings to U.S. embassies, military bases, and to the 18,000 police agencies in the United States. The message: Be advised, al Qaeda terrorists may be planning attacks around the time of the Millennium. Be on heightened alert for suspicious activity. And then we waited.

That message went overseas, but also to all federal law enforcement agents, as well as many county sheriffs, state troopers, highway patrol officers, and city cops. The break came in an unlikely location. A pleasant boat ride from British Columbia to Washington state ended with a routine screening by U.S. Customs officers. One passenger in line fidgeted, would not make eye contact. When the Customs officer, Diana Dean, went to pull him out of line, he bolted and ran off the boat, leaving his car on the ferry. Dean gave chase and called for backup. A few minutes later Ahmed Ressam was in custody. His car held explosives, and a map of Los Angeles International Airport.

If that were not enough to send us spinning, CIA had learned further details about the al Qaeda plot in Jordan. The head of the cell, who had helped assemble the bombs, had recently quit his job—as a cab driver in Boston.

The Jordanian Crown Prince, visiting the bomb factory hidden in an upper-middle-class home, had been amazed at the size of the haul. “They weren't planning terrorism, they were planning a revolution.” The King immediately declared a state of emergency and flooded the streets with soldiers and armored vehicles. More than the usual suspects were swept up and interrogated. The investigation led to an al Qaeda operative in Pakistan, and to another American who had lived not far from Los Angeles International Airport.

In the fifteen months since the embassy bombings, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger had held dozens of Principals meetings on al Qaeda. He knew their names, their modus operandi, and he feared they would strike again before we could cripple their organization. He convened the Principals in crisis mode. “We have stopped two sets of attacks planned for the Millennium. You can bet your measly federal paycheck that there are more out there and we have to stop them too. I spoke with the President and he wants you all to know…” Berger looked at Janet Reno, Louis Freeh, George Tenet, “…this is it, nothing more important, all assets. We stop this fucker.” (It was the sort of attention we needed in the summer of 2001, but we got only in the CSG, not in the Principals Committee.)

Following the first of these Principals meetings, we prepared, at Berger's request, a Pol-Mil Plan for the Millennium Alert, alerting units, increasing security, rounding up suspects around the world.

Berger was, in general, a cautious lawyer who had an unparalleled skill in seeing the many ways something could develop and go wrong, how people could under some circumstances blame you even if you came up with the cure for cancer. That skill kept the Administration out of a lot of hot water. He had also become, however, a true believer in the fight against al Qaeda, understanding early on the nature of the threat. Berger had a coldly cynical and accurate understanding of the flaws and weaknesses of the various departments and agencies. He did not think we could just trust that FBI, CIA, and the military would automatically do the right things to protect us.

This time, however, FBI did respond well. It did one of the things it is very good at: it threw bodies at the problem. Thousands of agents fanned out, pulling at strings. The strings from Ressam, the man on the ferry, led to a sleeper cell of Algerian mujahedeen in Montreal. How the Canadians had missed the cell was difficult to understand, but now they were cooperating. The leads the Royal Canadian Mounted Police provided went to what looked like cells in Boston and New York. By the time I called John O'Neill (by then the FBI Special Agent in Charge of National Security in New York City) to ask what he was doing, he was on a back street in Brooklyn where his agents had just arrested an al Qaeda operative connected to Ressam.

The Justice Department normally reviewed FBI requests for national security wiretaps with a skeptical eye. Justice correctly wanted to insure there were no abuses, lest the Congress restrict their ability to do any electronic surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In the weeks before the Millennium, however, Fran Townsend and her staff at Justice brought dozens of FISA requests to the special intelligence court judges. More happened in a week than normally took place in a year.

For the next several days as Christmas and then the Millennium approached, Berger held daily Principals meetings that often sounded like the pre-watch briefings on
Hill Street Blues.
The Attorney General and FBI Director gave reports that included descriptions of suspect vans and results of search warrants. We all learned what BOLO meant in cop talk (Be on the Lookout for…). Tenet called his key counterparts around the world, wringing out details, cajoling security services into preemptive raids on possible cells.

In addition to coordinating the offensive, the CSG prepared for the worst. Disaster recovery units were pre-positioned. All the assets we had used after the African bombings were mobilized. No one in the counterterrorism business was going to have any holidays, especially on New Year's Eve. On Christmas Day, Berger and I spent the morning at FBI headquarters with scores of agents and the afternoon at CIA's Counterterrorism Center with dozens of analysts. Again, we waited.

In Yemen, a U.S. Navy destroyer was planning a port call in Aden harbor as part of CENTCOM's effort to increase military-to-military contacts and cooperation. The destroyer, named after four brothers who had all died on the same ship in World War II, was the USS
The Sullivans.
As we later learned, Al Qaeda had it in the crosshairs. A small boat was loaded with high explosives in order to be driven right into the destroyer. Al Qaeda planned that attack to be simultaneous with others: Los Angeles Airport exploding in blood and glass; the Amman Radisson collapsing in flames and dust, Christian tourists gunned down at Mount Nebo. Perhaps the Yemen cell knew as they loaded the boat that the Los Angeles and Amman plans had been disrupted. Perhaps they knew they were the only part of the plot that the Americans had not discovered. As they pushed the boat down the landing and into the water, however, it moved off a little into the harbor, and sank. The explosives weighed too much.

In a vault just off the floor of the Y2K Coordination Center, we waited for midnight in Riyadh, then in Paris. There were no major computer failures, no explosions. I went down the list, calling each command center and monitoring post that would detect something happening. CIA noted that more than half the world had celebrated the rollover without incident. FAA said that almost no one was flying that night and airlines had canceled flights. Secret Service was ready to move the President to the Lincoln Memorial for the Washington celebration. FEMA said the disaster units were at air bases and pre-positioned in cities. Coast Guard had filled New York Harbor and its rivers with armed cutters. Energy had deployed its nuclear weapons detection teams. I could hardly hear John O'Neill when I called his cell phone; he was at the New York Police Command Post in Times Square. “We've shaken every tree, but I figure if they're gonna do anything in New York, they're gonna do it here,” he explained. “So I'm here.”

At midnight I went to the roof to look down on the celebration at the Lincoln Memorial. Fireworks burst in the cold night sky. As the celebration ended and the President's motorcade began to return to the White House to continue the party, Sandy Berger called from the limousine. “So far, so good. Any signs of trouble?”

“No, but Los Angeles celebrates in three hours,” I answered, wondering how I would stay awake until then. It had been a long three weeks.

“Well, thank everybody for the President and for me. I think we dodged the bullet, but we also learned a lot. We got a lot of work to do.” Berger was right. For anyone who doubted it before, the Boston taxi driver, the Los Angeles airport, the Brooklyn connection, the Montreal cell had all said one thing: they're here.

At 3:00 a.m. we went back to the rooftop and popped open a bottle.

T
HE MILITARY HAVE A PRACTICE
known as “Lessons Learned” or “After Action Review.” Whenever a major military operation or exercise is conducted, a formal process analyzes what went right and what could have been done better. In the military tradition of not wanting to fight for the same hill twice, the U.S. military is not eager to, as Santayana said, “be condemned to repeat” something out of failure to learn the lesson the first time. After what became known as the Millennium Terrorist Alert of December 1999, the Principals chartered the CSG to prepare a Millennium After Action Review. Each agency examined what it had learned and the group collectively looked at our shortcomings. The list of shortcomings clustered around one fact, that there were probably al Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States.

I had believed for at least five years that al Qaeda was here. I had not had much luck convincing the FBI to pay close attention. Officially, the FBI said they knew of only a handful of sympathizers who were under surveillance. There were no active cells, no indigenously based threat, according to the Bureau. John O'Neill and I believed otherwise, but O'Neill had transferred to the New York Office. It was the most important FBI office in the country and O'Neill had made it the operational arm of the FBI for going after al Qaeda overseas. Nonetheless, most field offices and much of FBI Headquarters was focused elsewhere. Louis Freeh's interest in foreign-based terrorism seemed to be almost entirely focused on investigating the Khobar attack. The National Security Division, where the terrorism account was located, was consumed with Russian and Chinese espionage, the case of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, the American spying for the Russians, and the case of Wen Ho Lee and the possible spying at the nuclear labs.

In the fifty-six Field Offices (except New York) the emphasis was on drugs, organized crime, and other issues that generated arrests and prosecutions. The managers of these offices had little time for surveillance and infiltration of possible Islamic radicals. In some cities, we had created Joint Terrorism Task Forces that brought together representatives from all the local federal law enforcement agencies with the state and local police. I had assumed that these JTTFs were hunting al Qaeda. To test that proposition, I traveled around the country visiting FBI offices and JTTFs. What I found was deeply disturbing.

In every instance, the Special Agents in Charge and their JTTF directors all professed that there was no al Qaeda presence in their region, but they had taken almost no steps to uncover any in the first place. Instead, they were following whatever terrorist organization was making itself obvious. In some cases it was the Irish Republican Army, in others it was Indian Sikhs, or domestic militias.

“Is there an al Qaeda presence in this city?” I would ask.

Often I would get the response, “What's al Qaeda? Is that that Been Layding guy? He hasn't been here.”

Roger Cressey or Paul Kurtz would follow up. “What do they say about jihad at the mosques, after the services? What do they pass out? What do they collect money for?”