Ghost Wars (46 page)

Raphel tried to argue for continued humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. But as Clinton attempted to balance the federal budget after years of deficit spending, his administration drastically cut funding for the Agency for International Development, the government’s main overseas aid organization. Clinton directed available funds away from countries like Afghanistan and toward the neediest cases in Africa, a dying continent that Lake and the new AID director, Brian Atwood, felt had been neglected for too long by Republican administrations. “Nobody wanted to return to the hot spots of the Reagan-Bush years,” such as Afghanistan, recalled one member of Clinton’s team at the aid agency. “They just wanted them to go away.” South Asia was “just one of those black holes out there.” Atwood faced hostility from Republicans in Congress who argued that American development aid was being wasted in poor, chaotic countries. After heated arguments within AID and despite resistance from Raphel, the United States ended all bilateral development aid to Afghanistan less than two years after Clinton took office.
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CIA director James Woolsey saw Afghanistan in these months merely as “a place where there was a lot of warlord-ism.” Its civil war and its jihad training camps did not seem to him a significant factor in the rise of Islamist politics in North Africa. In this analysis he was influenced by Frank Anderson, his Near East operations chief. Woolsey liked and admired Anderson and relied on him heavily for analysis about Afghanistan and the Arab world.
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The CIA was active in Central Asia. After the Soviet Union’s collapse the CIA’s Directorate of Operations moved into the newly independent, former Soviet republics. Among other objectives the CIA sought to thwart Iranian ambitions in Central Asia. Officers tracked Iranian agents and tried to secure the region’s loose nuclear bombs and materials. Oil-rich republics along the Caspian Sea opened their vast energy reserves to foreign corporations. American firms sought a piece of the action. For all these reasons the CIA’s officers “were all over Ukraine and Central Asia, going in just as fast as we could, finding new opportunities,” recalled Thomas Twetten, then chief of the Directorate of Operations and Frank Anderson’s supervisor.
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But the CIA ignored Afghanistan and its civil war. Twetten felt there was nothing the United States could do to mediate the Afghan conflict or put the country back together again. There were too many other challenges in a world so suddenly and vastly changed by communism’s collapse. The Afghan war threatened to destabilize the new Central Asian countries, but even that danger seemed remote. Afghanistan was “just really background” at the Directorate of Operations only two years after it had been at the center of one of the CIA’s most important and richly funded covert programs.
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Charles Cogan, the former Near East Division chief who had helped create the anti-Soviet jihad, spoke for many at the agency during this period when he described the CIA and the Islamist rebels built up by Pakistani intelligence as merely “partners in time.” They had no enduring interests in common. The United States “was no more able to put together a polity in the ghost town that Kabul had become than it can in Dushanbe or, alas, in Mogadishu. Nor should it try.” American intervention in civil wars unfolding in former Cold War client states would “lead to a dangerous overextension of American forces and resources [and] it will draw upon us more hatreds and jealousies. In most cases, we would be well advised to maintain a prudent distance, in the words of Douglas MacArthur, from the ‘internal purification problems’ of others.”
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Afghanistan was indeed about to purify itself. It was about to disgorge a radical Islamic militia as pure and unbending in its belief system as any in the Muslim world since King Saud’s antimodern Ikhwan had stormed across the Arabian peninsula seven decades before.

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“A New Generation”

COFER BLACK TRANSFERRED from London to Khartoum, Sudan, arriving as the CIA’s station chief during 1993. The United States had concluded that Sudan’s government sponsored terrorism and had imposed economic sanctions. This was not a country where the CIA’s station chief could trust the host government enough to provide official notification of his presence. Black and his case officers masqueraded as embassy-based diplomats. Khartoum was a rough station but also the kind of place where energetic young CIA case officers liked to operate. The city’s streets teemed with life, violence, and professional opportunity. The station effectively had just one subject on its Operating Directive: terrorism. In Europe, case officers might spend most of their time in bars and cafes with moody bureaucrats, trying to turn a source. In Khartoum they worked the streets, putting into practice all of the Farm’s tradecraft: surveillance, countersurveillance, electronics, and weapons.

In Cofer Black they had an ambitious chief. He was a tall man, balding, bespectacled, full-shouldered, forceful, and sometimes theatrical in manner and speech. His long career as a spy working in former British colonies in Africa had left vaguely British inflections in his voice. He had grown up in comfortable circumstances in Connecticut, attending an all-boys preparatory school called Canterbury. His father flew Boeing-747 jets as an international pilot for Pan American Airways. When he was a boy, his father would take him along during breaks in school. They would fly to Accra, Ghana, or Lagos, Nigeria, and Cofer would stay for a week or two with family friends, exploring the African countryside, while his father hopped airline routes. In college at the University of Southern California he studied international relations. He had earned a master’s degree and had begun work on a doctorate when he joined the CIA in 1974. After training in clandestine operations he volunteered for service in Africa. He was dispatched as a case officer to Lusaka, Zambia, during the Rhodesian war next door. He transferred to Somalia for two years during a Cold War–inspired conflict between Ethiopians and Somalis in the sands of the Ogaden desert. He worked in South Africa during the racist apartheid regime’s dirty war against guerrilla movements representing the black majority. While assigned to Kinshasa, Zaire, Black was involved in the Reagan administration’s covert action program to arm anticommunist guerrillas in neighboring Angola. By the time he arrived in Khartoum, he was steeped in Africa’s complexities.
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Khartoum had become a haven for exiled radicals and terrorists during the previous three years. It was a city in desperate shape. Perched on a dust-blown plain at the junction of the White Nile and Blue Nile, Khartoum had once been a British garrison town; its avenues were laid out in the form of the Union Jack. By the early 1990s the city plan had deteriorated, full of impassable craters, downed electrical lines, blinding sandstorms, and sprawling slums. Decades of civil war, runaway inflation, and violent coups had left its population prostrate. A Muslim Brotherhood–inspired political party called the National Islamic Front, led by the Sorbonne-educated theologian Hasan al-Turabi, had recently taken power. Turabi proclaimed solidarity with oppressed Muslims worldwide and advertised his country as a safe base for Hamas, Hezbollah, Egypt’s Islamic Group, and Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front. Sudan also granted asylum to secular terrorists such as Carlos the Jackal. And Turabi’s government had welcomed Osama bin Laden after his expulsion from Saudi Arabia in 1991.

Black’s station operated against all these targets. Their Operating Directive limited them in bin Laden’s case to intelligence collection. They had no White House mandate for covert action specifically to attack or disrupt the Saudi’s loose organization, nor did the CIA develop such a plan.
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The World Trade Center bombing and ongoing Islamist violence in Egypt and Algeria provided an urgent, enlivening backdrop for their work. They staked out Khartoum safehouses and office buildings, mapped the habits and movements of group leaders and foot soldiers, followed them clandestinely when they attended meetings, and recorded license plate numbers. The station penetrated local banks to obtain account numbers and details about international financial transfers, including those of bin Laden. They planted listening devices, translated conversations, and tried to identify connections. Who was working with whom? Who in the Sudanese government was being paid off? (Just about everybody who had power, the Khartoum station concluded.) What was the role of Iranian government agents in this nexus? What was the role of Iraqi agents who turned up in Khartoum occasionally during this period? Black and his colleagues cabled Cairo, Jerusalem, Tunis, Algiers, and Riyadh, trying to match up names and leads.
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Bin Laden was a significant target, but one among half a dozen. His money attracted a diverse crowd to his Khartoum compound. Pakistan announced one of its periodic crackdowns on Arab radicals in the spring of 1993, and bin Laden sent money to fly 480 of these jihadists to Khartoum. They became part of bin Laden’s local guard. In May of that year the CIA received an intelligence report from Egypt and Saudi Arabia showing that bin Laden’s businesses had begun to ship cash to Egyptian Islamists for printing presses and weapons.
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From this evidence Black and his case officers described bin Laden as an emerging leader. They saw him as determined to become a significant player in the Islamist movement. He was a financier, however, not yet an operator. Bin Laden was ready to fund and encourage a wide variety of Islamist and terrorist groups, but neither the Khartoum station nor CIA headquarters had solid evidence that he had joined directly in terrorist attacks.
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Bin Laden seemed soft, scholarly, and more of a tycoon and a lecturer than a hardened terrorist tactician. He did not behave like a typical underground terrorist leader. He was accessible and visible in Khartoum during these years; he was certainly not trying to hide. He spent many hours openly tending to his businesses. He bought a farm north of Khartoum for $250,000 and a salt farm near Port Sudan for about $180,000. At first he worked at the air-conditioned McNimr Street headquarters of his business empire, centered on a construction company, Al-Hijrah for Construction and Development. His office suite had eight or nine rooms and a phalanx of secretaries and receptionists. Later he bought a building in an upscale neighborhood called Riyadh City. Salaries for his aides ranged from $300 a month for the Sudanese to $1,500 a month for some of the favored Egyptians and Iraqis. He cut import-export deals through other companies and in partnership with Sudanese generals and government officials, whom he paid off generously. He secured a virtual monopoly on Sudanese exports of corn, sunflowers, gum, and other farm products. His agricultural subsidiary bought up hundreds of acres near Khartoum and in eastern Sudan. He rode horses with Turabi’s sons. He visited road and commercial projects that he developed in partnership with members of the Sudanese government. With some of these partners he invested an estimated $50 million in a Sudanese bank.
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It was clear to the Khartoum station that bin Laden was financing Islamist violence across North Africa through some of these businesses, but the details were difficult to nail down. At one point bin Laden wired $210,000 to a contact in Texas to purchase and import a private jet to shuttle cargo, including weapons, between Pakistan and Sudan. He bought camels to smuggle guns through the desert to Egypt.
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They watched him move around Khartoum like a prestigious sheikh, acolytes and gun-toting bodyguards at his heel. He prayed and lectured at local mosques. He lived in a walled three-story compound, continually surrounded by Arab Afghan veterans. Bin Laden liked to sit in the front yard “and talk about jihad and about Islam and about al Qaeda in general,” as one of his aides from this period recalled it. He lectured about politics and jihad every Thursday after sunset prayers. He was wary of newcomers to his inner circle, and he told his aides to watch out for agents of Middle Eastern intelligence services posing as volunteers.
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He had reason to worry. Four Arab veterans of the Afghan war tried to kill bin Laden during 1994. They apparently believed that his interpretation of Islam was not pure or radical enough. The assassins opened fire inside a Khartoum mosque where bin Laden preached. They shot several worshipers dead before they realized that bin Laden was not there. They jumped in their vehicles, drove to Riyadh City, and confronted his security guards in a shootout. Some of the attackers died; another was taken prisoner and executed.
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The failed assassination attempt ratified bin Laden’s growing stature. In Peshawar during the 1980s he had been overshadowed by Abdullah Azzam. In Saudi Arabia he was just one rich young sheikh among hundreds. But in Khartoum his wealth made him a rare and commanding figure. He was powerful enough to order men to their deaths. Yet he fashioned himself a lecturer-businessman, an activist theologian in the image of Azzam. Bin Laden was not especially harsh. Many terrorist leaders established power over their groups by routinely executing rivals or transgressors. When bin Laden caught one of his trusted aides embezzling tens of thousands of dollars, he demanded only that his aide pay the money back in installments. He talked with the man at length about improving his dedication to jihad.
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Bin Laden was emerging now as a politician, a rising force in the underground and exiled Saudi opposition. The Islamist backlash against the Saudi royals that erupted after the Gulf War continued to gather momentum in 1994. Bin Laden allied himself early that year with a Saudi opposition group based in London that used fax machines and computer lines to denounce the royal family’s “insatiable carnal desires.” Bin Laden set up his own group, the Advisory and Reformation Committee, which also published hundreds of anti-Saudi pamphlets, all filled with bin Laden’s picture. His tracts proposed the breakup of the Saudi state. Saudi Arabia’s borders marked the reign of a single and illegitimate family, the al-Sauds, bin Laden argued. He proposed two new countries, Greater Yemen and Greater Hijaz, which would divide the Arabian Peninsula between them.
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