Ghost Wars (77 page)

Nor did ISI change its conduct on the Afghan frontier. Just weeks after the Oval Office meeting, white Land Cruisers pulled up at the darkened Peshawar compound of Abdul Haq, the anti-Soviet Afghan commander and estranged former CIA client. Now a businessman in Dubai, Haq had begun to organize anti-Taliban opposition among prominent Pashtun tribal families such as his own. Pakistani intelligence had warned him to stop making trouble, but Haq had persisted. Ever since his first meeting with CIA station chief Howard Hart, he had seen himself as an independent leader, disdainful of the manipulations of ISI.
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That night, January 12, 1999, mysterious assailants smothered Haq’s bodyguards, entered his home, and murdered his wife and children. Haq’s aides investigated the case and concluded that the attack had been organized with help from Pakistani intelligence. Pakistani police made no arrests. The former American ambassador to the mujahedin, Peter Tomsen, who remained close to Haq, later reported that the killers had been trained at the Taliban intelligence school supported by bin Laden at Tarnak Farm.
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This was the war as many Afghans who challenged the Taliban knew it. It was not a war in which ISI cooperation against bin Laden seemed remotely plausible. By contrast, as far as these Afghans could tell, those who openly defied bin Laden or Pakistani intelligence risked everything they had.

WITHIN WEEKS of Sharif’s visit to Washington, the CIA station in Islamabad received its most promising report on bin Laden’s whereabouts since the August cruise missile strikes. In early February 1999 agents in Afghanistan reported that bin Laden had traveled to Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan to join an encamped desert hunting party organized by wealthy Bedouin sheikhs from the Persian Gulf.
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The CIA sent its tracking team on the road, equipped with sighting equipment, satellite beacons to determine GPS coordinates, secure communications, and other spy gear. They raced out on the nomad highways that snaked through the barren desert. By February 9 the team reported to the Islamabad station: They had found the hunting camp. It was an elaborately provisioned place far from any city but near an isolated airstrip big enough to handle C-130 cargo planes. The camp’s tents billowed in the wind, cooled by generators and stocked with refrigerators. The tracking team reported that they strongly believed they had found bin Laden. He was a guest of the camp’s Arab sheikhs, they reported, and it looked as if he would be staying for a while. There would be plenty of time to bomb the camp with precision weapons or to launch cruise missiles from ships or submarines in the Arabian Sea.

Bin Laden had grown up in Bedouin tradition. Falcon hunting, especially for the elusive houbara bustard, had been a passionate and romanticized sport in Saudi Arabia and neighboring kingdoms for generations. Each year Arab sheikhs with the money to do so chased the houbara across its winter migration route. Pakistan granted special permits to the visiting Arab sheikhs, dividing its northern hills and southwestern deserts into carefully marked zones where rival royals pitched their tents and sent their falcons aloft.
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One of the most passionate hunters was Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, the billionaire crown prince of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Equally devoted was Sheikh Maktoum, the leader of Dubai, another emirate in the oil-rich confederation. Scores of other fabulously rich U.A.E. notables flew to Pakistan each season to hunt. So entrenched did the alliance with Pakistan around houbara hunts become that the Pakistani air force agreed secretly to lease one of its northern air bases to the United Arab Emirates so that the sheikhs could more conveniently stage the aircraft and supplies required for their hunts. Pakistani personnel maintained the air base, but the U.A.E. paid for its upkeep. They flew in and out on C-130s and on smaller planes that could reach remote hunting grounds.
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Some of the best winter houbara grounds were in Afghanistan. Pakistani politicians had hosted Arab hunting trips there since the mid-1990s. They had introduced wealthy sheikhs to the leadership of the Taliban, creating connections for future private finance of the Islamist militia. Bin Laden circulated in this Afghan hunting world after he arrived in the country in 1996.
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So the CIA report that he had joined a large, stationary camp in western Afghanistan that winter seemed consistent with previous reporting about bin Laden.

The CIA’s tracking team marked the hunting camp with beacons and obtained its GPS coordinates. They began to watch on the ground from a safe distance. At Langley the Counterterrorist Center immediately ordered satellite coverage. Photographs of the billowing tents unspooled daily in the secure communications vault in the Islamabad embassy. The pictures confirmed what the agents had reported from the ground. Working closely with the Counterterrorist Center, the Islamabad station reported: “It’s still a viable target.”
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Richard Clarke, Sandy Berger, and a few White House aides with the highest security clearances reviewed the satellite pictures and the reporting from the TRODPINT tracking team. Along with senior managers at the CIA, they began to fire questions back to the Islamabad station: Which tent is he in? What time of day is he in the tent? Where does he go to pray? Bin Laden was reported to visit frequently a camp next to the main hunting camp. The CIA radioed the tracking team that was hovering near the camp, asking for answers. One person involved remembered that the CIA actually identified the specific tent where they believed bin Laden was sleeping. Still, Clarke worried that the sightings by the Afghan tracking team might not be reliable; they were roaming far from their home territory. Clarke told Deputy National Security Adviser Donald Kerrick on February 10 that the Pentagon might be able to launch cruise missiles the next morning, but that other options, possibly involving a Special Forces raid, would take longer.

The questions kept pouring into the Islamabad station. Langley and the White House wanted more precision. Days passed. Some of the CIA officers involved thought the evidence was very solid, good enough to shoot. As the questions seeking more targeting detail poured across their computer screens, Islamabad station chief Gary Schroen and his case officer colleagues began to ask sarcastically: “What is it going to come down to—when is he going to take a leak?”
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The feeling of some of the officers involved was, as Schroen put it, “Let’s just blow the thing up. And if we kill bin Laden, and five sheikhs are killed, I’m sorry. What are they doing with bin Laden? He’s a terrorist. You lie down with the dog, you get up with fleas.”
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Support for a missile or bombing strike was especially passionate inside the bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center in Langley. This was their life. They felt bin Laden had the United States in his sights. They came in every morning to new in-trays full of threat reports. They had been down this road of near misses too many times before. They wanted to shoot.

Years later, recollections differed about exactly when and how it first became apparent that the hunting camp had been organized by royalty from the United Arab Emirates. Several officials remembered that the satellite photography showed a C-130 on the ground near the camp and that the plane was painted in a camouflage pattern used by the U.A.E. air force. One participant recalled that the satellite photos also captured a tail number on the C-130 that was eventually traced to the U.A.E. government.

Richard Clarke knew the U.A.E. royal family very well. He had worked for years with the U.A.E.’s intelligence service as well as its royal family and military. He negotiated arms deals and basing agreements, and he exchanged occasional tips and favors with the U.A.E. security services. He had just returned from the country, where he had held talks on terrorism and arms purchases. The likelihood that U.A.E. royalty were on the ground raised the stakes mightily. The emirates were crucial suppliers of oil and gas to America and its allies. They cooperated with the American military on basing agreements. The port of Dubai received more port calls by the U.S. Navy than any port in the region; it was the only place in the Persian Gulf that could comfortably dock American aircraft carriers. The U.A.E. royal family had also been targeted by the Clinton administration’s “buy American” campaign to win overseas contracts for weapons manufacturers and other corporations. And Sheikh Zayed had come through in a very big way: In May 1998, in a deal partially smoothed by Clarke, the U.A.E. had agreed to an $8 billion multiyear contract to buy 80 F-16 military jets. The contract would enrich American defense companies. The planes were to be manufactured in Texas, creating good jobs in a politically crucial state.
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If the United States bombed the camp and killed a few princes, it could put all that in jeopardy—even if bin Laden were killed at the same time. Hardly anyone in the Persian Gulf saw bin Laden as a threat serious enough to warrant the deaths of their own royalty. They would react to such a strike angrily, with unknown consequences for the United States. And if it turned out that bin Laden was not in the hunting camp after all, the anti-American reaction would make the controversy over the cruise missile strike on the al Shifa plant in Sudan the previous summer seem mild by comparison.

All this was discussed at the White House just two days before President Clinton faced a final vote on impeachment charges in the U.S. Senate. It seemed clear that Clinton would win the trial and finish out his term, but his power had fallen to its nadir. This hardly seemed an ideal time for an all-or-nothing attack against a terrorist who made few Americans feel directly menaced.

Some of the CIA officers involved could not understand the White House’s hesitation. The CIA’s reporting—human agents, the tracking team outside the camp, the satellite photography, signals intelligence—left some officers involved with an unusually high feeling of certainty that bin Laden was really there. It was rare to see bin Laden sit still in one place for so long. Some in the U.S. embassy in Islamabad speculated that perhaps the recent Pakistani report about bin Laden’s illness was truthful and bin Laden had traveled to the luxurious camp to recuperate.
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Neither the Islamabad station nor the Counterterrorist Center at Langley could offer a 100 percent guarantee that bin Laden was in the hunting camp, however. They did not have a picture of bin Laden standing outside his tent. The satellites could not take a photograph of that quality, and the tracking team could not get close enough. If they launched a strike, they would have to accept some doubt. George Tenet, for one, was not convinced that the reporting was completely solid.

The U.S. military relied heavily on its alliances with the wealthy Persian Gulf emirates despite their occasional support for Islamists. To even consider a strike against bin Laden they needed to be completely sure, some of those involved argued. In the American military, recalled Gary Schroen, “Nobody wanted to say, ‘Well, you blew up a camp full of U.A.E. princes and half of the royal family of the U.A.E.’s dead—and you guys didn’t get him.’ ”
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Clinton’s national security cabinet had been tracking the camp for more than a week. They had learned what they could; they had to decide. Richard Clarke recommended against a cruise missile shot. George Tenet, too, recommended no. By February 12, the day of Clinton’s acquittal on impeachment charges, bin Laden reportedly had left the camp.

Afterward, the U.S. embassy in Abu Dhabi, capital of the U.A.E., contacted Sheikh Zayed’s government and asked for precise coordinates of the family’s Afghan hunting camp. The aviation maps and other data supplied through the U.A.E. foreign ministry confirmed that it had been the royal family’s camp. The U.A.E. later reported to the White House that no members of the royal family had been present at the hunt and that as far as they could determine, bin Laden had not been there, either. The Americans later concluded that high-level U.A.E. officials had, in fact, been at the camp, which was quickly torn down in March, after Clarke called U.A.E. officials. The call angered some CIA officers who had hoped to watch the camp quietly, hoping bin Laden would return. The U.S. embassy in Abu Dhabi began pressuring the royal family to cease its hunting trips altogether. The Americans argued that the trips violated United Nations sanctions meant to isolate the Taliban. Based on United Nations and other reporting, the Americans also suspected that the C-130s flying out of Dubai carried weapons to the Taliban. The U.A.E. government was one of three in the world that recognized the Taliban, yet its officials told the Americans that they “wanted to cooperate and wanted to know what they could do to help,” recalled a State Department officer involved in relaying the map data about the Afghan hunting camps.

For its part the U.A.E. was anxious to make sure the data it handed over were properly entered into American targeting computers. The royal family “had its own concern, in the aftermath of al Shifa, about making sure their camps were properly understood,” the State official recalled.
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For some of the ground-level officers involved in the bin Laden chase the decision to hold fire seemed almost unforgivable. It had been one thing before the Africa embassy bombings to have their plan to raid Tarnak Farm and kidnap bin Laden turned down. That plan contained a great deal of risk and uncertainty. But with the desert camp, recalled Schroen, reflecting the views of other officers as well, “We knew he was there. We had assets in place. There was little risk to life and limb to anybody—not our Afghan colleagues, nobody on the American side. And it would have been, we thought, definitive. We could take him out. Yeah, some of these other people would be killed, but we would really be able to take him out.” Some of them blamed Clarke, speculating that he was so close to the U.A.E. royal family because of defense deals he had previously negotiated that he would never take the risk of offending them.
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