Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (15 page)

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The drumbeat of warnings from the tribal areas had been growing louder for two years by the time Bush signed off on the secret CIA campaign. On March 1, 2007, Lynne Tracy, an intrepid American diplomat in Peshawar, fired off an urgent diplomatic cable to her superiors at the State Department. Peshawar is the capital of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, since renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and a gateway to the tribal areas, home to most of Al Qaeda’s leadership and their Pakistani Taliban hosts. If any American diplomat in Pakistan had a finger on the pulse of the militancy in western Pakistan, it was Tracy, a Dari-speaking career foreign service officer with experience in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Two years later, gunmen would ambush her armored car as she left her residence for the consulate in Peshawar, firing shots at the vehicle. She would escape unhurt.

In her cable, Tracy warned not only of the rise of radicals in the tribal areas but also of “a creeping Talibanization” in the North-West Frontier Province itself. She warned that police officers in the Tank District had stopped wearing their uniforms after receiving threats against them and their families. Barbers in the region had been warned by Taliban gunmen to stop shaving the beards of young men—long beards being a sign of piety for Islamic extremists—or face grim consequences. Music shops were also being threatened and shut down. Extremists were enlisting new recruits by paying higher salaries than those offered by the government security and law enforcement agencies.

Other American and NATO officials as well as Afghan and Pakistani intelligence officials concluded that Islamic militants were openly flouting a peace deal with the government and were tightening their expanding grip in the north. The result was a Taliban ministate that was rapidly becoming a magnet for an influx of foreign fighters from throughout the Middle East as well as from Uzbekistan and Chechnya who were not only challenging government authority in the contested area but also seizing control from local tribes. More than one hundred local leaders, government sympathizers, or accused “American spies” had been slain in 2006, many of them in gruesome beheadings deliberately carried out to cow the region through a reign of terror. America’s allies also voiced their growing concern. In November 2006, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, director general of the British Security Service, known as MI5, said in an unusual public statement that British authorities had some two hundred networks of Muslims of South Asian descent under surveillance. She linked many of these plots back to Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s western borderlands, warning of the organization’s guidance and tactical support of extremists.

In 2006 and early 2007, most of Bush’s top national security aides were consumed with the floundering war in Iraq, which still had priority for troops, spies, military hardware, and the precious time on policy makers’ schedules. But in corners of the government, a handful of aides trained their sights on the growing threat from Al Qaeda outside of Iraq. This made sense because the administration’s “new deterrence” strategy relied increasingly on disrupting Al Qaeda’s cyber operations or on interdicting flows of money into bank accounts rather than fighting solely with bullets.

The White House’s day-to-day point man on counterterrorism issues was Juan Zarate, newly arrived from the Treasury Department, where, as a deputy assistant secretary and later assistant secretary, he directed efforts to scour those flows of funds for terrorist financing, dissecting the sophisticated and shadowy networks of donors, illicit activities, and other sources that filled terrorist and insurgent coffers. Mapping the money trail offered the government new glimpses into Al Qaeda’s organizational structure, scaring analysts by how little they truly knew about the organization’s inner workings.

Like Jeffrey Schloesser and Art Cummings, Zarate was part of the new breed of American counterterrorism experts who were trained in other disciplines prior to 9/11 and then rose quickly through the bureaucratic ranks and flourished as the government hungrily sought specialists in what just a few years earlier had been an underfunded and sparsely staffed backwater. In June 2005, Zarate had moved to the White House to become deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism. In his role to address the transnational nature of terrorist threats, he reported to Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, and to Frances Fragos Townsend, another dynamic former federal prosecutor who headed the White House’s Homeland Security Council.

Zarate led the Counterterrorism Security Group, the government’s frontline counterterrorism policy-making entity. Every week, the group convened top experts from the Defense, State, Justice, Homeland Security, and Treasury departments as well as the intelligence agencies to focus on issues ranging from immediate terrorist threats in Pakistan and Afghanistan to longer-term concerns like undercutting Al Qaeda’s appeal in the Muslim world. The group made day-to-day decisions on counterterrorism policies and directives and set up the discussion for top-level decisions for the deputies and principals committees. “I saw my role as coordinator, organizer, and gadfly to the interagency process,” Zarate said, referring to the high-level coordination among federal security agencies.

Soon after he arrived at the White House, Zarate also assembled an ad hoc group of experts, including Henry A. Crumpton, a career CIA officer who was the State Department’s top counterterrorism official, and Thomas W. O’Connell, the Pentagon’s senior official for special-operations policy, to address the Pakistan problem. The group produced a set of recommendations that became the framework in early 2007 for sensitive internal discussions within the administration. Among their recommendations were to train more Pakistani security forces, particularly the Pashtun-dominated Frontier Corps in the tribal areas, and to press for American intelligence agencies to increase their own intelligence gathering inside Pakistan, relying less on the ISI for information. Zarate told his colleagues that he had a mental checklist of the seven priorities he reviewed every day. Number one on the list was the safe haven in the Pakistani tribal areas and the threat it posed to the American homeland. “I kept a map of the FATA next to my desk,” Zarate said.

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Zarate was hardly alone in his worries about a resurgent Al Qaeda in Pakistan. By February 2007, concern was so intense that the White House dispatched the new secretary of defense, Robert Gates, on an unannounced trip to Pakistan to lay out the administration’s growing concerns. After meeting with Musharraf in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, he told reporters, “If we weren’t concerned about what was happening along the border, I wouldn’t be here.”

The visit had special resonance for the secretary. While with the CIA, Gates had first visited Pakistan twenty years earlier as part of the American effort to back the mujahideen in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviet Union. The Soviets eventually were ousted, but the United States subsequently made a terrible mistake when it ceased to give any real attention to the region, Gates told reporters, allowing extremists to take over. The result was the September 11 attacks, planned by Al Qaeda leaders under Taliban protection in Afghanistan. “We will not make that mistake again,” Gates said. “We are here for the long haul.”

Political turmoil in Pakistan was mounting, however, leaving Musharraf increasingly distracted from the militant threat in the tribal areas. In March 2007, Musharraf fired the chief justice of the Pakistani Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, after a standoff over the legitimacy of his presidency, setting off a months-long showdown that would further distract Musharraf from the escalating extremist threat. Then, in July, Pakistani security forces stormed the radical Red Mosque in Islamabad in a bloody end to an eight-day siege. The raid prompted a series of retaliatory attacks by Islamic militants against government forces.

In Washington, Bush and his national security team watched the unraveling political situation in Pakistan with growing alarm. A new syndicate of Pakistani Islamic extremist groups calling itself the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-i-Taliban, was emerging in the tribal areas under the leadership of a firebrand named Baitullah Mehsud. The Pakistani Taliban was an organization distinct from the Taliban insurgency that the United States was fighting in Afghanistan, but it had links to that group and to Al Qaeda’s senior leadership. The threat from Pakistan was growing.

A year earlier, in the summer of 2006, American and British authorities had broken up a London-based plot to bomb at least seven transatlantic airliners on a single day with liquid explosives smuggled aboard in soft-drink bottles and detonated by devices powered with AA batteries. In response, airline passengers were prohibited from bringing aboard their flights any containers of liquids larger than three fluid ounces.

The summer of 2007 was different. The threat, based largely on snippets of furtive conversations and the fear of a countdown ticking away, was more general and amorphous, with no specific time, date, or location, so the United States had no idea when it would trigger terror operations. As a result of communications intercepted by the NSA, American officials grew increasingly alarmed over reports that Westerners who had trained in Al Qaeda camps in Pakistan’s tribal areas were beginning to filter back into Europe, possibly with plots already in the works. But there was nothing concrete for authorities to act on, as there had been the summer before. “There was just a lot of chatter,” Stephen Hadley recalled. “The noise level was up very much like it was up before 9/11 so everybody’s antennae came up.”

These Western recruits were reputed to speak multiple languages. They were technologically savvy. They understood Western culture and knew how to blend in. Some of the recruits were of Pakistani descent and were part of the huge diaspora that now lived in Britain. But others were Caucasian. “Al Qaeda was bringing more and more people into the tribal region, people who wouldn’t draw undue attention if they were next to you at the passport line at Dulles Airport,” Hayden said.

At the Pentagon, Michael Vickers had just taken over as the Defense Department’s top policy maker for special operations, succeeding Thomas O’Connell. Vickers, who had been the principal CIA strategist for arming anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s, understandably thought he would need to spend most of that summer tracking the impact of the surge of additional American troops in Iraq. But after visiting Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, he quickly realized Iraq would take its own course. He needed to be on a plane to Islamabad every two to three months to keep tabs on the morphing enemy and Pakistan’s response to it. “Pakistan was Job One from the beginning, I would say, for me and among the [counterterrorism] guys,” Vickers said. “It dominated our attention more than anything else.”

European allies with informants in Pakistan or in South Asian communities at home were enlisted to help look beyond their own borders. Fran Townsend, the White House Homeland Security adviser, quietly made the rounds in European capitals, including a trip to Rome on July 13, 2007, with FBI deputy director John Pistole to meet with senior Italian police and counterterrorism officials. “When you are looking for indications, technical intelligence becomes very important and the focus of our allies is very important because they are likely to pick up these plots first and may not realize that the intended target is in the U.S., which means they might not tell us,” Townsend recalled later. “The Italian service, the British service are doing domestic counterterror investigations. They’re not telling us about every one. They only tell us about the ones they think involve us or need our help on. So we’re trying to make them sensitive to the fact that we need them to be very fulsome, take a very liberal view of sharing with us, because, by the way, we may have a piece that is relevant to your cell, we don’t realize it and you don’t know to ask us.” Wary of past accusations that the White House had exaggerated terrorist threats to induce fear in the American public, the administration kept quiet about the latest threat warnings emanating from the tribal areas.

Two events changed that as the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approached in September 2007. On July 10, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in an interview with the
Chicago Tribune
’s editorial board that concerns about the Al Qaeda activity and public threats in Pakistan’s tribal areas gave him a “gut feeling” that the United States faced an increased chance of a terrorist attack that summer. Some senior administration officials saw Chertoff’s comments as part of the “new deterrence” strategy. By telling the militants their plot had been detected, officials said, Chertoff aimed to deter the terrorists from striking against defenses that would be better prepared. “There are data to support the idea that raising the level of difficulty does cause them to delay and sometimes divert what they are going to do,” Chertoff said.

The comment made headlines and the evening news, and prompted Chertoff to expand his remarks. After reading highly classified intelligence reports for years, Chertoff said, he had a kind of sixth sense for gauging when the country might be vulnerable to attack, even if there were no specific evidence. “It is the same intuition people use in medicine when they make a diagnosis or in law when you try a case,” he recalled later. The Al Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan posed just such a “gut instinct” problem. “Since you don’t know exactly who is there necessarily or how long they’ve been there or exactly what their mission is, time is your enemy,” Chertoff said. “If a year goes by and we haven’t disrupted the activities over there, that’s a year where you can do a lot of training and you can start to send people back. Because this pipeline had been open for a while and because the safe havens had been pretty unmolested for a while, we started to worry that we were going to start to see people coming out the other end.”

Just as Juan Zarate sought to understand Al Qaeda’s network and intentions by tracing its money trail while at the Treasury Department, Michael Chertoff had metrics, too, including an increasingly sophisticated system of monitoring the travel patterns of potential terrorists, using commercial airline passenger data and international travel records. “Where people come from, how they travel, what their travel activities might be in the United States and things of that sort,” he said. “Is there some way we can tell if someone has spent six, seven, eight months in Waziristan?”