Ghost Wars (72 page)

The daily operations of this threat and warning network dominated the American government’s reponse to the Africa embassy bombings. In effect, the government cranked up the volume on a warning system that was already sensitive. The CIA “surged,” in its jargon, to collect fresh intelligence about bin Laden’s network and strike plans. The Counterterrorist Center poured this threat reporting through classified electronic messaging channels, sometimes transmitting raw intercepts and cables at a rate of more than one dozen per hour. The White House encouraged these gushers of warning. Clinton’s counterterrorist and national security aides had been rocked by the bombings and dreaded a new wave of attacks. If bin Laden pummeled American targets while Clinton struggled through his impeachment crisis, the Saudi radical and his followers might seriously weaken the power and prestige of the United States, White House officials feared. Their job was to protect Clinton’s presidency from disaster; they felt isolated in their detailed, highly classified knowledge about just how vulnerable the country appeared to be, and how motivated the Islamist terrorists had become.
2

In one respect the system reacted as it was programmed to do. The Africa bombings signaled a serious ongoing threat, and the government’s warning system recalibrated itself at a higher state of alert. In another sense bin Laden unwittingly achieved a tactical victory. The immediate American emphasis on threat reporting, warning, and defense helped define the next phase of the conflict on terms favorable to bin Laden. Al Qaeda generated massive amounts of nonspecific threat information. As it did, time, money, and manpower poured into the American government’s patchwork system of defensive shields. Yet there was a consensus among the professionals that no such system could ever be adequate to stop all terrorist attacks. “Focusing heavily on the stream of day-to-day threat reporting not only risks forgetting that the next real threat may go unreported,” Counterterrorist Center deputy director Paul Pillar believed, “it also means diversion of attention and resources.”
3

The day-to-day work on terrorist threats was difficult, frustrating, and contentious. Soon after the Africa attacks Richard Clarke established a unit of the White House–led Counterterrorism Security Group to focus exclusively on incoming threat reports. Many of these reports were collected by CIA stations abroad and routed through Pillar’s office at the CIA Counterterrorist Center. The center’s policy was to “never sit on threat information that you can’t dismiss out of hand,” as one participant recalled it. CIA threat cables came to the White House with commentary that might cast doubt on the value or authenticity of a particular report. But the CIA’s customers across the administration began to feel as if they were drowning in unedited threats. Clarke’s aides grumbled that the CIA was giving Clinton too much unfiltered intelligence, especially in the President’s Daily Brief, warnings included not for their relevance but to protect the CIA’s reputation if a fresh attack came. For its part, the CIA Counterterrorist Center complained that the White House hectored and bullied them over reports that they had never intended to be taken so seriously. They were being pressured to share information, and then they got blamed for sharing too much.
4

On both sides of the Potomac they tried not to let the friction interfere with their solemn duty to get the facts right. American lives were at stake. But the analytical work, one fragmentary telephone intercept at a time, could be elusive and unrewarding. Each time they gathered in the White House Situation Room or spoke by secure telephone or video conference, they had complex, practical decisions to make. Should they order CIA surveillance against an obscure Arab militant named by a suspect in detention in Egypt? Should they order the American embassy in Rome to close on the day of a specific, though vaguely worded threat? Should they instruct United Airlines to cancel a flight from Paris without explanation to its passengers because an intercepted phone call had made a passing reference to that air route? If they failed to cancel the flight and it was attacked, how could they justify their silence?

One of their rules was “no double standards.” Those around the table with access to highly classified threat information—Pillar or his designees from the CIA, Steven Simon or Daniel Benjamin in Clarke’s office at the White House, officers from the Pentagon and the FBI—should not be able to use threat reports to plan their own travel or activities if that intelligence could just as easily be used to warn the general population. They had to decide when a specific, credible threat warranted public announcement, and when it was enough to take narrower protective measures in secret. Inevitably their daily judgments about threat reports were partially subjective. There was no way for any of them to be certain whether an interrogated suspect was lying or whether an Islamist activist bragging about an attack on the telephone was just trying to impress a friend. The “no double standards” rule provided one intuitive check for any specific decision. If an incoming threat to blow up an unnamed public square in London next Saturday looked credible enough so that any one of them would avoid such areas if he happened to be in London, then their duty was to issue a public alert. If the threat was against the U.S. embassy, they might consider a more targeted, secret alert to employees there. They issued dozens of such warnings in public and private in the weeks after the Africa attacks.
5

They were aware that bin Laden and his leadership group were probably planting disinformation to distract them. They assumed that the more they closed embassies and issued alerts, the more they encouraged this disinformation campaign. Yet they could see no alternative. They had to collect as much threat information as they could, they had to assess it, and they had to act defensively when the intelligence looked credible.

There was plenty that looked truly dangerous. The CIA pushed European security services, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other governments to crack down that autumn on known associates of bin Laden. Cooperation was mixed, but several dozen militants were arrested, including bin Laden’s longtime spokesman in London. Computers and telephone records seized in these cases made plain that al Qaeda’s global cells were metastasizing. The CIA saw a level of lethality, professionalism, and imagination among some of these detained Islamists—particularly among the well-educated Arabs who had settled in Europe—that was on a par with the more sophisticated secular Palestinian terrorist groups of the 1970s. Their connections with one another and with bin Laden often seemed loose. Yet increasingly the Islamist cells were united in determination to carry out the anti-American
fatwas
that had been issued by bin Laden and al-Zawahiri from Afghanistan.

Within the morass of intelligence lay ominous patterns. One was an interest by bin Laden’s operatives in the use of aircraft. A classified September 1998 threat report warned that in bin Laden’s next strike his operatives might fly an explosive-laden airplane into an American airport and blow it up. Another report that fall, unavailable to the public, highlighted a plot involving aircraft in New York and Washington. In a third case, in November, Turkish authorities broke up a plan by an Islamic extremist group to fly a plane loaded with explosives into the tomb of modern Turkey’s founder, Ataturk, during a ceremony marking the anniversary of his death. Some of these threats against aviation targets were included in classified databases about bin Laden and his followers maintained by the FBI and the CIA.
6
There these strands joined the evidence about suicide airplane attacks and aircraft bombings dating back to the 1995 arrest of Ramzi Yousef. Yet at the Counterterrorism Security Group meetings and at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center there was no special emphasis placed on bin Laden’s threat to civil aviation or on the several exposed plots where his followers had considered turning hijacked airplanes into cruise missiles. Aviation had been a terrorist target for three decades; hijacking threats and even suicide airplane plots had for years been part of the analytical landscape. The threat reports and the pattern of past bin Laden attacks emphasized other target categories more prominently, such as embassies and military bases. If they had any analytical bias, Clinton, Tenet, and Clarke tended to be most worried about weapons of mass destruction because of the casualties and economic damage such an attack might produce. Several classified reports that fall warned that bin Laden was considering a new attack using poisons in food, water, or the air shafts of American embassies. Aviation was an issue but not a priority.
7

A second pattern in the threats that fall did galvanize attention: It seemed increasingly obvious that bin Laden planned to attack inside the United States. In September the CIA and the FBI prepared a classified memo for Clinton’s national security cabinet outlining al Qaeda’s American infrastructure, including charities and other groups that sometimes operated as fronts for terrorist activity. In October the intelligence community picked up reports that bin Laden sought to establish an operations cell in the United States by recruiting American Islamists or Arab expatriates. In November came another classified report that a bin Laden cell was seeking to recruit a group of five to seven young men from the United States to travel to the Middle East for training. When the FBI announced a $5 million reward for bin Laden’s capture, the CIA picked up reports that bin Laden had authorized $9 million bounties for the assassination of each of four top CIA officers. Many of the intelligence reports were vague. Still, the pattern was unmistakable. “The intelligence community has strong indications,” declared a December classified memo endorsed by the CIA and circulated at the highest levels of the U.S. government, “that bin Laden intends to conduct or sponsor attacks inside the United States.”
8

AFTER THE AFRICA EMBASSY BOMBINGS, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger ordered the Pentagon to station navy ships and two cruise-missile-bearing submarines beneath the Arabian Sea, off the coast of Pakistan. The secret deployment order was so closely held that even some senior directors at the CIA did not know the submarines were in place. Cruise missiles could twist and turn across hundreds of miles as they flew preprogrammed paths to their targets. Their software guided them to coordinates marked by satellites in fixed, stationary orbits. The White House hoped that CIA agents on the ground in Afghanistan—at this time mainly the tribal agents operating near Kandahar—would track bin Laden and relay the coordinates of one of his meeting places or overnight guest houses. Some of the coordinates of bin Laden’s known camps, such as the buildings in the Tarnak Farm compound, had already been loaded into the submarines’ missile computers. Other places could be marked by laser targeting equipment carried by the mobile tracking team, then quickly relayed as GPS coordinates to the submarines. Clinton made it clear to his senior White House aides that if they could produce strong intelligence about bin Laden’s location, he would give the order to strike. Clarke’s counterterrorism office initiated classified exercises with the Pentagon and discovered they could reduce the time from a presidential order to missile impact in Afghanistan to as little as four hours. Still, as they considered a launch, a vexing question remained: How certain did they need to be that bin Laden was really at the target? In a political-military plan he called “Delenda,” from the Latin “to destroy,” Clarke argued that they should move beyond trying to decapitate al Qaeda’s leadership and should instead strike broadly at bin Laden’s infrastructure. The Delenda Plan recommended diplomatic approaches, financial disruption, covert action inside Afghanistan, and sustained military strikes against Taliban and al Qaeda targets. Some of Clarke’s ideas rolled into continuing discussions about how to pressure bin Laden, but none of Clinton’s national security cabinet agreed with his approach to military targeting. Broad strikes in Afghanistan would provide “little benefit, lots of blowback against [a] bomb-happy U.S.,” recalled Deputy National Security Adviser James Steinberg, who like Berger opposed Clarke’s proposal for attacks against al Qaeda camps or Taliban infrastructure, such as it might be. Still, Clinton and his senior aides said they remained ready to fire missiles directly at bin Laden or his most senior leaders if they could be located precisely.
9

Late in 1998 the CIA relayed a report to the White House from one of its agents that bin Laden had been tracked to Kandahar. The report was that bin Laden would sleep in the Haji Habash house, part of the governor’s residence complex. The CIA had reported that there were fifty-two Stinger missiles hidden on the grounds. A bomb or cruise missile might kill bin Laden and Omar or other senior Taliban, plus destroy the missiles—a counterterrorism trifecta. “Hit him tonight,” Gary Schroen cabled from Islamabad. “We may not get another chance.” The Cabinet principals on terrorism issues, including Tenet and Richard Clarke, discussed the report.
10
Target maps showed that the building where they expected bin Laden to be was near a small mosque. Clinton knew from painful experience that for all the amazing accuracy of cruise missiles, they were far from perfect. When the president had launched missiles against the Iraqi intelligence headquarters in 1993, one missile had fallen a few hundred yards short and had killed one of the most prominent female artists in the Arab world. Clinton had never forgotten that. Now he and others around the table worried that if one of the missiles fell short again, it would destroy the mosque and whoever happened to be inside. Civilian casualties had not been an issue for Clinton during discussions about the August cruise missile strikes, he told a colleague years later, because Clinton felt they had a serious chance in that attack to get bin Laden. Now the prospect of success seemed less certain, Clinton believed. The president said that he would not allow minimizing civilian casualties to become a higher priority than killing or capturing bin Laden, but he wanted to achieve both objectives if possible. In a memo written at the time, Clarke said Clinton had been forced to weigh 50 percent confidence in the CIA’s intelligence against the possibility of as many as three hundred casualties. The two issues—the likelihood of innocent deaths and the uncertainty about bin Laden’s exact whereabouts—often were discussed together in the Small Group after mid-1998.