Ghost Wars (67 page)

Clarke’s tall office windows looked south across the Ellipse to the Potomac River and National Airport. His suite had been occupied during the mid-1980s by Colonel Oliver North, and it was possible to believe that Clarke had chosen it for just this reason, so palpably did he thrive on an air of sinister mystery. His preferred method of communication was the short, blunt intra– White House email delivered down classified channels in a signature red font. The son of a Boston chocolate factory worker, Clarke was a pale, stout man whose cropped red hair had turned steadily gray under the pressures of his work. He had ascended through education and restless work, winning entrance by competitive exam to the Boston Latin School, a centuries-old six-year high school whose Revolutionary War–era alumni included John Hancock, Paul Revere, and Benjamin Franklin, and which more recently had launched Joseph Kennedy, the political family’s patriarch. Clarke enrolled at age eleven, just as John F. Kennedy became president. Kennedy’s message about the importance of government service was drummed into Clarke and his classmates “to the extent of brainwashing,” as he recalled it.

Clarke moved on to the University of Pennsylvania and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At college he was active in student government and was selected to join The Sphinx, an elite club for Penn seniors. It became only the first in a series of hidden, self-selected social networks in which Clarke thrived. After working as an intelligence analyst at the Pentagon he was appointed in 1985, at age thirty-four, as the deputy chief of intelligence and research at the State Department. There he authored a plan to spook Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafy by detonating sonic booms over Tripoli, floating rubber rafts mysteriously to the Libyan shore, and spreading false rumors of American military action. The scheme fell apart when the Reagan administration was exposed for planting false stories in an American newspaper. Later Clarke became embroiled in a bitter struggle over accusations that he had turned a blind eye to transfers of military equipment from Israel to China. The State Department’s inspector general concluded that Clarke had usurped his superiors, turning himself into a one-man foreign policy czar and arms-trafficking shop. But Clarke battled back, survived, and transferred to the National Security Council at the White House. His reputation for deft bureaucratic maneuvering grew. Even his friends conceded that he was a blunt instrument, a bully, and occasionally abusive. His enemies regarded him as not only mean but dangerous. Either way, the Israel affair would not be the last time Clarke was accused of running a unilateral American foreign policy.
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During the first Clinton term Clarke popped up as an indispensable figure in some of the administration’s most interesting foreign policy episodes. He managed the American withdrawal from Somalia, the campaign to replace Boutros Boutros-Ghali as U.N. secretary general, the refugee crisis in east Africa after the Rwandan genocide, and dozens of other complex issues that required White House coordination of vast, divided federal departments. Officially a member of the Senior Executive Service, the highest class of permanent civil servant in the U.S. government, Clarke honed the art of the interagency maneuver in national security affairs. It was not only that he worked hard and bullied opponents until they did his bidding, but he understood in a precise, disciplined way how to use his seat at the White House to manipulate money in the federal budget to reinforce policy priorities that he personally championed. Clarke had also learned how to manage a formal, seemingly inclusive interagency decision-making process—one that involved regular meetings at which minutes were kept—while privately priming the process through an informal, back-channel network of personal connections. Rivals attributed to Clarke the unseen powers of a Rasputin, and even where these fears were exaggerated, Clarke did little to disabuse the believers. He shook his head modestly and said he was just trying to bring people together.

One of Clarke’s talents was to sense where national security issues were going before most other people did, and to position himself as a player on the rising questions of the day. By 1997 he gravitated toward counterterrorism. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing and the downing of TWA Flight 800 (mistakenly believed at first to be a terrorist incident), the White House requested and Congress wrote enormous new appropriations for counterterrorist programs in a dozen federal departments. In an era of tight federal budgets, terrorism was a rare bureaucratic growth industry. From his National Security Council suite Clarke shaped these financial decisions. He also took control over interagency reviews of terrorist threats and counterterrorist policy. Backed by National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Clarke reorganized day-to-day policy making on terrorism and what later would become known as homeland defense.
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Clarke declared that America faced a new era of terrorist threats for which it was woefully unprepared. He proposed a newly muscled Counterterrorism Security Group to be chaired by a new national security official, the National Coordinator for Infrastructure Protection and Counterterrorism. Naturally, his colleagues noted as memoranda and position papers flew back and forth to define this new job, it emerged that no one was better qualified to take it on than Richard Clarke himself.

In this elevated role, he would chair a new working group whose core members would be the heads of the counterterrorist departments of the CIA, FBI, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Departments of Defense, Justice, and State. At the Pentagon and the FBI, officials who had been running counterterrorist programs without any White House oversight balked at Clarke’s power grabs. They protested that he was setting himself up to become another Oliver North, that the National Security Council would “go operational” by running secret counterterrorist programs. Clarke said his critics were “paranoid.” He was just trying to “facilitate” decision-making. In the end Clarke’s opponents did force President Clinton to insert language in his final, classified decision directive to make clear that Clarke had no operational power. But the rest of Presidential Decision Directive-62, as it was called, signed by Clinton on May 22, 1998, anointed Clarke as the White House’s new counterterrorism czar, with unprecedented authority. Over time he acquired a seat at Clinton’s Cabinet table as a “principal,” equal in rank to the secretary of defense or the secretary of state, whenever the Cabinet met to discuss terrorism. No national security staffer of Clarke’s rank had ever enjoyed such Cabinet status in White House history. PDD-62, formally titled “Protection Against Unconventional Threat to the Homeland and Americans Overseas,” laid out a counterterrorism mission on ten related tracks, with a lead federal agency assigned to each one. The CIA’s track was “disruption” of terrorist groups.
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Clarke’s ascension meant the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center managers had a new man to please at the White House. CIA director Tenet enjoyed a close working relationship with Sandy Berger and others at the National Security Council because of Tenet’s years on the White House staff. But the CIA managers who worked two rungs down now had to build an equally effective relationship with Richard Clarke, no easy task given his forceful personality. On policy issues the CIA managers mainly regarded Clarke as an ally. He “got” the seriousness of the bin Laden threat, it was commonly said in the agency’s Counterterrorist Center, and Clarke generally supported the CIA’s nascent programs to capture or disrupt bin Laden in Afghanistan. Indeed, Clarke sometimes pushed harder for action on bin Laden than the CIA’s own officers recommended. The trouble was, Clarke could be such a bully that when the CIA managers felt he was wrong, they had no way to go around him. On the whole, this suited a White House wary of Langley’s unwieldy bureaucracy. As Berger said later: “I wanted a pile driver.”

Bin Laden was by no means Richard Clarke’s only counterterrorist priority. Reflecting President Clinton’s private fears, he repeatedly sounded alarms about the danger of a biological weapons attack against the United States. He pushed for new vaccination stocks against smallpox and other threats, and he lashed departments such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency to prepare for unexpected terrorist-spawned epidemics. Clarke spent equally long hours on new policies to guard government and business against the threat of cyberterrorism—“an electronic Pearl Harbor,” as he called it.
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To galvanize action he repeatedly issued frightening statements about the new terrorist danger facing the United States. American military superiority “forces potential future opponents to look for ways to attack us other than traditional, direct military attacks. How do you do that? Through truck bombs. Through nerve gas attacks on populated areas. Through biological attacks on populated areas.” Clarke compared his crusade to Winston Churchill’s lonely, isolated campaign during the 1930s to call attention to rising Nazi power before it was too late. If Churchill had prevailed when he first called for action, Clarke said, he would have gone down in history “as a hawk, as someone who exaggerated the threat, who saber-rattled and did needless things.”
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Increasingly, this was the charge Clarke himself faced. National security analysts and members of Congress accused him of hyping the terrorist threat to scare Congress into allocating ever greater sums of federal funds so that Clarke’s own influence and authority would grow.

“I would be delighted three or four years from now to say we’ve wasted money,” Clarke said in reply. “I’d much rather have that happen than have to explain to the Congress and the American people why we weren’t ready, and why we let so many Americans die.”
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AS THEY REFINED their snatch plans in the spring of 1998, the bin Laden unit at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center looked with rising interest at Tarnak Farm. This was a compound of perhaps a hundred acres that lay isolated on a stretch of desert about three miles from the American-built terminal building at Kandahar airport. On many nights, the CIA learned, bin Laden slept at Tarnak with one of his wives.

Tarnak presented a raiding party with no challenges of terrain or urban maneuver. It had been constructed by the Afghan government years before as an agricultural cooperative. The farm itself was encircled by a mud-brick wall perhaps ten feet high. Inside were about eighty modest one-story and two-story structures made from concrete or mud-brick. These included dormitory-style housing, storage facilities, a tiny mosque, and a building that bin Laden converted into a small medical clinic for his family and his followers. On the edge of the compound stood a crumbling, water-streaked, six-story office building originally erected for bureaucrats from the government’s agricultural departments. Immediately outside the compound walls were a few irrigated plots, canals, and drainage ditches. But the most remarkable feature of Tarnak Farm was its stark physical isolation. Flat plains of sand and sagebrush extended for miles. Vineyards and irrigated fields dotted the landscape in checkerboard patches, but there were virtually no trees in any direction. The nearest buildings, haphazard extensions of the airport complex, were more than a mile away. Kandahar’s crowded bazaars lay half an hour’s drive beyond.
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Case officers in Islamabad spent long hours with the tribal team’s leaders devising a plan to attack Tarnak in the middle of the night. The Afghans would seize and hold bin Laden prisoner until the Americans figured out what to do with him. They ran two rehearsals in the United States late in 1997. Tenet briefed Berger in February. A third rehearsal took place in March. Still, Clarke wrote Berger that he felt the CIA seemed “months away from doing anything.”

The raid plan was meticulously detailed. The Afghans had scouted and mapped Tarnak up close, and the CIA had photographed it from satellites. The agents had organized an attack party of about thirty fighters. They identified a staging point where they would assemble all of their CIA-supplied vehicles—motorcycles, trucks, and Land Cruisers. They would drive from there to a secondary rallying point a few miles away from Tarnak. The main raiding party, armed with assault rifles, secure communications, and other equipment, planned to walk across the flat plain toward Tarnak in blackened night, arriving at its walls around 2 A.M. They had scouted a path to avoid minefields and use deep gulleys to mask their approach. On the airport side of the compound a drainage ditch ran underneath Tarnak’s outer wall. The attackers intended to enter by crawling through the ditch. As they did, a second group would roll quietly and slowly toward the front gate in two jeeps. They would carry silenced pistols to take out the two guards stationed at the entrance. Meanwhile the walk-in party would have burst into each of the several small huts where bin Laden’s wives slept. When they found the tall, bearded Saudi, they would cuff him, drag him toward the gate, and load him in a Land Cruiser. A second group of vehicles at the rally point would approach in sequence, and they would all drive together to the cave complex thirty miles away that had been stocked with food and water. Recalled station chief Gary Schroen, “It was as well conceived as a group of amateur soldiers with some training could do.” He wrote Langley on May 6 that the tribals were now “almost as professional” as U.S. commandos.
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As they finalized the plan, the CIA officers found themselves pulled into emotional debates about legal authorities and the potential for civilian casualties if a shoot-out erupted at Tarnak. Satellite photography and reports from the ground indicated that there were dozens of women and children living at Tarnak. Langley headquarters asked for detailed explanations from the tribal team about how they planned to minimize harm to women and children during their assault. Case officers sat down with the team leaders and walked through a series of questions: “Okay, you identify that building. What if he’s not in that building? What if he’s next door? And what are you going to do about collateral damage?” It was a frustrating discussion on both sides. The Americans thought their agents were serious, semiprofessional fighters who were trying to cooperate with the CIA as best they could. Yet “if you understood the Afghan mind-set and the context,” Schroen put it later, you understood that in any raid on Tarnak, realistically, the Afghans were probably going to have to fire indiscriminately to get the job done.
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