Ghost Wars (85 page)

The bin Laden unit at Langley shot a message to the Panjshir: You’ve got to recall the mission. We have no legal standing to provide intelligence that will be used in rocket attacks against bin Laden, the CIA officers pleaded. Massoud’s aides replied, in effect, as an American official put it, “What do you think this is, the Eighty-Second Airborne? We’re on mules. They’re gone.” There was no way to reach the attack team. They did not carry satellite phones or portable radios. They were walking to their launch site, and then they would fire off their rockets, turn around, and walk back.
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Langley’s officers waited nervously. Some of them muttered sarcastically about the absurd intersections of American law and a secret war they were expected to manage. The worst case would be if the rocket attack went badly and killed innocent civilians. The best case would be if Massoud’s men killed bin Laden; they could take the heat if that happened. Days passed, and then weeks. Massoud’s aides eventually reported that they had, in fact, shelled Derunta Camp. But the CIA could pick up no independent confirmation of the attack or its consequences. The lawyers relaxed, and the incident passed, unpublicized.
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For the bin Laden unit’s officers the episode only underlined the issues Massoud had emphasized at their meetings in the Panjshir. Why was the United States unable to choose sides more firmly in Massoud’s war against the Taliban? “What is our policy toward Afghanistan?” the bin Laden unit officers demanded in agency discussions. “Is it counterterrorism? Is it political?”
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Although Clarke was a relative hawk on bin Laden in the Clinton Cabinet, increasingly Cofer Black and his colleagues at the Counterterrorist Center resented the role played by the White House–run Counterterrorism Security Group. They were in broad agreement about the seriousness of the bin Laden threat, but the CIA’s field operatives—“we who actually
did things,”
as one of them put it—sought only two kinds of support from Clarke’s White House team: funding and permissive policy guidance. By 1999 they felt increasingly that Clarke and Berger could not or would not deliver on either front. “We certainly were not better off by their intervention in ops matters in which they had no experience,” recalled one officer involved. In the CIA’s executive suites Tenet and clandestine service chief James Pavitt stressed that Langley would not make policy on its own—that was the lesson of the Iran-Contra debacle, they believed. For their part, Clarke and his White House colleagues repeatedly questioned the CIA’s ability to act creatively and decisively against bin Laden. Clarke felt that the current generation of CIA officers had “over-learned” the lessons of the 1960s and 1980s that covert action “is risky and likely to blow up in your face.” Clinton’s Cabinet lacked confidence in its spy service. Explaining what she perceived to be CIA caution in the field, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright quipped to her Cabinet colleagues that because of the scandals and trials suffered during earlier decades, the CIA’s active generation of field officers were still coping with the deep bruises of their “abused childhood.”

Under the revised guidelines the CIA and Massoud’s men could only develop plans for bin Laden’s capture. They needed to have a way to bundle him up and fly him out of Afghanistan as part of the plan. Massoud’s men could use lethal force if they encountered resistance from bin Laden’s bodyguards—as they almost certainly would. The CIA also still had to avoid any action that would fundamentally alter Massoud’s military position against the Taliban.

Albright and Berger continued to believe that providing covert military aid to Massoud would only lead to more Afghan civilian deaths while prolonging the country’s military stalemate. Massoud’s forces were too small and too discredited by their past atrocities to ever overthrow the Taliban or unite the country, they and many analysts inside the State Department believed. Increasingly the White House and even senior CIA managers such as Cofer Black worried as well about Pakistan’s stability. If they angered Pakistan’s army by embracing the Taliban’s enemy, Massoud, this could destroy the Clinton administration’s attempt to negotiate controls on Islamabad’s nuclear weapons program. As so often before, Pakistan’s Islamist-tinged elite managed to appear just dangerous and unpredictable enough to intimidate American officials. The Pentagon, especially General Anthony Zinni at CENTCOM, who remained close to Musharraf personally, emphasized engagement with Pakistan’s generals. To covertly provide weapons or battlefield intelligence to Massoud would be to join India, among others, in a proxy war against Pakistan. Zinni also opposed more missile strikes in Afghanistan.

On the front lines of the Panjshir Valley, Massoud and his men took a jaundiced view of American priorities. Episodes like the Derunta attack confused and entertained them. “We were puzzled,” remembered one of Massoud’s senior aides. “What was ‘unlethal’ operations if you have an enemy that is armed to the teeth; they have everything. Then you are not allowed to have lethal operations against him?” Still, Massoud recognized that the CIA “represented a democracy, they represented an organized society where institutions function with restrictions,” as the senior aide recalled. Massoud also believed that within the American bureaucracy, “intelligence people are always aggressive.” Massoud and his advisers were “confident that the CIA wished to do a lot in Afghanistan, but their hands were tied. It was not intelligence failure. It was political failure.” When they met with visiting CIA officers or exchanged messages about the new, detailed rules for operations against bin Laden, even after the Derunta attack, “we never heard the word ‘kill’ from any American we talked to,” the senior Massoud aide remembered. “And I can tell you that most of the individuals who were reading these legal notes were also laughing. It was not their draft.”
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For two decades Massoud had watched in frustration as the United States deferred to Pakistan in its policies toward Afghanistan. In that sense the Clinton administration’s policy was not new. Massoud understood that Washington’s “relationship with Pakistan was considered strategic,” as his senior aide put it. “Pakistan’s interference in Afghanistan was considered a minor issue,” and so the United States ignored it. This continuing American deference to Islamabad fueled Massoud’s cynicism about the CIA’s campaign against bin Laden, however. About a dozen Americans had died in the Africa embassy bombings. Many hundreds of Afghan civilians, the kin of Massoud’s commanders and guerrillas, had been slaughtered soon afterward by Taliban forces on the Shomali Plains north of Kabul. Yet American law did not indict the Taliban masterminds of the Shomali massacres. It did not permit military aid to attack the Taliban. American politicians rarely even spoke about these massacres. This seemed to some of Massoud’s men a profound and even unforgivable kind of hypocrisy.
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GEORGE TENET’S EXHORTATIONS about bin Laden cascaded through the CIA. It was rare for the Director of Central Intelligence to personally invest himself in a single counterterrorist mission, as Tenet had done. The result during 1999 and early 2000 was a surge in recruitments of unilateral agents who could operate or travel in Afghanistan. It was the largest CIA drive for unilateral Afghan agents since the late years of the anti-Soviet war. Near East Division case officers and officers dispatched by the Counterterrorist Center sought contact with every potential Afghan source they could find. Some might be informal sources, helping the CIA because of their political opposition to the Taliban. Others were recruited secretly onto the CIA’s unilateral payroll. Case officers began to turn some Taliban military leaders, including a brigade-level commander in eastern Afghanistan. One energetic young case officer operating from Islamabad single-handedly recruited six or seven Taliban commanders operating in eastern Afghan border regions. The Islamabad-based case officers also contacted every mujahedin veteran of the anti-Soviet period who was known to the CIA. These included old commanders with Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf, who was now an ally of Massoud and opposed to the Taliban; Shiite commanders who had worked with the CIA around Kabul during the late 1980s; and Pashtun elders and political figures who spent most of their time in Pakistan but who had kin networks in eastern Afghanistan and sometimes traveled across the border. (An exception was Abdul Haq, still regarded as unreliable by his former CIA allies.) All of these recruitments and contacts were kept secret from Pakistani intelligence, just as the unilateral program had been in the late 1980s. None of the recruited agents was close to bin Laden. Despite several years of effort the CIA had been unable to recruit a single agent inside the core al Qaeda leadership. Black knew that the CIA was in trouble “without penetrations of [the] UBL organization,” as a classified Counterterrorist Center briefing to Clinton’s national security Small Group put it late in 1999. “While we need to disrupt operations . . . we need also to recruit sources,” Black’s briefing documents declared, even though “recruiting terrorist sources is difficult.” Still, the growing size of the CIA’s private agent network on the edges of the leadership, Tenet said later, could be measured in the agent reports that flowed through Langley headquarters: In 1999, for the first time, the CIA generated more unilateral reports about bin Laden from its own agents than reports from liaisons with other intelligence agencies. The Defense Intelligence Agency, working its own Pakistani and Afghan sources, produced scores of its own classified reports about bin Laden.
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One purpose of the recruitments was to collect detailed intelligence about bin Laden’s movements, his training camps, the houses where he stayed, the houses where his wives stayed, and the houses where al-Zawahiri, Mohammed Atef, and other top lieutenants lived or worked. Gradually the CIA built up a detailed map of bin Laden’s infrastructure in Afghanistan. Reports and photography from unilateral agents were matched against satellite imagery to fill in maps of camps and urban neighborhoods.

Bin Laden practiced intensive operational security. He was wary of telephones. He allowed no Afghans into his personal bodyguard, only Arabs he had known and trusted for many years. He varied his routes, did not stay in any one place for long, and never told anyone but his Arab inner circle about his plans. These practices limited the effectiveness of the CIA’s recruitments because the agency’s sources and paid agents were mainly Afghans who were kept at bay by bin Laden’s core bodyguard and leadership group. The CIA was unable to penetrate the inner circle, but bin Laden did have one security weakness, as agency operatives saw it: his several wives. Even after it was obvious that the Americans knew about Tarnak Farm near Kandahar, for example, bin Laden kept one of his families there and visited regularly. As a pious Muslim he tried to follow the Islamic practice of treating all his wives equally. The women had nearly identical lodging. At one point the CIA believed bin Laden had two different wives in Kabul. He would visit their houses regularly. The Islamabad station, through its tribal agents in Kandahar, recruited an Afghan who worked as a security guard at one of the Kabul houses bin Laden used. But the agent was so far down the al Qaeda information chain that he never knew when bin Laden was going to turn up; he was summoned to guard duty just as the Saudi’s Land Cruisers rolled in, and it was difficult to get a message out before bin Laden was gone again. “We occasionally learned where bin Laden had been or where he might be going or where someone who looked a little like him might be,” Madeleine Albright recalled. “We heard of suspicious caravans or of someone tall with a beard moving about with bodyguards . . . it was maddening.”
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The CIA’s agent networks and operational problems were different in each of the cities where bin Laden stayed. The agency had the best coverage around Kandahar, where its core group of paid tribal assets had been operating for years. Their reporting was now supplemented by swelling networks of anti-Taliban Pashtun activists who could move in and out of the region from Pakistan with ease. “Anytime he went to Kandahar, we would know it,” an American official recalled. “We had very good sources in Kandahar. The problem was . . . nobody could say where he was going to be the next day at noon.” Kandahar also was the Taliban’s military stronghold. Even if the CIA pinpointed bin Laden downtown, there was no easy way to organize a snatch operation; the attacking force would face strong opposition from Taliban units. There was also a likelihood of civilian casualties if the White House ordered missile strikes in the city. Besides, American counterterrorism policy did not identify Mullah Omar or the Taliban as the enemy. By Clinton’s declared policy at the United Nations and elsewhere, the Taliban was not fair game for targeted strikes.
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It would be less complicated to catch bin Laden at a training camp, on a road in rural Kandahar, or in nearby Uruzgan province, Mullah Omar’s home. In the summer of 1999 a truck bomb detonated outside Omar’s downtown Kandahar house, killing and wounding some of his relatives. In the aftermath bin Laden used his wealth to construct new compounds for the Taliban leader. He built Omar an extravagant, unapproachable walled palace on Kandahar’s outskirts. And bin Laden began a construction program in Uruzgan, including a new training complex for foreign al Qaeda volunteers. When the CIA learned about the Uruzgan project, it ordered satellite imagery and agent reports to document the camp. Its officers also hoped bin Laden might wander in for an inspection. Abdullah, Massoud’s foreign policy adviser, recalled that the CIA supplied detailed maps of the Uruzgan camp, based on satellite photography, in the hope that Massoud’s agents would mount an attack if bin Laden visited. At one point a team of four or five Afghan CIA agents with the southern tribal group approached the camp at night to scout it firsthand. Al Qaeda guards opened fire and wounded one of the agents. Bin Laden opened a similar camp near the Helmand River, to the west of Kandahar, but the CIA had few recruits whose tribal and ethnic heritage allowed them to travel comfortably in that area.
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