Ghost Wars (108 page)

14. Rubin,
Fragmentation of Afghanistan,
pp. 266-67.

15. Peter Tomsen, "An extremist seizure," is from "Afghan Policy-U.S. Strategy," September 26, 1991, excised and declassified March 23, 2000, author's files. "Scramble for power" is from "Afghanistan: Trends for 1992," December 16, 1991, excised and declassified March 23, 2000, author's files. Charles Cogan, reflecting a widely held outlook at the CIA, wrote in 1993 that "the partnership, if you will, between the United States and the Afghan resistance was of limited duration and could only have been so. The long-range aims of a country in which Islamists were at last beginning to have a say would not be, could not be, wholly compatible with the aims of a Western nation."

16. Interview with a U.S. official. The estimate of the number of tanks is uncertain. ISI officers interviewed by the author acknowledged being pressed by the CIA to destroy leftover Afghan equipment.

17. Interview with Edmund McWilliams, February 26, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC) The size of Dostum's militia is from Rubin,
Fragmentation of Afghanistan,
p. 270. Rubin provides a definitive account of the internal collapse of the Najibullah regime and the fruitless negotiations by the United Nations early in 1992.

18. Michael Griffin,
Reaping the Whirlwind,
p. 5, quoting the
International Herald Tribune
.

19. The account of Hekmatyar's operations at Charasyab in April 1992 is drawn largely from an interview with an Arab journalist who was there. The author was in Kabul at the time and heard similar accounts from travelers in the region. The author visited Charasyab in 2002. Abdullah Anis, the son-in-law of Abdullah Azzam, an Algerian Islamist activist who was close to Massoud, has also published an account of the Massoud-Hekmatyar negotiations. His recollections of the radio exchange from Massoud's side are similar to those of the Arab journalist in Charasyab.

20. Interview with an Arab journalist then with Hekmatyar. Prince Turki has also acknowledged that bin Laden was in Peshawar at the time and participated in the peace talks. Turki told the Arab television network MBC on November 7, 2001, speaking of bin Laden, "He went there to work with other Islamic personalities who were trying to reconcile the Afghan mujahedin, who differed on the setting up of a government. I saw him among those personalities."

21. William Maley, "Interpreting the Taliban," in William Maley, ed.,
Fundamentalism
Reborn,
p. 9.

22. The author was in Kabul at the time and watched Massoud's forces rout Hekmatyar over several days of intensive street fighting.

23. Interview with Yahya Massoud, May 9, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).

24. Personal weapons: Rubin,
Fragmentation
of Afghanistan,
p. 196. Estimates of total outside aid: Larry P. Goodson,
Afghanistan's Endless
War,
p. 99.

25. Abdul Haq's letter to Tomsen is from
Afghan Warrior: The Life and Death of Abdul
Haq,
Touch Productions, aired by the BBC, 2003. Tomsen memos: "Afghanistan-U.S. Interests and U.S. Aid," December 18, 1992, excised and declassified April 4, 2000, author's files; and "Central Asia, Afghanistan and U.S. Policy," February 2, 1993, excised and declassified March 23, 2000, author's files.

CHAPTER 13: "A FRIEND OF YOUR ENEMY"

1. "The heartbreak" is from Associated Press, June 17, 1992. "141 words" and "very much apart" are from David Halberstam,
War in a Time of Peace,
pp. 193 and 22. "A small blip" is from an interview with Anthony Lake, May 5, 2003, Washington, D.C. (GW).

2. "The biggest nuclear threat" is from the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette,
September 27, 1991. "Strong special operations" is from
The Boston Globe,
February 2, 1992.

3. It had not been a major issue: Interview with Lake, May 5, 2003. Clinton's views about terrorism and Afghanistan are from interviews with senior U.S. officials close to the president.

4. Interview with Robert Gates, March 12, 2002, Cleveland, Ohio (SC).

5. Woolsey's trip to Little Rock and that he had met Clinton only once are from an interview with James Woolsey, February 20, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC). His antiwar activities and professional history are from Michael Gordon,
The New York Times,
January 11, 1993.

6. Interview with Woolsey, February 20, 2002.

7. Ibid. For a similar account of this scene, see Halberstam,
War in a Time of Peace,
p. 192.

8. Interview with Thomas Twetten, March 18, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

9. What Clarridge concluded is from an interview with Duane Clarridge, December 28, 2001, Escondido, California (SC).

10. How Woolsey was perceived at the White House is from interviews with Clinton administration officials.

11. Interview with Woolsey, February 20, 2002.

12. Interviews with Clinton administration officials.

13. Kasi's background is from John Ward Anderson and Kamran Khan,
The Washington
Post,
February 17, 1993. "Something big" is from Patricia Davis,
The Washington Post,
November 14, 2002.

14. Davis,
The Washington Post,
November 14, 2002. See also the
Post
coverage of the shootings by Bill Miller, Patricia Davis, D'Vera Cohn, Robert O'Harrow Jr., and Steve Bates, January 26, 1993.

15. The core source of nearly all published biographies of Yousef is the FBI witness statement produced from handwritten notes by FBI special agent Charles B. Stern and United States Secret Service officer Brian G. Parr. The notes were taken during their six-hour conversation with Yousef while flying back to the United States from Pakistan on February 7 and 8, 1995. According to Parr's testimony at Yousef 's trial, Yousef refused to allow them to take notes while they spoke in a makeshift interview room at the back of the plane, so Stern and Parr each got up periodically and took summary notes out of Yousef 's sight, in another part of the plane. The notes were dictated on February 9. The details about his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and his great-uncle, Mohammed's father, are from Finn et al.,
The Washington
Post,
March 9, 2003.

16. During one of his FBI interviews, Yousef acknowledged that after the World Trade Center bombing, while he was a fugitive, his parents knew that he was responsible for the attack and on the run from American authorities. Yousef said that his parents had moved to Iran. Certainly they would have been safer there than in Pakistan, less vulnerable to police or government pressure. While in Iran, Yousef said, his parents received a phone call from a woman purporting to be from an American phone company who was looking to locate Yousef about a billing issue. Yousef told the story to indicate that he and his parents had assumed the caller was from the FBI and that they had dodged the inquiry.

17. Yousef complained repeatedly during his interviews with the FBI about his lack of funds. He said that he had "borrowed" money from friends in Peshawar who did not know about his plans. The World Trade Center attack was a threadbare operation in many respects. Yousef, however, was able to purchase a first-class ticket to Pakistan when he made his escape after the bombing.

18. "Attack a friend" is from the statement by FBI special agent Stern and Secret Service officer Parr, February 7 and 8. They placed the phrase in quotes.

19. A photocopy of the letter was introduced as evidence at Yousef 's trial. The brief narrative of the attack is from transcripts of opening statements delivered at the trial.

20. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon,
The Age of Sacred Terror,
p. 13. The authors were counterterrorism officials at the National Security Council during Clinton's second term.

21. Interview with Woolsey, February 20, 2002; interview with Stanley Bedington, senior intelligence analyst at the Counterterrorist Center during this period, November 19, 2001, Rosslyn, Virginia (SC); and interviews with other U.S. officials.

22. That the personal histories of Yousef and Kasi were murky and that Iranian-sponsored terrorism "was
the
priority" are from the interview with Lake, May 5, 2003. "Sudafed" is from the interview with Bedington, November 19, 2001.

23. This account of the center's budgetary pressures is from interviews with U.S. officials. By this account the pressure eased after 1996 when domestic terrorist attacks led Congress to open its purse for counterterrorism programs governmentwide. Since the September 11 attacks there have been contradictory assertions about how aggressively counterterrorism efforts were funded by Clinton and Congress. Benjamin and Simon assert, for instance, that the White House provided budget increases to the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. CIA officials have been quoted in news reports as saying they did not do well in budgetary struggles even during the second term. Since the relevant budgets are all highly classified, it is difficult to resolve the contradictions with any confidence. Clearly the second Clinton term was better for counterterrorism budgets than the first. A separate issue is whether other cuts at the CIA during this period in the Directorate of Operations, on which the center heavily depended, merely shifted the burden of the budget problems from one CIA office to another. This, too, is a difficult question to resolve without fuller access to the classified budgets.

24. That the center had no more than one hundred personnel during this time and its branch structure are from the interview with Bedington, November 19, 2001.

25. Interview with Larry Johnson, deputy director of the State Department's counterterrorism office during this period, January 15, 2002, Bethesda, Maryland (SC). Clinton signed two important policy documents on terrorism, Presidential Decision Directive-35 and Presidential Decision Directive-39, during the first six months of 1995. See chapter 16.

26. This history draws from the staff report of Eleanor Hill, staff director of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry into the events of September 11, issued October 8, 2002.

27. Benjamin and Simon are especially forceful in their criticisms of the FBI's internal culture. They quote Clinton's former national security adviser, Samuel Berger, and deputy national security adviser James Steinberg complaining that they could not extract crucial information from the FBI about a wide variety of subjects including terrorism. Benjamin and Simon write, "For the NSC staff working on counterterrorism, this was crippling-but how crippling was also something they could not know. Every day a hundred or more reports from the CIA, DIA, the National Security Agency, and the State Department would be waiting in their computer queues when they got to work. There was never anything from the FBI. The Bureau, despite its wealth of information, contributed nothing to the White House's understanding of al-Qaeda. Virtually none of the information uncovered in any of the Bureau's investigative work flowed to the NSC."
Age of Sacred Terror,
p. 304.

28. Eleanor Hill, Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry staff report, October 8, 2002.

29. The record of a Woolsey and Lake discussion about bin Laden is from two former senior Clinton administration officials. One of the officials recalled that the memo of the conversation had been prepared by either George Tenet or Richard Clarke, who both later figured heavily in the Clinton administration's covert campaign against bin Laden. This official also believed that the discussion concerned evidence that bin Laden was funding violence by Somali militiamen against American troops. The quotations from and descriptions of CIA reports and cables about bin Laden are from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, Appendix, pp. 5-6.

30. "Did we screw up . . . Of course" interview with Lake, May 5, 2003.

CHAPTER 14: "MAINTAIN A PRUDENT DISTANCE"

1. After working first as chief of analysis and then as deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center from 1993 until 1999, Pillar spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, where he completed a book,
Terrorism and
U.S. Foreign Policy,
that was published shortly before the September 11 attacks. The book is a thorough and scholarly review of the modern terrorist threat and American policy instruments for containing it, and it provides a rich archive of Pillar's own analytical outlook. The account of Pillar's views in this chapter is based partially on his book and other published journal articles, as well as on multiple interviews with U.S. officials familiar with CIA Counterterrorist Center analysis during this period. Among those who spoke on the record about the 1993-94 period were former CIA director James Woolsey; Stanley Bedington, a senior analyst at the center until 1994; and Thomas Twetten, chief of the CIA's Directorate of Operations during this period.

2. Mary Anne Weaver,
A Portrait of Egypt,
provides a richly reported account of the rise of the Islamic Group and its roots in the Upper Nile. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have accumulated thorough records of the atrocities in the Algerian conflict after the elections were canceled.

3. This summary of the muddled debates in Washington over the challenge of Islamist insurgencies in North Africa is drawn from interviews with multiple participants, some located at the White House and others at the State Department and the CIA.

4. One issue in the liaison was the routine use of torture against detainees by Egyptian counterterrorist units. The CIA and the State Department tried to calibrate their funding to encourage Egyptian reforms without breaking off the liaison, according to officials involved. At one stage during the mid-1990s the CIA suspended funding to a certain Cairo unit because of its repeated human rights abuses, two officials involved said in interviews. The details of these counterterrorist aid programs and human rights policy decisions remain highly classified, and the extent of American pressure on Egyptian security units is difficult to describe with any confidence. In any event, according to human rights monitors, Egyptian police continued to make widespread use of torture. That the U.S. sent its first declared CIA station chief to Algiers in 1985 is from the author's interview with Whitley Bruner, February 26, 2002,Washington, D.C. (SC). Bruner was the declared station chief. He left Algiers in 1989 and afterward served in the Tunis and Tel Aviv stations before retiring in 1997.