RICHARD A. CLARKE AGAINST ALL ENEMIES INSIDE AMERICA'S WAR ON TERROR TO THOSE WHO WERE MURDERED ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, INCLUDING THOSE WHO TRIED TO STOP IT, AMONG THEM JOHN O'NEILL AND THE EXTRAORDINARILY BRAVE PASSENGERS ON UNITED FLIGHT 93- AND TO ALL THOSE THEY LEFT BEHIND. CONTENTS Preface ix 1. Evacuate the White House 1 2. Stumbling into the Islamic World 35 3. Unfinished Mission, Unintended Consequences 55 4. Terror Returns (1993-1996) 73 5. The Almost War; 1996 101 6. Al Qaeda Revealed 133 7. Beginning Homeland Protection 155 S.DelendaEst 181 9. Millennium Alert 205 10. Before and After September 11 227 11. Right War, Wrong War 247 Epilogue 289 Index 293 PREFACE FROM INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE, the State Department, and the Pentagon for thirty years, I disdained those who departed government and quickly rushed out to write about it. It seemed somehow inappropriate to expose, as Bismarck put it, "the making of sausage." Yet I became aware after my departure from federal service that much that I thought was well known was actually obscure to many who wanted to know. I was frequently asked "exactly how did things work on 9/11, what happened?" In looking at the available material, I found that there was no good source, no retelling of that day which history will long mark as a pivot point. Then, as I began to think about teaching graduate students at Georgetown and Harvard, I realized that there was no single inside account of the flow of recent history that had brought us to September 11, 2001, and the events that followed from it. As the events of 2003 played out in Iraq and elsewhere, I grew increasingly concerned that too many of my fellow citizens were being misled. The vast majority of Americans believed, because the Bush administration had implied it, that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the al Qaeda attacks on America. Many thought that the Bush administration was doing a good job of fighting terrorism when, actually, the administration had squandered the opportunity to eliminate al Qaeda and instead strengthened our enemies by going off on a completely unnecessary tangent, the invasion of Iraq. A new al Qaeda has emerged and is growing stronger, in part because of our own actions and inactions. It is in many ways a tougher opponent than the original threat we faced before September 11 and we are not doing what is necessary to make America safer from that threat. This is the story, from my perspective, of how al Qaeda developed and attacked the United States on September 11. It is a story of the Pieface XI x Preface CIA and FBI, who carne late to realize that there was a threat to the United States and who were unable to stop it even after they agreed that the threat was real and significant. It is also the story of four presidents: • Ronald Reagan, who did not retaliate for the murder of 278 United States Marines in Beirut and who violated his own ter- rorism policy by trading arms for hostages in what carne to be called the Iran-Contra scandal; • George H. W. Bush, who did not retaliate for the Libyan mur der of 259 passengers on Fan Am 103; who did not have an of ficiai counterterrorism policy; and who left Saddam Hussein in piace, requiring the United States to leave a large military presence in Saudi Arabia; • Bill Clinton, who identified terrorism as the major post-Cold War threat and acted to improve our counterterrorism capa-bilities; who (little known to the public) quelled anti-American terrorism by Iraq and Iran and def eated an al Qaeda attempt to dominate Bosnia; but who, weakened by contin-ued politicai attack, could not get the CIA, the Pentagon, and FBI to act sufficiently to deal with the threat; • George W. Bush, who f ailed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from al Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then har-vested a politicai windfali for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks; and who launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radicai Islamic terrorist movement worldwide. This is, unfortunately, also the story of how America was unable to develop a consensus that the threat was significant and was unable to do ali that was necessary to deal with a new threat until that threat actually killed thousands of Americans. Even worse, it is the story of how even after the attacks, America did not eliminate the al Qaeda movement, which morphed into a distributed and elusive threat, how instead we launched the counter-productive Iraq fiasco; how the Bush administration politicized counter- terrorism as a way of insuring electoral victories; how criticai home-land security vulnerabilities remain,- and how little is being done to address the ideological challenge from terrorists distorting Isiam into a new ideology of hate. Chance had placed me inside key parts of the U.S. government throughout a period when an era was ending and another was born. The Cold War that had begun before my birth was ending as I turned forty. As the new era began I started what turned into an unprece-dented decade of continuous service at the White House, working for the last three presidents. As the events of 2003 unfolded, I began to feel an obligation to write what I knew for my fellow citizens and for those who may want to examine this period in the future. This hook is the fulfillment of that obligation. It is, however, flawed. It is a first-person account, not an academic history. The book, therefore, tells what one participant saw, thought, and believed from one perspective. Others who were in-volved in some of these events will, no doubt, recali them differently. I do not say they are wrong, only that this account is what my memory reveals to me. I want to apologize in advance to the reader for the fre-quent use of the first-person singular and the egocentric nature of the story, but it was difficult to avoid those features and stili do a fėrst-person, participant's account. The account is also necessarily incomplete. Many events and key participants are not mentioned, others who deserve rich description are only briefly introduced. Great issues such as the need to reform the intelligence community, secure cyberspace, or balance liberty and security are not fully analyzed. There will be other places for a more an-alytical reflection on those and other related issues of technical detail and policy import. Much that is stili classified as secret by the U.S. government is omitted in this book. I have tried, wherever possible, to respect the confidences and privacy of those about whom I write. Nonetheless, there are some conversations that must be recalled be-cause the citizenry and history have a justifiable need to know. I recognize there is a great risk in writing a book such as this that many friends and former associates who disagree with me will be of-fended. The Bush White House leadership in particular have a reputa- Pieface Xlll Pieface Xll tion for taking great offense at criticism by former associates, consid-ering it a violation of loyalty. They are also reportedly adept at re-venge, as my friend Joe Wilson discovered and as former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill now knows. Nonetheless, friends should be able to disagree and, for me, loyalty to the citizens of the United States must take precedence over loyalty to any politicai machine. Some will say this account is a justification or apology, a defense of some and an attack on others. It is meant to be factual, not polemi-cal. In a decade of managing national security, many made mistakes, definitely including me. Many important steps were also taken in that decade as the result of the selfless sacrifice of thousands of those who serve the superpower and try daily to keep it on the path of principle and progress. I have tried to be fair in recounting what I know of both the mistakes and the service. I leave bottom-line assessments of blame and credit to the reader, with a caution that accurate assign-ments of responsibility are not easily done. The dose reader will note that many names recur throughout the hook over a period of not just a decade, but more than two decades. That fact reflects the often unnoticed phenomenon that during the last fėve presidencies, many of the behind-the-scenes national security midlevel managers have been Constant, people such as Charlie Allen, Randy Beers, Wendy Chamberlin, Michael Sheehan, Robert Gelbard, Elizabeth Verville, Steven Simon, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, and Roger Cressey. When things worked, it was because they were listened to and allowed to implement their sound advice. Working closely with them were an even less noticed cadre of administrative assistants, such as the stalwart Beverly Roundtree, who has kept me in line and on time for the last fifteen years of our twenty-five-year association and friendship. No one has a thirty-year run in national security in Washington, including ten years in the White House, without a great deal of help and support. In my case that help has come from Republicans, Demo-crats, and independents, from Members of Congress, journalists, part-ners in foreign governments, extraordinary colleagues, mentors and mentees, and a long list of very tolerant and long-suffering bosses. Since some will not want to be named, I will spare them ali specific mention here. They know who they are, and so do I. Many thanks. Thanks too to Bruce Nichols of Free Press and to Len Sherman, without whom I would not have been able to produce a readable hook. In the 1700s a small group of extraordinary Americans created the Constitution that governs this country. In it, they dictated an oath that the President of the United States should swear. Forty-three Americans have done so since. Scores of millions of Americans have sworn a very similar oath upon becoming citizens, or joining the armed forces, becoming FBI agents, GIĀ officers, or federai bureau- crats. Ali of the above-mentioned groups have sworn to protect that very Constitution "against ali enemies." In this era of threat and change, we must ali renew our pledge to protect that Constitution against the foreign enemies that would inflict terrorism against our nation and its people. That mission should be our flrst calling, not unnecessary wars to test personal theories or expiate personal guilt or revenge. We must also defend the Constitution against those who would use the terror-ist threat to assault the liberties the Constitution enshrines. Those liberties are under assault and, if there is another major, successful ter-rorist attack in this country there will be further assaults on our rights and civil liberties. Thus, it is essential that we prevent further attacks and that we protect the Constitution ... against ali enemies. Chapter 1 EVACUATE THE WHITE HOUSE i RAN THROUGH THE WEST W i N G to the Vice Presidenti office, oblivious to the stares and concern that brought. I had been at a conf erence in the Ronald Reagan Building three blocks away when Lisa Gordon-Hagerty called to say an aircraft had struck the World Trade Center: "Until we know what this is, Dick, we should assume the worst." Lisa had been in the center of crisis coordination many times in exercises and ali too often in the real world. "Right. Activate the CSG on secure video. Fll be there in less than fėve," I told ber as I ran to my car. The CSG was the Counterterrorism Security Group, the leaders of each of the federai government's coun-terterrorism and security organizations. I had chaired it since 1992. It was on a five-minute tether during business hours, twenty minutes at ali other times. I looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was 9:03 a.m., September 11, 2001. As I drove up to the first White House gate Lisa called again: "The other tower was just hit." "Well, now we know who we're dealing with. I want the highest-level person in Washington from each agency on-screen now, especially FAA," the Federai Aviation Administration. As I pulled the car up to the West Wing door, Paul Kurtz, one of the White House Counterterrorism team, ran up to me. "We were in the Morning Staff Meeting when we heard. Condi told me to find you fast and broke up the meeting. She's with Cheney." Bursting in on the Vice President and Condi—Condoleezza Rice, the Presidenti National Security Advisor—alone in Cheney's office, I 2 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES caught my breath. Cheney was famously implacable, but I thought I saw a reflection of horror on his face. "What do you think?" he asked. "It's an al Qaeda attack and they like simultaneous attacks. This maynotbeover." "Okay, Dick," Condė said, "you're the crisis manager, what do you recommend? " She and I had discussed what we would do if and when another terrorist attack hit. In June I had given ber a checklist of things to do after an attack, in part to underline my belief that some-thing big was coming and that we needed to go on the offensive. "We're putting together a secure teleconference to manage the crisis," I replied. "l'd like to get the highest-ranking officiai from each department." My mind was already racing, developing a new list of what had to be done and done now. "Do it," the Vice President ordered. "Secret Service wants us to go to the bomb shelter," Condi added. I nodded. "I would and ... I would evacuate the White House." Cheney began to gather up his papers. In his outer office the nor-mal Secret Service presence was two agents. As I left, I counted eight, ready to move to the PEOC, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a bunker in the East Wing. Just off the main floor of the Situation Room on the ground level of the West Wing is a Secure Video Conf erencing Center, a clone of the Situation Room conference room except for the bank of monitors in the far wall opposite the chairman's seat. Like the conference room the Video Center is small and paneled with dark wood. The presiden-tial seal hangs on the wall over the chair at the head of the table. On my way through the Operations Center of the Situation Room, Ralph Seigler, the longtime Situation Room deputy director, grabbed me. "We're on the line with NORAD, on an air threat conference cali." That was a procedure instituted by the North American Aero-space Defense Command during the Cold War to alert the White House when Soviet bombers got too close to U.S. airspace. "Where's POTUS? Who bave we got with him?" I asked, as we moved quickly together through the center, using the White House staff jargon for the President. "He's in a kindergarten in Florida. Deb's with him." Deb was Evacuate the White House Navy Captain Deborah Lower, the director of the White House Situation Room. "We have a line open to her celi." As I entered the Video Center, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty was taking the roll and I could see people rushing into studios around the city: Donald Rumsfeld at Defense and George Tenet at CIA. But at many of the sites the Principal was traveling. The Attorney General was in Milwaukee, so Larry Thompson, the Deputy, was at Justice. Rich Armitage, the number two at State, was filling in for Colin Powell, who was in Perų. Air Porce four-star General Dick Myers was fėlling in for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Hugh Shelton, who was over the Atlantic. Bob Mueller was at the FBI, but he had just started that job. Each Principal was supported by his or her member of the CSG and behind them staffs could be seen frantically yelling on telephones and grabbing papers. Condi Rice walked in behind me with her Deputy, Steve Hadley. "Do you want to chair this as a Principals meeting? " I asked. Rice, as National Security Advisor, chaired the Principals Committee, which consisted of the Secretaries of State and Defense, the CIA Director, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and often now the Vice President. "No. You run it." I pushed aside the chair at the head of the table and stood there, Condi visibly by my side. "Let's begin. Calmly. We will do this in crisis mode, which means keep your microphones off unless you're speaking. If you want to speak, wave at the camera. If it's something you don't want everyone to bear, cali me on the red phone." Rice would later be criticized in the press by unnamed partici-pants of the meeting for "just standing around." From my obviously partial perspective, she had shown courage by standing back. She knew it looked odd, but she also had enough self-confidence to feel no need to be in the chair. She did not want to waste time. I thought back to the scene in this room when the Oklahoma City bombing took piace. President Clinton had walked in and sat down, chairing the CSG video conference for a few minutes. While it showed high-level concern and we were glad to have him there, it would have slowed down our response if he had stayed. "You're going to need some decisions quickly," Rice said off cani- 4 AGAINST ALI ENEMIES era. "l'm going to the PEOC to be with the Vice President. Teli us what youneed." "What I need is an open line to Cheney and you." I turned to my White House Fellow, Army Major Mike Fenzel. The highly competitive process that selected White House fellows had turned out some extraordinary people over the years, such as another army major named Colin Powell. "Mike," I said, "go with Condi to the PEOC and open a secure line to me. l'il relay the decisions we need to you." Fenzel was used to pressure. As a lieutenant, he had driven his Bradley Fighting Vehicle down the runway of an Iraqi air base shooting up MiGs and taking return fire. As a captain, he had led a company of infantry into war-torn Liberia and faced down a mob outside the U.S. embassy. (Eighteen months after 9/11, Fenzel would be the fėrst man to parachute out of his C-17 in a nighttime combat jump into Iraq.) "Okay," Ibegan. "Let's start with the facts. FAA, FAA, go." I fell in to using the style of communication on tactical radio so that those lis-tening in the other studios around town could hear who was being called on over the din in their own rooms. Jane Garvey, the administrator of the Federai Aviation Adminis-tration, was in the chair. "The two aircraft that went in were American flight 11, a 767, and United 175, also a 767. Hijacked." "Jane, where's Norm?" I asked. They were frantically looking for Norman Mineta, the Secretary of Transportation, and, like me, a rare holdover from the Clinton administration. At fėrst, FAA could not flnd him. "Well, Jane, can you order aircraft down? We're going to bave to clear the airspace around Washington and New York." "We may have to do a lot more than that, Dick. I already put a hold on ali takeoff s and landings in New York and Washington, but we have reports of eleven aircraft off course or out of Communications, maybe hijacked." Lisa slowly whispered, "Oh shit." Ali conversation had stopped in the studios on the screens. Everyone was listening. "Eleven," I repeated. "Okay, Jane, how long will it take to get ali aircraft now aloft onto the ground somewhere?" My mind flashed back to 1995 when I asked FAA to ground ali U.S. flights over the Pa- I Evacuate the White House 5 cific because of a terrorist threat, causing chaos for days. It had taken hours then to find the Secretary of Transportation, Federico Pena. "The air traffic manager," Jane went on, "says there are 4,400 birds up now. We can cancel ali takeoffs quickly, but grounding them ali that are already up ... Nobody's ever done this before. Don't know how long it will take. By the way, its Ben's first day on the job." Garvey was referring to Ben Sliney, the very new National Operations Manager at FAA. "Jane, if you haven't found the Secretary yet, are you prepared to order a national ground stop and no fly zone?" "Yes, but it will take a while." Shortly thereafter, Mineta called in from his car and I asked him to come directly to the Situation Room. He had two sons who were pilots for United. He did not know where they were that day. I suggested he join the Vice President. Roger Cressey, my deputy and a marathoner, had run eight blocks from his doctor's office. Convincing the Uniformed Secret Service guards to let him back into the compound, Roger pressed through to the Situation Room. I was relieved to see him. I turned to the Pentagon screen. "JCS, JCS. I assume NORAD has scrambled fighters and AWACS. How many? Where?" "Not a pretty picture, Dick." Dick Myers, himself a fighter pilot, knew that the days when we had scores of flghters on strip alert had ended with the Cold War. "We are in the middle of Vigilant Warrior, a NORAD exercise, but. . . Otis has launched two birds toward New York. Langley is trying to get two up now. The AWACS are at Tinker and not on alert." Otis was an Air National Guard base on Cape Cod. Langley Air Force Base was outside Norfolk, Virginia. Tinker AFE, home to ali of America's flying radar stations, was in Oklahoma. "Okay, how long to CAP over D.C.?" Combat Air Patrol, GAP, was something we were used to placing over Iraq, not over our nation's capitai. "Fast as we can. Fifteen minutes?" Myers asked, looking at the generals and colonels around him. It was now 9:28. I thought about the 1998 simultaneous attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. There was the possibility now of 6 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES multiple simultaneous attacks in several countries. "State, State. DOD, DOD. We have to assume there will be simultaneous attacks on us overseas. We need to dose the embassies. Move DOD bases to com- bat Threatcon." The television screen in the upper left was running CNN on mute. Noticing the President coming on, Lisa turned on the volume and the crisis conference halted to listen. "... into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country." During the pause, I noticed that Brian Stafford, Director of the Se-cret Service, was now in the room. He pulled me aside. "We gotta get him out of there to someplace safe ... and secret. l've stashed FLO-TUS." FLOTUS was White House speak for Mrs. Bush, First Lady of the United States, now in a heavily guarded, unmarked building in Washington. Stafford had been President Clinton's bodyguard, led the presidential protection detail. Everyone knew that, despite the Elvis hairstyle, Stafford was solid and serious. He told presidents what to do, politely and in a soft Southern drawl, but in a way that left little room for discussion. Franklin Miller, my colleague and Special Assistant to the President for Defense Affairs, joined Stafford. Frank squeezed my bicep. "Guess l'm working for you today. What can I do?" With him was a member of bis staff, Marine Corps Colonel Tom Greenwood. "Can you work with Brian," I told Miller. "Figure out where to move the President? He can't come back bere till we know what the shit is happening." I knew that would not go down well with the Commander in Chief. "And Tom," I directed at Colonel Greenwood, "work with Roger—Cressey—on getting some CAP bere—fast." Stafford had another request. "When Air Force One takes off, can it have fighter escorts?" "Sure, we can ask," Miller replied, "but you guys know that CAP, flghter escorts, they can't just shoot down planes inside the United States. We'll need an order." Miller had spent two decades working in the Pentagon and knew that the military would want clear instruc- tions before they used force. I picked up the open line to the PEOC. I got a dial tone. Someone Evacuate the White House had hung up on the other end. I punched the PEOC button on the large, white secure phone that had twenty speed dial buttons. When Major Fenzel got on the line I gave him the first three decisions we needed. "Mike, somebody has to teli the President he can't come right back bere. Cheney, Condi, somebody. Secret Service concurs. We do not want them saying where they are going when they take off. Sec-ond, when they take off, they should have fėghter escort. Three, we need to authorize the Air Force to shoot down any aircraf t—including a hijacked passenger flight—that looks like it is threatening to attack and cause large-scale death on the ground. Got it?" "Roger that, Dick, get right back to you." Fenzel was, I thought, optimistic about how long decisions like that would take. I resumed the video conference. "FAA, FAA, go. Status report. How many aircraf t do you stili carry as hijacked?" Garvey read from a list: "Ali aircraft have been ordered to land at the nearest field. Here's what we have as potential hijacks: Delta 1989 over West Virginia, United 93 over Pennsylvania ..." Stafford slipped me a note. "Radar shows aircraft headed this way." Secret Service had a system that allowed them to see what FAA's radar was seeing. "l'm going to empty out the complex." He was ordering the evacuation of the White House. Ralph Seigler stuck his head into the room, "There has been an ex-plosion in the Pentagonparking,lot, maybe a car bombi" "If we evacuate the White House, what about the rest of Washington?" Paul Kurtz asked me. "What about COG?" Continuity of Government was another program left over from the Cold War. It was designed to relocate administration officials to alternate sites during periods of national emergency. COG was also planned to devolve power in case the President or key Cabinet members were killed. Roger Cressey stepped back in to the video conference and an-nounced: "A piane just hit the Pentagon." I was stili talking with FAA, taking down a list of possibly hijacked aircraft. "Did you hear me?" Cressey was on loan to the White House from the Pentagon. He had friends there; we ali did. "I can stili see Rumsfeld on the screen," I replied, "so the whole 8 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES building didn't get hit. No emotion in here. We are going to stay fo-cused. Roger, find out where the fėghter planes are. I want Combat Air Patrol over every major city in this country. Now." Stafford's order to evacuate was going into effect. As the staff poured out of the White House compound, the Residence, the West Wing, and the Executive Office Building, the Uniformed Secret Service guards yelled at the women, "If you're in high heels, take off your shoes and run—run!" My secretary, Beverly Roundtree, was on the line to Lisa, tellingher that she and the rest of my staff were stili in our vault in the Executive Office Building. "Okay, okay," Lisa was saying, knowing she could not persuade her to leave, "then bring over the chem-bio gear." Our coordinator for Continuity of Government (we will cali him Fred here to protect bis identity at the request of the government) joined us. "How do I activate COG?" I asked him. In the exercises we had done, the person playing the President had always given that order. "You teli me to do it," Fred replied. At that moment, Paul handed me the white phone to the PEOC. It was Fenzel. "Air Force One is getting ready to take off, with some press stili on board. He'll divert to an air base. Fighter escort ės author-ized. And..." He paused. "Teli the Pentagon they bave authority from the President to shoot down hostile aircraft, repeat, they bave authority to shoot down hostile aircraft." "Roger that." I was amazed at the speed of the decisions coming from Cheney and, through him, from Bush. "Teli them I am institut-ing COG." I turned back to Fred: "Go." "DOD, DOD." I tried to get the attention of those stili on the screen in the Pentagon. "Three decisions: One, the President has or-dered the use of force against aircraft deemed to be hostile. Two, the White House is also requesting fėghter escort of Air Force One. Three, and this applies to ali agencies, we are initėating COG. Please activate your alternate command centers and move staff to them immedi- ately." Rumsfeld said that smoke was getting into the Pentagon secure teleconferencing studio. Franklin Miller urged him to helicopter to Evacuate the White House V o DOD's alternate site. "I am too goddamn old to go to an alternate site," the Secretary answered. Rumsfeld moved to another studio in the Pentagon and sent his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to the remote site. General Myers asked, "Okay, shoot down aircraft, but what are the ROE? " ROE were Rules of Engagement. It was one thing to say it's okay to shoot down a hijacked aircraft threatening to kill people on the ground, but we needed to give pilots more speciflc guidelines than that. I asked Miller and Greenwood to make sure DOD had an answer to that question quickly. "I don't want them delaying while they lawyer that to death." Lisa slipped a note in front of me: "CNN says car bomb at the State Department. Fire on the Mail near the Capitol." Ralph Seigler stuck his head around the door: "Secret Service re-ports a hostile aircraft ten minutes out." Beverly Roundtree arrived and distributed gas masks. Cressey sug-gested we activate the Emergency Broadcast System. "And bave them say what?" I asked. "State, State ..." I called to get Rich Armitage's attention. The Deputy Secretary of State had been a Navy SEAL and looked it. He responded in tactical radio style: "State, here, go." "Rich, has your building just been bombed?" I asked. "Does it fucking look like l've been bombed, Dick?" "Well, no, but the building covers about four blocks and you're be-hind a big vault door. And you need to activate your COG site." "Ali right, goddamn it, l'il go look for myself," Armitage said, lifting himself out of the chair and disappearing off camera. "Where the hell is our COG site ..." Fred returned. "We bave a chopper on the way to extract the Speaker from the Capitol. Did you want ali departments to go to COG or just the national security agencies?" The Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, was next in line to the presidency if Bush and Cheney were killed or incapacitated. Soon, he would be skimming across the backed-up traffic and on his way to a cave. "Everybody, Fred, ali departments. And check with the Capitol Police to see if there is a fire." "Already did," Fred replied. "It's bogus. No flres, no bombs, but Evacuate the White House 11 10 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES the streets and Metro are jammed with people trying to get out of town. It's going to be hard to get people to alternate sites." Seigler was back: "Restile aircraft eight minutes out." Franklin Miller pulled me aside. Miller and I had been staff offi-cers together at the State Department in 1979. Ever since then we had been friendly, but competitive. Miller went to the Pentagon, while I stayed at State. We had both become office directors, then Deputy As-sistant Secretaries, then Assistant Secretaries, now Special Assistants to the President. "We gotta get these people out of here," Frank said and then looked me in the eyes. "But Fll stay here with you, if you're staying." The White House compound was now empty except for the group with Cheney in the East Wing bomb shelter and the team with me in the West Wing Situation Room: Roger, Lisa, and Paul from my coun-terterrorist staff, Frank Miller and Marine Colonel Tom Greenwood and a half dozen Situation Room staff. Roger Cressey, sitting on my right, was a career national security practitioner. I had hired him as a civil service employee at the State Department ten years earlier. To give him some real-world experi-ence, I had sent him on assignment to the embassy in Tei Aviv. Later, in 1993, I asked him to go to Mogadishu as an aide to Admiral Jonathan T. Howe, who had left the White House job as Deputy National Security Advisor to be, in effect, the U.N.'s governor in Somalia. Cressey drove the darkened streets of Mogadishu at night in a pickup truck with a 9mm strapped to his hip, listening to the gunfire rippling around town. Two years later when another American, General Jacques Klein, was appointed by the U.N. to run bombed-out Eastern Slavonia, Cressey had gone into the rubble with him. Together they dealt with warring Croatians and Serbs, including war criminals, refugees, and organized crime thugs. From there, he had gone to the civilian office in the Pentagon that reviewed the military's war plans. Cressey had joined me at the White House in November 1999 just as we placed security forces on the first nationwide terrorist alert. Now thirty-five years old, he was married to a State Department expert on weapons of mass destruction and had a beautiful two-year- old daughter. He thought his father-in-law was on American 77. (Later Cressey would learn that Bob Sepucha was safe.) Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, sitting behind me, had started her career at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as an expert on nuclear weapons and the health effects of radiation. Blonde and stylish, she stood out among the White House staff. Lisa had helped to create and organize NEST, the Nuclear Emergency Support Team. The support that NEST was supposed to give was to U.S. military Special Forces trained to seize and disarm nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. Lisa had trained with Delta Porce and SEAL Team Six. I was impressed by her understanding of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological devices, especially during the Tokyo subway attack in 1995 when terrorists had sprayed sarin nerve gas. In 1998 I asked her to join me in the White House to design and implement a new national pian to defend against terrorist attacks using chemical and biological weapons. Three weeks after her arrivai, al Qaeda at-tacked the two U.S. embassies in Africa. Lisa had stayed up for three days straight coordinating the flow of FBI, State, Marine, and disaster response teams to Kenya and Tanzania. Paul Kurtz, on my left, was another career civil servant. I had first hired him in 1987 in the Inteliigence Bureau at State. There he became an expert on nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Following the first Gulf War, he went into Iraq repeatedly for both the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.N. Special Commission to hunt down hidden Iraqi weapons. Kurtz then became the Politicai Advisor to the U.S. Commander of Operation Northern Watch, based in Turkey and taking a Blackhawk flight every week into the Kurdish areas of Iraq. The week after he left that job, his successor died when the U.S. Air Force mistakenly shot down the U.S. Army Blackhawk. Kurtz then went on to North Korea, inspecting for a nuclear weapons program. On his first inspection, Kurtz and his team were forced into a concrete block building and surrounded by loudly jeering Korean troops who thrust bayonets in the Windows at them. He joined the White House terrorism team in December 1999 and spent Christmas Day that year accompanying the National Security Advisor to the ter- 12 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES rorism centers at CIA and FBI as part of the Millennium Terrorist Alert. Like Cressey, he had run marathons and he was the kind of guy that no one disliked. These people did not flap. They were like family to me, but sud-denly I realized that I wanted them to leave for their own safety, I checked again with FAA to see if they stili thought there were hi-jacked aircraft aloft. There were 3,900 aircraft stili in the air and at least four of those were believed to be in the hands of the terrorists. I huddled everyone together just outside the Video Conferencing Center and asked them to leave. Lisa spoke for the group: "Right, Dick. None of us are leaving you, so let's just go back in there." "Hold on. We will be the next target. It's no shame to relocate. Some of you have kids too—think about them," I said, looking at Roger, whose second child was due in a few months. Roger did not hesitate. He said, "If we don't hold this thing together, no one will and we don't have time for this." Then he brushed by me and walked back into the Video Conferencing Center. Frank Miller grabbed a legai pad and said, "Ali right. If you're staying, sign your name here." "What the hell's the point of that?" Paul Kurtz asked. Frank slowly scanned the group, "l'm going to e-mail the list out of the compound so the rescue teams will know how many bodies to look for." Everyone signed and walked back in. We resumed the video con-ference. "DOD, DOD, go." I asked the Pentagon for an update on the fighter cover. Dick Myers had a status report. "We have three F-16s from Lang-ley over the Pentagon. Andrews is launching fighters from the D.C. Air National Guard. We have fighters aloft from the Michigan Air National Guard, movėng east toward a potential hostile over Pennsylva-nia. Six fėghters from Tyndall and Ellington are en route to rendezvous with Air Force One over Florida. They will escort it to Barksdale. NORAD says that it will have AWACS over New York and Washington later this morning." DOD Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had relocated to the Alter- 13 Evacuate the White House nate National Military Command Center outside Washington and had now rejoined the conference. "We have to think of a message to the public. Teli them not to clog up the roads. Let them know we are in control of the airways. Teli them what is happening. Have some-body go out from the White House." "Paul, there is nobody in the White House but us and no press on the grounds. I think the President will have something to say when he lands in Barksdale, but we have to be careful. .. we really don't know what is going on, are attacks stili under way . . . anybody?" Dale Watson, counterterrorism chief at FBI, was waving at the camera indicating he had an update. "Go ahead, Dale." "Dick, got a few things here. Our New York office reports that the Port Authority is closing ali bridge and tunnel connections into Manhattan. We have a report of a large jet crashed in Kentucky, near the Ohio line. "We think we ought to order ali landmark buildings around the country to evacuate, like the Sears Tower, Disney World, the Liberty Bell, the Trans America Building in San Francisco. This thing is stili going on. And Dick, cali me in SIOC when you can." SIOC—the Strategie Information and Operations Center—is FBI's command cen-ter. Dale had something he did not want to share with everyone in the conference. Frank Miller took over the video conference and I stepped out and called Watson on a secure line. "We got the passenger manifests from the airlines. We recognize some names, Dick. They're al Qaeda." I was stunned, not that the attack was al Qaeda but that there were al Qaeda operatives on board aircraft using names that FBI knew were al Qaeda. "How the fuck did they get on board then?" I demanded. "Hey, don't shoot the messenger, friend. CIA forgot to teli us about them." Dale Watson was one of the good guys at FBI. He had been trying hard to get the Bureau to go after al Qaeda in the United States with limited success. "Dick, we need to make sure none of this gang escapes out of the country, like they did in '93." In 1993 many of the World Trade Center bombers had quickly flown abroad just before and after the attack. 14 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES "Okay, l've got that." As we talked, we both saw on the monitors that WTC 2 was collapsing in a cloud of dust. "Oh dear God," Dale whispered over the line. "Dale, fėnd out how many people were stili inside." I had often been in the World Trade Center and the number that popped into my head was 10,000. This was going from catastrophe to complete and total calamity. 'TU try, but you know one of them. John just called the New York Office from there." John was John O'Neill, my closest friend in the Bureau and a man determined to destroy al Qaeda until the Bureau had driven him out because he was too obsessed with al Qaeda and didn't mind breaking crockery in bis drive to get Usama bin Laden. O'Neill did not fit the narrow little mold that Director Louis Freeh wanted for bis agents. He was too aggressive, thought outside the box. O'Neill's struggle with Freeh was a case study in why the FBI could not do the homeland protection mission. So, O'Neill retired from the FBI and had just become director of security for the World Trade Center complex the week before. We were silent for a moment. "Dale, get the word out to evacuate the landmarks and ali federai buildings across the country." "You got it... and Dick ... bang in there, we need you." I walked over to the Communications desk where one of the longest-serving Situation Room staff was stili there. Gary Breshnahan had come to the White House as an Army sergeant during the Reagan administration. To insure Communications back to the Situation Room, Gary had accompanied National Security Advisor Bud McFar-lane on the secret mission to Tehran that became the centrai act of the Iran-Contra fiasco. Later Gary had videotaped Bill Clinton's deposi-tion during the impeachment process. He was a single father of three. "You shouldn't stili be bere, Gare," I tried. "You want this fuckin' video to work, don't you?" "Okay, well if you're staying ... can you pulė up Coast Guard and Treasury?" "Coast Guard, no problem. But l'il bet the mortgage nobody is home at Treasury." When I walked back to the Video Conferencing Center Cressey 15 Evacuate the White House told me what had happened to one of the aircraft we thought was headed toward us. "United 93 is down, crashed outside of Pittsburgh. It's odd. Appears not to have hit anything much on the ground." A new site was appearing on a wall monitor, a row of men in light blue, Coast Guard Commandant Jim Loy in the middle of them. He was one of the most competent people in federai service, quiet and ef-fective. (Loy would later run the new Transportation Security Administration and then be promoted to run the new Department of Homeland Security as its Deputy Secretary.) "Dick," the commandant informed me, "we have a dozen cutters steaming at flank speed to New York. What more can we do to help?" "Jim, you have a Captain of the Port in every harbor, right?" He nodded. "Can they close the harbors? I don't want anything leaving till we know what's on them. And I don't want anything coming in and blowing up, like the LNG in Boston." After the Millennium Ter-rorist Alert we had learned that al Qaeda operatives had been infėltrat-ing Boston by coming in on liquid naturai gas tankers from Algeria. We had also learned that had one of the giant tankers blown up in the harbor, it would have wiped out downtown Boston. "I have that authority." Loy turned and pointed at another admi-ral. "And I have just exercised it." "Justice, Justice, over." I signaled to Larry Thompson, the DAG, Deputy Attorney General. "Larry, can you have Immigration get to-gether with Customs and close the land borders? " "Consider it done, but you know what the borders are like. You can just walk across in a lot of places, especially along the Canadian border. By the way, we need some help getting the AG back. Can we get approvai for an aircraft out of Milwaukee?" Ali flights were now banned, except for the fighters and AWACS. Frank Miller reported that DOD had gone on a global alert, DEFCON 3: "That hasn't happened since the 73 Arab-Israeli War." I remembered it. It was the first time I had worked a crisis. I was a young staffer in the National Military Command Center when Soviet nuclear warheads were discovered en route to Egypt. Secretary of De-fense James Schlesinger had ordered DEFCON 3 and sent U.S. forces racing ali over Europe without telling our NATO allies. Evacuate the White House 17 16 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES "State, State, go." Armitage acknowledged the cali. "Rich, DOD has gone to DEFCON 3 and you know what that means." Armitage knew; he had been an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration. "It means I better go teli the Ruskies before they shit a brick." Armitage activated the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, down the hall from the State Department Operations Center. The NRRC was con-nected directly to the Russėan Ministry of Defense just outside the Kremlin. It was designed to exchange information in crises to prevent misunderstanding and miscalculation. Armitage reappeared. "Damn good thing I did that. Guess who was about to start an exercise of ali their strategie nuclear forces? " He had persuaded his Russian counterpart to defer the operation. "By the way, we are taking calls here from countries ali over the world who want to help. We are going to dose ali our embassies to the public and skinny down the staffs, step up security." Jane Garvey was waving her arms at the camera. "We're down to 934 aircraft aloft, but we have a problem in Alaska." A Korean Airlines 747 looked like it had been hijacked. "KAL 85, NORAD is scrambling." "Has Alaska Center got comms with it?" I wanted to know if FAA could talk to the 747. Garvey indicated a thumbs-up, yes. "Okay, teli KAL it will obey orders from the F-15s or we will blow it up. We are not about to have them fly into Prudhoe Bay." I had an image of the 747 taking out the port that exported ali the oil from the North Slope. President Bush had landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Lou- isiana, escorted by fighter aircraft. He called Cheney on a secure landline. On the basis of Frank Miller's recommendations, Cheney pressed the president to proceed to a bunker, either Strategie Com-mand headquarters in Omaha or NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. The press corps on board were told not to report where they were. Before lifting off again, Bush taped a statement to be broadcast only after he was airborne. "Make no mistake. The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts." At this point, they hardly seemed cowardly. "Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward. And freedom will be defended." He seemed tentative. Cressey told me that Fenzel was looking for me. I picked up the open line to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, only to find that once again it was a dial tone. When I punched the PEOC but-ton, the person answering the line grunted and passed the phone to Major Fenzel. "Who is the asshole answering the phone for you, Mike?"Iasked. "That would be the Vice President, Dick. And he'd like you to come over." Frank Miller again took over the chair of the video con-ference, becoming, as I was most of the day, the nation's crisis manager. I had walked from the Situation Room in the West Wing through the Residence to the East Wing many times before, flashing my badge at the many guard posts along the way. Now, as I walked through the West Wing and the Residence, there was no one there. No sound. The guards had been ordered by Brian Stafford to assume a perimeter a block outside the White House fence. They had cordoned off streets and set up machine guns. Inside the fence, the White House itself was eerily empty. In the quiet of that walk, I caught my breath for the first time that day: • This was the "Big al Qaeda Attack" we had warned was com- ing and it was bigger than almost anything we had imagined, short of a nuclear weapon. With the towers collapsed, the death toll could be anywhere from 10,000 to maybe as high as 50,000. No one knew. And it wasn't over. I kept hearing in my mind Marlon Brando's whispered words from Apocalypse Now, "The horror, the horror." • Now we would finally bomb the camps, probably invade Af ghanistan. Of course, now bin Laden and his deputies would not be at the camps. Indeed, by now the camps were probably as empty as the White House. We would begin a long fight against al Qaeda, with no holds barred. But it was too late. • 18 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES They had proven the superpower was vulneratile, that they were smarter, they had killed thousands. • The recriminations would flow like water from a fire hose. There was no time for thinking like that. Not now. We had to move fast. Other attacks were probably in the works and had to he stopped. The country was in shock. The government had largely fled Washington. The nation needed reassurance. We needed to fėnd our dead. As I made it to the bottom of the stairs in the East Wing, I turned the corner and found a machine gun in my face. Cheney's security de-tail had set up outside the vault doors, with body armor, shotguns, and MP5 machine guns. Although they knew me, they were not about to open the vault door. "Hey guys, it's me. The Veep called me over here. At least cali in-side and let him know l'm here." While they did that, they frisked me. Condė Rice's deputy, Steve Hadley, carne to the vault door to identify me and escort me in. Inside the vault there were more MP5s and shotguns in the narrow corridor lined with bunk beds. In the Presidential Emergency Operations Center the cast was de-cidedly more politicai. In addition to the Vice President and Condė Rice, there was the Vice President's wife, Lynne; his politicai advisor Mary Matalin; his security advisor, Scooter Libby; Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten; and White House Communications director Karen Hughes. The monitors were simultaneously blaring the coverage from flve networks. On one screen, I could see the Situation Room. I grabbed Mike Fenzel. "How's it going over here?" I asked. "It's fine," Major Fenzel whispered, "but I can't hear the crisis conference because Mrs. Cheney keeps turning down the volume on you so she can hear CNN .. . and the Vice President keeps hanging up the open line to you." Mrs. Cheney was more than just a family mem-ber who had to be protected. Like her husband, she was a right-wing ideologue and she was off ering her advice and opinions in the bunker. I moved in and squatted between Cheney and Rice. "The Presi- 19 Evacuate the White House dent agreed to go to Offutt," Cheney informed me. His manner im-plied that it had been a hard sell. "He can't come back here yet," I insisted. "Do you need any-thing?" I asked the Vice President. "The comms in this piace are terrible," he replied. His calls to the President were dropping off. "Now you know why I wanted the money for a new bunker?" I could not resist. The President had canceled my plans for a replace-ment facili ty. "It'll happen," Cheney promised. "Are you getting everything you need, everybody doing what you want?" Cheney asked, placing his hand on my shoulder. I had known Dick Cheney for a dozen years and for that long been fascinated at how complex a person he was. On the surface, he was quiet and soft-spoken. Below that surface cairn ran strong, alrnost extreme belief s. He had been one of the five most radicai conservati ves in the Congress. The quiet often hid views that would seem out of piace if aired more broadly. It had been speculated in the press that he would really be the president for national security affairs, not the inexperienced Governor from Texas. Yet now he was wanting to make sure that the President knew what we had been doing in his absence. "I want you to prepare a briefing for him when he lands in Omaha. And I need a timeline of everything that you have done." I retraced my route through the abandoned Executive Mansion. It was 12:30 p.m. Back in the West Wing, I discovered that Gary Breshnahan had been right: no one was able to get to the Treasury video conferencing site. I grabbed Paul Kurtz. He and I had spent two days literally crawl-ing around Wall Street a few weeks before. We had gone on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, but we had also gone through the tun-nels carrying the fiber optic cable to the Verizon and AT&T switches. We had identified several buildings that were they taken out, would disconnect Wall Street from the world. "Paul, get Treasury, get the Fed, activate the National Communications System. We have to make sure the markets can dose their books and we're going to have to protect the comms centers and SIAC." 20 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Evacuate the White House 21 SIAC is the Securities Industry Automation Corporation, the mainframes, fiber, and data backup that made the American and New York Stock Exchanges work. Kurtz and I had been in their computer rooms. The National Communications System was yet another Cold War relic, housed in DOD but working for the White House. NCS was mandated to insure that criticai telephony and data flowed even under attack. In their Arlington center, ali the major telephone companies sat together around the table. Kurtz called the manager there, Brent Greene and said, "Teli them ali they need to support Verizon." A Ver-izon switching center for Wall Street was next to the World Trade Center and we could see from the television coverage that the build-ing, fllled with routers and switches, was punctured. Kurtz reached out for the market makers. In 1993 when the World Trade Center was bombed, President Clinton was called directly by Wall Street firm CEOs who had been prevented from reentering the towers. Unable to close their transaction accounts for the day, billions of dollars were up in the air, unassigned. That day eight years earlier, at the Presidenti direction, I had called the Pire Commissioner and gotten agreement to let key staffers back into the towers. That wasn't an option now, both towers had dropped. Kurtz called the people on Wall Street we had met earlier in the year. He learned that they had off-si te backup and had avoided the 1993 problem. He also learned that it would be hard to reopen the markets because of the infrastruc-ture damage. I walked back into the Video Conferencing Center and took the chair. "FEMA, FEMA go." The Federai Emergency Management Agency was responsible for disasters and there had never been one as big as this. Mike Brown, the Deputy Director, appeared on-screen. "The Mayor has called for the evacuation of Manhattan south of Canai Street. Governor Pataki has called up the National Guard. We bave eight FEMA-sponsored teams en route to Manhattan and four rolling to Arlington. Both New York and D.C. bave declared a state of emergency." "How many dead?" I asked. "They have no idea, thousands," he said, shaking bis head. Cressey had been preparing a PowerPoint briefing for Bush's ar- rivai in Omaha and Kurtz had done a timeline on what had happened when, and what we had done. The deck looked good, simple, straight-forward. I asked Kurtz to walk it over to the PEOC. Then, remember-ing the difficulty I had in getting in, I asked my Secret Service liaison officer, Agent Pete McCauley, to escort and vouch for Kurtz. Kurtz and McCauley walked incredulously through the empty White House, past the abandoned interior guard posts. Pete gave the documents to an agent he knew at the vault door in the East Wing for handoff to the Vice President. Together they climbed back up, into the open air of the Colonnade along the Rose Garden. Halfway to the West Wing, they heard a sudden crashing roar and looked up to see two F-15 Eagles screech across the South Lawn at three hundred feet, shaking the two-hundred-year-old Executive Mansion. McCauley pressed bis back against the wall, "Holy Mary, Mother of God!" Kurtz, a Holy Cross graduate, completed the prayer: "Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus." The Combat Air Patrol had arrived. The White House was a war zone. Back in the Situation Room, I was looking for Breshnahan. "POTUS is inbound Offutt. I need video connectivity to STRATCOM and I need them to have this PowerPoint." Gary indicated that would not be a problem, but he would need to disconnect the Coast Guard. Just before 3:00 p.m., we saw Bush stride into the underground bunker at Strategie Command, Offutt Air Porce Base, Nebraska. Everyone stepped out of the West Wing Video Conferencing Center, except Frank Miller and me. The last item on the agenda was supposed to be where the President should be. Instead, we began there. "I'm coming back to the White House as soon as the piane is fueled," the President said. "No discussion. Item two, briefing by Dick Clarke." I walked through "What Happened," from 08:50 to 10:06, four air-craft impacting the earth. Next, the "Response Actions," the nation-wide grounding of aircraft, the borders closed, the ports sealed, the forces on DEFCON 3, the government moved to caves, FEMA mortu-flry units en route to Manhattan. Next was "Issues for the Next 24-48 hours." Given that the President had decided to return to the White House, I suggested that, : a con- 23 22 AGAINSTAH.ENEMIES stitutional successor be deployed with a support team outside the city. (Commerce Secretary Don Evans was found and moved to a secret lo-cation outside the city.) We would need another publėc statement by the President, from the Ovai Office, after his return. Also to be decided was the continued grounding of the air transportation System, mili-tary deployments to guard criticai infrastructure here and abroad, and the schedule for reopening the markets. We needed to order the federai workforce to stay home. Basically, we needed the country to go on hold for a day or two until we learned whether there were more at-tacks coming, until we organized improved security, until we began to pick up the pieces. GIĀ Director George Tenet was up next. He left no doubt that al Qaeda had committed these atrocities. He had already been on the telephone to key counterparts around the world, lining up the forces for the counterstrike. Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld briefed on the status of forces. The Atlantic Fleet had departed Norfolk and was steaming with air-craft carriers and cruisers toward New York. He omitted the fact that no one had ordered the Atlantic Commander to do that. At times like these, initiative was a good thing. About 120 ftghters were fėnally cir-cling America's metropolitan areas. Forces worldwide were on battle status. FEMA talked of the Urban Search and Rescue Teams driving up the turnpike to Manhattan. A blood drive was under way. Emergen-cies were in effect in New York State, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Then the President was up, out, and in the air, escorted by F-15s and racing for Andrews Air Force Base. His was the only passen-ger aircraft in the air over America. The skies were clear. Somehow FAA had landed over four thousand aircraft, diverting flights from Europe to tiny Canadian fėelds with few if any hotels. Canadian citizens were opening their homes to strangers, who were slowly piecing to-gether what had happened to them, what had happened to America. After Bush left Omaha, World Trade Center tower Number 7 col-lapsed and with it the mayor's command post and the Secret Service fleld office. In the Situation Room, the talk turned to next steps. "Okay," I Evacuate the White House began, "we ali know this was al Qaeda. FBI and GIĀ will develop the case and see if l'm right. We want the truth, but, in the meantime, let's go with the assumption it's al Qaeda.What's next?" I asked the video conference. "Look," Rich Armitage responded, "we told the Taliban in no un-certain terms that if this happened, it's their ass. No difference be-tween the Taliban and al Qaeda now. They both go down." The Taliban was the radicai Muslim group controlling Afghanistan. "And Pakistan?" I asked. "Teli them to get out of the way. We bave to eliminate the sanctu-ary." Armitage was on a roll. If Pakistan did not cooperate, we would bave a major problem with a nuclear-armed Islamic state. "We'll need presidential pressure on Yemen and Saudi Arabia too," said John McLaughlin, Tenet's deputy. "And a major covert ac-tion program for three to flve years, support to the Northern Alli-ance." It was too late, however, for Massoud, the leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance. He had been assassinated by al Qaeda twenty-four hours earlier. "There are forty-two major Taliban bombing targets," General Myers said, reviewing a briefing handed to him. Just before 7:00, the 747 known as Air Force One touched down at Andrews AFB and the President moved quickly to Marine One, which was parked close by. The helicopter, accompanied by two decoys, took a circuitous path over the city before diving onto the South Lawn of the White House. Above them, AWACS watched the skies and vec-tored F-15s and F-16s on Cómbat Air Patrol. They were tracking a smaller USAF aircraft with Secretary of State Colin Powell. Upon his landing at Andrews, a heavily armed convoy whisked him directly to the White House. At 8:30 the President addressed the nation from the Ovai Office. Karen Hughes had built the consensus of the video conference into the message. "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." Immediately fol-lowing the address, the President met with us in the PEOC, a piace he had never seen. Unlike in his three television appearances that day, Bush was confident, determined, forceful. 24 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Evacuate the White House 25 "I want you ali to understand that we are at war and we will stay at war until this is done. Nothing else matters. Everything is available for the pursuit of this war. Any barriers in your way, they're gone. Any money you need, you have it. This is our only agenda." The President asked me to focus on identifying what the next attack might be and preventing it. When, later in the discussion, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that in-ternational law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. "No," the President yelled in the narrow conference room, "I don't care what the in-ternational lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass." Bush had already learned that some of the hijackers were people that the GIĀ had known were al Qaeda and were in the United States. Now he wanted to know when the CIA had told the FBI and what the FBI had done about it. The answers were imprecise, but it became clear that CIA had taken months to teli FBI that the terrorists were in the country. When FBI did learn, they failed to flnd them. Had FBI put them on the television show America's Most Wanted or alerted the FAA about them, perhaps the entire celi could have been rounded up. Bush's look said he would want to come back to this issue later. For now, however, the President shifted to the economie damage. Somehow he had learned that four shopping malls in Omaha had closed after the attacks. "I want the economy back, open for business right away, banks, the stock market, everything tomorrow." Ken Dam, the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, fėlling in for the traveling Paul O'Neill, pointed out that there was physical damage to the Wall Street infrastructure. "As soon as we get the rescue operations done up there, shift everything to flxing that damage so we can reopen," Bush urged. Turning to Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta, he pressed for resumption of air travel. Mineta suggested that flights could begin at noon the next day. Brian Stafford urged the President to spend the night in the bunker, but he would have none of it. Following the meeting, he went to the Ovai Office and began working the telephones. I returned to the Situation Room and found my team hard at it. Cressey was on the telephone to New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's chief of staff. "Anything he wants, troops, equipment. And if FEMA or any agency is slow, cali us directly." Kurtz was talking to Verizon about the Stock Exchange. I asked him to put them on hold for a minute so I could give him what in the White House we called guidance: "From the President for you ... two priorities. First, search and rescue. Second, reopen the markets. Let me know what you need to do that." Paul looked up, a bit of fatigue appearing for the first time. "How about five miles of fiber optic cable and a dozen switches and routers ... installed?" "That should not be a problem. We can get that." I pressed him, remembering the Presidenti determination. "So you can have the markets open Thursday?" I knew as soon as I said it that was too am-bitious, even though we were already getting calls from CEOs at Cisco, AT&T, and others offering personnel and equipment no ques-tions asked. "Try Monday," Kurtz shot back and went on with the cali. Lisa was in dialogue with Governor George Pataki. "Well, don't you have even an estimate of the dead?" I took ber aside. "You know those chemical and bio detectors you're developing? I want some, now, bere and at the Capitol." "Well, there are only three small problems with that, Dick," Lisa began. "A) they're experimental, and B) they're in California, and C) nothingisflying." "Right, so here at the White House, Wednesday, up and run- ning... ?" I asked. / "Okay, okay," she said, adding it to ber list. The Navy staff of the White House Mess had reappeared and were distributing sandwiches. "We're going to stay open ali night." I real-ized I hadn't eaten since the night before when I had gone to a new seafood restaurant near the White House with Rich Bonin of 60 Min-utes. Bonin was obsessed with al Qaeda, had done a story about terror-ism with me and Lesley Stahl in October. They had taped three hours of interviews with me for a seventeen-minute segment. Now, without my knowing it, CBS was running much of the unused interview, in-cluding me explaining the concepė of Continuity of Government. The night before, Bonin had asked if it was true that I had asked for 26 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Evacuate the White House 17 a transfer. As of October 1,1 would be starting a new national program on cyber security. Bonin wanted to run the story that I was quitting the terrorism job in frustration with the new administration's lack of focus on al Qaeda. I asked him not to, but admitted that I had sought the transfer. It seemed like ages ago. I grabbed a sandwich from the Mess and walked outside with Cressey to the parking lot that had once been a public Street known as West Executive Avenue. My car was stili parked askew in front of the West Wing. It was the only vehicle left. The night was clear and quiet. We were in the middle of Washington and there was hardly a sound. I debrief ed Roger on the Principals meeting with the President. I realized then that until today I had not ever briefed the President on terrorism, only Cheney, Rice, and Powell. We had finally had our first Principals meeting on terrorism only a week earlier. The next step was to bave been a briefing to walk the President through our pro-posed National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD). The Washington Post later reported (January 20, 2002) that the NSPD had as its goal to "eliminate al Qaeda." The pian called for arming the Northern Al-liance in Afghanistan to go on the offensive against the Taliban, pressing CIA to use the lethal authorėties it had been given to go after bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership. Bush had never seen the pian, the pieces of which had first been briefed to Cheney, Rice, Powell, and others on bis team in January. I had not been allowed to brief the President on terrorism in January or since, not until today, September 11. It had taken since January to get the Cabinet-level meeting that I had requested "urgently" within days of the inauguration to approve an aggressive pian to go after al Qaeda. The meeting had finally happened exactly one week earlier, on September 4. Now, as I was telling Cressey, I thought the aggressive pian would be implemented. "Well, that's fuckin' great. Sounds like they're finally going to do everything we wanted. Where the beli were they for the last eight months?" Cressey asked. "Debating the fine points of the ABM Treaty?" I answered, look-ing up at the sky for the fighter cover. "They'll probably deploy the armed Predator now too," Cressey said, referring to his project to kill bin Laden with an unmanned air- craft. CIA had been blocking the deployment, refusing to be involved in running an armed version of the unmanned aircraft, to hunt and kill bin Laden. Roger Cressey was stili fuming at their refusai. "If they had deployed an armed Predator when it was ready, we could bave killed bin Laden before this happened." "Yeah, well, this attack would bave happened anyway, Rog. In fact, if we had killed bin Laden in June with the Predator and this stili happened, our friends at CIA would bave blamed us, said the attack on New York was retribution, talked again about the overly zealous White House counterterrorism guys." I tried to think ahead, of what we could best do now. "From bere on in it's a self-implementing pol-icy, or as you guys from the Pentagon would say, a self-licking ice cream cone ... but it's too late, way too late. The best thing you and I can do now is figure out how to block any follow-on attacks." We walked back in. The next task was securing the air transport System so flights could resumé. U.S. aviation had long been insecure and the 1997 Commission on Aviation Safety and Security had avoided the tough decisions, like federalizing airport security. The FBI had even attempted to eliminate the Federai Air Marshal program in 1998, arguing that armed FAA agents on hijacked aircraft could be killed by FBI's commandos storming a hijacked aircraft. Now, we had thousands of aircraft scattered at airfields ali over the United States and Canada, and probably a quarter of a million passengers sleeping on airport floors. We also had a continuing threat. Had ali of the al Qaeda teams struck? We resumed our video conference and I put the ques-tion to FAA: how could we resumé flight? "We can't just put everybody back on the planes and go back to business as usuai," Mike Canavan was insistent. Canavan was an Army three-star generai, a former commander of Delta Porce, who had only recently retired and taken over the job of Director of Security at FAA. He had been in Puerto Rico doing a personnel shake-up of his San Juan operation when the attacks hit. Using his military contacts, he had grabbed a DOD aircraft to get back. Using his FAA contacts, he had been given F-16 escorts so that he would not be shot down by mis-take. "We need to search ali the aircraft and airports for hidden 28 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Evacuate the White House 29 weapons. I think some of the knives or box cutters they used had ai-ready been put on the aircraft for them." Canavan had a report of box cutters found hidden away on one of the aircraft that had been grounded. "Mineta told the President that the System would reopen at noon Wednesday. That would just give us about twelve hours, Mike." I was looking for a reality check from FAA because my team did not see how the airports could reopen for days. "Open tomorrow? That ain't gonna happen, Dick." Canavan had already had this conversation with his boss, following Mineta's return from the White House. "We have been on to the airlines. They could not open at noon even if we wanted to. And we don't. I want FAMs on everyflight." "Well that means thousands of Federai Air Marshals and last time I checked you had a few dozen," I said, knowing where Canavan was going. The FAA had flown armed agents on only a few flights on over-seas routes. I made Canavan a proposai I knew he would like. "After the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics we threw hundreds of federai agents into security in Atlanta, Border Patrol, Customs, Secret Service, U.S. Marshals. We can do that again, but it will take days to brief them and position them." Canavan agreed. "That's what I need for now, but we are going to have to have a dedicated and large FAM program quickly, and it's going tocost." "Mike, I told the President about the minimum-wage rent-a-cops doing screening of passengers and carry-on. He understands that will have to end." We would have to screen every passenger closely before we resumed flights and then put in piace a permanent System. "FAA needs to take that over, too," Canavan pushed, "but for this week we are going to have to supplement the rent-a-cops with the real thing, locai police, National Guard, federai agents." "What about everything else?" Paul Kurtz asked. "Are we letting every thing resumé flying this week? How do we check private planes? I look out my window every day and see private jets taking off from National flying right at the White House before they veer off." Large passenger aircraft were only a piece of what had been grounded that . Cargo aircraft, executive jets, personal aircraft, traffic helicopters, crop dusters, Goodyear blimps, and hot air balloons also filled America's skies on a normal day. Dealing with them would have to come later. I asked Kurtz to work with FAA to phase those other aircraft back in after we had a security pian for them. For weeks there-after, I would catch snippets of Paul's conversations. "I don't care if there is no aerial camera shot of the game, no blimps over stadi-ums ..." and "What do you mean / stili have ali the traffic helicopters grounded?" Condi Rice joined us again in the Situation Room. The President now wanted to be sure we were ali going to get some sleep. "I need you bright and fresh in the morning. Go home." Rice made sure we under-stood it was an order. I worried about ber security if she planned to go back to her apartment in the nearby Watergate. So had the President; she was going to spend the night in the Residence. After 1:00 a.m., I agreed to go home briefly to shower and change. Lisa and Mike Fenzel would stay, supported by Margie Gilbert of the National Security Agency. Before I left, I called Pete McCauley to get a ride through the Secret Service positions around the building and to put us on a list to get out... and get back in. We drove through their barricades, down the empty streets. A Humvee with a .50 caliber ma-chine gun was on the corner of 17th and Pennsylvania. We stopped on the Roosevelt Bridge over the Potomac and watched the smoke stili rising from the Pentagon, lit by the floodlights that had been brought in. It gave me a chili. As we pulled up to my house in Arlington and shut off the car, we heard the drone of a heavy four-engine aircraft. AWACS circling. An hour later, as I dressed to go back in, I wondered again how many al Qaeda sleeper cells there were in the United States. I had long believed they existed. So had John O'Neill, who was now dead under tons of steel. So had Dale Watson, who had tried to get the FBI to look for the sleepers. Were there stili cells planning more attacks? Thousands had died; we in the West Wing had almost been among them. Now we had the full attention of the bureaucracies and the full sup-Port of the President. I had to get back to the White House and begin Planning to prevent follow-on attacks. I found my Secret Service- 30 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Evacuate the White House 31 issued .357 sidearm, thrust it in my belt, and went back out into the night, back to the West Wing. I expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term. Instead, I walked into a series of dis-cussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda. Then I realized with al-most a sharp physical pain that Rumsf eld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well be-fore, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pen-tagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002. On the morning of the 12th DOD's focus was already beginning to shift from al Qaeda. CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, was not per-suaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to bave pulled off by itself, without a state sponsor—Iraq must have been helping them. I had a flashback to Wolfowitz saying the very same thing in Aprii when the administration had finally held its first deputy secre-tary-level meeting on terrorism. When I had urged action on al Qaeda then, Wolfowitz had harked back to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, saying al Qaeda could not have done that alone and must have had help from Iraq. The focus on al Qaeda was wrong, he had said in Aprii, we must go after Iraqi-sponsored terrorism. He had rejected my assertion and CIA's that there had been no Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the United States since 1993. Now this line of think-ing was coming back. By the afternoon on Wednesday, Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and "getting Iraq." Secretary Powell pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda. Relieved to have some support, I thanked Colin Powell and bis deputy, Rich Armitage. "I thought I was missing something bere," I vented. "Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at PearlHarbor." Powell shook bis head. "It's not over yet." Indeed, it was not. Later in the day, Secretary Rumsfeld com-plained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious and the President did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq. Instead, he noted that what we needed to do with Iraq was to change the government, not just hit it with more cruise missiles, as Rumsfeld had implied. Joint Chiefs Chairman Hugh Shelton's reaction to the idea of changing the Iraqi government was guarded. He noted that could only be done with an invasion by a large force, one that would take months to assemble. On the 12th and 13th the discussions wandered: what was our ob- jective, who was the enemy, was our reaction to be a war on terrorism in generai or al Qaeda in specifėc? If it was ali terrorism we would fight, did we have to attack the anti-government forces in Colombia's jungles too? Gradually, the obvious prevailed: we would go to war with al Qaeda and the Taliban. The compromise consensus, however, was that the struggle against al Qaeda and the Taliban would be the first stage in a broader war on terrorism. It was also clear that there would be a second stage. / Most Americans had never heard of al Qaeda. Indeed, most senior officials in the administration did not know the term when we briefed them in January 2001.1 found a moment without meetings and sat at my computer and began: "Who did this? Why do they hate us? How will we respond? What can you as an American do to help? " It ali carne out, in a stream of pages. I wrote of al Qaeda's hatred of freedom, of its perversion of a beautiful religion, of the need to avoid religious or eth-nic prejudice. Thinking it might be helpful, I sent it to John Gibson in Speech Writing. Meanwhile, Roger Cressey and I dusted off the draft National Se-curity Presidential Directive on al Qaeda, authorizing aid to the 32 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Evacuate the Wbite House 33 Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Joinedby Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, we also began to list the major domestic vulnerabilities to further terror-ist attacks and to task the departments to start plugging the holes. Trains with HAZMAT—hazardous materials—were diverted from major cities. Crop dusters were grounded until they could be tracked and we could be sure terrorists were not filling them with biological agents. Special security teams were sent to protect telecommunica-tions hubs, chemical plants, and nuclear reactors. George Tenet and Cofer Black (the counterterrorism chief at CIA) were off and running now, demanding action from friendly intelli-gence services and preparing at last to send CIA officers into Afghanistan. Colin Powell and Rich Armitage were turning Pakistan around, from halfhearted support of the U.S. campaign against al Qaeda to full cooperation. Later, on the evening of the 12th, I left the Video Conferencing Center and there, wandering alone around the Situation Room, was the President. He looked like he wanted something to do. He grabbed a few of us and closed the door to the conference room. "Look," he told us, "I know you have a lot to do and ali... but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way ..." I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. "But, Mr. President, al Qaeda did this." "I know, I know, but... see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred ..." "Absolutely, we will look ... again." I was trying to be more re-spectful, more responsive. "But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen." "Look into Iraq, Saddam," the President said testily and left us. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty stared after him with her mouth hanging open. Paul Kurtz walked in, passing the President on the way out. Seeing our expressions, he asked, "Geez, what just happened here?" "Wolfowitz got to him," Lisa said, shaking her head. "No," I said. "Look, he's the President. He has not spent years on terrorism. He has every right to ask us to look again, and we will, Paul." Paul was the most open-minded person on the staff, so I asked him to lead the special project to get the departments and agencies to once again look for a bin Laden link to Saddam Hussein. He chaired a meeting the next day to develop an officiai position on the relationship be-tween Iraq and al Qaeda. Ali agencies and departments agreed, there was no cooperation between the two. A memorandum to that effect was sent up to the President, but there was never any indication that it reached him. The next week President Bush addressed a Joint Session of Con-gress in the most eloquent speech of his career. Gone was any tenta-tiveness or awkwardness as a speaker. Karen Hughes had drafted the text personally on her old typewriter. It included my questions and some of my answers: who is the enemy, why do they hate us ... The weeks that followed were filled with meetings, back to back. A Campaign Coordination Committee, co-chaired by Franklin Miller and me, developed a game pian for attacking al Qaeda. A Domestic Preparedness Committee, chaired by Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, pooled the departments' efforts to identify and remedy vulnerabilities in the U.S. to further attack. The Cabinet and their deputies had their eyes opened. It was a time of jitters. There were clearly bogus reports of commando teams targeting the White House and nuclear bombs on Wall Street, but many of the people now reading such intelligence had never seen it before and could not teli the wheat from the chaff. Reagan National Airport remained closed, but because of concerns about aircraft possibly headed toward the White House, we were on Constant alert. Throughout it ali, we thought of the dead, of the horror. Those of us who had stayed in the White House that day now knew why the United flight had crashed in Pennsylvania, that heroic passengers had rought and died, and probably saved our lives in the process. But we tned to stay unemotional, to stay f ocused on the work that had to be done, the work that kept us in the White House eighteen hours a day and more, every day since 9/11. We were told that parts of my FBI 34 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES friend, John O'Neill, had been found in the rubble in New York and that there would be a memorial service in his hometown of Atlantic City. I told Condi Rice that we would be taking a half day off. Lisa, Roger, and Bev Roundtree joined me and we drove to New Jersey. As the Mass ended and John's coffin rolled by, the bagpipes played, and, flnally, I wept from my gut. There was so much to grieve about. How did this ali happen? Why couldn't we stop it? How do we prevent it from happening again and rid the world of the horror? Someday I would flnd the time to think through it ali and answer those ques-tions. Now is that time. Chapter2 STUMBLING INTO THE ISLAMIC WORLD L ITTLE NOTICED BY MOST AMERICANS, including in itS government, a new international movement began growing dur-ing the last two decades. It does not just seek terror for its own sake; that international movement's goal is the creation of a network of governments, imposing on their citizens a minority interpretation of Isiam. Some in the movement cali for the scope of their campaign to be global domination. The "Caliphate" they seek to create would be a severe and repressive fourteenth-century literalist theocracy. They pursue its creation with gruesome violence and fear. To understand why that movement has chosen America as its target and why America failed to see the effects of its own actions, we need to remind ourselves of some events of the last twenty-five years. The story, the strands of history that brought us to September 11 and to today's war on terrorism and Iraq, does not start with Bill Clin-ton or George W. Bush. It goes back to their two predecessors, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. First, in this chapter, Ronald Reagan. He had been obsessed with aggressively confronting the Soviet Union, not just by outspending the Red Army, but by inserting U.S. military influence in new regions to put Moscow off balance. His efforts to push the Soviet Union to col-lapse worked, much to the surprise of most of officiai Washington. By confronting Moscow in Afghanistan, inserting the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf, and by strengthening Israel as a base for a southern flank against the Soviets, Reagan created new equations. The moves were 36 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Stumbling into the Islamic Woild 37 unquestionably correct strategically, but the details of how they were handled left problems and wrong impressions that grew with time. As a junior officer and then midlevel manager, I played a small role in each of these events, which shaped my perceptions of the U.S. role in the region. The world that Ronald Reagan inherited as President was freshly reshaped by two cruciai changes that happened in 1979, the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Both events rekin-dled the radicai movement in Isiam and both drew America further into the realm of Isiam. Although a low-level officiai at the time, I had a ringside seat to these events. No one thought then that, as dramatic as the 1979 changes were; they were America's flrst steps into a new era when U.S. forces would fight multiple wars in the Middle East and confront Middle Eastern terrorism at home. I had joined the State Department in 1979 to work on the issue of the Soviet Union's growing military power, particularly its nuclear weapons facing NATO. I had focused on these issues for half a decade at the Pentagon. As 1979 carne to an end, however, the White House froze ali nuclear arms control talks with Moscow and began to concentrate on the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and South Asia. The 1974 Arab Oil Boycott of the United States had made clear to Washington the importance of Persian Gulf resources. In 1979 America's greatest ally in the Gulf was violently overthrown by a radicai Islamic group. Then, on Christmas Day, the Soviet Red Army moved south in the direction of the Persian Gulf, by invading and oc- cupying Afghanistan. The State Department, then and now, was mostly staffed by For-eign Service officers, professional international relations and regional affairs specialists who spend most of their career overseas. In 1979, the Department's Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs (State's "little Pentagon") was not led by a Foreign Service officer, but by a former New York Times columnist, Leslie Gelb. To help him deal with the Penta-gon's technical arguments on arms control, Gelb created a small office of young, civil service, military analysts. I was part of that team, along with junior staff who would have an increasing and persistent role in the next twenty years: Arnold Kanter, later the Special Assistant to the President for Defense Policy and Under Secretary of State in the George H. W. Bush administration,- Randy Beers, who would go on to serve four presidents on the National Security Council staff; Franklin Miller, who would serve twenty years in senior Pentagon positions, then as Special Assistant to the President, in which capacity he would join me in the emptied White House on 9/11. Af ter the twin shocks of the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, our group of politico-military analysts was given a new focus: the Persian Gulf. In the Persian Gulf, the Shah of Iran had served two useful pur-poses for Cold War America. First, he had guaranteed a source of oil unaffected by the Arab Oil Boycott. Second, he had offered to use Iran's newfound wealth to create a modern military "as strong as Germany's" on the Soviet Union's southern flank. Cold War America saw ali foreign policy issues through the prism of the conflict between the two superpowers, much as we now see the world through the war on terrorism. The Cold War had parallels with the War on Terror. Both conflicts raged globally, with regional wars, secret sleeper cells, and competing ideologies. The two struggles also threatened the horrific destruction of our cities by weapons of mass destruction (although in the Cold War we knew the enemy actually had thousands of nuclear weapons). Our opponents in both vowed to seek the imposition of their form of government and way of life on ali nations. In retrospect, some (particularly those born after 1970) believe America overreacted to the Cold War threat. At the time, however, it seemed an existential struggle, the depth of which is now difficult for many to recali or un-derstand. FOLLOWING THE SOVIET INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN, our little analytical team began fielding questions from the State Department leadership and from the White House. A Soviet strategie bomber base appeared to be under construction in Afghanistan. From it, we were asked, could Soviet bombers attack U.S. naval forces in the In-dian Ocean, should the U.S. bomb the Afghan base before it became r 38 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Stumbling into the Islamic World 39 operational? We determined the construction was actually a Soviet agricultural aid development project. If the Soviet Union poured troops into Iran, could they get to the Persian Gulf before U.S. forces could stage a D-Day-like landing? Yes, the Soviets could beat us there because we had no forces in the area and no realistic pian or capability to project forces to the Persian Gulf, but then neither did the Soviets. The first part of that answer res-onated with both the Carter and Reagan administration leadership; the latter part was ignored. Prior to 1979, the United States had little military presence in the Indian Ocean or Persian Gulf. The exception was a small naval f acility in Bahrain, which we had agreed to maintain when the British left. Thus did the United States embark on a fevered campaign to de-velop the military capability to project force into the region and to create bases into which those forces could be sent. I was asked to meet with the U.S. military planners who were assigned to this task. In-stead of finding them in the bowels of the Pentagon, I found them at the end of a noisy runway on a fighter base in Florida. They were in trailers surrounded by barbed wire and they were wearing fleld cam-ouflage. Of course, I had to ask why. "We're called the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, RDJTF," General Robert Kingston explained. "So I want it to look like we can deploy rapidly to the region." "Canyou?"Iasked. "No, but that's where you guys come in. You're gonna get us some bases." Kingston smiled. Some of his military colleagues also thought it a little odd that he was behind barbed wire in trailers in Tampa, and began referring to General Kingston as "Barbed Wire Bob." His enthu-siasm and sense of urgency were, however, infectious. My colleagues and I soon found ourselves negotiating in Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Unable to procure bases, we asked for "access" agreements and the right to enhance existing facilities. No nation wanted to of-fend the other superpower by overtly agreeing to facilitate the U.S. military. In most cases, however, we reached understandings that would allow us to improve air bases and pre-positioned war materici secretly, without any guarantee that we would be able to use it in a crisis. The Saudis were different. They agreed to the creation of the facilities, but they would build them much larger than was necessary for their own small forces, a concepė that became known as "Over-building, Overstocking." Thousands of American civilian contractors moved into the Kingdom, causing resentment among some Muslims who read the Koran as banning the presence of infidels in the country that hosted the two holiest mosques of Isiam. We negotiated with the British over a long forgotten coaling sta-tion on a rock in the Indian Ocean called Diego Garcia. (In later years I and my British counterpart in London were designated "co-mayors" of that distant island neither of us had ever seen.) In 1980 we asked the British, "Could we please use Diego Garcia and maybe add to it a little?" Soon, it was capable of launching B-52s and about to sink from the weight of pre-positioned war matériel. A year after the shocks of 1979, another unexpected event hit, dragging the United States a bit further into the politics of the region. A new president in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, launched a preemptive at-tack on Iran in an attempt to seize its oil fields. Saddam may also have been provoked by the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who ap-pealed to the Shi'a majority in Iraq to rise up. At first, Washington maintained neutrality. The United States did not have good relations with Iraq, which had been close to the Soviet Union. Our relations with Iran, however, were terrible and getting worse. The new Iranian government seized the U.S. embassy staff and held them for over a year. Iran then contributed to the turmoil in Lebanon, a nation that the United States had always considered a friendly and stable, prō-Western anchor at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. When the turmoil worsened in 1982, Ronald Reagan was in his second year as President. Seeing the events in Lebanon as linked to the anti-American regime in Iran and threatening to Israel, which Reagan had begun calling an ally, he ordered Marines into Beirut. By so doing, Reagan began what would become a misadventure that gave terrorists the impression they could attack the United States with relative impunity. Reagan explained to a prime-time audience that we went into 40 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Stumbling into the Islamic World 41 Lebanon in part "because of the oil." Lebanon had no oil. The Iranian -supported Hezbollah faction in Lebanon responded to the new American military presence by staging devastating car bomb attacks on the U.S. Marines barracks and twice on our embassy. In the attack on the Marine barracks alone, 278 Americans died. There would be no similar loss of American lives in terrorism until the Libyan attack on Fan Am 103 six years later during the first Bush's presidency. Those two acts stood as the most lethal acts of for-eign terrorism against Americans until September 11. Nothing occur-ring during Clinton's tenure approached either attack in terms of the numbers of Americans killed by foreign terrorism. Neither Ronald Reagan nor George H. W. Bush retaliated for these devastating attacks on Americans. After the Marine barracks was leveled in Beirut, Americans were faced for the first time with what Middle East terrorism could really do, and how a confused multifactional civil war could drag us in. At the State Department, our newly created Middle East politico-military team was pressed into supporting our besieged Beirut embassy. Although Reagan had decided not to attack Syria or Iran (both of which were implicated in the attacks on the Marines and the embassy), he was determined to keep a U.S. diplomatic presence. Fronti the radio room in the Operations Center, we would check on the status of the American diplomats who had relocated to the Ambassador's Residence in the Beirut neighborhood of Yazde. "Yazde, Yazde, this is State, over. What is your status?" "State, State, Yazde here. We are taking artillery fire from a ridge across the way," carne the voice crackling across thousands of miles. "We could sure use some support from New Jersey." That was not a re-quest for letters from back home, but rather a cali for suppressing fire from the U.S. battleship riding off the coast. The Reagan administra-tion had decided to deter further attacks by showing U.S. military muscle. Minutes later, the long guns of a World War II throwback tur ned east and fired their famous "shells as big as Volkswagens." "Yazde, Yazde, are you stili taking fire from that ridgeline, over." "State, Yazde: there is no ridgeline there anymore." Despite our military superiority, however, we were unable to counter the religious ferver of the Iranian-Syrian-supported faction. Lebanon seemed to be going down into a long, bloody death spirai of factional conflict that the United States was ili prepared to affect. After a series of bombings and shellings, Reagan ordered U.S. forces out of Lebanon. Throughout the Middle East, it was noted how easily the superpower could be driven off, how the U.S. was stili "shell-shocked" from its defeat in Vietnam. Years later Usama bin Laden would ref er to the success of terrorism in driving the United States out of Beirut, a city whose pleasures he had enjoyed before becoming a devout Muslim. It was against this backdrop of hostile relations with Iran that the Reagan administration began to look anew at the war between Iran and Iraq, which had erupted when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, hoping to take advantage of the weakness of the new revolu-tionary government and its inability to get American spare parts for the weapons the shah had bought. There has been speculation that the United States gave Saddam a green light to attack Iran, perhaps in the hopes that if he seized the oil-rich province of Khuzistan, we would continue to have access to Iranian crude and perhaps because Washington hoped that the new Iranian regime would collapse without its major source of revenue. I tried to find evidence of such a U.S. strategy then, from inside the State Department and from my sources in the Pentagon and the White House. As far as I could teli, Saddam's attack on Iran was a surprise to Washington just as bis attack on Kuwait would be almost a decade later. Shortly after it began, the Iran-Iraq War became a stalemate, with very high casualties on both sides. Our little politico-military team at State was asked to draft options to prevent an Iranian victory or, as we entitled one paper, "Options for Preventing Iraqi Defeat." As time passed and the war continued, many of those options were employed. Although not an ally of Iraq, the Reagan administration had decided that Saddam Hussein should not be allowed to be defeated by a radicai Islamist, anti-American regime in Tehran. In 1982, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the list of nations that sponsored terrorism. Iraq was thus able to apply for cer-tain types of U.S. government-backed export promotion loans. Then 42 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Stumbling into the Islamic World 43 in 1983, a presidential envoy was sent to Baghdad as a sign of support for Saddam Hussein. A man who had been the Defense Secretary seven years earlier in a previous Republican administration was sent carrying a presidential letter. The man was Donald Rumsfeld. He went to Baghdad not to overthrow Saddam Hussein, but to save him from probable defeat by the Iranian onslaught. Shortly thereafter, I saw American intelligence data begin to flow to Baghdad. When Iran was preparing an offensive in a sector, the Iraqis would know from what U.S. satellites saw and Saddam would counter with beefed-up defenses. In 1984, the United States resumed full diplomatic relations with Iraq. Although the U.S. never sold arms to Iraq, the Saudis and Egyp-tians did, including U.S. arms. Some of the bombs that the Saudis had bought as part of overstocking now went to Saddam, in violation of U.S. law. I doubt that the Saudis ever asked Washington's permission, but I also doubt that anyone in the Reagan administration wanted to be asked. After the intelligence flow to Saddam was opened up, our State Department team was then asked to implement the next option in the pian to prevent Iraqi defeat, identifying the foreign sources of Iranian military supplies and pressuring countries to halt the flow. We dubbed the diplomatic-intelligence effort Operation Staunch. I spent long days tracing arms shipment to Iran and firing off instructions to American embassies around the world to threaten governments with sanc-tions if they did not crack down on the gray market arms shipments to Tehran. The effort was surprisingly successful, raising the price and reducing the supply of what arms Iran could get. By 1986, the Iran-Iraq War expanded into attacks on oil tankers. To insure its oil made it to market, Iraq shifted its product to neutral Kuwaiti tankers. Undeterred by attacking a "neutral" state's shipping, Iran bombed the Kuwaiti tankers. The Soviet Union then offered to send the Red Navy to the Persian Gulf to protect the Iraqi oil shipments. Horrified at the prospect of the Soviet fleet in the oil lanes, the White House asked our State Department team to come up with an alternative that would satisfy Iraq and Kuwait. We proposed that the Kuwaiti tankers be "reflagged," their registration and names changed so that they became American ships subject to protection by the United States Navy. To defend the American ships carrying Saddam's oil, the U.S. Navy placed large convoys of U.S. warships into the Persian Gulf. On my wall in the State Department, we mapped mine-fields and locations of ship attacks. For the first time, we examined what to do if things escalated into a U.S.-Iranian war. They didn't, al-though shots were fired by both sides as the convoys made their way through the Gulf. (Ten years later, terrorism would force me to look again at options for a war with Iran.) Simultaneously, Ronald Reagan's administration was responding to the threat of the Soviet Union's military involvement in the Middle East by bringing the United States closer militarily to Israel. Prior to this period, it was a given in the State Department that the United States could not expand military relations with Arab states and at the same time do so with Israel. U.S. military relations with Israel were minimal in the 1960s and 1970s. We had greatly expanded arms supplies after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, but our two militaries hardly knew each other. Looking at the threat the Soviet Union posed to the eastern Mediterranean, the Reagan administration sought to change that. The Administration proposed "Strategie Cooperation" with Israel. It was just short of a military alliance. To operationalize the con-cept, in 1983 we created something called the Joint Politico-Military Group or JPMG, a U.S.-Israeli planning group. First as a staff member and later as the U.S. head of the JPMG, I sought to find roles for the Israeli military in joint operations with American forces in the event of a war with the Soviet Union. My partner in this effort would be a heroic Israeli fighter pilot turned defense bureaucrat and strategist, David Ivry. When in 1981 Israeli intelligence had developed irrefutable infor-mation that Saddam Hussein was building the Osiraq nuclear reactor to develop a bomb, the Israeli cabinet asked Ivry's reaction to the idea of preemptively bombing the plant. He recommended against it, al-though he said his air force could do it at considerable risk to the pi-lots. When the cabinet decided to order the attack anyway, Ivry planned the raid personally. Ivry went on to serve successive Israeli governments of ali parties as the permanent civilian head of the Min- 44 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Stumbling into the Islamic World 45 istry of Defense, national security advisor, and ambassador to Washington. I met Ivry after the Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1987. Although the kw was aimed at South Africa, it had a little noticed provision that required the Reagan administration to investigate what nations were sending arms to South Africa in vio-lation of the U.N. embargo. The provision also required that the re-sults of the investigation be sent to the Congress and held open the possibility that the United States would ban military cooperation with any state found in violation of the embargo. No one in the State Department wanted to be involved in implementing that provision, because it was widely assumed the investigation would fėnd that the biggest gunrunner to the apartheid regime would be Israel. Being the youngest Deputy Assistant Secretary of State at the time and having responsibility f or intelligence analysis, I was given the hot potato and asked to run the investigation. I booked a flight to Tei Aviv. Sitting in Ivry's office in the heart of the Kiriat, the walled-off complex in Tei Aviv that serves as Israel's Pentagon, I laid out to the Director General of the Israeli Ministry of Defense what I knew and what I suspected about Israeli-South African cooperation. I omitted any reference to rumors of their cooperation on nuclear weapons, but mentioned joint development of long-range ballistic missiles and fighter aircraft. David was clearly uncomfortable, but I began to think that it was not just because some young American was sitting there accusing him and bis government. "I am not saying we are doing these things, these rumors that you mention," David began. "But we must bave a defense industry; we cannot depend on other countries for our defense. A defense industry in a small country like ours has to export to stay alive, to keep costs in check. We do not sell to the Soviets or their allies, never. We bave de-veloped our own advanced weapons technologies. We bave very smart, very capable engineers. America, however, will not buy our weapons. American defense contractors prevent the Pentagon from buying from us, they spread lies that what we bave developed we stole from them. If we stole it from them, how is it they haven't been able to develop some of these technologies that we have working, unmanned aerial vehicles, air-to-ground guided smart bombs, other things." I had just met General Ivry, but I thought I saw a side to him that was not hinted at in the CIA profile of him as a hard-ass fighter pilot. "General, I have been to South Africa. Have you?" He hesitated. "Yes, yes I have." Then he added a justification that did not admit to the weapons programs. "We have a very large Jewish community there that we have to insure is protected from the anti-Semitism." "Anti-Semitism is a terrible, ugly thing, General. I saw a small piece of it growing up. My house was the only non-Jewish family in the neighborhood. I saw what people would do to the temple, I saw the harassment, heard the epithets. But, General, apartheid is the same thing. It's racism. Don't you think a government based on apartheid is a sin?" Ivry had been looking at bis hands. Now he looked up and into my eyes. "Yes. Yes, I do." The next week Ivry asked to appear before the Israeli cabinet. After the meeting the government of Israel announced that it was ter-minating any and ali defense relations with South Africa and banning the import and export of defense items between the two countries, in keeping with the U.N. embargo. The U.S.-Israeli Strategie Cooperation had a slow start. The Israeli Defense Forces had been the ultimate loner ali of its life, never having operated with another nation's forces. The talks went slowly at first. Perhaps we could do an antisubmarine warfare exercise, I suggested. "Why would we want you to fėnd our submarine?" carne the bemused reply. Well, perhaps we could do an air-to-air exercise similar to Top Gun. "No, we will beat you and then your pilots will be mad at us." I suggested that the U.S. be allowed to position military supplies in Israel for our forces to use in a crisis with the Soviets. "Certainly. And we will use them when we have a crisis too." Eventually, however, we reached agreements. My counterpart in the U.S. military was a Navy admiral who, at 46 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Stumbling into the Islamic World 47 flrst, did not seem schooled in diplomacy. When asked at our flrst social dinner in Tei Aviv whether he had ever been to Israel before, Ad-miral Jack Darby thought a moment and then replied in a slow Southern drawl, "Well, that would depend on whether you count when I was in my submarine. You know, you can see a lot through a periscope." Eventually, we agreed on a series of exercises, which became larger with time. We also agreed on the development of war plans in the event the Soviet Union acted militarily in the region. Darby com-pletely ingratiated himself with the Israeli military and built bonds of personal trust. When, later, Jack Darby became head of U.S. Submarine Porce Pacific, he collapsed and died while jogging around Pearl Harbor. The Israel Defense Forces flew the Darby family to Israel for the dedication of the Jack Darby Memorial Grō ve in the desert. David Ivry had grown concerned at the prospect of Soviet, Syrian, or Iraqi missiles attacking Israel. Together, we successfully proposed the U.S. fund the Israeli development of a missile defense System, as well as the interini deployment of U.S. Patriot missiles. We also man-aged to get the Pentagon to evaluate the Israeli unmanned aerial vehi-cle and air-to-ground smart bomb. The Marines bought the former, the Air Porce the latter. (A few years later on the Iraqi border with the Marines, I got to "fly" one of the Israeli-made unmanned aerial vehi-cles over Iraqi troops.) Ivry also became my advocate in the Israeli cab-inet, arguing successfully for my personal requests that they agree to international standards on nonproliferation of missiles and chemical and biological weapons. (At the outset of the first Gulf War, Ivry and I conspired to get our governments to agree to deploy a U.S. Army Patriot unit in Israel. No foreign troops had ever been stationed before in Israel. We also worked together to sell Patriots to Israel, and to tie in the Kiriat with American satellites that detected Iraqi Scud missile launches toward Israel. After the war, CIA circulated unfounded rumors that Israel had sold some of the Patriots to China. Many in the State Department who thought that I was "too close to the Israelis" sought to blame me. Ivry called. "I hear you are in trouble. What can I do?" I jokingly suggested that he invite the U.S. to send an inspection team to Israel to do "any- where, anytime" checking to see if any of the Patriots were missing or had been tampered with. I knew it was a silly idea. Israel would never give another country that kind of unfettered access. Ivry did not think the idea was silly. Again he went to the Cabinet for me. The ensuing U.S. Army inspection concluded that there was no reason to believe that Israel had tampered with or transferred any Patriot missile, software, designs, or associated material. I was cleared, but not without making enemies at CIA and State.) Our stronger military relationship with Israel carne about only by the Reagan White House imposing it on the Pentagon and State Department. The decision was the right thing to do militarily and morally, but the closer relationship with Tei Aviv did over time in-flame some Arab radicals and give them propaganda to help recruit terrorists to their anti-American cause. Thus, between our buildup in the Gulf and our programs with Israel, by the mid-1980s, the United States had a growing military presence in the Middle East. Marines were regularly staging landings in Israel, Air Porce and Navy flghters were flying into Israel air bases. Patriot radars scanned the skies. In Egypt, Oman, and Bahrain, the United States had bombs and other war materie! in warehouses and bunkers. A large U.S. Navy squadron plied the Persian Gulf. Reagan had checkmated the Iranians by strengthen-ing Saddam Hussein. He had built new relations with both Israel and key Arab states to allow the U.S. military to operate against any Soviet threat into the Mediterranean or Persian Gulf. These actions by the Reagan administration were defensive. What they did in Afghanistan, however, was go on the offensive, in a way that drew the United States further into the region. In the mid-1980s, as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intelli-gence at the State Department, I produced a series of analyses of the cost to the Soviet Union of fėghting the proxy wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, and Afghanistan. We had only esti-mates, inferences, of the effect on the Kremlin treasury. Nonetheless, even the low-end guesses would piace a serious burden on what was already a badly underperforming Soviet economy. That was, of course, what President Reagan and CIA director Bill Casey had hoped, that by turning the tables, going on the counteroffensive in the proxy wars 48 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Stumbling into the Islamic World 49 and by rapidly increasing our own defense spending, America could force the Kremlin to respond in ways that would overtax the Soviet economy. Afghanistan offered Reagan and Casey their best opportunity to drain the other superpower. Moscow had overcommitted there. Rather than just manipulate the Kabul government and secure the area around the capitai, after invading in late 1979, the Red Army had decided to pacify the country. It was a major deployment for which they were not ready, equipped, or trained. The initial fighting showed the weaknesses of the Red Army's conscript divisions, but Moscow had responded with Spetsnaz Special Forces and Airborne troops. They began to employ heavily armed helicopters and new close-support aircraft, which were beginning in 1985 to have devastating ef- fects. Yet, despite their rhetoric, the Reagan administration had not sig-niflcantly funded the Afghan resistance. The Afghan war analysts on my staff kept numerical indicators of the flghting, as well as anecdotal information on the spirit of the Afghan flghters. By 1985 the analysts were growing concerned that the tide had shifted in favor of Moscow. My boss and mentor was a career ambassador, but hardly from centrai casting. Morton Abramowitz filled his darkened office with cigar smoke, and left ashes in his wake. He was oblivious to the fact that what little hair he had was often standing straight up. He had saved hundreds of thousands of Cambodians when, as U.S. Ambassador to Thailand, he had initiated a cross-border feeding program. Later, as Ambassador to Turkey, he would be responsible for starting a similar effort to save the Kurds in the wake of the First Gulf War. He focused not on appearances, but on getting things done. "Don't just teli me we're losing, Clarke, teli me what the fuck to do about it." That was how Abramowitz received our analysis of the shifting tide in Afghanistan. Our analysis had focused on the Hind-D helicopter as being the thing that had worked for the Soviets. Afghan bullets bounced off its armor piate, while the helicopter's rockets ripped apart the hidden mujahedeen camps. "We need to give them Stingers to shoot down the Hinds," I shot back. "Agh, come up with a new thought. CIA and the Pentagon won't agree to release the missiles." Mort was relighting the stub of a cigar. "You wanna do something? Go see your friend Richard Perle, the Prince of Darkness, get him to release the Stingers." Perle was Assistant Secretary of Defense and greatly distrustful of the State Department, whom he saw as capitulationists and accom-modationists in the Cold War. Following the military coup in Turkey in 1984, Perle had flown to Ankara to counteract the State Depart-ment's denunciations of the takeover. His message: deal with the in-stability, but lay out a roadmap for a return to civilian rule. Perle charmed the Turkish pashas, as the four-star generals were known. He clearly loved their country, insisting on traveling throughout it and buying rugs and copper pots. I had been assigned by State to go along on the trip to keep an eye on Perle. Instead, I too had been charmed by his manner and persuaded by his logic about the strategie importance of Turkey. Now, at Abramowitz's urging, I used my nascent friendship to have a private meeting with Perle. I confronted him with the Penta-gon's refusai to send Stingers to Afghanistan. He at first denied it, but then hit an intercom button and asked an aide whether it was true. "God damn it! Who blocked it? Well, fuck the CIA!" He then hit an-other intercom button and, more politely, asked, "Can I stick my head in on Gap for a second? " Perle left me alone in his office for a long time while he went down from the fourth floor to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger's huge office on the Pentagoni third-floor E Ring. When he carne back, his explanation was simple: "Gap didn't know about it." I was stili wondering whether his knowing about it now meant that he would approve the release of the Stingers to the mujahedeen. "No U.S. Army on the ground in Afghanistan. The muj will have to come out and be trained in Pakistan." With State, Defense, and the National Security Council in favor of deploying Stingers and with heavy congressional pressure, CIA re-lented. The training was over and the weapons smuggled in by Sep-tember 1986. Within weeks of the deployment of the infrared-seeking Stinger antiaircraft missiles and the wire-guided British Javelins, the 50 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Stumbling into the Islamic World 51 mujahedeen had figured out a clever strategy to employ them in tandem to deal with the Soviets' countermeasures. The number of Hind and MiG kills started slowly, but then accelerated dramatically. Over 270 Soviet aircraft were shot down. Then the Hind kills stopped. The Soviets were no longer flying their airborne tanks into harm's way. The overall covert action program expanded greatly in Reagan's second term. Unclassified studies show that it grew from $35 million in 1982 to $600 million in 1987. With few exceptions, the funds bought matériel that was given to Afghan flghters by Pakistan's intel-ligence service. CIA personnel were not authorized to enter Afghanistan, except rarely. State's analysts were not cleared to know details about the U.S. covert action program, including the Stingers. They could, however, see the effects in the war and they heard the Afghans talking about the Stinger. By 1987, they told me the tide was shifting back to the Afghans. Soon they predicted that the Soviets would pulė back to Kabul. They were wrong. The Soviets agreed in 1988 to pulė back ali the way out of the country, and did so the following year. Pakistani military intelligence funded by the U.S. and Saudi governments and "charitable" organizations, had turned groups of nineteenth-century Afghan tribesmen and several thousand Arab vol-unteers into a force that had crippled the mighty Red Army. The Stinger had been the final element they had needed. Throughout the war, the Soviets had restrained themselves from bombing the mujahedeen sanctuary and U.S. staging base that was Pakistan. On a few occasions their fighter aircraft had strayed over the border, but they had taken American cautions seriously and not at-tacked. Following the Geneva agreement that called for a quick Soviet withdrawal, two things happened. First, the major base used by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence to stockpile arms for the Afghans mys-teriously blew up in an explosion of immense size. The nearby city of Rawalpindi shook for hours. Second, a few months later, the military ruler of Pakistan died in an unexplained aircraft crash. I could never find the evidence to prove that Soviet KGB had ordered these two acts as payback for their bitter defeat, but in my bones I knew they had. The word of the death of Pakistan's ruler carne to me as Abramowitz and I stood on the deck of the USS Theodoie Roosevelt in the Atlantic. A Navy officer tapped on my helmet to get my attention over the roar of F-14s taking off. He signaled for us to step inside the tower so we could talk. "State Ops just radioed us. They want you two back in Washington. There's a COD getting ready to take you direct to Andrews. Seems the Pakistani president died in a piane crash." I was glad we would bave an S-3 Carrier Onboard Delivery aircraft, but puzzled by why the State Department leadership should want us back so fast. I asked him, "What else do you know about it?" "Oh, yeah," the officer replied, "the American ambassador. He was on board the piane, too." Abramowitz paled. I felt as though I had been kicked in the stomach. The American ambassador was Arnold L. Raphel, Abramowitz's dose friend and my mentor. He had risen rap-idly through the State Department, demonstrating great understand-ing of South Asia and the Middle East, cleaning up messes others had made in Lebanon and elsewhere. Despite bis successes and responsi-bilities, Arnie, as everyone called him, found time to encourage and advise younger officers and to fight against sexism in the Foreign Service. In the years that followed, as we stumbled through one Middle East crisis after another, some of us would often wonder what would ha ve happened had Arnie not been on that aircraft. The American government had many highly competent experts on the Soviet Union, but few senior officers who could both speak Urdų and Farsi and make things happen in Washington. Were we right to have armed the Afghans with Stingers and other weapons? Was it a misjudgment to have involved the Saudis? There are many who believe that these were mistaken Cold War policies that laid the seeds of al Qaeda. Even with hindsight, I believe the Reagan administration was right to assist the Afghans and to drain the Soviet Union's resolve. We had sought to end the proxy wars by proving to Moscow that these conflicts could be a two-way Street. Our security was directly affected by those struggles. The stakes in the Cold War were high. We also sought to help a people who were occupied by an invader who had come to set up a puppet government. The Stinger missiles were largely expended in the war or destroyed in the Rawalpindi blast. Oth- 52 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES ers were bought back. Some were not accounted for, but became inoperative when their unique batteries expired. None were ever used by terrorists, although Stinger became a generic name for shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles around the world. The involvement of the Saudis and other Arab states was also pru-dent. Not only did it reduce the flnancial cost to the United States, but it also proved to those governments that we had common goals and beliefs, despite our differences about Israel. The U.S. did, however, make four mistakes during the Reagan administration that affect us today. First, the fact that the GIĀ became dependent upon the Pakistani intelligence service to aid the Afghans meant that we developed fewer ties and loyalties among the Af ghans that we should have been able to generate for our multibillion-dollar effort. (Later in the 1990s, GIĀ would also make a similar mistake, failing to put U.S. operatives into the country to kill bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership, relying on hired Af ghans instead.) Second, when the U.S. engaged the Saudis, Egyptians, and other Arab states in the fighting against the Soviets, America sought (or ac-quiesced in) the importation into Afghanistan and Pakistan of an army of "Arabs" without considering who they were or what would happen to them after the Soviets left. The Saudis took the lead in as-sembling the group of volunteers. The Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki, relied upon a man from a wealthy construction family that was close to the Saudi royal family. Turki empowered a son of that family, one Usama bin Laden, to recruit, move, train, and indoctrinate the Arab volunteers in Afghanistan. Many of those recruited were misfits in their own societies. Many had connections to the Muslim Brother-hood, a longtime fundamentalist group that had threatened Egypt and Syria. Many of these volunteers later became the al Qaeda network of affiliated terrorist groups, stagėng campaigns in Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere. Third, America's quick pull-out of assets and resources following the Soviet defeat left us with little influence over, or understanding of, what happened next. The United States sought to reduce the burden of Afghanistan on our foreign policy and our intelligence budget, largely 53 Stumbling into the Islamic World abandoning the country to its own fate. (Later, after our invasion in 2001, we would also try to influence Afghanistan on the cheap.) Following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the Afghan factions eventually defeated the Soviet puppet regime and then set upon each other. Kabul and other cities were destroyed in the civil war, forcing huge refugee flows into Pakistan on top of those who had fled there during the long war with the Soviets. Pakistani intelligence, whom we had empowered in Afghanistan, used its power and influence to bring order out of the chaos through a new religious faction, the Taliban. The Pakistanis also facilitated the Taliban's use of the Arab Afghan War veterans, al Qaeda, to fighi for the Taliban. Fourth, the U.S. did little to help Pakistan understand or deal with the corrosive effects on its society caused by the mix of millions of Afghan refugees and the wealthy, fanatic, misfit Arabs who carne and stayed. Instead, concerned with Pakistan's nuclear program, the U.S. cut aid to the country. The aid cutoff did not, of course, end the nuclear program. Rather, it insured that the country that was deploying nuclear weapons was politically unstable and threatened with a takeover by fanatics. The Red Army and the Soviet Union were greatly changed by the war in Afghanistan. As the body bags and the lies had piled up, the average citizen's faith in the Communist Party had further declined, as had the standard of living. Changes, however, also carne in Afghanistan. The withdrawal of the last Soviet soldier took piace in February 1989, the first full month of the administration of George H. W. Bush. It was just a matter of time until the pro-Moscow puppet government fell. In Afghanistan a new power structure was emerging. The new players were the tribal chiefs who had led fighting forces, the Pakistani military intelligence officers who had conveyed the American supplies to them, and the Arab volunteers who had brought money and Korans. As they sat together in Kabul, Kandahar, and Jalalabad, they mused on what was now happening to the Soviet Union. Among them were the Saudi Usama bin Laden, the Pakistani Khalid Sheik Muham- , the Indonesian known as Hambali, and others we did not know 54 AGAINST ALI ENEMIES then. In the wake of their Afghan defeat (and, the Arabs believed, be-cause of that defeat), the Soviet Union was now unraveling. Some Afghans and some Arab fighters pondered what you could do with money, Korans, and a few good weapons. You could overthrow an infi-del government. More important, you could destroy a superpower. They just had. It was now 1990. Chapter 3 UNFINISHED MISSION, UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES c HARLIE ALLEN HAD HIS HAIR ON PIRE. That is the way that Steve Simon, then the head of the State Department politico-military analysis team, put it. "You better talk to him. He thinks Iraq is really going to do it." By 19901 had become the Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs, greatly outraging many Foreign Service officers who thought that job and many other good jobs I fllled with young civil service experts should bave been preserved for their "union" members. Charlie Allen was widely admired and disliked in GIĀ, and for the same reason: he was usually right. A legend, always involved in the most important programs, he had narrowly dodged dismissal be-cause he had been dragged to Tehran by Bud McFarlane on the ill-fated secret trip with the cake and the Koran. Now as National Warning Officer, he was dissenting from CIA's corporate view that Iraq was only intimidating Kuwait to affect oil prices. CIA's officiai analysis given to the White House said that no one would go to war in temper-atures hovering around 108 degrees Fahrenheit. It was, after ali, late July 1990. "What makes you think it's real, Charlie. After ali it is 108 degrees out there," I teased Charlie Allen on the secure phone, knowing my quoting the CIA analysis would set him off. "Don't believe those guys. They wouldn't notice if an Iraqi T-72 drew up in the CIA parking lot next to them." Allen's hair was on fire. 56 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Unfinished Mission, Unintended Consequences 57 "Seriously, why do you think the Iraqis are up to something? Aren't they just trying to scare the Kuwaitis?" "Emcon," was ali Charlie saidback. "They're operating under emcon? No radio transmissions from their units? Hiding their locations, their movements? You don't do that if you are just trying to scare someone." "You got it, boyo." Allen knew he had made the sale. "Ali right. FU try to get a Deputies Committee, but no one is in town. Scowcroft and Bob Gates are out at NSC. Baker and Eagleburger are out at State. Who will chair it?" Although not 108 degrees in our nation's capitai, Washington felt like it and most of the leadership had left town. Under Secretary Bob Kimmitt chaired the late afternoon meeting. Only Kimmitt, NSC's Richard Haass, and I seemed concerned. CIA Deputy Director Dick Kerr said there was no chance of an Iraqi inva-sion of Kuwait. Admiral Dave Jeremiah agreed and refused my sugges-tion to retain U.S. forces that were leaving the area after an exercise. State's own Middle East bureau had a report from our ambassador, Aprii Glaspie, noting Saddam's reassurances to her. The meeting broke up without a sense of urgency. I went home. Steve Simon met me at my house and we sat on the stoop and began to drain a bottle of Lagavulin. John Tritak, then a leading State Department analyst, joined us. I debriefed them on the meeting and we commiserated about the bureaucracy. As the second round was being poured, the telephone rang. John took it. "You have to go back in. The Deputies Committee is reconvening." "Why, so we can ali agree not to do anything again?" I asked bit- terly. John shook his head and grinned: "No, actually, it seems like there really is an Iraqi T-72 in the parking lot.. . of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait." The Principals returned to Washington. President Bush was hesi-tant about how America should respond. His foreign policy alter ego, Secretary of State Jim Baker, and his Defense Secretary, Dick Cheney, were reluctant to act. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, however, thought that Iraq had just changed the strategie equation in a way that could not be permitted to continue. So did British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The two argued that nothing stood be-tween the advance units of the Iraqi army in Kuwait and the immense Saudi oil fields. If we did nothing in response to Iraq's seizing Kuwait, Saddam Hussein would think that he could get away with seizing the Saudis' eastern oil fields. If that happened, Baghdad would con-trol most of the world's readily available oil. They could dictate to America. Reluctantly, Bush and his team decided that they needed to defend the Saudi oil fields, and do so quickly. They needed Saudi permission for the defensive deployment, but there were some in the Pentagon and White House who thought that U.S. forces needed to protect the Saudi oil with or without Saudi approvai. The mission to persuade the Saudi King to accept U.S. forces was given to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. He assembled a small team, including Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Central Com-mand head Norman Schwarzkopf, Sandy Charles of the NSC, and me, then the Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs. Our aging aircraft landed on the Azores in the mid-Atlantic to re-fuel. While the refueling went on, we drove to a hilltop to look down on the small island at night. I chatted with Schwarzkopf, who was a little known figure in Washington. His Central Command in Tampa was generally regarded as a backwater, the least important of the major military commands. Nonetheless, I had spent some time with him in Tampa earlier in the year and gotten to like the big bear of a generai. As he asked me how I thought the trip would go we looked down on the lights of the Azores. Suddenly, a power failure plunged the island into darkness. "Well, hopefully the trip will go better than it's starting," Cheney replied. It was night when we landed in a steamy Jeddah and went to the King's palace. The Saudi princes sat on the opposite side of the wide room; the King was at the head of the U-shaped audience chamber. For a late-night meeting in Jeddah in August, there was a large turnout of the royal family. As we had agreed on the flight, Cheney began by saying that we thought the Kingdom might be in danger. Iraqi forces might continue 58 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES south from Kuwait and seize the Saudi oil fields too. There was noth-ing to stop them. He then turned it over to Schwarzkopf, who erected a stand and placed satellite photography and maps on it, During our re-hearsal on the aircraf11 had been afraid that the briefing was not persuasive. I thought that again when I heard it now; we had no evidence that Iraq was intending to keep going, even though I believed it possi-ble either now or in the future. Cheney concluded the presentation, promising that U.S. forces would come only to defend the Kingdom. President Bush wanted the King to know that he had the Presidenti word that the U.S. forces would leave as soon as the threat was over, or whenever ordered to do so by the King. The King turned to his brothers and solicited their views. Despite our presence, a debate erupted over the very idea of having U.S. troops in the Kingdom. "They will never leave," one prince said in Arabie. Our interpreter whispered a translation. "It violates Koranic princė-ples," said another. The argument seemed to be going against us. What we then learned was that the King had just received a report that a Saudi National Guard unit had stumbled upon an Iraqi army force near or slightly over the poorly marked Saudi border. Maybe they were going to keep going. Cheney's staff began asking if we should be stay- ing the night there. Sitting next to the King translating our English for him was his ambassador to the U.S. and nephew, Prince Bandar. Bandar had flown out hours ahead of us in his own aircraft. A favorite of the King and a darling of the Washington social set, Bandar agreed with the need to deploy U.S. forces and had tried to persuade the King before the meeting. The tension in the room, both among the Americans on one side of the hall and the Saudi princes f orty f eet across the room, was almost electric. Neither group knew what the King would say next, but we ali knew that what he decided would bave huge implications for years to come. Physically turning to his right, the King literally turned his back on his brothers and looked directly at Cheney. "I trust President Bush. Teli bini to have his Army come, come with ali they bave, come 59 Unfinished Mission, Unintended Consequences quickly. I have his word that they will leave when this is over." He then launched into a lengthy monologue about what he and his family had built in the desert Kingdom, turning a backward collection of nō-madie tribes into a modern nation. He was not about to let Saddam Hussein steal it. As we prepared to leave the palace, Cheney called a huddle. The Americans formed a tight circle in the foyer. "Poker faces leaving here. Ali the cameras out there are going to be looking at your faces to see the King's decision. Don't let Saddam know. If he thinks we're coming in, he may jump off and seize the oil fields before we can get there." When the doors to the palace opened, however, the humidity was so intense that our glasses instantly fogged. Rather than having poker faces, the American team stumbled toward its cars, rubbing its glasses, looking confused. The Saudi princes left by another door. Some of them had thought of an alternative to the Americans. Unknown to the Americans at the time, the intelligence chief, Prince Turki, had been approached by the Saudi who had recruited Arabs to fight in the Afghan War against the Soviets, Usama bin Laden. With the Afghan War over, bin Laden had returned triumphantly to Saudi Arabia in 1989. Prince Turki had reportedly asked him to or-ganize a fundamentalist religion-based resistance to the Communist-styled regime in South Yemen. (The contacts that bin Laden made then in Yemen proved valuable to al Qaeda later.) Bin Laden had also kept some of the Afghan Arab fighters organized. When Kuwait was invaded, he offered to make them available to the King to defend Saudi Arabia, to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. After we left the palace, per-haps bin Laden was told of the King's decision. His help would not be required. He could not believe it; letting nonbelievers into the Kingdom of the Two Holy Mosques was against the beliefs of the Wahhabist branch of Isiam. Large numbers of American military in the Kingdom would violate Isiam, the construction magnate's son thought. They would never leave. He feared the King had made a fatai mistake, but he did not break with the regime. He continued his work transforming his front organization, the Afghan- 60 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES istan Services Bureau, into a network that linked returning Afghan war veterans in Algeria, Chechnya, Bosnia, Egypt, and the Philip- pines. Returning to the guest palace, Cheney sought to debrief the Presi-dent. His staff had trouble installing a secure telephone, then found out that it was incompatible with the unit in the Ovai Office. When the cali did go through, Cheney's Military Assistant was told by some-one that the President was in a meeting. Incredulous at the delays, Cheney's implacable facade cracked and he finally erupted, "Well, pulė him out of the meeting. We may be going to war." Schwarzkopf was having better luck with bis phone. Talking to Tampa, he ordered, "Stand by to lift the 82nd Airborne in and the tac-tical fighters." Apparently asked how many flghters, he answered, "What's ever in the pian." The pian, which coincidentally CENT-COM had just exercised in a tabletop war game, called for hundreds of aircraft. It was imprecise as to where they would be based, how they would ali fit. The Saudis were eager for us to involve other Arab nations. Cheney flew on to Cairo to persuade Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak to send troops to the Kingdom. Wolfowitz and I flew on to Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, and Salalah to gain approvals for American aircraft to land at air bases in the smaller Gulf countries. In the United Arab Emirates, we were greeted by the unusual sight of ali of the emirs of the seven federai states sitting together led by President Zayed. They had ex-pected us to ask to land forty-eight flghter aircraft. When we asked to base two hundred, there was an audible gasp. Zayed, however, had been trying to warn America for weeks that Saddam would invade Kuwait. A week earlier he had asked for U.S. tanker aircraft to help his aircraft defend UAE oil flelds from Iraq. He now knew that the Amer-icans were serious this time and ordered construction of more fighter aircraft support areas immediately. In Bahrain, the emir was equally stunned by the size of our pro-posed aircraft deployment. "Of course you may come, but there is not enough room at the airport and my fighter base is stili being built." We offered to finish it. We found the sultan of Oman in a fifteenth-century fortress by the I 61 Unfinished Mission, Unintended Consequences sea in Salalah, glued to CNN. When he turned to us, it was clear that he knew from our previous stops that we would be asking for permis-sion to land a major air force. "Of course they may ali come," he said with a smile. A graduate of the British military academy, he was a strategie thinker. He also loved aircraft. "Will you bring the Stealth? May I ride in it?" As we received approvals for U.S. aircraft to bed down in the Gulf countries, we quickly relayed that information to Schwarzkopf's com-mand. The aircraft had already left the U.S. Now, as we flew over Dhahran, on the way out of the Gulf, we could see U.S. heavy-lift transports landing with the lead units of the Airborne. They were equipped with rifles and had only the bullets they carried on them. Schwarzkopf called them "speed bumps" if Iraq kept going. Listening on the headsets, we heard the U.S. AWACS aircraft cir-cling over Saudi Arabia being called by incoming squadrons of fighters, "Sentinel, this is Tango Foxtrot 841 with twelve birds, exactly where are we supposed to land, in what country? " Ali along our return route, across the Mediterranean and then the Atlantic, we heard the chatter of hundreds of U.S. military aircraft that formed a bridge reaching out from their American bases to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the states of the Gulf. The access agree-ments and pre-positioning that we had achieved to stop the Soviet Union were now being utilized for the first time—but to stop Iraq. In the months that followed, President Bush and Secretary Baker engaged in a diplomatic tour de force. They created a consensus coali-tion of over one hundred nations, many of which agreed to send f orces to defend Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. My job was to coordinate the solicitations for military units and to find space for the immense Tower of Babel military force that was heading to the Gulf: French, Syrians, Egyptians, units from South and Central America, Africa and Asia. At one point when I told Cheney that the Australians had made a decision to send F-l 11 aircraft, he threw up his hands in frustration, "Dick, we do not have room for any more allies. Stop asking them." Cheney's attitude then foreshadowed his attitude twelve years later: we can deal with Iraq militarily by ourselves and everybody else is just more trouble than they are worth. 62 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Unfinished Mission, Unintended Consequences 63 By contrast, Bush and Baker knew that the thought of an American army going to war with an Arab nation could be enormously dam-aging to America's irnage in the Muslim world. They believed that the only way to inoculate against that damage was by extraordinary, un-precedented diplomatic effort and coalition building. Both spent long hours on the telephone for months, building and holding together the eclectic coalition. They knew that for that alliance to stay united, they had to demonstrate that they had taken the time and given Iraq every opportunity to avoid war. It could not just look that way, it had to be a really exhaustive effort to achieve a peaceful outcome. Only then could American f orces go on the attack, along with the militaries of seven Arab nations. Their historic efforts are in marked contrast to the go-it-alone, hell-bent-for-war policy pursued by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney twelve years later. When Bush's and Baker's diplomatic efforts failed to persuade Sad-dam Hussein to abandon Kuwait, the U.S. pian changed from defend-ing Saudi Arabia to invading Kuwait. The Saudis supported the offensive pian, fearing the effects in their own country if hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops had to stay for years defending the Kingdom against a possible Iraqi invasion. The Iraqis expected a frontal assault on Kuwait, supplemented by amphibious landings by U.S. Marines. So did I, until late November 1990 when Schwarzkopf asked me to fly around the Gulf to visit American units and give speeches to the troops about the coming war and why we had to fight. I was with the lOlst Airborne in a forward desert camp one night when I learned that we had a trick planned. After my speech, the fifth of a very long day, the generai who was the division commander, and I stood in the chow line with the troops and then grabbed an outdoor table alone. "Aren't those fine troops?" the generai asked as we ate baked beans. "They are, but Fm sick at the thought that many of the guys I talked to today will be killed in a few weeks," I admitted. The generai looked surprised. "Hell, Dick, the Hail Mary will catch Saddam off guard. We'll envelop him before he knows what hit him. He'll stili be looking for the Marines landing, which ain't ever gonna happen." I asked the generai to show me in the sand. He drew a dramatic left hook from Saudi Arabia into Iraq, which would attack the Iraqis in Kuwait from the rear. Barry McCaffrey's 24th Division was to lead the sweep around. (Twelve years later, renamed the 3rd Infantry, the same division would race to Baghdad in three weeks.) I smiled. "Well, General Shelton, if we can pulė that off we ought to be able to eliminate Saddam's army once and for ali." Hugh Shelton smiled back. "That's the idea." Shelton had no fear of boots on the ground in Iraq then. When it carne to boots on the ground in Afghanistan in 1999, he would be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and would think otherwise. At Schwarzkopf's request, I had placed some of my staff in his bunker in Riyadh. He asked them, although civilians, to dress in cam-ouflage uniforms. He requested one of my staff, John Tritak, who had a newly minted degree in war studies from London's Kings College, to conduci a series of seminars for his senior commanders on how wars end. Tritak explained the "unconditional surrender" logic that Chur-chill had insisted on in World War II. My staff in Riyadh also provided Schwarzkopf with informai reports on the latest bureaucratic maneu-vering in Washington. What Schwarzkopf also knew was that my guys kept me well informed about his plans. As soon as the air phase of the U.S. attack began, Iraqi missiles landed on Israel. Initial reports reaching me in the State Department Operations Center spoke of chemical clouds coming from the missiles. If that were true, I knew the Israelis could not be held back from responding. Seymour Hersh reported in his hook The Samson Option that Israel actually prepared missiles for launch against Iraq during this period and they did so in a way that the United States detected. The Patriot missiles in Israel fired at the incoming Iraqi warheads, but stili the warheads landed. My Israeli counterpart, David Ivry, told me of their plans to send Airborne forces into western Iraq to clean out the Iraqi missile launchers. If that happened, if it became the U.S. and Israel attacking Iraq, the U.S.-Arab coalition might rupture before the ground war had even begun. My staff in Riyadh were reporting that Schwarzkopf was refus-ing to pulė U.S. aircraft off scheduled bombing missions to search for Iraqi missiles in the west. I used my unauthorized back channel to 64 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Unfinished Mission, Unintended Consequences 65 Schwarzkopf and called him. "Norm, you said to cali you directly any-time I needed to. Well, I need to. l'm hearing that we don't have a lot of assets hunting for the Scuds. The Israelis are about to go nuts." "To hell with them, not one Israeli has died from the Scuds," Schwarzkopf fumed. "Those things are just big flrecrackers. The bombing missions I am running are eliminating Iraqi units that will kill American troops if those Iraqis are stili alive when the ground war starts." He was right, not one Israeli had died at that point and we did need to bomb the front-line Iraqi troops. He was also wrong. If we did not do something about the Scuds, Israeli parachutists would he the flrst troops into Iraq. Schwarzkopf was ordered by Cheney and Powell to divert bombing missions to do Scud hunting. A diplomatic mission to Israel by Deputy Secretary Larry Eagleburger, and promises that U.S. forces would take out the Scud missile launchers, persuaded Israel to stand down. (The Scud-hunting bombing missions failed to destroy a single Iraqi missile.) Once the ground war started, Schwarzkopf's pian worked per-fectly. Iraqi units began to flee Kuwait. Meanwhile, McCaffrey drove his division farther and faster than any American unit had ever gone in combat, moving into position to cut the withdrawing Iraqis from behind. But then the pro-war tenor of U.S. news reporting began to change. American television carried stories of American aircraft slaughtering retreating Iraqi troops. Returning pilots were inter-viewed plane-side talking about "turkey shoots." Schwarzkopf's view was that these withdrawing Iraqis were combat units with their equipment intact, repositioning. Individuai Iraqis who had abandoned their weapons were not being attacked by U.S. aircraft. The repositioning units were, however, a threat. They were elite Republican Guard divisions with the best equipment the Iraqi army had. They could resumé combat at any time. He wanted McCaffrey and the air strikes to eliminate them. Washington thought otherwise. The war was coming up on its hundredth hour, Iraq was abandoning Kuwait, and there was no sense risking adverse U.S. media coverage. Schwarzkopf was ordered to stop. Although he writes in his memoir that he agreed with the order, it seemed otherwise to some in his headquarters who were sitting behind him on the secure phone to me. In the field, McCaffrey was stunned. A few more hours and he could have eliminated any future Iraqi military threat to anyone by de-stroying the Republican Guard divisions. Without them, the chances of Saddam Hussein being overthrown increased. Many in Washington, however, had come to take it as a given that the Iraqi military would in any event oust the adventurous Saddam once the war ended. Schwarzkopf was sent to negotiate a surrender with Iraqi generals at Safwan, near Kuwait. A joint U.S.-U.K. working group I led had dis-cussed proposed surrender terms, including the destruction of the heavy armor of the Guard divisions. In the talks at Safwan, however, the Iraqi units were allowed to withdraw intact. At the request of the Iraqis, the no-flying rule was amended to permit the Iraqi army to fly its helicopters. The U.S. forces inside Iraq would withdraw, although Iraqi units could not be stationed near the Kuwait! border. There had never been a U.S. pian to march on Baghdad, nor an ad-vocate in Washington for doing so. The Arab nations with large num-bers of troops flghting in the coalition (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria) were not eager to see American troops occupy an Arab country, nor did they want to see the Shi'a Muslim majority take over Iraq and set up a pro-Iranian regime. Thus, the Saudis and Egyptians had backed U.N. Secu-rity Council resolutions authorizing only the liberation of Kuwait. The Bush administration also shied away from the enormous task of occupying Iraq. How much would that cost? What Iraqi would we put in charge? What would we do with the Shi'a majority in Iraq? Left to their own devices, they thought, the Iraqi army would no doubt pick some Sunni generai, but one who would be less dangerous than Saddam. After ali, this defeat in Kuwait followed hard on the heels of the defeat in the long war with Iran, which was also started by Saddam's desire to expand his territory into another nation's oil fields. The Iraqis had now suffered hundreds of thousands of dead because of his lunacy. The Bush White House was convinced, wrongly, Saddam would not last. 66 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Unfinished Mission, Unintended Consequences 67 In the postwar period, of course, Saddam was not overthrown. Quite the contrary, he used his surviving Republican Guard units to massacre those who did rise up against him, notably the Shi'a, the "marsh Arabs" in the south, and the Kurds in the north. Iraqi helicop-ters mowed down the rebels. U.S. forces stood by. Years later, the Shi'a would remember how Washington had called on them to rise up, but then did nothing as they were slaughtered. It can and has been well argued as to whether the United States should bave continued the war for a day or a week to destroy the Republican Guard, as had been originally intended. To me it was obvious then and now that another seventy-two hours of combat was needed. After ali we had been through, we needed to insure that the Iraqi mili-tary was not strong enough to pose a future threat, otherwise we would bave to keep our military in Saudi Arabia for the indefinite future. Some even believe, wrongly, that we should bave gone on to Baghdad. I can see how people can make that argument, although continu-ing into Baghdad would bave shattered the coalition and left the U.S. holding the very messy bag of an occupied Iraq. What I cannot under-stand is how anyone can defend the Bush administration's decision to stand by and let the Republican Guard mass-murder the Shi'a and the Kurds. We had it within our power to resumé the bombing of the Republican Guard and regime targets. Our Arab coalition partners and the world in generai would bave had to respect an American decision to renew hostilities for the limited purpose of stopping the slaughter. If we had bombed the Republican Guard and defended the Shi'a and Kurds, the Bush calculus that Saddam Hussein would fall without our occupying Baghdad might bave proved true. Since we did not, a moral outrage was committed and Saddam Hussein stayed in power, and the U.S. had to keep forces in Saudi Arabia to defend against a renewed strike on Kuwait by a reconstituted Republican Guard. WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION had figured little in the justi-fication for the war. Nonetheless, before the end of the war, my U.K.- U.S. working group on the postwar period had focused on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. We proposed a Special Commission, run by the U.N. that would require Iraq to destroy its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs. The U.N. would cali it the United Na-tions Special Commission, UNSCOM. Now, after the war, I developed plans for UNSCOM to bave a for-ward base in Bahrain, equipment from various allies, and expert staff drawn heavily from the U.S. and U.K. I asked Bob Gallucci, who had been teaching at the War College, to be the top American and the Deputy Director of the Commission. Although UNSCOM was shown tons of chemical weapons and some missiles, U.S. and British intelligence indicated that Iraq was hiding other programs, notably its nuclear weapons effort. U.N. teams found an enormous nuclear weapons research and development cam-pus, which had been unknown to CIA prior to and during the war. Thus, it had never been bombed. The program was much further along than CIA had known. Prior to the war, Israeli intelligence had urgently reported that Iraq was close to developing a nuclear weapon. When pressed by doubting CIA analysts, however, Israel had refused to provide corroboration or reveal sources. Now it began to appear that Israel may bave been right. We then received a report that the records of the Iraqi nuclear program had been removed and hidden in the Agricultural Ministry. Working through the Special Commission, we and the British overtly planned an inspection on another nearby site, but at the last minute it would turn into a surprise raid on the ministry. U.S. and British Special Forces would be among the inspectors and would smash locks and break into files quickly before the Iraqis could react. The problem with the pian, we knew, was how the inspectors would get out once they discovered the nuclear bomb records. Gallucci and I agreed on a standoff, the U.N. inspectors would not leave the site or give up the documents. Meanwhile, the U.S. would prepare a renewed bombing campaign. I gave Gallucci a satellite phone and promised him that we would use it to instruct him to leave the records and depart the area before the bombing started. The raid worked. Nuclear records were found before the Iraqis fig- 68 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Unfinished Mission, Unintended Consequences 69 ured out what was going on. Iraqi security units arrived quickly, how-ever, and surrounded the ministry. They demanded the documents be returned to them. Gallucci refused and the standoff we anticipated en-sued. When Gallucci called in on the satellite phone, I gave him the telephone numbers of U.S. television news organizations, which in-terviewed him live during the standoff. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft approved a pian to renew bombing and sent it to the President. Scowcroft seemed pleased at the prospect of renewed bombing, perhaps thinking that it might create another chance for the Iraqi military to topple Saddam. The targets were Special Republican Guard units and other units that propped up Saddam. Gallucci, from the parking lot in Baghdad, called me again in the State Ops Center. I told him how proud we ali were: "Bob, this is working. You were great on CNN. Remember, 'The whole world is watching!' " Gallucci and I had both been anti-Vietnam War protest-ers in the 1960s. "Yeah, I remember that well," Bob whispered over the satellite telephone, "but Dick, we've found the smoking gun here. These guys almost had the bomb. But the Iraqis are never going to let me out of here with this document." Arabie translators on the inspection team had found the annual re-port of the nuclear weapon program and rendered it into English. It re-vealed that the design was complete and that enriched material would soon be available in sufficient quantity to conduci the first nuclear ex-plosion. Prior to the outbreak of the war, Iraqi scientists estimated that they were less than a year from that detonation. "Well, can you hook up a fax machine to the sat phone? We bave to get the proof out to the world, to the U.N." I could taste success, but there were stili risks. The standoff in the fenced-in parking lot could get out of hand. The Iraqis surrounding it were well armed. "No. The fax doesn't work with the satellite phone." Gallucci and bis team had already looked at the options. "We bave what they cali a digitai camera, no film, but we can't get that to work well enough ei-ther." Digital cameras were something very new to us. "Okay, Bob, you know Beverly Roundtree pretty well, you worked together in PM?" My assistant, Bev, had previously worked for Gal- lucci when he directed an office in the Pol-Mil Bureau. "She can take dictation for hours. l'm going to put ber on the sat phone." It did take hours. With the world's television cameras and the Iraqis' guns pointed at the UNSCOM team, a relay of inspectors read Beverly Roundtree the smoking-gun document, which was on the desk of the President and the U.N. Secretary General when they carne to work in the morning. As they did, Beverly left the State Department Operations Center and went home to sleep. Faced with the prospect of renewed U.S. bombing, however, Secretary Baker returned to Washington and convinced President Bush to accept a negotiated settlement of the standoff. Baker held a strong influence over Bush. He had a dedicated telephone on bis State Department desk that ran directly to the Ovai Office. By my own obser-vation, Baker did not hesitate to initiate calls on that line. In private, Baker did not treat Bush with ali the deference a Secretary of State usually accords a President. Baker thought that he had made Bush the President, through Baker's politicai maneuvering. Baker also sometimes doubted Bush's skills. At a NATO summit in London early in the administration, Baker had stunned me by com-ing to sit next to me in an auditorium, as I listened to President Bush's press conference. As Bush batted the reporter's questions, the Secretary of State provided me with a personal color commentary whisper-ing in my ear: "Damn he flubbed that answer ... I told him how to handle that one . . . Oh, no, he'll never know how to deal with that..." I was one of Baker's Assistant Secretaries, but I could not un-derstand why he would go out of bis way to disdain the President to an audience of one, me. Over time I carne to understand that Baker often doubted the Presidenti judgment. Baker would never bave gone to war in the Gulf and made that clear at several points in the months after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The two friends and rivals did, together, demonstrate how an international coalition should be built and how America can get done what it needs without creating self-inflicted wounds. They did, however, fail to manage the postwar chal-lenges, as their successors would also fail to do twelve years on. After the Gulf War, with Saddam stili in power and bis army re-constituting, it would be necessary for large-scale U.S. forces to re- Unfinished Mission, Unintended Consequences 71 70 AGAINST ALI ENEMIES main in the region, especially in Saudi Arabia where most of the residuai forces were based. I was given a Gulf strearn jet and told by Baker to fly around the Gulf locking down new agreements with the six Gulf states so we could keep some of our military forces in their countries. Shuttling up and down the Gulf, we obtained basing agreements with Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman. No longer would we bave only secret access arrangements with limited and hidden preposi-tioned equipment. A temporary arrangement was also struck with the United Arab Emirates, pending agreement on how to handle U.S. per-sonnel who might break locai laws, but U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups could regularly dock near Dubai. Saudi Arabia, however, would not negotiate a basing agreement. Neither, however, did the King order ali U.S. forces to leave as Cheney had said he could. The continued presence of Saddam and bis army had changed the King's prewar calculus that the Americans could and would leave when the war in Kuwait was done. The enormous American military presence rapidly dwindled after the war, but it gradually became clear to the Saudi public that some would remain. Fighter squadrons and support aircraft would stay at several air bases. The U.S. military headquarters would also stay active, although at smaller levels. The Saudis also went on a shopping spree for new U.S. arms. With each arms deal carne more American civilians to make the weapons work. Saudi dissidents who had protested the originai U.S. presence now complained again that the American forces in the Kingdom were a sacrilege. GIĀ did not know much about these dissidents, who they were, what they said. The Saudis kept us well away from their internai debates. Among the dissidents was bin Laden, who grew more criticai of the King. The Saudi government moved against the dissidents, threatening them with legai and economie punishments. Despite bis past work for Prince Turki in Afghanistan and Yemen, bin Laden was no exception to the government's crackdown. In bin Laden's case the government also threatened bis extended family and its vast economie holdings. Invited to Khartoum by Hasan al-Turabi, the funda-mentalist fanatic who had taken charge in Sudan, a bitter bin Laden decamped across the Red Sea. Soon thereafter, he summoned bis Afghan Arabs to join him. Saddam was stili in power. U.N. inspections were being more re-stricted. U.S. forces were settling in throughout the Gulf. Usama bin Laden had broken with the Saudi regime and moved in with a radicai state sponsor of terrorism. It was 1991. As the year ended, the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a legai entity. During the Cold War every military action by one superpower had drawn a reaction by the other. Thus, large-scale shifts of military assets such as the movement of a half million American troops to the Persian Gulf would bave risked some dramatic Soviet countermove. Moreover, nations that signifi-cantly increased their military relationship with one superpower knew they risked subversion from the other. Thus, the kind of cooper-ation the United States enjoyed in the First Gulf War would bave been impossible during the Cold War. The Cold War had also served to suppress some traditional ethnic and religious rivalries beneath the heavy glacier of the Communist to-talitarian state, particularly in the Balkans and Central Asia where there were many Muslims. To the extent that religion was a politicai f orce during the Cold War, it was a weak one promoted by the United States as a counterpoint to the anti-religious ideology of the Soviet Union. When the Cold War ended, the United States could move mas-sively into the Persian Gulf during a crisis there, ethnic and religious tensions could erupt in the Balkans and Central Asia, and religious ferver could no longer be directed at the Communists. Those feeling disadvantaged by the global system and wishing to blame their lot on foreign forces had only one world-dominant nation to blame for their troubles, one major target to motivate their followers: America. Chapter 4 TERROR RETURNS (1993-1996) i N 1993 THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION carne to office with an agenda to deal with the post-Cold War era, and terrorism was not on it. Terrorism had not been a major issue in the preceding Bush administration either. George H. W. Bush had issued no formai policy on counterterrorism and had chosen to deal with the single major anti-U.S. act of terrorism during his tenure (the bombing of Pan Am 103) through diplomacy, not the use of force. America seemed to be enjoying a period largely free of anti-American terrorism after the tumultuous years of the Reagan administration and its bombings of Lebanon and Libya. In January 1993 the new National Security Advisor, Tony Lake, had taken the unusual step of asking me to stay on in the White House when the Bush team left. Lake, on Madeleine Albright's advice, asked me to work on post-Cold War issues such as peacekeeping and failed states. While terrorism was in my portfolio of "Global Issues," it was far down on the new team's priority list. Ali that was about to change, quickly. LARGE, WHITE TELEPHONE CONSOLE BLURTED. I had never heard it ring before and wasn't initially sure what the noise was. Ŧi the little window on the console a name popped up: "Scowcroft." rent Scowcroft, the National Security Advisor to the first President 74 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Tenor Returns (1993-1996) 75 Bush, had left the White House the month before, along with almost ali of bis staff except me and a few other holdovers. How was he call-ing me now on this highly secure phone? I reached for the handset. "Did the Serbs do it? " It was Tony. I had no idea what he was talk-ing about. "Did the Serbs bomb it? Was it a bomb?" "I don't know yet, Tony." I faked it. "We're checking. Let me get back to you as soon as we have something, soon." My next cali was to the Situation Room. "Did something just get bombed?" "Well, something just exploded, we don't know if it was a bomb, sir. The World Trade Center," a young Navy officer replied. "I know you handle terrorism, sir, and we're supposed to teli you when something happens that might be terrorism, but do you want to know when things happen in the United States too? Do you guys handle domestic crises too?" The notion that terrorism might occur in the United States was completely new to us then. The National Security Council staff, which I had joined in 1992, had only ever concerned itself with foreign policy, defense, and intelligence issues. "Yes, yes we do," I vamped, making up my view as I answered. "Anything that happens in the U.S. that could involve foreign agents is our job. Just like the shooting at CIA." A month earlier, only four days into the Clinton administra-tion, a young Pakistani named Mir Amai Kansi had walked down Virginia Route 123 and shot motorists stopped at a traffic light, waiting to drive into CIA headquarters. Three people had died. Kansi had suc-cessfully flown out of the country after the shooting. Neither CIA nor FBI had found out anything interesting about who Kansi was or to what group he belonged. "So what do we know about this explosion in NewYork?"Iasked. "Well, sir, we're hearing that it was a transformer that erupted, but we will keep you posted. And, sir, we will let you know right away in the future when things blow up, anywhere." I turned to Richard Canas, a DEA agent on my staff. "You know anyoneinNYPD?" I HAD JOINED THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL STAFF in 1992 under President Bush and his National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, whom I had come to know during the Gulf War and its af-termath. Scowcroft had been brought back from retirement to do a second tour as National Security Advisor (he had held the position under President Gerald Ford) to clean up the mess that Ollie North and others had made of the NSC Staff. North had been a junior staffer assigned to worry about terrorism. Terrorism had shot to the top of the agenda after the Beirut bombings of our embassy and the Marine bar-racks, the kidnapping of Americans in Lebanon, the hijackings of American aircraft in the Middle East, and Libya's bombing of a U.S. Army hangout in Berlin. North had responded vigorously to the problem—a little too vig-orously. He and National Security Advisor John Poindexter had crossed the line into secret policies and procedures that were short-sighted and, in some cases, probably illegai, when they arranged to sell arms to Iran in hopes of the release of American hostages held there, and then diverted some of the proceeds to the anti-Communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Congress had outlawed aid to the Contras, and trading arms for hostages violated Reagan's oft-stated insistence that we never negotiate with terrorists. President Reagan and Vice President Bush had escaped, barely, without being shown to be personally culpable. When Bush became President in 1989, he had asked Scowcroft to run a less-activist NSC Staff and to play down the U.S. re-sponse to terrorism. Luckily for Scowcroft, with the exception of the attack on Fan Am 103, there had been little anti-American terrorism on his watch. Bush's and Scowcroft's response to Pan Am 103 had been muted, at best. Despite the death of 259 passengers at the hands of Libyan intelligence agents, the United States had not retaliated with force. Instead, it had sought U.N. sanctions on Libya. When I went to the NSC Staff, it had been to head up a new office to worry about proliferation of missiles and chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Secretary Baker didn't like the idea of that increas-ingly important issue being run out of the NSC Staff, however, and told Scowcroft so. My assignment was changed to "International Pro-grams," issues that did not fit into any of the regional offices of the 76 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Terror Returns (1993-1996) 77 NSC. Among those issues was terrorism, and it was stili there and stili a low priority, when Tony called about the explosion at the World Trade Center. MEANWHILE, RICHARD CANAS HAD USED bis law enforce-ment skills and White House clout to cali through to the police com-mander on the scene at the World Trade Center. "Dick, l've got a Deputy Commissioner on the line. NYPD has had its bomb guys get down into the hole, They say it's deflnitely a bomb." I convened the Counterterrorism Security Group in the Situation Room. Six people were dead in New York, hundreds wounded. Within days of the World Trade Center bombing, FBI made an ar-rest. The FBI's magicians, the forensics specialists, had gone through the wreckage in the basement of the tower and determined which vehi-cle had held the bomb. They had earlier amazed us ali by rebuilding Fan Am 103 from pieces scattered over hundreds of square miles, and then determining which suitcase had held the bomb. Now they were able to identify the specific Ryder rental truck and trace it back to a franchise in nearby northern New Jersey. Incredibly, the rental agency said that the person who had rented the truck was scheduled to return the next day to collect the deposit on what he said was a stolen truck. With the arrest of Muhammad Salameh, the case broke open. A suspicious rental Storage facility operator called the FBI to suggest that the terrorists might bave used one of bis lockers to prepare the bomb. Pulling on those strings of information, the FBI developed a list of the celi that had performed the bombing: Egyptians, a Jordanian, an Iraqi, a Pakistani—it was not the Serbs. The CSG met again. "Okay," I started, "so you know the names of the guys who did it. What is the group? Or to quote from a great movie, who aie these guys?" I was asking Bob Blitzer, who represented the FBI in the meeting. "Nobody we know," Blitzer answered, obviously chagrined. "New York thinks there may be some links to the guy who shot a rabbi up there last fall. They ali seem to be related to a Muslim preacher from Egypt, a guy in Brooklyn or Jersey City." CIA's representative, Winston Wiley, had compared ali the names with those in a database. "They are not known members of Hezbollah or Abu Nidal or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or any other terrorist group. The bureau gave us some overseas telephone numbers these guys called and we're trying to run them down, but we didn't recognize any of the numbers." "So, what are you telling me," I asked. "That these guys met at a pickup basketball game at the Y in Brooklyn or Jersey City and de-cided to blow up the World Trade Center 'cuz they were bored? You expect me to believe that?" "Could be." Wiley shrugged. "How did they get in?" I wondered. "What does their visa application say, terrorist?" Blitzer explained: "Well, two of them just showed up at JFK last year without any documents or even false docs. One of the two was detained because he had 'How to Make a Bomb' manuals on him." The other man was Ramzi Yousef. "So, let me get this straight, we let a guy go who was with a bomb builder, we let him get into a cab at JFK even though he shows up bere without a passport?" I could not believe it. Immigration had given Yousef a citation to appear before an immigration magistrate at a later date and let him walk into the country. Ramzi Yousef was now the one FBI was fingering as the cell's leader. He had disappeared overseas after the attack. "Don't worry, Dick, we'll pick them ali up," Blitzer assured me. "We'll track them down. We'll find out who they worked for. " The New York City FBI Office is so big that the head of it is an As-sistant Director of the FBI, not a Special Agent in Charge, as is the title in most cities. In fact, the head of the New York Office actually has three special agents in charge, or SACs, reporting to him. One of the SACs was responsible for national security cases. Although that had once meant keeping track of Soviet spies, it also involved the supervi-sion of a Terrorism Task Porce. As in every city, the FBI in New York 78 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES works closely with the locai federai prosecutor, the U.S. Attorney, and the Assistant U.S. Attorneys on the staff. Following the World Trade Center attack, the New York FBI Office and the U.S. Attorney's Office set to flnding out exactly what we were f acing. Within two weeks of the bombing, FBI had taken four of the celi into custody. Ahmed Ajaj had been held since he arrived at JFK Airport the previous year. Muhammad Salahme was arrested while seeking his deposit at the Ryder office on March 4. Nidal Ayyad, a U.S. citizen, was arrested on March 10. Abdul Yasim, interrogated on March 4, was released because he convinced the FBI he was not involved and would cooperate. He flew immediately to Iraq, where, we believe, he was in-carcerated by Saddam Hussein's regime. Eyad Ismoil fled to Jordan and stayed out of sight until he was arrested two years later. The celi leader, Ramzi Yousef, disappeared andbecame the CSG's most wanted terrorist, only later showing up in the Philippines. The New York investigation soon revealed a network that had supported the plotters. Spread across Brooklyn, Queens, and north Jersey, the network seemed to center on Ornar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian, who served as a spiritual leader to Egyptian radicals. Rahman had been sentenced in absentia f or terrorism in Egypt. He was on the State Department visa lookout list, but somehow he had managed to get a visa at the U.S. embassy in Sudan and had moved to New York. Egyptian government requests that he be extradited had apparently been made and rejected. By keeping a dose eye on Rahman, within months the FBI uncov-ered another celi planning bombings in New York. This time it would be the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations headquar-ters, and other landmarks. By the end of June 1993, the plotters and Rahman were in the federai government's Manhattan Metropolitan Detention Center. It seemed like the counterterrorism machinery was working well. It wasn't. The FBI and CIA should have been able to answer my question, "Who aie these guys?" but they stili could not. The real answer was a group that the FBI and CIA had not yet heard of : al Qaeda. The flrst member of al Qaeda arrested in the United States—as we later discovered—was El Sayyid Nosair, who assassi- 79 Terror Returns (1993-1996) nated Rabbi Meir Kahane, the flery leader of the radicai Jewish De-fense League, in New York in 1992. The FBI's investigation into the World Trade Center suspects connected them to Nosair. Nosair's legai bills were ultimately paid by bin Laden. His apartment had materials connecting him to something called the Afghan Services Bureau,- yet many of the Arabic-language materials would go untranslated by the FBI for years after his arresi. The four initially arrested for the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 were quickly linked to the Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn. That center was funded by and openly affiliated with the Afghan Services Bureau (Mahktab al Kiddimah), run by bin Laden. The blind sheik had spent time in Afghanistan with bin Laden. The blind sheik was a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was already tied to bin Laden. Ahmed Ajaj had been detained at JFK Airport for carrying bomb-related materials, including a manual on the cover of which was the phrase "al Qaeda." Ramzi Yousef had even called bin Laden from New York. Usama bin Laden had formed al Qaeda three years earlier. Not only had no one in the CIA or FBI ever heard of it, apparently they had never heard of bin Laden either. His name never carne up in our meet-ings in 1993 as a suspect in the World Trade Center attack. We did hear about someone who appeared to be Ramzi Yousef's uncle. He went by various names, and he appeared to be behind Yousef's mysterious money. One name he used was Khalid Sheik Muhammad. It was not clear exactly what his role was, but he was connected, and therefore the FBI wanted him, wherever he was. As IT HAPPENED,! was the one in Washington who first saw evi-dence of a true act of terrorism by Saddam against us, and the irony is that President Clinton's response to it successfully deterred Saddam from ever again using terror against us. I had the daily habit of reading hundreds of intelligence reports, embassy messages, and translations of foreign media that the Situa-tion Room dutifully forwarded to my office computer. During the Week, I skimmed many of them. On weekends, however, I had more 80 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Terrai Returas (1993-1996) 81 time. One Sunday in Aprii, I saw a subject line that grabbed my eye. An Arab-language newspaper in London was reporting that the Kuwaiti police had prevented an assassination attempt on former President Bush. There had been no such report from the Secret Service, FBI, GIĀ, or the embassy. Nonetheless, something suggested to me that I should not dismiss the report. Instead, I called our ambassador in Kuwait, Ryan Crocker, a career officer and expert on the Arab world. "Ryan, have you seen this report in a London paper about an at-tempted assassination on former President Bush? " He had not seen it, but did teli me what a great time Bush had in Kuwait. Then he paused, "Dick, knowing you, you could not possibly be instructing me to ask the Kuwaitis about the report.. . because you know, of course, that we are told never to accept instructions directly from the White House staff." One of the continuing legacies of Ollie North's excesses was a ban on NSC Staff directly ordering ambassa- dors to do things. "No, no, of course not, Ryan. Thought never crossed my mind," I chuckled back across the secure line. "As it happens, now that I know about the story, I might just ask someone I happen to be seeing tonight..." The next morning there was a sealed envelope on my desk, a mes-sage so sensitive that it could not be sent to me electronically from the Situation Room. It was a report from our Ambassador in Kuwait which stated that the Kuwaitis were covering up a plot that they had foiled. The plot was aimed at killing former President Bush and had al-most succeeded. Several people were being held and they had impli-cated the Iraqi intelligence service. I called Lake: "Saddam tried to kill Bush." After I explained, the National Security Advisor gave me instructions: "Teli State to make it clear to the Kuwaitis. They have to come cleanwithus." That allowed me to draft an instruction cable to Crocker and ask if the State Department would send it to him on its behalf. Crocker then confronted the Kuwaiti government with our knowledge of the plot and formally asked for access to the prisoners. There were sixteen. Two were Iraqi nationals, who admitted that they had been recruited in Basra by the Iraqi intelligence service and given a Toyota Land Cruiser, in which a sophisticated bomb had been installed. They were to park it near the university in Kuwait City and then detonate it by radio when President Bush and the Emir drove by. It would have killed everything up to four hundred yards away. The Iraqi assassination plot failed only because a Kuwaiti policeman discovered the bomb-laden SUV af ter it was involved in a traffic accident and the Kuwaitis started to make arrests. On instructions from Tony Lake, I asked Secret Service, FBI, and CIA to send teams to Kuwait. Attorney General Janet Reno and CIA Director Woolsey agreed to conduci two separate but parallel investi-gations, one in law enforcement and one in intelligence channels. It took over a month, but in early June the two reports were in draft. Both agencies had corroborated the prisoners' story. The bomb materi-als were also definitely from Iraqi intelligence. On June 23, Lake had his usuai Wednesday lunch with Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and Secretary of State Warren Christopher in Lake's West Wing office. During the lunch, he called and asked me to join them. "We'd like you to pian a retaliation mission against Iraq. Only you, and one person each from Defense and State. When can we have the pian, the checklist?" Someone from CIA was added to the circle, and in a day we had a target list developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA. Secretary Christopher argued strongly on legai grounds that the list be limited to one facility, the Iraqi intelligence headquarters. He also wanted it hit on Saturday night, to minimize casualties. Christopher won. We developed the pian. The ships would move into firing position. An "execute order" from the Joint Chiefs to CENTCOM (the U.S. mil-itary regional command for the Middle East and the successor to the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force) had been prepared. Personal mes-sages would go out in staggered fashion from the President to the Emir of Kuwait, the King of Saudi Arabia, the British Prime Minister. To avoid leaks, they would be sent from the White House rather than through the State Department. Instructions would be sent to the U.S. 82 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES mission at the United Nations to ask for an emergency session of the Security Council. Justice and GIĀ would have detailed white papers to release to the press and foreign embassies, outlining the evidence. congressional leaders would be called individually by the President. Former President Bush would be told. American embassies and troops in the region would be placed on heightened alert against Iraqi coun-termoves. CIA stations and FBI offices would piace Iraqi agents under surveillance. The President would make a short announcement from the Ovai Office. A stark warning would be passed to the Iraqis, threat-ening dire consequences for any further terrorism against the United States. I put the checklist, a timeline, and the implementing documents in a hook and gave it to Lake on Friday. He looked at it and said, "That's good. Take it down and show the President. l'I! teli him you're coming. Then, do it." NSC Staff, even Special Assistants to the President like me, had not popped in on the President in my experience. Brent Scowcroft had talked to the President for us. Sometimes Brent had allowed a staff member to sit in for a while. Now, I was being asked to go see the President about the first use of torce in bis administration. There had been a secretive Principals meeting with the President on the subject ear-lier and Clinton had seemed resolute. But there were doubts among the right wing that Clinton would ever use force. Presented with the detailed pian, Clinton was pragmatic. "Well, this may teach him a lesson, but if it doesn't, we will have to do more." Saturday morning, White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, who did not know what was about to happen, told the White House press corps that "the lid" was on, that nothing would happen the rest of the day. A group of White House reporters then left for a baseball game in Baltimore. As they did, I began sending the messages out from the Situation Room. Shortly after 6:00 p.m. a small group of senior administration offi-cials began assembling in Lake's office. I went to the Ovai Office to help the President with bis last few calls notifying congressional leaders. The cruise missiles had just been launched. 83 Terroz Returns (1993-1996) "So when will we get the pictures from the missiles?" the President asked me. "Well, we don't get pictures from the missiles, sir, but we will have bomb damage images from satellites available to show you first thing in the morning," I explained. "Tomorrow morning? l'm going on TV in an hour to say we blew up this building—I want to know first that we did. Why don't the missiles have cameras in them?" the President insisted. "Well, if the missiles communicated, someone might see them coming or interfere with them. But we know how many we fired and when, so we can calculate how many will hit and when—" "We can't communicate with the missiles? What if I wanted to turn them back?" the President asked. "You don't want to sir, do you?... because you can't... there is no mechanism to ..." I stammered. "No I don't, but I do want to know for certain that we blew this piace up before I go telling the world that I did." I went back to Lake's office with the news. Admiral Bill Stude-man, the number two man at CIA, began making calls. Satellites were redirected. "We got nothin'," he reported. "The missiles should have hit several minutes ago, but nothing we have can teli us that... not for a while." A glum mood settled over the office as we wondered how we would get the President to go on national television. Then, as we talked, he did it. On ali networks, the Saturday evening news anchors were told something and announced a surprise address by the President. "We don't know why," one said. Clinton read the short statement and then, almost immediately, showed up in Lake's office with Vice President Al Gore. "We thought you were not going to go on," Lake confessed. "We thought you needed proof that the missiles hit." Gore urged the President to teli us something that the two highest leaders in the land clearly found funny. "Okay, okay," Clinton agreed. "I needed relative certainty that the missiles had hit and none of you guys could give me that... so I called CNN .. . they didn't have any- 84 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES body in Baghdad tonight, but their cameraman in their Jordan bureau had a cousin or some relative who lived near the intelligence head-quarters, so they calledhim." Most of the room looked horrifėed. "The cousin said, yeah, the whole piace blew up. He was certain ... so I fig-ured we had relative certainty." Clinton using torce was not going to be a problem. The next day, however, he was clearly upset with reports that some of the missiles had fallen short and killed the leading female artist of the Arab world, who happened to have a house across the Street from the Muhabarat— Iraqi intelligence. I was initially disappointed that the retaliation had been so small, that targets had been taken off the list, and that the raid was scheduled in the middle of the night when few Iraqi intelligence officers would be present. My friends from the Bush administration told me vaguely that they heard that the Bush family were also upset that the response was so limited. My disappointment faded with time because it seemed that Sad-dam had gotten the message. Subsequent to that June 1993 retaliation, the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities never devel-oped any evidence of further Iraqi support for terrorism directed against Americans. Until we invaded Iraq in 2003. THE FIRST YEAR OJ THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION also tested the new Presidenti willingness to use torce a second time, in Somalia. In retrospect, it is possible that the October Battle of Mo-gadishu may have been a second case of an al Qaeda role in an attack on Americans. President Bush had sent troops to Somalia to help end an enormous f amine that had placed approximately 700,000 people on death's door. Their fellow Somalis with guns were stealing and selling relief supplies. International relief organizations could not obtain se-curity for their operations. Following bis defeat in a bid for reelection, President Bush had sent the troops into Somalia to insure the delivery of the relief supplies. Brent Scowcroft had asked me to be the White 85 Terror Returns (1993-1996) House coordinator for the operation, and in January 1993 he had asked me to brief bis successor, Tony Lake, on the subject. I found Lake in the Presidential Transition Office, a floor of a private office building on Vermont Avenue. I had never seen him before. He and the "National Security" area on the floor were the only indica-tion of cairn in a flurry of young staffers and a sea of résumés. "Well, thank you for coming, but I gather that we won't have to worry too much about Somalia because the U.S. will be largely out by Inaugura-tion Day," Lake said. "Ah, no, actually, the U.S. troop movement into Somalia will not be complete until the end of January," I replied, pulling out a Pentagon chart that showed the staged deployment of U.S. units. Lake looked suspiciously at the chart. "We were told that the U.N. would take over. That the U.S. troops would be out." He did not say precisely who told him, but I gathered it was my bosses at the White House. "The U.N. is dragging its feet, Mr. Lake. Boutros-Ghali thinks it would strain the U.N. to take over." Lake's reaction made him look like a man who had just been told he had cancer. In a way, he had. U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali grudgingly ac-cepted a U.N. role, but the arrivai of a U.N. peacekeeping force was slow in coming. He urged the United States to provide an American to be the head of the U.N. operation, to insure dose coordination be-tween the U.N. and the U.S. Lake persuaded Scowcroft's deputy, Ad-miral Jonathan Howe, to take the job. Shortly after Clinton carne to office, coordination of the Somali operation shifted from the White House to the State Department and its Bureau of African Affairs. Howe was soon tested by the Somali warlords, particularly by Farah Aideed. In June, Aideed's men slaughtered two dozen Pakistani troops who were operating under the new U.N. command. Howe's response was flrm. If the Somalis thought they could get away with killing the Pakistanis, it would be ali over for the interna-tional relief effort. Aideed needed to be arrested and bis militia smashed. Howe had only recently retired as a four-star admiral. He knew U.S. military capability well. He drafted a detailed list of addi- 86 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES tional f orces immediately, including Delta Porce commandos to arrest Aideed and AG-130 aerial gunships to blow up the militia's infrastruc-ture. He got the gunships, but only for a few strikes. Despite pressure from the NSC, the Pentagon refused to send the commandos or most of what Howe needed and the Pentagon stopped the AC-130 strikes before Aideed's militia infrastructure was destroyed. Aideed was moving about Mogadishu openly with little or no se-curity in June. A Delta team could have arrested him with little diffi-culty. Following the AC-130 attack on his arms warehouses, however, he went underground and ordered more attacks on the coalition, including American troops. In September, three American troops were killed by Aideed's f orces. Only then did the Pentagon agree to send in the commandos. The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which included what the public called Delta, had mastered the art and science of surprise night-time operations and low-profile, covert operations. In Mogadishu, however, they acted in broad daylight with dozens of helicopters clat-tering into the city. The operations were repetitive and the Somalis learned by watching them. On October 3, 1993, in the famous Black Hawk Down incident, the Aideed militia responded and engaged JSOC, shooting down two helicopters with rocket-propelled grenades. Eighteen Americans andprobably 1,200 Somalis were killed. When the National Security Council cabinet members met with the President in the Cabinet Room, Clinton was irate. Somalia was not his idea of how to spend his first year in office. He had inherited it and the military had let him down. He had followed the Pentagoni ad-vice, not Howe's, in June and they had been wrong. When Aideed could have been captured in June, they had let him go. When the military had finally agreed to send in JSOC to Mogadishu, they had acted as though there were no hostile forces operating against them, ignor-ing their usuai tactics, and creating a disaster. Clinton sat silently, red-faced, in the Cabinet Room listening to Warren Christopher, Les Aspin, and Colin Powell. I realized that he was letting them have their time, but he had already decided something. He was done listening to them on Somalia. When they had talked themselves out, Clinton stopped doodling 87 Terror Returns (1993-1996) and looked up. "Okay, here's what we're gonna do. We are not running away with our tail between our legs. l've already heard from Congress and that's what they ali want to do, get out tomorrow. We're staying. We are also not gonna flatten Mogadishu to prove we are the big bad-ass superpower. Everybody in the world knows we could do that. We don't have to prove that to anybody. "We are going to send in more troops, with tanks and aircraft and anything else they need. We are going to show force. And we are going to keep delivering the food. If anybody fucks with us, we will respond, massively. And we are going to get the U.N. to finally show up and take over. Teli Boutros he has six months to do that, not one day more. Then ... then we will leave." As the meeting broke up, Clinton indicated for Lake and me to fol-low him through the side door into the outer area of the Ovai Office. "I want us running this, not the State Department or the Pentagon." He looked at me. "No more U.S. troops get killed, none. Do what you have to do, whatever you have to do." In the days that followed, American snipers were placed on the roofs and walls of the U.S. compounds. When they saw any Somalis in the area with guns, they took them out. There was little or no public-ity about these deaths. When the U.S. forces went back on the streets, they went with tanks. Six months later, the United States finally handed over the operation to the United Nations peacekeeping force. There had been no more American casualties. During those six months I repeatedly pressed CIA to track down rumors in the foreign press about terrorists who might have trained Aideed's militia. They discounted them. I asked my friends Mike Sheehan and Roger Cressey, who had worked in Mogadishu in 1993, what they thought. "How the shit would CIA know," Mike replied. "They had nobody in the country when the Marines landed. Then they sent in a few guys who had never been there before. They swapped people out every few weeks and they stayed holed up in the U.S. compound on the beach, in comfy trailer homes that they had flown in by the Air Force." Apparently Sheehan and Cressey were right. Although CIA did not know it in 1993 and 1994, evidence later emerged and was in- 88 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Terrai Returns (1993-1996) 89 cluded in the U.S. indictment of bin Laden that al Qaeda had been sending advisors to Aideed and had helped to engineer the shoot-down of the U.S. helicopters. Indeed, al Qaeda had bombed a hotel in Yemen in December 1992, thinking that U.S. Air Porce personnel supporting the Somalia operation were living there. (The Americans had been evacuated because Yemeni security had heard rumors of the plot.) CIA had not been able then to figure out who had bombed the hotel. Thus, when the Clinton administration looked back on the terror-ism of 1993, they did not include the events of Somalia in that cate-gory. Nor did they think about bin Laden or al Qaeda, because they had not yet been told that that terrorist or his organization existed. Al Qaeda and bin Laden, however, thought about the United States. Even though the U.S. had not "cut and run" under congres-sional pressure, they perceived that it had. The additional six months stay and the orderly handoff to the U.N. had not impressed them. The failure to flatten Mogadishu had registered. Once again, they told one another, the United States had been humiliated by a Third World country. Just like Vietnam. Just like Lebanon. Just like the Soviets in Afghanistan. What al Qaeda did not seem to understand is that the United States had never intended to stay in Somalia. It had gone there for a limited time until the creaky U.N. peacekeeping bureaucracy could field a force. By its own limited deflnition of an objective, the U.S. had done what it set out to do. Was Clinton right not to respond with some large-scale retaliation to the murder of the eighteen U.S. commandos? I was not sure then and I am not sure now. We had killed over a thou-sand Somalis in a day. Should we have done more? We could have kept up the hunt for Aideed, but that would have placed the prestige of the United States against the resourcefulness of one man hiding in his own country. Did our self-restraint reduce our deterrence? I feared then that it would, but I had no good idea about how to do anything about it. After the murder of 278 Marines in Beirut, Reagan had in-vaded Grenada in part to show that we were stili able to exercise force. I had no doubt that Clinton would use force again soon, in Bosnia and maybe in Hai ti, not just to demonstrate resolve but because those sit-uations demanded it. In retrospect, I doubt that there was anything that could have been done then to deter al Qaeda. Killing more inno-cent Somalis would not have helped. JUST BEFORE 1993 GAME TO A CLOSE, I received one last, memorable lesson in terrorism. Tony Lake and his Staff Director, Nancy Soderberg, had urged me and my staff to deal directly with the families of the victims of terrorism, especially the families of the Fan Am 103 attack. Fan Am 103 had been destroyed by Libyan terrorists in 1988. The families were upset with their handling by the Bush administration. In particular, they could not understand why their request for a memorial in Arlington National Cemetery had been turned down, especially when many of the victims were military personnel. We met with the families. We heard their stories and we put pic-tures of their fallen children on our desks. The aircraft had exploded above and around Lockerbie, Scotland, killing some of the town's res-idents as well. The town had opened its hearts to the families of ali of the victims. Lockerbie had donated stones for a cairn, a Scottish memorial rock pile, one rock for every victim. Joined by my colleague Randy Beers, we drove to the cemetery and selected a site for the cairn. On the fifth anniversary of the attack, the President drove to the site to say a few words and turn the dirt to begin the construction of the cairn. It was just before Christmas, cold and wet and windy. The President asked a little boy who had lost his father on the piane to join him with the shovel. He kneeled by the boy and whispered to him. A Ione piper from Lockerbie played "Amazing Grace." As people moved to their cars and out of the rain, I asked the boy's mother what the President had said. "He said, 'My father died before I was born too. Be good to your Mom.' " That night the network news showed tape of the President head-ing out from the Ovai Office for the cairn event, as the White House reporter talked over the tape about allegations of impropriety made by former Arkansas state troopers. They did not mention Fan Am 103. Tenoi Retuins (1993-1996) 91 90 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES ALTHOUGH NEITHER GIĀ NOR PBI hadyet heard of al Qaeda, because of the many known terrorism events of 1993, the Clinton team, from the President down, was seized with the ėssue by 1994. Clinton, Lake, and I belėeved our response to terrorism should be high on the lėst of measures to shape the post-Cold War world. Part of that response was developing a new policy on counter-terrorėsm to replace what Reagan had signed seven years earlier. There had not been a formai counterterrorism policy in the first Bush ad-ministration. As I would discover, turf battles could derail even the best efforts at counterterrorism, and (as Toni Ridge would much later demonstrate) it is easier to waste time on bureaucratic reorganization than it is to accomplish anything concrete. Three policy issues emerged as I drafted and circulated a new policy for approvai by ali of the relevant departments and agencies. First, was terrorism a law en-forcement issue or an intelligence issue? While the question was posed that way, what it meant was, would CIAbe in charge? or did we just pian to arrest and prosecute terrorists as if they were organized. criminals? The answer that Clinton approved, correctly I believe, was trxat we would use ali the resources of any department or agency that covalcl contribute. If the FBI could contribute by, for example, reassemblėrxg the wreckage of Pan Ani 103 and determining who put the bomb OTI board, that was a capability we wanted utilized. GIĀ did not bave sėg-nifėcant forensics capabilities and was not good at interviewing h-xin-dreds of wėtnesses to stitch together a post-attack investigation. IĢ ^vve can chase down individuai terrorists and arrest them, drag them tŧack to the United States for trial and punishment, we should—even iĢ the FBI has to do it. We had to use every agency that had somethirxg to bring to the effort. There were those who said such arrests and trėals did not deter terrorists. I did not think that was knowable. I did tcrxow that there would be times when the criminal iustice process woixlcl be feckless in dealing with terrorism and we needed intelligence, rxiili-tary, and diplomatic responses as a result. If the FBI liked the response to the first policy question, they -were less than thrilled with the reply to the second. The second question had to do with the role of the White House and its National Secvmty Council in domestic events. It was the question posed to me by the Situation Room watch officer, "Do you guys do domestic incidents?" In the wake of the World Trade Center bombing and the plots by the blind sheik, I thought the question answered itself. If there are foreign agents involved, we are ėnvolved. Until we know there are no foreign agents involved, we assume there are. The immediate problem that policy ran up against was the secrecy of the FBI. Institutionally, the fifty-six FBI offices talked only to the U.S. Attorneys around the country. There was also some communication between the field and FBI headquarters and somewhat less between FBI headquarters and the Justice Department. To deal with that obstacle Lake, accompanied by bis deputy, Sandy Berger, and me, drove over to the Attorney General's cavernous office. In a room that could bave accommodated a few of the Saudi King's throne rooms, the three of us met with Janet Reno and the FBI. I explained the problem. If the NSC was going to coordinate counterterrorism policy and keep the President informed about what needed to be done, we needed to know what the FBI knew. The FBI officials present explained that information developed in a criminal investigation could not be shared with "civilians." Reno, whom I did not really know at the time, sat silently taking notes on her legai pad. I wondered to what extent she had already been captured by the Bureau, or to what extent she would bave the courage to stand up to them. She had shown incredible public courage in taking the blame for the disastrous siege of the religious cultists at Waco, Texas. In doing so she had taken the blame for an incident that was started by federai police in another department (Treasury's ATF agents had raided the compound initially) and ended with dead children when the FBI had given her bad advice. Now, she turned to the FBI and the White House guys present and issued her ruling: "If it's terrorism that involves foreign powers or groups, or if it could be, the Bureau will teli a few senior NSC officials what it knows." Lake and Reno agreed to sign a Memorandum of Understanding enshrining that prin-ciple. They never did. FBI and Justice Department lawyers slow-rolled the document for years. Nonetheless, it was the principle that we op-erated under and when I knew about people or events I was able to use 92 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Terror Returns (1993-1996) 93 the "Lake-Reno Agreement" to pry out information. Sometimes, a few senior FBI personnel even volunteered information to us. Usually, however, the FBI acted like Lake-Reno was a resort in Nevada. The third policy issue was one that uniquely reflected the person-ality of the Clinton administration. It was: what should he the role of the federai government in dealing with the victims of terrorism? For Clinton, Lake, and Reno this issue loomed large. They now knew per-sonally the families of the Fan Am 103 victims, who had told them how they were informed about the deaths of their loved ones, not by the government but by the airline. Often the news had been delivered badly and there was no one to work with to make arrangements for dealing with the deaths. From now on there would be a federai government role, to help in the grieving process and to provide information about the ongoing investigations. I had a fourth issue that I wanted to add: weapons of mass destruc-tion and terrorism. There were no signs of a terrorist group attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction, but there was a disturbing correlation between the list of countries we labeled as state sponsors of terrorism and the list of countries that had chemical weapons. My previous work on nonprolif eration had told me that the counterterror-ism and nonprolif eration "communities" in the government hardly knew each other. That had to change. No one in the departments ob-jected to my including a policy on counterterrorism and weapons of mass destruction, they just thought it was odd. With these issues agreed upon, President Clinton signed Presiden-tial Decision Directive 39 (PDD-39), "U.S. Policy on Counterterrorism." It reiterated the "no concessions" policy, which the Reagan administration had violated by trading arms to Iran for the release of American hostages. It called for both offensive and defensive actions in order to "reduce terrorist capabilities" and in order to "reduce vul-nerabilities at home and abroad." Law enforcement, intelligence, mil-itary, and diplomatic tools would be used and coordinated. Finally, there would be "no greater priority than preventing the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction" by terrorists, or if that failed there would be no greater priority than "removing that capability." THE NEW POLICY SOUNDED GODO, but it depended on intelligence that remained spotty. The search for the two remaining World Trade Center bombers continued in 1994, with Ramzi Yousef getting the most intensity. He was busy, but his activity did not gain the no-tice of U.S. intelligence. Unknown to us at the rime, he engaged in un-successful plots to kill the Pope and later President Clinton, both in the Philippines. Then in January 1995, Manila police responded to a flre in an apartment building. The message from Manila popped up on my computer screen on a Saturday morning. I printed it and ran from my office in the Executive Office Building across the parking lot known as West Exec to the West Wing. I interrupted a meeting Tony Lake was having on Bosnia and an-nounced: "They found Ramzi Yousef. " "That's great news," Lake replied. "No it's not. He got away," I exhaled. "And he was planning to blow up U.S. airliners in the Pacific with bombs smuggled on board, bombs we won't notice, using liquid explosives. They're assembled on board in the bathroom and then left there. The terrorist then gets off at the first stop and the piane continues on and blows up. The Filipinos found some of the bombs, but not ali. He had the flights ali picked out, United, Northwest. . . eleven of them, 747s." Lake got the image. The man who blew up the World Trade Center, who had eluded capture for almost two years, was on the loose with bombs designed to create more Fan Am 103s, several simultane-ously over the Pacific. "Have you grounded the aircraft? " Lake asked. I had already called FAA and told them to cali the airlines and stop flights originating in the Pacific. FAA said it would, but they also told me that only the Sec-retary of Transportation could ground flights. I told Lake ali this. "Get me the Secretary of Transportation," Lake said, picking up the phone to his assistant. Then he looked back at me, "Who the hell is the Secretary of Transportation?" Lake asked White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta to join us, as various people tried to locate Secretary Terror Returns (1993-1996) 95 94 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Federico Pena. "Well," Panetta decided, "if the secretary has the au-thority, the President does too. Teli the airlines to ground them by order of the President." U.S.-owned airlines originating flights in the Pacific were told to ground them. Flights in the air were turned around. Cabin crews were instructed to search above the ceiling tiles in the bathrooms, and any-where else a bomb made of batteries, a watch, and a contact lens clean-ing fluid bottle could be hidden. Nothing was found. Beginning the next day, when flights resumed, no passenger could carry any liquid on board. Hand searches disposed of perfumes and colognes. Ramzi Yousef had again eluded capture. The CSG had already decided to issue a reward for Yousef and had authorized the distribution of matchbooks throughout the Middle East and South Asia, noting our $2 million bounty. There was a flood of people claiming to know where he was and seeking the reward. Vir-tually ali of them were worthless leads. In early February, however, one of the callers actually did know. When questioned by State Department security officers from our embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, the source gave details that made him credible. What happened next was a model apprehension. It happened quickly. The Ambassador sought and obtained Pakistani support for an arrest and extradition from that country. While an FBI arrest team flew in from New York, the embassy cobbled together its own team of State Department security officers, DEA agents, and a regional FBI officer from Thailand. In the early morning hours of the day on which Ramzi Yousef planned to take a bus to Afghanistan, he was rudely awakened by Pakistani and American officers. A few days later, he was back in New York. Ramzi Yousef had many aliases. He was born Abdul Basit in Pakistan and grew up in Kuwait, where his father worked. After bis arrest, he became a man of as much mystery and attention as when he was at large. With almost every terrorist incident or similar event, an urban legend develops that challenges the officiai story. After the events of 9/11, one widespread legend had it that Israel had attacked the World Trade Center and had warned Jews not to go to work that day. After TWA 800 crashed, the legend was that the U.S. Navy had shot down the civilian 747. With Ramzi Yousef, the legend was that there were actually two people: one was the man arrested by the FBI in Pakistan and the other was a mastermind of Iraqi intelligence, the Muhabarat. This legend was part of the theories of Laurie Mylroie. For those in the U.S. government who knew Iraqi intelligence, the phrase "Iraqi intelligence mastermind" was an oxymoron. The Muhabarat had a well-deserved reputation as the Keystone Kops of the Middle East. Moreover, Ramzi Yousef, or Abdul Basit, was implicated in the World Trade Center attack by a large number of eyewitnesses, fėn-gerprints, and other evidence. That did not stop author Laurie Mylroie from asserting that the real Ramzi Yousef was not in the federai Metropolitan Detention Center in Manhattan, but lounging at the right hand of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Mylroie's thesis was that there was an elaborate plot by Saddam to attack the United States and that Yousef/Basit was his instrument, beginning with the fėrst World Trade Center bombing. Her writing gathered a small cult following, includ-ing the recently relieved CIA Director Jim Woolsey and Wolfowitz. As reported by Jason Vest in the Village Voice (November 27, 2001): "According to intelligence and diplomatic sources, Powell—as well as George Tenet—was infuriated by a private intelligence en-deavor arranged by Wolfowitz in September. Apparently obsessed with proving a convoluted theory put forth by American Enterprise Institute adjunct f ellow Laurie Mylroie that tied Usama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Wolfowitz, according to a veteran intelligence officer, dispatched former Director of Central Intelligence and cabalisi James Woolsey to the United King-dom, tasking him with gathering additional 'evidence' to make the case. Woolsey was also asked to make contact with Iraqi exiles and others who might be able to beef up the case that hijacker Mohammed Atta was working with Iraqi intelligence to pian the September 11 at-acks, as well as the subsequent anthrax mailings." It turned out there was only one Ramzi Yousef, he was not an Iraqi agent, and he had been in a U.S. jail for years. More than anyone in the Clinton administration, I wanted an ex-cuse to eliminate the Saddam Hussein regime. Having been involved in the Gulf War's planning and execution, I had been furious when the had stopped without eliminating the Republican Guard, and 96 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES when Saddam had been permitted to mow down the Kurdish and Shi'a opposition while the U.S. stood idly by. I had hoped the UNSCOM parking lot incident that I had helped to contrive would bave blos-somed into a renewed round of major bombing that would bave weak-ened the regime. Por the same reason, I had pressed for a major round of bombing of Iraq in 1993 after the Bush assassination attempi was uncovered. More than anyone, I wanted the World Trade Center at-tack to be an Iraqi operation so we could justify reopening the war with Iraq—but there was no good evidence leading to Baghdad's culpa-bility. By 1994, there was a lot of evidence beginning to point to an-other organization, whose name and outline was stili unknown, but which involved a man that the GIĀ kept referring to as "terrorist fė-nancer Usama bin Laden." The Saudis, fed up with bin Laden's continued anti-regime propaganda, had revoked his citizenship in 1994. Rumors suggested that a gunflght at bin Laden's house in Khartoum had been an attempt by Saudi intelligence to kill him using Yemeni mercenaries. His name popped up in intelligence in connection with terrorist activity in places as widely dispersed as the Philippines and in Bosnia. Beginning in 1993 Lake and Nancy Soderberg joined me in pestering CIA for more information about the man and his organization. CIA doubted initially that there was an organization. Although bin Laden's name surfaced with increasing frequency in raw intelligence in 1993 and 1994, CIA analyses continued to refer to him as a radicalized rich kid, who was playing at terrorism by sending checks to terrorist groups. CIA knew of the existence of the Afghan Services Bureau, but did not see it as the public face of a covert terrorist network. Senior CIA officers explained to the Counterterrorism Se-curity Group that the bureau was what it purported to be, a sort of Veterans of Foreign Wars for Arabs who had fought in Afghanistan. They allowed as how there may be some terrorists who were using some of its officers or services, but they did not say that it was now run by Usama bin Laden and was recruiting, paying, and arranging transportation for terrorists in a dozen or more countries. But it was. 97 Terror Retuins (1993-1996) Two MONTHS AFTER RAMZi YousEp's ARREST on a Sunday afternoon in March, I got the news that there had been a terrible ex-plosion in downtown Oklahoma City. It had terrorism written ali over it. But in Oklahoma? I called the White House from Haiti and reached my deputy, Steve Simon, in the Situation Room. He had stepped out of a CSG meeting to take the cali. I felt guilty interrupting the meeting. "Who's chairing the meeting while you're talking to me?" I asked. "Oh, don't worry, it's in good hands," Simon answered dryly. "Bill Clinton's chairing the CSG." My only advice was to not assume the bombing in Oklahoma City was by an Arab or Islamic group. It didn't smeli right. Simon had ai-ready figured that out and the White House was publicly cautioning that no one should leap to conclusions regarding who did it, and that no one should engagé in reprisals against any ethnic or religious group. Hours later it became clear that the bombing was done by Americans. The President's repeated appearances and speeches after the Oklahoma City bombing did much to comfort a shaken nation, but also to focus it on the problem of terrorism. Clinton talked incessantly about what it would be like if terrorists used a weapon of mass destruction to attack in a U.S. city. Not content to work with what we had, Clinton decided to seek more legai authority and more money to increase our ability to go on the offensive against terrorism. I was asked to in-ventory what we needed. It was the flrst of several terrorism funding reviews that I led be-tween 1995 and 2000. At a time of a decreasing federai budget, we took the federai counterterrorism budget from $5.7 billion in 1995 to $11.1 billion in 2000. The counterterrorism budget of the FBI was increased over 280 percent over that period. We also sought additional authori-ties for the FBI, including extending organized crime wiretap rules to terrorists, making funding of terrorist groups a f elony, easing access to terrorists' travel records, and accelerating deportation of those associ-ated with terrorist front groups. While most of the funds I sought in 1995 were approved by the White House and its Office of Management and Budget, some were not passed by the Congress. There was not one fund for counterterrorism, but several department budgets. We sought to fund programs in the Department of Energy, the Health and Human 98 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Terror Returns (1993-1996) 99 Services Department, the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the Federai Emergency Management Agency, and other depart-ments whose congressional appropriators did not see "their" agencies as being counterterrorist departments. I sought the new legai ban on fund-raising for terrorist groups be-cause several people in the administration had thwarted the CSG's at-tempts to go after terrorist money. In January 1995 we had persuaded the President to issue an Executive Order making it a felony (under the International Emergency Economie Powers Act) to raise funds for or transfer funds to designated terrorist groups or their front organiza-tions. Rick Newcomb, the head of an obscure but powerful office in the Treasury (the Office of Foreign Assets Control), was eager to use the new authority. Newcomb was a dedicated, bright career bureau-crat who knew the rules and procedures in this area better than anyone. Newcomb and I reviewed the case of the Holy Land Foundation of Richland, Texas. We were convinced that it was in violation of the Executive Order. Newcomb used the Customs police to enforce his edicts and, after CSG review, he had them set to raid the HLF, break the locks, seize the records and assets, and plaster posters on the doors and Windows proclaiming that the piace had been raided. Then FBI Di-rector Louis Freeh and Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin objected. Freeh was concerned with alienating Arabs in America and claimed that use of the International Emergency Economie Powers Act might be chal-lenged in court. Rubin claimed that he feared the law might not hold up under a challenge. He had also been reluctant to support any moves against money laundering for fear that it would cause capitai flight from the U.S. and raise objections from other nations concerned with the sanctity of "bank secrecy." (In a case of strange bedfellows, Repub-licans like Congressman Dick Armey also opposed infringement on "bank secrecy.") The raid did not occur. The Holy Land Foundation continued its activities, and I could only seek a new law that would be unassailable, a clear expression of congressional intent against terrorist fund-raising. Incredibly, the legai authorities we sought were not approved by the Congress in 1995.1 had thought these issues were bipartisan, but the distrust and animosity between the Democratic White House and Republicans in the Congress was strong and boiled over into counter-terrorism policy. The World Trade Center attack had happened, the New York landmarks and Pacific 747 attacks had almost happened, sarin had been sprayed in the Tokyo subway, buses were blown up on Israeli streets, a federai building in downtown Oklahoma City had been smashed to bits, but many in the Congress opposed the counter-terrorism bill. Republicans in the Senate, such as Orrin Hatch, opposed expanding organized crime wiretap provisions to terrorists. Tom DeLay and other Republicans in the House agreed with the National Rifle Association that the proposed restrictions on bomb making infringed on the right to bear arms. We would ha ve to try again in 1996 to strengthen our ability to fight terrorism. Chapter 5 THE ALMOST WAR, 1996 i F THE CLINTON NATIONAL SECURITY TEAM had come to office in 1993 without a thought to terrorism, by the beginning of 1996 they were preoccupied with it and feared a major terrorist attack would happen in the year ahead. But it wasn't al Qaeda that they ex-pected to attack. CIA had not begun to use that phrase in its reports. The radicai theocracy that had replaced the Shah of Iran in 1979 had not cooled in its zealotry. Although the American hostages in Tehran were released at the beginning of 1980, the regime continued on a path of action against America. Iran had played a major role in the three truck bomb attacks on U.S. facilities in Lebanon, in which Hez-bollah terrorists had killed Americans in the 1980s. It had been the be-hind-the-scenes mastermind of the prolonged hostage takings of Americans in Lebanon, including journalists, a Marine colonel, and a CIA station chief, both of whom were tortured and killed. Throughout the 1980s, Iran was engaged in an eight-year war, de-fending itself from the invasion by Saddam Hussein. That war had spilled over into the Gulf, involving Iranian (and Iraqi) attacks on oil tankers. Defending oil tankers, the U.S. Navy had engaged in flrefights with Iranian ships and aircraft. Then, in 1989, in the middle of such a flrefėght with Iranian small boats, the USS Vincennes had mistaken an Iran Air passenger piane for an attacking Iranian flghter piane, and shot it down, killing 290 civilians. When I received the word of the shoot-down, I thought it would be the end of our "neutrality" in the war between Iran and Iraq. We had been supporting Iraq with intelligence, escorting its oil in Kuwaiti tankers, and cracking down on military supplies flowing to Iran. r The Almost Wai, 1996 103 AGAINST ALL ENEMtES 102 Nonetheless, we said we were neutral. Now that we had killed hun-dreds of Iranian civilians, I assumed that Tehran would attack us di-rectly in retaliation, thus drawing us into the war overtly on Saddam's side. Instead, our mistaken shoot-down of the Iran Air flight ended the war. Bled dry by an eight-year war, the leaders of the Iranian Revolu-tion were looking for an excuse to end the war and this would he it. Publicly they claimed that the United States was starting to fight them overtly and that they could not stand up to both Iraq and America at the same time. They said that further fighting could result in cir-cumstances in which the Revolution would be undone, presumably by a U.S. invasion. Iran declared a cease-fire. Saddam Hussein, whose people and resources were also drained by bis misadventure against Iran, eagerly accepted the cease-fėre. The Iran-Iraq War was over. Three hundred and flfty thousand people lay dead. The covert export of the Iranian Revolution continued, however, through the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), its special branch called the Qods Porce (Jerusalem Porce), the Ministry of Intel-ligence and Security (MOIS), and their own foreign legion of nationals from other countries, Hezbollah. The Arabie word for "Party of God," Hezbollah was initially Iran's instrument among the Lebanese and Palestinians in Lebanon. Tehran then extended it, establishing Hezbollah chapters in countries as near as Saudi Arabia and as distant as Brazil and Uruguay. The Iranian government pumped out extreme anti-American propaganda and welcomed terrorists from throughout the Islamic world for conferences on the struggle against Israel and the United States. In response, the United States continued the economie sanctions that it had instituted in 1980 and kept Iranian assets in the U.S. frozen in escrow accounts. Despite those sanctions, Iran had continued to export oil to the United States, as much as $1.6 billion worth in 1987. During the "Tanker War," the U.S. added sanctions to further weaken Iran in its war with Saddam Hussein, ending the import of Iranian oil and banning the export to Iran of militarily useful civilian products. Evidence mounted of Iran's procurement of modern weapons and materials to make chemical, biological, and nuclear arms. Tehran sought to acquire missiles and aircraft from Moscow and Beijing, and signed a deal with Russia to build a civilian nuclear power plant. No longer drained by fėghting Iraq, its aid to Hezbollah increased, as did Hezbollah's attacks on Israel. Congress and the Administration competed with each other in originating further sanctions against Iran, while Hezbollah activity only mounted. In 1992 Senator John McCain sponsored the Iran-Iraq Nonproliferation Act, extending sanctions on third-country entities that exported "advanced conven-tional" weapons or components to either of those two countries. In 1992, the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires was bombed. In 1994, a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires was bombed, killing eighty-five. Intelligence indicated that Hezbollah and Iran were behind the attacks, but the Argentine government seemed reluctant to accuse them. In 1995 Senator Alfonse D'Amato introduced legislation to ban ali trade with Iran (except humanitarian items) and prohibit U.S. sub-sidiaries in third countries from trading in Iranian oil. In response, the Clinton administration instituted its own similar ban, using Executive Order authority. That action ended a billion-dollar deal that Conoco had in the works with Iran. As the head of Halliburton, Dick Cheney opposed the U.S. sanctions. Clinton also ordered Vice Presi-dent Gore to coordinate efforts to build oil and gas pipelines that would tap the resources of Central Asia (chiefly in Kazakhstan) and pump them out using routes that did not cross Iranian territory, thus denying Iran the economie benefėt it had hoped to gain from new pipeline deals. The White House and the State Department launched a concerted effort to persuade allies to cut economie ties with Iran, al- though to little avail. Not content with administrative action, as 1995 ended Congress passed additional statutory sanctions against Iran and a secret appro- priation to fund covert action by the CIA aimed at the Iranian regime. That secret leaked in the Washington Post a month later, in January 1996. The Post report alleged that a small amount, $18 million, had been added at the insistence of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. It said that Gingrich had wanted the funds to "overthrow" the Iranian regime, but had settled with the Administration on language that 104 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES The Almost War, 1996 105 would permit the funds to be used to "change the behavior" of the government in Tehran. Although the U.S. had promised not to seek the overthrow of the revolutionary regime as part of the agreement releasing the U.S. Em-bassy hostages in 1981, the Iranian government stili believed and feared that Washington wanted to restore the Shah. The story that Gingrich had now persuaded Clinton to fund subversion set off alarms throughout the Iranian hierarchy. In a mirror image of the U.S. action, the Iranian Majlis, or parliament, publicly passed funding for covert action against the United States. The Majlis action was largely a propaganda move; the IRGC and MOIS were already actively engaged in anti-U.S. efforts around the world. In March 1996 four suicide bombings took piace in Israel in nine days, killing sixty-two people. Israeli intelligence believed that Hezbollah and Iran had a role in the attacks. Although suicide bombings in Israel would later become almost commonplace, in 1996 the world was shocked. President Clinton quickly orchestrated a summit of twenty-nine Arab and European leaders, which Egypt hosted at Sharm el-Sheikh. The International Summit on Terrorism produced proof that Arab governments rejected terrorism. Iran did not attend. Fearing Iranian-sponsored terrorism against the U.S., the Coun-terterrorism Security Group formed a team to examine what Iran might do and how we could move to deter and prevent its attacks. One possible target we considered was the International Olympics planned for August 1996 in Atlanta. The FBI said it was the lead federai agency for the security of the Olympics and had been planning for the event for over a year, so I asked it to brief the CSG in Aprii. John O'Neill was the FBI man on the CSG and he arranged for FBI personnel from Headquarters and the Atlanta Field Office to come to the White House Situation Room with a briefing on ali they had done. John proudly introduced the team and we ali sat back to listen and to view their PowerPoint slides. The briefing was short and uninforma-tive. The team could not answer most of the questions thrown at them by the interagency members of the CSG. I could see O'Neill was embarrassed and so I quickly brought the meeting to an end. As the group filed out of the Situation Room, I pulled O'Neill into the empty White House Mess next door. "That wasn't encouraging, John." "Know what l'm thinkin'?" O'Neill smiled. "Road trip. The whole CSG. Let's go down there and see how fucked up this thing re- allyis." Two weeks later, two dozen Washington counterterrorism experts from eight agencies landed and boarded a bus for an unusual tour of Atlanta to look for security vulnerabilities. After the ride, the Washington team met with the locai authorities and the Atlanta represen-tatives of the federai agencies that had been working on Olympics security for two years. We had a few questions. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty of the Energy Department went first. "I no-ticed when we were touring the Olympic Village that it's really the Geōrgia Tech campus." Everyone nodded. "And that there is a nuclear reactor in the middle of the campus." A few nodded. "And I didn't see any real security on the reactor building, but I assume that it probably has spent fuel on site." Nobody nodded. People left the meeting to piace calls. Steve Simon of the NSC Staff followed. He was a student of mili-tary history, as well as being a real expert on the Middle East. "Atlanta is a big railroad hub, ali the north-south and cast-west trains in the South pass through downtown Atlanta. That's why it was such an im-portant hub for the Confederacy and such a key target for the Union." Again nods, but more carefully. I was thinking that perhaps we should not bave mentioned the war in which a Washington department had ordered Atlanta burned to the ground and Scarlett O'Hara had become homeless. "But when you drive around downtown, you don't see any train tracks," Steve continued. Someone from Atlanta talked about the many underground tunnels. "Problem is those tunnels go right under the Olympic Stadium," Simon went on, "and those trains carry highly explosive and hazardous materials, even without a terrorist Placing anything on them. You have a pian for searching the train cars °r diverting the traffic?" They did not. "Well, the nuclear reactor and the chemical train cars raise the 106 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES The Almost War, 1996 107 whole question of the pian and the assets to respond to a chem, bio, or radiation incident," R. P. Eddy from the NSC Staff put in. "Can we get a briefing on the pian for that? " There was none. The Washington representative of the Secret Service asked about access contro! on the Olympic venues, especially the Olympic Sta-dium where the President would be sitting. "Who is going to mag and search everyone as they come into the stadium? " After he explained that the verb "to mag" meant to search for meta! such as guns using handheld or stationary walk-through magnetometers, the Atlanta Olympic Committee representative revealed its pian to have citizen volunteers at each gate to the stadium. They would not be using mags. Mindful of Ramzi Yousef's plot to blow up 747s and the images of Pan Am 103,1 asked about aircraft. "What if somebody blows up a 747 over the Olympic Stadium, or even flies one into the stadium?" The Special Agent in Charge of the Atlanta FBI Office was steam-ing under the cross-examination from the Washington know-it-alls. "Sounds like Tom Clancy to me," he sneered. I glared at him. "But if it happens well, that's an FAA problem, " he answered. "Okay. Admiral Flynn?" I turned to Cathal Flynn, the retired Navy SEAL who ran FAA security. Born in Ireland and having spent twenty-five years in the U.S. Navy with the first name Cathal, Flynn likedtobecalled"Irish." "Well, Dick, we could ban aircraft from over the Stadium during the events by posting a Notice to Airmen," Irish responded. "But what if a terrorist hijacks an aircraft and violates that ban? " I asked. "Then we would cali the Air Porce if we saw the aircraft violate the ban on radar. But by then it would be too late," Flynn intoned in his deep baritene. "But, of course, we would not even see them on radar if they shut down the transponder on the aircraft. You see, our radar s are not air defense radars. Our air traffic contro! radars rely on the aircraft sending out a radio signal to us to teli us its altitude." The Defense Department representative then explained to us about the posse comitatus law and how it prohibited the military from using force in the U.S. Jim Reynolds from the Justice Department helpfully pointed out that posse comitatus could be waived and had been waived to allow Army Special Forces to assist in suppressing a prison riot "right here in Atlanta" a few years earlier. "Yeah, but there is also an international law, to which we are a party, that bans shooting down a civilian aircraft. We learned al! about that after we shot down the Iranian Airbus," carne the DOD reply. "Okay, okay. So whose job is it to stop a hijacked aircraft from fly-ing into the Olympic Stadium?" I asked in frustration. "Don't let them hijack an aircraft in the first piace," the Atlanta FBI man offered. We returned to Washington. On the flight back, I wondered aloud with John O'Neill how we would ever get the departments back in Washington to do the right thing about Atlanta Olympics security, spending the money, moving the teams. There was not much time left. Nominally, Vice President Gore chaired a committee on the Olympics, but it was one of dozens of jobs that President Clinton had piled on him. Leon Feurth was Gore's national security advisor. Feurth understood security and terrorism issues as well as anyone I knew. We went to Feurth. A week later, the Vice President of the United States was in a short motorcade up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Headquarters of the FBI. O'Neill had arranged for the large Flag Room on the first floor to be set up for a CSG meeting in which every department would, again, pres-ent a briefing on plans for their role in Atlanta Olympics security. I sent the word to the departments that I would not be chairing the CSG that day; Gore would be. The level of attendance rose. In the car on the way to the J. Edgar Hoover Building, I painted the picture for Gore one more time. "Here are some questions you might like to ask, innocently, " I said, passing a list of what we had asked in Atlanta. "Then, after a while, you ought to look really mad." "I do mad well." Gore smiled. He did have an impressive temper when he thought bureaucracy was unresponsive. After the introductions and a few of the briefėngs, Gore slipped the questions out of his suit jacket. Some of the CSG regulars saw it com-ing. "Well, I know you ali have briefings, but let me just ask a few questions that have been troubling me ..." The answers had not gotten any better. "Look, guys," the Vice 108 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES TheAlmost War, 1996 109 President said, "I know General Shelton over there could probably personally scare away most terrorists, but we can't put Hugh on every corner. We need a better pian than this." Shelton was then the head of Special Operations Command and, in his jump boots, had towered over Gore during the handshaking at the start of the meeting. Turning to me on his right, Gore handed me ali the authority I needed. "Dick, I am going to ask you to pulė that together, use whatever resources these agencies have that are needed. Anybody got any problems with that?" We were off to the races. I had been helpful to the U.S. Customs Service in its efforts to persuade Congress to convert old Navy P-3 anti-submarine aircraft into flying radar platforms to fėnd small planes smuggling drugs from South America. I called Customs and asked if they would move their P-3s to Atlanta during the Games. I also asked if they would move in some of their Blackhawk helicopters and piace Secret Service snipers with .50 caliber rifles on board to warn off, or take out, aircraft threat-ening the Olympics. The Defense Department agreed to set up a joint air coordination post with the FAA and to piace an Army radar on a hill outside Atlanta. They also agreed to have National Guard fighter aircraft on strip alert. After weeks of persuading the General Counsel of the Treasury (Customs and Secret Service were then both Treasury bureaus), we began to have an air defense pian. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty and Frank Young went to work creating a re-sponse team to deal with chemical, biological, or nuclear incidents. Special medicai stocks were moved in, as were decontamination units, and thousands of protective suits and hundreds of detection and diagnostic packages. Personnel from the Energy Department's nuclear labs, the Health and Human Services Department, the Army's chemical weapons command, and DOD's Joint Special Operations Command commandos would work together in a task force at an air base outside the city, where an interagency command post would be cre- ated. Secret Service began to survey every Olympics venue for vulnera-bilities and developed a pian to search everyone entering them. Hundreds of Secret Service personnel would be moved to Atlanta. O'Neill insured that hundreds of FBI agents would also be added, patrolling the streets undercover and sitting in key locations with rapid-response SWAT teams. The Transportation Department persuaded the railroads to reroute hazardous material cargos and to move additional railroad police in to surveil the trains. Flights going into Atlanta would get special passanger screening. The Energy Department ordered the nuclear reactor shut down temporarily and the nuclear waste moved. By May we had a pian to move several thousand federai personnel and their equipment into facilities in and around Atlanta at a cost that ran into scores of millions of dollars. It dawned on us that the package of preventive and responsive measures we had assembled, along with the restrictions we had imposed, would be needed again elsewhere. For a while af ter the Olympics, when talking about using this security blanket approach to an event, we referred to them as "Atlanta Rules." Yet, much to our chagrin, the Atlanta Rules failed to stop a Ione bomber from striking at the Olympics. The fact that it was a small bomb did not matter, nor the fact that it had gone off in a public square and not at an event. What we needed quickly were two things: a reas-suring show of force, without making the Olympic Games look like a military exercise; and we needed to know who had set off the bomb that killed one person and injured 111. The reassuring and not threatening show of force turned out to be the easier of the two requirements. We asked the Treasury and Justice Departments to quickly provide hundreds of uniformed federai agents, even if the uniforms were raid jackets and baseball caps. Bor-der Patrol agents were flown in from Texas and California on Air Force jets. Customs, INS, Park Rangers, and Bureau of Prisons guards were dispatched and walked the streets of Atlanta. The Games continued. Finding out who had placed the bomb, however, was more diffi-cult. I heard a rumor that the FBI had someone in custody and called a friend at the Bureau's Command Center. "They got a guy ali right. Louis Freeh is on the phone now telling Atlanta what questions to ask him. Freeh thinks it's him." His tone suggested there was more to it. I asked, "So what do you think?" "Atlanta doesn't like this guy for the bomb. He's a rent-a-cop who was at the scene. But don't say we don't know who did it, 'cuz Louis hasdecided." 110 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES The Almost War, 1996 111 The rent-a-cop was named Richard Jewell. He had discovered the bomb and cleared the area of many potential victims. Freeh's theory was that he had staged the incident to get a full-time job with the po-lice. After bis life was ruined by the negative publicity of the deten-tion and media leaks by the FBI, Jewell was released. The real bomber turned out to be Eric Rudolph, who went on to commit several other acts of terrorism. When the FBI flnally set its sights on Rudolph in 1998, Freeh went to North Carolina to lead the search, using FBI heli-copters and hundreds of agents, without success. Rudolph was later arrested by locai police in 2003. After the Olympics in 1996, in order to institutionalize what we had learned in Atlanta, I suggested that we create an officiai designa-tion of "National Security Special Events." The CSG could formally designate upcoming public ceremonies as such, and the agencies in-volved could request Congress for funds in advance, unlike in Atlanta where I had to promise the departments that I would find the money to pay them back. FBI agreed, with the condition that they be put in charge of ali NSSEs. After their performance in Atlanta, I would not agree. Despite FBI objections, I insisted that the Secret Service share the lead. Secret Service had shown in Atlanta that they were better equipped and trained to think about preventing a terrorist attack by eliminating vulnerabilities. In the following years, the CSG designated several National Security Special Events, including the celebration of the United Nations Fiftieth Anniversary in New York, NATO's Fiftieth Anniversary in Washington, the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, the Democratic National Convention in New York, and the 1997 and 2001 Presidential Inaugurations. Heightened security was obvious at ali of those events. Less obvious were the thousands of special re-sponse units with menacing-looking vehicles hidden in buildings nearby, or the hundreds of undercover federai agents on the streets, the Coast Guard cutters in the rivers, or the aircraft above. Invisible were the intelligence activities performed at the events and around the world by FBI, CIA, Secret Service, NSA, Customs, Immigration, Diplomatic Security, Coast Guard, and Defense Department to detect and prevent terrorism. Unfortunately, the teamwork and integration forced on the departments for special events did not always continue when the events were over. IN MAY 1996, shortly before the Atlanta Olympics, word reached Washington of a remarkable discovery made by the Belgian authori-ties. They had intercepted a shipment en route to Germany. Inside what was labeled as "pickles" was a custom-designed weapon best de-scribed as the largest mortar ever seen. The weapon was designed to lob a large explosive charge a short distance, such as over the walls of an Israeli or U.S. embassy compound. The shipment was traced to Iran. The Defense Department agreed to our request to station an addi-tional aircraft carrier battle group in the waters off Iran temporarily, as a deterrent signal to Tehran. The Navy was growing increasingly con-cerned with anti-ship missiles that Iran was placing on islands in the Persian Gulf and on its coastiine, particularly at the narrow point in the Gulf leading to the Indian Ocean, the Straits of Hormuz. In early May, DOD announced that Iran had acquired long-range missiles from North Korea and was engaged in a program to protect its missiles in hardened bunkers. The Navy relied on two ports in the Persian Gulf. Only one, in the United Arab Emirates, could handle an aircraft carrier. That port, near Dubai, saw more U.S. Navy ships anchored and more U.S. sailors ashore than any harbor outside the United States during the 1990s. It remained, however, a commerciai facility with no permanent U.S. Navy facility. The U.S. Navy base was a few hundred kilometers up the Gulf in the island nation of Bahrain. There, thousands of U.S. sailors lived and worked. After the Tanker War and then the flrst Gulf War, the little Navy base at Bahrain had mushroomed into a large and active facility. In 1996, DOD announced that the base would now be headquarters to a new entity, the Fifth Fleet. With the Soviet navy rusting at Siberian ports and the Iraqi Navy sitting on the bottoni of the Persian Gulf and Shatt al-Arab, the Fifth Fleet had only one possile enemy: Iran. 112 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES The Almost War, 1996 113 Bahrain was ruled by the Khalifas, a Sunni Muslim family. The Shah of Iran had laid claim to their country, based on a relationship lost in antiquity. A United Nations commission decided against the Iranian claim in 1970 and the island remained an independent nation. It had few oil or gas deposits, so the Khalifas had turned the small island nation into a Western-style destination, with shopping, banking, and entertainment for Saudis and others who were inhibited in their own countries. More than half of Bahrain's citizens were, however, Shi'a Muslims who felt disenfranchised by the Khalifas. They pro-vided fertile ground for Iran. In early June, the Bahraini ambassador to Washington called me and asked, on behalf of bis foreign minister, for an urgent meeting at the White House. He presented me with pictures of bombs and other weapons that had been found in Bahrain the day before. He handed over a document outlining a plot by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to stage an armed attack on the Khalifas and instali a pro-Iranian government in Bahrain. Tehran's instrument was something called Hezbollah-Bahrain, a group of Bahraini Shi'a created in Qum, Iran in 1993. It had been training terrorists in Iran and Lebanon for over two years. Twenty-nine Hezbollah had been arrested in Bahrain; others had fled to Iran. The ambassador offered details from the inter-rogations of the Hezbollah prisoners. Although little noticed by the Western press, the attempted coup in Bahrain was further evidence of Iran's support for terrorism and its attempt to drive the U.S. military out of the region. In two weeks, we had stili more. The American military had come to Saudi Arabia in August 1990 and was stili there in 1996, although in smaller numbers. They were spread out over a half dozen facilities. In the Eastern Province, where most of the minority Shi'a lived, the U.S. Air Porce had been given a high-rise housing complex near the village of Khobar. On }une 25, 1996, it was attacked by terrorists using a devastating truck bomb. Nineteen Americans died. In fact, Khobar was the second attack on a U.S. military facility in Saudi Arabia. In November 1995, the Riyadh headquarters of the U.S. military training mission to the Saudi National Guard had been bombed, killing five Americans. Within days, the Saudi authorities had arrested four men, obtained their confessions, and executed them. Despite U.S. appeals to hold up the executions so that an American investigation could be completed, the Saudis decapitated the four. The Saudis provided scant details about who they were or why they had acted. To avoid a repeat of the previous incident, I asked Clinton to write to the King seeking full cooperation in a joint investigation of the Khobar attack and announcing that he was sending an FBI team. I also sug-gested that Clinton appoint retired four-star generai Wayne Downing to head an independent U.S. inquiry into the security of U.S. facilities in the region and, in particular, what had gone wrong at Khobar. I had known Wayne since he was a major and had no doubt that he would teli us the truth. Clinton agreed. The Pentagon, civilian and military, was outraged that the President would launch an investigation of military laxness. After a CSG meeting to coordinate relief efforts, I met with the NSC staff counterterrorism team. We went over every CIA, NSA, De-fense, and State Department report on threats in Saudi Arabia for the past two years. A few dozen reports, culled from thousands on file, told a clear story. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp's Qods Porce had created Hezbollah groups in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. They had secretly recruited terrorists and sent them off for training in Iran and then in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia had learned of this activity and protested to Iran. Iran had denied the allegation. One night, the Saudi border guards were using a bomb-sniffing dog suggested by the United States that noticed something in a car at a customs post. The car was found to have a load of sophisticated plastic explosives. The ensuing Saudi interrogation and investigation led to arrests of Hezbollah oper-atives in the Kingdom and established that the car was operated by Saudi Hezbollah and originated at a camp in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley. The camp was nominally run by a Saudi named Mugassal, but he worked for the Qods Porce, the Iranian Special Forces. The bomb was mtended for an attack on a U.S. military facility in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis had told us none of this. They had quietly asked the Syrians to dose the Hezbollah camp in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley, which 114 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES The Almost War, 1996 115 was under Syrian control, and to hand over the Saudi Hezbollah ter-rorists. Syria had professed ignorance. The day after the Khobar attack, we presented Tony Lake with a detailed NSC Staff report placing the blame on Iran's Qods Porce and their front, Saudi Hezbollah. Lake believed us and wondered why CIA had not reached the same conclusion. He sent the report to CIA Direc-tor John Deutch, who replied only that ours was one of many theories. At the FBI, Director Louis Freeh responded eagerly to the White House request for an FBI investigation. It was one of the few times Freeh did anything eagerly that the White House had asked him to do. Freeh had told senior FBI officers that the White House staff were ali "politicals" who could not be trusted. Many of his senior officers, however, had been working with me and other career national security officials in the White House for years on sensitive counter-terrorism, counterintelligence, and anti-narcotics activities. They continued to do so, while admitting that they were no longer telling Freeh about ali their meetings at the White House complex. • For Freeh, who had worked on narcotics and organized crime cases in New York, international affairs was a new arena. Soon after the Khobar attack, Freeh was sought out by Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar. Bandar charmed Freeh at frequent meetings at the Saudi's Virginia estates. Bandar facilitated meetings in Saudi Arabia for Freeh, who went there to coordinate the investigation personally. John O'Neill accompanied Freeh to the Kingdom. O'Neill told me he was struck by the contrast between the fawning protocol the Saudis showed to Freeh and their mendacity whenever the conversation got around to the investigation. Freeh, according to O'Neill, did not seem to detect the du-plicity. Behind the glad hand, the Saudis had no intention of cooperating with the FBI. The attack had revealed an internai vulnerability in the Kingdom, the armed opposition of Shi'a Muslims from the Eastern Province. The Saudis did not want that embarrassment publicly revealed. Saudi Interior Minister Nayef denied the FBI access to evi-dence and witnesses. When the Saudis traced the attack back to Mugassal and Iran, they arrested some of the Saudi Hezbollah group stili in the country, but denied the FBI access to the prisoners and re- fused to admit to the FBI that the attack was orchestrated by Iran. Nayef and others in the royal family worried about what the U.S. would do with that information. Almost a year after the attack, the Saudis did convey one interest-ing fact. They claimed that they had traced a member of the terrorist celi to Canada. They asked that the United States intervene with the Canadians to return the suspect to Saudi Arabia. I thought otherwise, suggesting to the CSG that we put the suspect, Hani el-Sayegh, under surveillance to see whom he met with, whom he talked to. Unfortu-nately our agreements with Canada prohibited us from unilateral op-erations there. FBI, therefore, requested Canadian surveillance. After a short time, the Canadians complained that they did not have the staff or the funds to continue Constant surveillance. Louis Freeh had a solution. He proposed confronting Sayegh and soliciting his cooperation in exchange for a light sentence. That was the way Freeh had handled organized crime cases, rolling up the gang by "flipping" lower-level members, getting them to implicate their bosses in exchange for le-niency. Freeh asked if the White House and State Department would go along with Sayegh testifying before a grand jury even if the result might be indictments of Iranian officials. The NSC Principals Com-mittee met and agreed that we should indict whoever we had evidence against, including Iranian government officials. I didn't think Freeh's pian would work with Sayegh and asked the director, "Why should he agree to go to jail when we have no evidence against him? If we bring him here, you will have to release him and he can walk out onto the streets in the U.S. a free man." I could not convince Freeh, who proceeded with the confronta-tion of Sayegh. When detained, the Saudi talked freely to the Canadian authorities and FBI in Canada. He admitted that the Khobar attack was directed by the Saudi Hezbollah leader, Mugassal, and the Iranian Qods Porce. Surprisingly, Sayegh agreed to come to the United States and testify before a grand jury. He was told that he would be sentenced to prison for his role in anti-U.S. terrorisrn, but he would be given a light sentence. Sayegh agreed to the bargain and was trun-dled off. 116 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES The Almost War, 1996 117 Yet once in the United States, Sayegh refused to cooperate and sought politicai asylum, noting that he would be tortured and then de-capitated if he were returned to Saudi Arabia. Of course, he would bave been decapitated for killing Americans, but nonetheless bis asylum request was placed into the State Department and Justice Department systems for review. When asked about the attack on Khobar and the role of Iran, he clammed up. His government-appointed lawyer moved for bis release, pending the asylum review. The FBI had no evi-dence against him. Sayegh was about to walk out the door of a federai building onto the streets of the United States. Then Freeh carne up with an idea that showed real creativity. He ordered Sayegh detained on the grounds that he was in the United States illegally, even though it was the FBI that had brought him in. Two years later, in 1999, Sayegh was placed into Saudi custody, without ever having testifled before a grand jury or having given one bit of evidence from the time he stepped foot in the United States. FBI agents accompanied him to Saudi Arabia, reminding him throughout the flight that it was not too late to turn the piane around if he would testify. Sayegh ignored them. During the two years of Sayegh's detention in the United States, Freeh sought to understand from Prince Bandar why the FBI was not getting better cooperation from the Saudi government. I learned that Bandar had explained to Freeh that the White House did not want the Saudis to cooperate with Freeh. Clinton, Bandar claimed, did not want the evidence that Iran had bombed an American Air Force base,- Clinton did not want to go to war with Iran. Freeh believed it. It flt with bis own dim view of the President, the man to whom he owed bis rapid el-evation from a low-level federai job in New York. In the White House, we heard that Freeh began to repeat Bandar's explanation for the failed Khobar investigation, telling Congressmen and reporters of the sup-posed Clinton cover-up. Freeh should bave been spending bis time fixing the mess that the FBI had become, an organization of fifty-six princedoms (the flfty-six very independent fėeld offices) without any modern information tech-nology to support them. He might bave spent some time hunting for terrorists in the United States, where al Qaeda and its affiliates had put down roots, where many terrorist organizations were illegally raising money. Instead, he reportedly chose to be chief investigator in high-profiles cases like Khobar, the Atlanta Olympics bombing, and the possible Chinese espionage at our nuclear labs. In ali of those cases, his personal involvement appeared to contribute to the cases going down dark alleys, empty wells. His back channels to Republi-cans in the Congress and to supporters in the media made it impossi-ble for the President to dismiss him without running the risk of making him a martyr of the Republican Right and his firing a cause célebre. In actuality, Clinton had been pursuing the opposite path to what Freeh imagined. In discussions with Saudi officials, the U.S. made very clear at presidential direction that there must be full cooperation, not the rapid decapitation of suspects as had been done in the Riyadh case. Having been advised that the Saudis were reluctant to see the United States start another war in the Persian Gulf by retaliating against Iran, we assured the Saudi leadership that there would be no surprises, that the U.S. would consult fully with the Saudis before re-sponding to whatever it learned about those behind the attack. Clinton was promised that Saudi Arabia would teli us ali it knew and cooperate fully with the FBI. They proceeded to do the exact opposite. Some in the Saudi royal family, like Bandar's father, Minister of Defense Sultan, reportedly welcomed the possibility of a U.S. war with Iran, if America could remove the Tehran regime. Bandar, in private talks with senior American officials in 1996 and 1997, suggested that ali that was stopping the Saudis from implicating Iran was the fear that the American retaliation would be halfhearted. If the U.S. could promise a full-scale fight to the finish, then the Kingdom would probably teli ali that it knew about the Iranian role in the Khobar attack. Sandy Berger told Bandar that the United States could not promise what it would do on the basis of evidence it had not seen. Others in the Saudi royal family thought any war with Iran would end up with a Pyrrhic victory. The U.S.-led war with Iraq had almost bankrupted the oil-rich Saudis. They had spent so much money subsi-dizing U.S. and coalition forces and then buying more arms from America that they had few funds left for anything else and were falling 118 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES The Almost War, 1996 119 behind in payments owed to foreign suppliers. The presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia had been destabilizing. Another war would bring the Americans back in large numbers. The Crown Prince was reportedly of this school of thought. With the King largely incapaci-tated, Crown Prince Abdullah was making the decisions. Without telling the United States, he entered into talks with Iran. After many months, what was agreed between the Saudi and Iran-ian leadership was essentially this: Iran would not sponsor or support terrorism in Saudi Arabia; Saudi Arabia would not permit the United States to launch attacks on Iran from the Kingdom. The White House pressure on the Saudis to cooperate in the inves-tigation continued over three years, with letters from the President and demarches by National Security Advisors Lake and Berger. Vice President Gore demonstrated his famous temper in one such meeting, pounding on the table and asking a Saudi prince what sort of country hid the identity of people who had killed American military personnel stationed in that country defending it and its royal family. When enough time had passed to convince the Saudis that America had cooled down and was not about to bomb Iran, the FBI was fi-nally granted access to the suspects. Pive years after the bombing, indictments were handed down by a U.S. grand jury. While Freeh had been pursuing the Saudis, the White House had been preparing for war. We had convinced Tony Lake that Iran launched the Khobar attack, and CIA soon agreed and suggested that further Iranian-sponsored terrorism against the U.S. was likely. Clin-ton told us that if it carne to using force against Iran, "I don't want any pissant half-measures." Lake convened what he called the Small Group, CIA Director Deutch, Defense Secretary William Perry, Secre-tary of State Christopher, and the Vice President's National Security Advisor, Leon Feurth, to examine options. Separately, Lake sent his deputy, Sandy Berger, and me to see Chairman of the Joint Chiefs John Shalikashvili. The Joint Chiefs had made a practice of never showing their war plans to civilians, despite being hectored to do so over the years by various Pentagon civilians. I knew the number of the war pian for Iran and asked Lake to cali Shali and ask him to brief us on that pian. John Shalikashvili was an unlikely person to be the senior American military officer. Born in Poland to a family from Soviet Geōrgia, he stili had an accent. Out of uniform, he looked like a kindly pediatri-cian. I had flrst heard his name when, in 1991, as Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs, I was asked to set up a meeting between a U.S. commander and an Iraqi commander, in order to teli the Iraqis to clear out of northern Iraq. U.S. forces were about to inter-vene to save the starving Kurds, who were fleeing into snow-covered mountains in Turkey. Looking at a large, detailed map of northern Iraq, I found a town near the Turkish border named Zakho. "Teli the U.S. mission at the U.N. to get the Iraqi ambassador. Teli him to have a flag rank officer meet a U.S. generai in, let's see, how about Zakho at noon the day after tomorrow," I instructed my executive officer, Martin Wellington. "Then teli the Pentagon to send a U.S. generai to Zakho." Wellington returned in a few hours, saying "The Iraqis want to know where in Zakho they are supposed to meet Shalikashvili? " "Meet who? Are the Russians trying to get involved?" I asked Wellington, who assured me that was the name of an American generai. Shali went on to perform heroically in rescuing the Kurds and moving them safely back from Turkey to their homes in Iraq. When it carne time to replace Colin Powell as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 1993, many of us urged the selection of Shali. Unlike Powell, who had bristled at the use of the U.S. military in minor engagements, Shali had thought there was a role for the military in creating stability in situations short of all-out war. In our meeting in the Pentagon in July 1996, Shali was talking about all-out war. The military had a pian for almost any contingency. The pian on the shelf for war with Iran looked like it had been drawn up by Eisenhower. Several groups of Army and Marine divisions would sweep across the country over the course of several months. 'What if we wanted to do something a little bit less first?" Berger asked. "Well," Shali said, reaching for another map, "CENTCOM also "as a pian to bomb their military facilities along the coast: navy ports, i air force bases, missile installations." i 120 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES The Almost War, 1996 121 "Let's suppose for the sake of argument that we did that, bombed their coastal stuff," I asked. "What happens next?" "If you're asking what I personally think happens next, Dick, is that they attack us again, with hidden missiles, with little boats, with terrorist cells going against us and the Saudis and the Bahrainis," Shali mused. "Not good/' Berger said, shaking his head, "tit for tat. Then we have to hit them again." Clinton had told Lake, Berger, and me that he did not want to get into a round of gradually escalating mutuai at-tacks. If we were going to do this, he wanted a massive attack that would frighten the Iranians into inaction. In 1989, the Iranians had stopped the war with Iraq because they said they were convinced that the United States and Iraq together would take actions that threatened the continuance of the Iranian Revolution. Could we get them to think that way again? "What about the old nuclear strategy concept of escalation domi-nance," I asked, "where you hit the guy the flrst time so hard, where he loses some things he really values, and then you teli him if he re-sponds, he will lose everything else he values?" "We could do that," Shali suggested. "Let me talk to the boys down in Tampa." It was clear that he was going to do that even with-out my input. Shali had not liked the choices CENTCOM gave him any more than we did. The Small Group examined what we were now dubbing the Eisen-hower Option and others too. One option was attacking Iranian-sponsored terrorism camps in Lebanon. Another was a Presidential Envoy to Europe and Japan to try again to convince our allies to engagé in an economie boycott, but this time promising a U.S. military re-sponse on Iran if they did not join us in economie action. There was also an intelligence operation option. When the Small Group was pre-sented with the intelligence option, Leon Feurth said, "Well, we ought to do that any way just for the hell of it." The intelligence operation had intrinsic merit, as Feurth had noted, but if combined with a stark private-channel threat to the Iranians, it would give that message greater credibility: We have just demonstrated what we can do to hurt you. If your agents continue to engagé in terrorism against us, we will hurt you in ways that will se-verely undermine your regime. Such a one-two punch would be escalation dominance. If it failed to deter Iran, then we could turn to CENTCOM's new plans. Unfortunately, it would take months to put CIA assets in piace and to choreograph a more or less simultaneous se-ries of intelligence actions around the world. SOMETHING HAPPENED DURING OUR DEBATES about how tO respond to Khobar that almost made that debate a foregone decision for all-out war with Iran. On a hot summer night just three weeks after the bombing of Khobar Towers, the Coast Guard and the Air Porce were conducting a joint nighttime search-and-rescue exercise off Long Island, using cutters and aircraft. At 8:31 many in the exercise saw a huge fėreball in the sky cast of the island, at about flfteen thousand feet. It was TWA 800, a 747 from Kennedy Airport on its way to Paris. There were 230 people on board. Shortly after 9:00 p.m., the CSG met via secure video conference connecting the Situation Room with operations centers at FAA, FBI, Coast Guard, State, CIA, and the Pentagon. Racing in from Virginia, I dreaded what I thought was about to happen. The Eisenhower Option, invading Iran. The description provided by the Coast Guard was graphic. If there had been anyone alive, the fact that there was a rescue operation under way even before the explosion took piace would have meant that the victims might have been saved. But no one was alive. Scores of naked bodies that had been floating on the water were now piling up on the cutters and the dock at the little Coast Guard boat station at nearby Moriches. Their clothes had been blown off by the force of the ex- plosion and their rapid flight through the air. Debris was also every-where. The FAA was at a total loss for an explanation. The flight path and the cockpit Communications were normal, the aircraft had climbed to 17,000 feet, then there was no aircraft. "A lot like Fan Am 103," Irish Flvnn suggested, "but too early to teli." 122 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES TheAlmost War, 1996 123 FBI had mobilized in a big way. John O'Neill reported that hun-dreds of FBI agents from New York City were en route to Kennedy Air-port and to Long Island to establish a crime scene and begin interviewing witnesses. Jim Kallstrom, the head of FBI New York, had ordered a mobile command post to roll out to the Moriches Coast Guard station so that FBI could take charge of the operation. "John, I admire that response, " Irish Flynn began, "but somebody has to point out that the National Transportation Safety Board is in charge of an airline incident." "Not if it's a criminal act, they aren't," O'Neill shot back. "Be-sides, what assets does the NTSB have anyway? " We agreed it would be a parallel investigation, until we knew what happened. We ali thought we knew what had happened and it would end up being an FBI problem. Yet in the days that followed, no intelligence surfaced that helped advance the investigation. Many witnesses described things that sounded like a surface-to-air missile just before the explosion. TWA, having learned from Fan Am's mistakes in the Lockerbie crash, had a pian for dealing with the victims' families. They flew them to Kennedy Airport and put them up in an airport hotel where they could be briefed. Initially, there was nothing to brief them on. Then, during din-ner, a Long Island coroner showed up with pictures of bodies for them to identify. The outraged and distraught families were featured promi-nently on the evening news. Bill Clinton was watching. He called us into the Ovai Office. "I want to go up there tomorrow, to see those families." That did not seem like the best idea I had ever heard. The families were looking to lynch someone. If the president of TWA was unavail-able, they might settle for the President of the United States. I suggested there might be a problem with meeting the families in their current mood. "In addition, you are going to Atlanta tomorrow to the Olympics." That thought frightened me too. "Get a French interpreter too. Many of the families are from France," the President continued as though I had never objected. "l'U go on to Atlanta from Kennedy." As we were leaving the Ovai Office, he had one more thought. "And I want to announce new airline secu-rity measures while l'm at Kennedy. So develop some." We had been working with Evelyn Lieberman, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the White House, and Kitty Higgins, the Cabinet Secretary, on the idea of a Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. A low-cost airline, Valujet, had crashed into the Everglades earlier in the year because of hazardous cargo that should not have been on board and had exploded. Almost two hundred people had died. The airline indus-try needed something to restore confldence in air travel, as industry leaders had been telling Lieberman. From my perspective, a commis-sion would highlight ali the shortcomings in airport security that Irish Flynn and I had been discussing. Now, however, the President wanted some new security measures announced immediately. I called Flynn, "Teli your lawyers they're not going home tonight." In the morning, I flew with the President and First Lady to Kennedy International and briefed them aboard Air Porce One on the an-nouncements he would make. From now on, no one would be allowed on board an aircraft without a government-issued photo ID that matched the name on the ticket. Random passenger and cargo searches would be increased. Cars would temporarily not be permit-ted to park near terminal buildings. Curbside check-in would be temporarily discontinued. Vice President Gore would head a new Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, which would include family members of victims from flights that had crashed. The com-mission would recommend permanent changes to enhance security and safety. Upon arriving at the airport hotel, we went into a ballroom where the families were waiting. There were a lot of them. The President spoke from a small podium, pausing for consecutive translation into French. When he had finished, Mrs. Clinton left to meet with Red Cross and other rescue workers who were gathered nearby. The President, to my chagrin and to the horror of the Secret Service, stepped Ŧito the crowd. He began to gather them in small family groups, pray-uig with them, hugging them, taking pictures with them, looking at the pictures of their now dead loved ones, and listening intently. I 124 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES The Almost Wai, 1996 125 thought he was about to cry. I knew I was, so I slipped out of the ball-room. I opened a door into the next room, which had been set up as a chapel. Alone in the room, on her knees, Mrs. Clinton was praying. I stepped outside. There a cluster of television cameras and reporters waited to interview the irate families. They emerged slowly in small groups, after having had their time with the President. "Did you teli the President how angry you are about the way you've been treated? " one reporter yelled. "The President was so good to come to us," a woman who might bave been a grieving mother replied. "He's so kind." It went on for a long time. When it was over, the President stood at a podium in front of Air Porce One and made the new security an-nouncements. He then left for the Olympics. His statement also made clear that we did not yet know if the crash had been a terrorist act. I knew he thought it was a terrorist act and he was bracing himself for what he would have to do in response. After the blue and white 747 took off for Geōrgia I was left alone on the tarmac. An FBI agent drove me to LaGuardia to catch the shuttle back to Washington. A long line snaked out of the Marine Air Terminal. The guy in front of me ex-plained, "New security stuff. You have to have a photo ID." A few weeks later I returned to LaGuardia with John O'Neill. He had an FBI helicopter waiting next to the shuttle's jetway. O'Neill was lobbying me to get the FBI some money to pay for the enormous oper-ation they were undertaking to recover the wreckage and to recon-struct it. In a giant hanger in Bethpage, Long Island, where NASA had originally built part of the Apollo moon mission, the 747 was being re-built. Rebuilding a 747 that was in thousands of pieces looked like it might he as hard as the moon mission. On the bop out to Bethpage, O'Neill told me that the eyewitness interviews were pointing to a missile attack, a Stinger. I tried to dissuade him from the Stinger theory. "It was at 15,000 feet. No Stinger or any other missile like it can go that high. The dis-tance and angle are too far from the beach, and even from a boat right under the flight path, you can't get that high." John wanted proof from the Pentagon. I agreed to get it. At Bethpage, O'Neill urged me to wander around, talk with the technicians and visit the lab that the Bureau had created on site. It was a strange, quiet piace. Airline seats were being placed around the floor. A window was propped up nearby. One room was filled with luggage. There was a giant tail section. I stopped to ask one technician what he was doing. "Looking to see the pitting and the tear," he explained. "See, a bomb causes a cer-tain type of pitting on the metal nearby, little bumps. And a bomb causes sharp tear lines where the metal separates." "So this is from near where the bomb exploded?" I asked. "Where on the piane was it?" "The explosion was just forward of the middle, below the floor of the passenger compartment, below row 23. But it wasn't a bomb," he added. "See the pitting pattern and the tear. It was a slow, gaseous eruption, from inside." "What's below row 23?" I asked, slowly sensing that this was not what I had thought it was. "The center line fuel tank. It was only half full, might have heated up on the runway and caused a gas cloud inside. Then if a spark, a short circuit..." He indicated an explosion with bis hands. "Yeah, but wait a minute," I said. "How do you get a spark inside a fuel tank?" "These old 747s have an electrical pump inside the center line fuel tank . .. fuel eats away the insulation. If a spark ..." His hands did an explosion again. There was no pitting or tear, no indication of an inbound explosion from a Stinger-like missile and no indication that a bomb had been on board. (The engines, once raised from the ocean, would show nothing to suggest that they were hit by a missile either. A simulation of the crash would later Indicate that what witnesses saw as a streak of a missile going up toward the aircraft was actually a column of jet fuel from the initial explosion and rupture, falling and then catching flre, sending flame ascending prior to a second, larger fuel explosion. The FBI concluded in November 1997 that there was no evidence of a crim-inal act. In May 1998, the NTSB ordered inspection and possible re-Placement of fuel tank wiring insulation on 747s.) That summer day in 1996 I returned to the White House from 126 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES The Almost War, 1996 127 Bethpage and asked to meet with Tony Lake and Leon Panetta. By now they had been conditioned to equate my asking for a meeting with the probability that something was about to explode. I sketched the 747 design and explained about the fuel tank. "Does NTSB agree with you, or does FBI?" Lake asked. "Not yet," I admitted. Nonetheless, we were ali cautiously en-couraged. Unfortunately, the public debate over the incident was clouded by conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are a Constant in counter-terrorism. Conspiracy theorists simultaneously hold two contrary be-liefs: a) that the U.S. government is so incompetent that it can miss explanations that the theorists can uncover, and b) that the U.S. government can keep a big and juicy secret. The flrst belief has some va-lidity. The second idea is pure fantasy. Dismissing conspiracy theories out of hand, however, is dangerous. I learned early on in my government career not to believe that the government experts knew it ali. The list of major intelligence failures and law enforcement errors is far too long to dismiss alternative views. Because I was personally skepti-cal about what agencies told me and always intrigued by the possibil-ity of the unlikely explanation, I encouraged my analysts to bave open minds and perform due diligence on every claim. For that reason we had always looked for Iraqi involvement in the World Trade Center at-tack of 1993, to no avail. For that reason too, in 1996 I asked the Senior Director for Coun-terterrorism at the NSC Staff, Steve Simon, to drive over to the Georgetown townhouse of Pierre Salinger. The former White House Press Secretary had publicly claimed to bave evidence that TWA 800 was shot down. Simon was gone a long time. When he returned, he looked like someone who had been on a far more difficult and frustrai -ing mission than a two-mile drive to a fashionable Washington neigh-borhood. "What the hell happened to you?" I asked after Simon stormed into my office and stood silently steaming, bis arms folded across his chest, and a look of intense disgust on his face. Finally he blurted out, "Plucky Pierre is whacked; he's lost it. The real world is a planet he left long ago." With that Simon spun around and went back to the office that had once belonged to Ollie North N'VV F 14ChTt T ' ^ 3 ^ debrieflng' SaHnger tho^ht • U-S.' Navy F-14 had shot down TWA 800 and he had a set of accompanying fan aS1es. DefenseDepartment, FAA, and FBI evince ali mgly proved that theory wrong. ANOTHER CONSPIRACY THEORY intrigued me because I could never disprove it. The theory seemed unlikely on its face: Ramzi Yousef or Khalid Sheik Muhammad had taught Terry Nichols how to blow up the Oklahoma Federai Building. The problem was that, upon investigation, we established that both Ramzi Yousef and Nichols had been in the city of Cebu on the same days. I had been to Cebu years earlier,- it is on an island in the centrai Philippines. It was a town in which word could bave spread that a locai girl was bringing ber American boy friend home and that the American hated the U.S. government. Yousef and Khalid Sheik Muhammad had gone there to help create an al Qaeda spinoff, a Philippine affiliate chapter, named after a hero of the Afghan war against the Soviets, Abu Sayaff. Could the al Qaeda explosives expert bave been introduced to the angry American who proclaimed his hatred for the U.S. Government? We do not know, de-spite some FBI investigation. We do know that Nichols's bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned. We also know that Nichols continued to cali Cebu long after his wife returned to the United States. The final coincidence is that several al Qaeda operatives had attended a radicai Islamic conference a few years earlier in, of ali places, Oklahoma City. FROM WHERE I SAT, Khobar, TWA 800, and the Atlanta Olympics bomb had given the impression of a renewed wave of terrorism against the United States, and even in the United States, even if some of that impression was mistaken. It was a good time to play the Washington 128 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES The Almost War, 1996 129 game of seeking increased funding. I prepared an Emergency Supple-mental request and took it to White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta. Emergency Supplementals, budget requests sent up to Congress after the President's Budget, were anathema to another part of the White House, the Office of Management and Budget. The normal budget preparation process took months and OMB controlied the out-come. Getting money for counterterrorism was not easy in the normal process because the departments often did not ask for the funds. That meant that the NSC Staff then had to argue that we knew better than the Cabinet members what should be in their budgets. I had done well in pumping up the counterterrorism funds in the last two budgets, but had not gotten everything we needed. When OMB heard I was putting an Emergency request together, they were more than a little unhappy. They knew that if the Administration asked for counterterrorism money in a Presidential election year (which 1996 was), Congress would vote for every penny and more. The new level would then be-come a baseline for the next budget. OMB's chief concern was balanc-ing the budget and driving down the deficit. They had been doing a good job of it. The OMB staff, however, took solace in the fact that Leon Panetta had come to the Chief of Staff 's job from having been Director of OMB. He would see things their way. We met around Panetta's long conference table: the Chief of Staff, me, and six OMB officials. Panetta, doodling on a legai pad and half looking up at the group, asked, "What do you need, Dick?" The OMB staff shuffled papers; that was not the way they wanted to begin the meeting. "Little over a billion." There were botri gasps and groans from OMB. I continued, "Four-thirty for airline security upgrades, four-thirty for force protection for DOD bases like Khobar, some more for FBI, some more for CIA." Panetta had sat through the meetings that summer thinking about war with Iran. OMB had not. Paying to prevent terrorism was a lot more attractive decision than those he had thought we might be faced with. "Okay, sounds good. Let's get it up to the Hill this week. Any-thing else, anyone?" Panetta rose from the table. Meeting over. We had the money. We also did the intelligence operation against the Iranians. Professor Grane Britton's study of revolutions claimed that there were predictable phases in the life of any revolution. When the move-ment became the government, its ardor ultimately cooled, a stage that Britton called Thermidor. We have been waiting since 1979 for Tehran's Thermidor. It has been like waiting for Godot. Following the intelligence operation, and perhaps because of it and the serious U.S. threats, among other reasons, Iran ceased terrorism against the U.S. War with Iran was averted, giving Thermidor more time to arrive, giving the Iranian people more time to take complete contro! of their government. Despite the election of "moderate" President Khatami in 1997, the Iranian security services continued to support escalating terrorism against Israel and allowed al Qaeda safe passage and other support. Clinton had ended 1995, after the Oklahoma City attack, with a speech to the United Nations fiftieth General Assembly focusing on terrorism, the need to end sanctuaries, to go after their money, to deny them access to weapons of mass destruction. In November, he had gone back to Arlington Cemetery to unveil the finished Pan Am 103 cairn and speak again about the continuing threat of terrorism. In Aprii 1996, after Khobar, he gave another address on terrorism at George Washington University, declaring a war on terror before the term became fashionable: "This will be a long, hard struggle. There will be setbacks along the way. But just as no enemy could drive us from the fight to meet our challenges and protect our values in World War II and the Cold War, we will not be driven from the tough fight against terrorism today. Terrorism is the enemy of our generation, and we must prevaii.... But I want to make it clear to the American people that while we can defeat terrorists, it will be a long time before we defeat terrorism. America will remain a target because we are uniquely present in the World, because we act to advance peace and democracy, because we have taken a tougher stand against terrorism, and because we are the most open society on earth. But to change any of that, to pulė our troops back from the world's trouble spots, to turn our backs on those 130 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES taking risks for peace, to weaken our opposition against terrorism, to curtail the freedom that is our birthright would be to give terrorism the victory it must not and will not have." Shortly thereafter, on September 9, 1996, Clinton formally re-quested $1.097 billion for counterterrorism-related activities. One month to the day after he flled the request, the funds were approved by Congress: money for more GIĀ and FBI counterterrorism agents, for Immigration to look for possible terrorists entering the country, for Rick Newcomb at Treasury to hire staff to go after terrorist financing, for the State Department and Department of Defense to harden over-seas facilities, for improving security on federai buildings, for training and exercising counterterrorism disaster response units in major cities, and for weapons of mass destruction terrorism-related programs at the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Energy. The Commission on Aviation Safety and Security (the Gore Commission) requested and got funding for programs involving baggage screening, carry-on luggage checks, passenger proflling, screener training, research on aircraft hardening, and to hire more FAA security agents. The Gore Commission did not, however, agree to recommend that the federai government assume the role of airport passenger and luggage screening. It would continue to be the job of the airlines, which in turn would continue contracting out the mission to firms using low-wage staff. It was clear even at the time that the Gore Commission had not been sufficiently ambitious about the job of airport security and passenger screening. Having the federai government assume the mission of passenger screening would, however, have meant hiring flfty thou-sand new federai employees and spending billions more, at a time when both the Administration and the Congress were taking pride in cutting the number of federai employees and the federai budget. In-stead, the Gore Commission agreed that there would be more testing and inspection of the rent-a-cops involved, new machines to screen bags, and a passenger-proflling System. The events of 1996 (the Valujet crash from an exploding oxygen tank and the TWA crash from a worn wire in a fuel tank) had not provided the politicai circumstances needed for the massive change in how the federai government per- The Almost Wai, 1996 131 formed aviation security. No one in the Administration or Congress would have backed a new 50,000-person Transportation Security Administration. One proposai that would actually have made things worse was narrowly averted. The FBI proposed eliminating the FAA's small Federai Air Marshal program. The Bureau was concerned that if an aircraft were hijacked, any Marshal on board would just get in the way of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, which was trained to seize a hijacked aircraft. The FBI was unable to say how the Marshals posed any greater risk to the Hostage Rescue Team than the hundreds of FBI, Secret Service, Drug Enforcement, State Police, and other law enforcement offi-cers who flew armed every day. Nor did the FBI address the problem that for the Hostage Rescue Team to deal with a hijacked aircraft, the piane had to land first. The Secret Service and Customs had teamed up in Atlanta to provide some rudimentary air defense against an aircraft flying into the Olympic Stadium. They did so again during the subsequent National Security Special Events and they agreed to create a permanent air defense unit to protect Washington. Unfortunately, those two federai law enforcement agencies were housed in the Treasury Department and its leadership did not want to pay for such a mission or run the li-ability risks of shooting down the wrong aircraft. Treasury nixed the air defense unit, and my attempts within the White House to overrule them carne to naught. The idea of aircraft attacking in Washington seemed remote to many people and the risks of shooting down aircraft in a city were thought to be far too high. Moreover, the opponents of our pian argued, the Air Force could always scramble fėghter aircraft to protect Washington if there were a problem. On occasions when aircraft were hijacked (and in one case when we erroneously believed a Northwest flight had been seized), the Air Force did intercept the air-liners with fėghter jets. We succeeded only in getting Secret Service the permission to continue to examine air defense options, including the possibility of placing missile units near the White House. Most people who heard about our efforts to create some air defense System in case terrorists tried to fly aircraft into the Capitol, the White House, or the Pentagon simply thought we were nuts. r Chapter 6 AL QAEDA REVEALED T HE FIRST YEARS OF THE ClINTON ADMINISTRATION had seen a staccato drum roll of terrorism. Eleven "terrorist" events rose to high-level attention in the United States, from the first World Trade Center attack, to the shootings outside CIA headquar-ters, to the Atlanta Olympics bomb, and others. Not one of them had been blamed on anything called al Qaeda by CIA or by FBI. The story of when, and how, the U.S. first began to focus on Al Qaeda has been garbled in various recent accounts. It is time to set the record straight. A man narned Usama bin Laden, a so-called financier, had been re-motely and tentatively related to one or two events but not blamed f or them. Maybe, CIA said, he was connected to a failed attack on Ameri-cans in Yemen in 1992 and perhaps there was some connection be-tween him and Ramzi Yousef, who had attacked the World Trade i Center in 1993 and then plotted in the Philippines. The supposedly known perpetrators of terrorist attacks discussed by the media were an unrelated hodgepodge of apparently containable threats: Iraqi intel-ligence for the attempt on former President Bush, Iranian intelligence ffor the attack on the U.S. Air Porce at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, a Ione wolf from Baluchistan for the attack on the CIA gatehouse, two odd ducks from the American right wing for the Oklahoma City bombing, an Egyptian cleric for the plot to blow up the New York City jtunnels, a wannabe cop turned security guard for the Atlanta Olympics bomb, a crafty Palestinian-Kuwaiti for the World Trade I Center attack, a group of now beheaded Saudis for the bombing of the I U.S. military training mission in Riyadh, and a mystery man in a boat J°ff Long Island or perhaps even a U.S. Navy pilot for the downing of 134 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Al Qaeda Revealed 135 TWA 800. By 1997, the two hostile intelligence services had been checkmated by our bombing of Iraq's service headquarters, and by the intelligence operation against Iran. Most of the other actors were in jail or dead, and the rent-a-cop and U.S. Navy had been exonerated of the Atlanta bomb and the TWA crash. If there was a pattern in ali of this, U.S. intelligence and federai law enforcement did not see it. Nonetheless, this regular diet of destruction and death was enough for us to generate a White House response. The Clinton ad-ministration had begun a steady escalation in counterterrorism fund-ing. For the first time in forty years, an Administration had designed and funded a major program for homeland defense. Clinton had fo-cused on terrorism in a string of major speeches: at the Air Porce Acad-emy, Oklahoma City, George Washington University, Annapolis, twice at the United Nations, twice at the Fan Am 103 cairn, at the White House, at Lyon, France, and Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Most of the media ignored the pattern of the administration's response and warnings. While some federai employees were alarmed at the rise of terrorism and worked diligently against it, others in the FBI, CIA, and the Defense Department did not see the urgency. We now know that the World Trade Center attack in 1993 was an al Qaeda operation, as were the failed plots to attack New York land-marks and U.S. airliners over the Pacific. At the time, however, these events were attributed by FBI and CIA to Ramzi Yousef and the blind sheik, both of whom were behind bars by 1995. Rumors circulated of Arab involvement in the events against American troops in Somalia, but neither the Defense Department nor the CIA could verify them. The details of the attack on the U.S. military training mission in Riyadh were not well established due to the lack of Saudi cooperation. The larger attack in Saudi Arabia at Khobar was conducted by Saudi Hezbollah under the close supervision of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Qods Porce. Iran had also staged terrorist attacks in Is-rael, Bahrain, and Argentina. Outside of New York the attacks in the U.S. were conducted by deranged loners. We had not been able to connect Mir Amai Kansi, the CIA gatehouse shooter, to any known group. The Oklahoma City and Atlanta attacks had been conducted by right-wing Americans, with tenuous ties to homegrown militias and religious extremists. An-other, potentially devastating attack had involved Americans in a right-wing militia planning to explode a gas Storage facility in Fresno. FBI surveillance of the militias had averted that calamity. DESPITE THE LACK OF EVIDENCE of a bin Laden hand in the se-ries of terrorist events, Lake, Berger, Soderberg, and I had persisted in 1993 and 1994 in asking CIA to learn more about the man whose name kept appearing buried in CIA's raw reporting as "terrorist finan-cier Usama bin Laden." It just seemed unlikely to us that this man who had bis hand in so many seemingly unconnected organizations was just a donor, a philanthropist of terror. There seemed to be some organizing force and maybe it was he. He was the one thing that we knew the various terrorist groups had in common. And we kept com-ing back to the incredible notion offered by CIA and FBI that the gang that bombed the World Trade Center had just come together as individuai agents who happened upon one another and decided to go to America to blow things up. In 1991 the Saudi government had given up trying to persuade Usama bin Laden to stop bis criticism of the royal family, its military alliance with the United States, and the continuing presence of U.S. forces. Despite threats to the large, wealthy, and well-connected bin Laden family and construction company empire, Usama kept crossing the line. A frustrated Saudi government told him to leave the country. He chose to go to Sudan, which at the time was the quintessential safe haven for terrorists of ali stripes. The government of Sudan was dominated by the National Islamic Front, whose leader was Hasan al-Turabi. Although allegedly a religious scholar, Turabi preached a particularly violent flavor of hatred. Bin Laden and Turabi had known each other through the growing international network of radicai Is-lamists. When bin Laden carne under pressure from the Saudi government, Turabi invited him to set up shop in Sudan. Bin Laden carne with bis money and bis men, the Arab veterans of the Afghan War. 136 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Al Qaeda Revealed 137 Most of these veterans faced jail cells if they returned home to Egypt, Kuwait, Algiers, or Morocco. As is well known by now, Turabi and bin Laden set up several joint projects: a new construction company, a new investment firm, control of the Sudanese commodities markets, a new airport, a road between the two largest cities, new terrorist training camps, a leather factory, Arab Afghan War veterans housing, arms shipments to Bosnia, sup-port to Egyptian terrorists plotting to overthrow President Mubarak, and development of an indigenous weapons industry (including chem-ical weapons). The two radicai fundamentalists were soul mates, shar-ing a vision of a worldwide struggle to establish a pure Caliphate. The two also socialized together, taking meals at each other's homes. In bin Laden's spare time he went horseback riding with Turabi's son. Ecfore going to Sudan, bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, the site of his now widely acclaimed role in the war against the Soviets. He had found the post-Soviet Afghanistan factionalized by tribal groups unwilling to take his counsel or direction. Although fighting continued there, it was not jihad against non-Muslims. Jihad was available to a limited extent in the Philippines, where Muslims in the south had been fighting the Christian government for centuries. Bin Laden sent key lieutenants there, including his brother-in-law Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, Ramzi Yousef, and Yousef's uncle and mentor, Khalid Sheik Muhammad. Jihad was also available in Russia, where oppressed Muslims took advantage of the fall of the Soviet Union to seek independence for the province of Chechnya. Bin Laden sent Afghan Arab veterans, money, and arms to fellow Saudi ibn Khatab in Chechnya, which seemed like a perfect theater for jihad. The ingredients al Qaeda dreamed of for propagating its move-ment were a Christian government attacking a weaker Muslim re-gion, allowing the new terrorist group to rally jihadists from many countries to come to the aid of the religious brethren. After the suc-cess of the jihad, the Muslim region would become a radicai Islamic state, a breeding ground for more terrorists, a part of the eventual network of Islamic states that would make up the great new Caliphate, or Muslim empire. Bosnia also seemed to fit the bill. The fall of Commu-nism in Yugoslavia had sent the ethnic republics of that artificial union spinning off into their own orbits. The predominately Muslim province Bosnia had long been discriminated against by the Christian center, and Bosnia's attempi at independence in 1991 was brutally countered by the Serb-dominated Belgrade government. Despite an in-ternational outcry, the George H. W. Bush administration had done little to stop the slaughter. General Scowcroft and his dose friend Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger judged the dissolu-tion of Yugoslavia to be a hopeless quagmire best left to the European community to fix. (Eagleburger, a former U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, had almost unerring instincts in foreign policy, but his years in Belgrade made him reluctant to involve the U.S. too deeply in Balkan affairs. He became Secretary of State briefly in 1992 when President Bush virtually ordered a reluctant Jim Baker to manage the Bush reelection campaign.) Unlike the jihad in Chechnya, which Russia tried to keep away from the scrutiny of the world, Bosnia was a center of attention during its struggle with Serbia. It was also a center for scrutiny by West European and American intelligence. What we saw unfold in Bosnia was a guidebook to the bin Laden network, though we didn't recognize it as such at the time. Beginning in 1992, Arabs who had been former Afghan mujahedeen began to arrive. With them carne the arrangers, the money men, logisticians, and "charities." They arranged front companies and banking networks. As they had done in Afghanistan, the Arabs created their own brigade, allegedly part of the Bosnian army but operating on its own. The muj, as they carne to be known, were fierce fėghters against the better-armed Serbs. They also engaged in ghastly torture, murder, and mutilation that seemed excessive even by Balkan standards. The hard-pressed Bosnians clearly wished they could do without these uncontrollable savages, but Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic decided to take aid where he could. America talked a good game, but was doing little to stop the Serbian military. Iran sent guns. Better yet, al Qaeda sent men, trained, tough fighters. European and U.S. intelligence services began to trace the funding and support of the muj to bin Laden in Sudan, and to facilities that had already been established by the muj in Western Europe itself. 138 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Al Qaeda Revealed 139 The ties led to the Finsbury Park Mosque in London, to the Is-lamic Cultural Center in Milan, to the Third World Relief Agency in Vienna. They also led to the Benevolence International Foundation in Chicago and to the International Islamic Relief Organization in Saudi Arabia. These charities were providing funds, jobs, identification pa-pers, visas, offices, and other support to the international brigade of Arab combatants in and around Bosnia. Western governments, includ-ing our own, did not find adequate legai grounds prior to September 11 for closing these organizations. Many of the names that we flrst encountered in Bosnia showed up later in other roles, working for al Qaeda. Among the top jihadists in the Bosnia fighting were: Abu Sulaiman al-Makki, who would later show up standing next to bin Laden in December 2001 as al Qaeda's leader extolled the September 11 attacks; Abu Zubair al-Haili, who would be arrested in Morocco in 2002 plotting to attack U.S. ships in the Straits of Gibraltar; Ali Ayed al-Shamrani, who was arrested in 1995 by Saudi police and quickly beheaded for involvement in attack-ing the U.S. military aid mission in Saudi Arabia; Khalil Deck, who would be arrested in December 1999 for his role in planning attacks on American facilities in Jordan at the Millennium; and Fateh Kamel, who would be fingered as part of the Millennium Plot celi in Canada. Although Western intelligence agencies never labeled the muj activity in Bosnia an al Qaeda jihad, it is now clear that is exactly what it was. Although not seeing it entirely for what it was, the United States did begin to act against the jihadist presence in Bosnia. U.S. officials made clear to Izetbegovic that the jihadists would have to leave, that he was riding a tiger that would swallow him at some point. The Clin-ton administration also made stopping the war in the Balkans its high-est foreign policy priority, introducing U.S. forces and hammering out the Dayton Accord. (That peace agreement took the dedicated and diligent labor of Clinton, Lake, Berger, Albright, Ambassador Dick Holbrook, and General Wes Clark. In its pursuit, Holbrook's team faced personal tragedy. An armored vehicle in their convoy careered off a ridgeline and burst into flames. Clark dragged out some of those inside before the vehicle exploded. Three died, including my NSC Staff colleague Nelson Drew.) A part of that Dayton Accord called for li the eviction of the muj from Bosnia following the end of the fighting. We didn't know they were al Qaeda, but we knew they were international terrorists. Diplomacy and peacekeeping were not the only tools we em-ployed. In 1995 Abu Talal al-Qasimy, the leader of the Egyptian muj in Bosnia, disappeared. He had earlier run an office of the International Islamic Relief Organization in Peshawar on the Pakistan-Afghan bor-der. He had worked with Ayman Zawahiri, leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (later bin Laden's deputy) in exile in Denmark. His disappear-ance was responded to with a car bomb directed at Croatian police. The bomber was a Canadian working for the Vienna-based Third World Relief. As it became clear that diplomacy had not entirely worked, in 1998 French troops raided one of the remaining muj facilities stili op-erating in Bosnia in violation of the Dayton Accord. They arrested eleven, including two Iranian diplomats and nine muj. The facility was filled with explosives, arms, and plans for terrorist attacks on U.S. and other Western troops. Also in 1998 a shipment of C-4 plastic explosives was intercepted en route to an Egyptian Islamic Jihad terrorist celi in Germany. Indications were that the explosives were intended for a round of attacks on U.S. military installations in Germany. The same year, an Egyptian Islamic Jihad celi in nearby Albania disappeared. The group, led by Abu Hajir (Mahmoud Salim), was plotting to blow up the U.S. embassy in Tirana. The United States threatened Bosnian President Izetbegovic with a termination of military aid, then a cessation of ali assistance, if he did not fully and faithfully implement Dayton by evicting the muj. The Bosnians claimed that they had evicted them, except for sixty men who had married Bosnian women and become Bosnian citizens. Not until 2000 in his last week in office, did Izetbegovic expel the remaining muj leader, Abu ai-Ma'ali. (The Netherlands welcomed him.) And Izetbegovic never did expel everyone. Al Qaeda cells in Bosnia were identified by the United States and raided by Bosnian police as late as 2002. Despite Izetbegovic's lapses, Bosnia was largely a failure for al Qaeda. They invested men and money, but were unable to establish a Al Qaeda Revealed 141 140 AGAINST ALI.ENEMIES major, permanent base, unsuccessful at turning another country into part of the Caliphate. They did, however, gain further experience and burrow deeper into Western Europe. For the United States, Bosnia was largely a success. Although late to address the issue, the U.S. was the major reason that the Islamic government in Bosnia survived. The U.S. also blocked Iranian and al Qaeda influence in the country. More-over, CIA was able to cripple parts of the al Qaeda network and un-cover others. Much of what was uncovered was in Europe, where al Qaeda had taken advantage of refugee policies and other forms of in-ternational openness to lay down roots. Although West European gov-ernments knew what was present in their countries, many continued to turn a blind eye to al Qaeda's presence. The Finsbury Park Mosque in London, the Islamic Cultural Center in Milan, and similar gather-ing places for terrorists continued to operate without interference. THROUGHOUT BIN LADEN's YEARS in Sudan, that country served as a base for arms and fėghters going not just to Bosnia, but also to terrorists in Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda, and even Qadhafl's Libya. Sudan's intelligence service and military supported the terrorists. Then in June 1995, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak flew to Ethiopia for a meeting in Addis Ababa of the Organization of African Unity. Aware that Sudanese-based Egyptian terrorists were plotting to kill Mubarak as they had assassinated his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, Mubarak's intelligence advisor insisted on an armored limousine and rooftop snipers along the routes from the airport. Without them, Mubarak would have been dead. Islamic Jihad terrorists attempted to block the road, fire on the limousine, and bomb the motorcade. They narrowly failed. Evidence tied the attack to terrorists in Sudan, and ali of that evėdence indicated support from the Sudanese government. Following that event, Egypt and we (joined by other countries in the region) sought and obtained the United Nations Security Council's sanction on Sudan. Only Libya had previously been subject to U.N. sanctions because of terrorist sponsorship. In the Counterter-rorism Security Group we considered the sanctions a rare diplomatic success. The CSG also considered direct action, examining options for attacks on bin Laden's and/or Turabi's facilities in and around Khartoum. The White House requested the Pentagon to develop plans for a U.S. Special Forces operation against al Qaeda-related facilities in Sudan. Weeks later a Pentagon team briefed National Security Advisor Tony Lake and other Principals in Lake's West Wing office. There were options to raid a terrorist facility that the Pentagon briefing la-beled "Veterans' Housing for Afghan War Fighters," a pian to blow up a bank in downtown Khartoum that was thought to house bin Laden's money, and a few other options. While the Joint Staff dutifully briefed on the pian, they recommended strongly against it. "I can see why," Lake replied after seeing the details. "This isn't stealth. There is noth-ing quiet or covert about this. It's going to war with Sudan." The military briefing leader nodded: "That's what we do, sir. If you want covert, there's the CIA." The CIA, however, had no capabil-ity to stage significant operations against al Qaeda in Sudan, covert or otherwise. The Saudis or perhaps the Egyptians may have been thinking along similar lines about the need for some covert operation against bin Laden in Sudan. Reports reached us from Sudan of two incidents in which someone had attempted to kill bin Laden in Khartoum. We also knew that Mubarak was sending the word to Khartoum to rein in the terrorists, or else. Egypt had moved troops and aircraft to the Sudan border once before and had even used its air force to bomb an anti-Egyptian radio station in Khartoum in the early 1980s. Now, Mubarak was threatening another military buildup. The weak Sudanese military could beat up Christian tribes in the south, but it was no match for the Egyptian military. It was getting a little too hot there for the al Qaeda leader. Afghanistan was looking better to bin Laden in 1996. The puppet government the Soviets had left behind in Kabul had fallen and, after ten years of factional fighting, Pakistan had intervened to stabilize the situation. Hoping to see the return of millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, the Pakistan military intelligence service (ISID) had armed and trained the Taliban religious movement to gain control of much of Afghanistan. The leader of the Taliban was much like Sudan's Turabi, 142 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Al Qaeda Revealed 143 a religious zealot seeking to create theocracy at the point of gun. Like Turabi, Mullah Ornar was known to bin Laden and was eager to bave bis men and money back. Turabi and bin Laden departed as friends, and pledged to continue the struggle and to use Khartoum as a safe haven. In recent years Sudanese intelligence officials and Americans friendly to the Sudan regirne bave invented a fable about bin Laden's flnal days in Khartoum. In the fable the Sudanese government offers to arrest bin Laden and hand him over in chains to FBI agents, but Washington rejects the offer because the Clinton administration does not see bin Laden as important or does and cannot fėnd anywhere to put him on trial. The only slivers of truth in this fable are that a) the Sudanese government was denying its support for terrorism in the wake of the U.N. sanctions, and b) the CSG had initiated informai inquiries with sev-eral nations about incarcerating bin Laden, or putting him on trial. There were no takers. Nonetheless, had we been able to put our hands on him then we would bave gladly done so. U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White in Manhattan could, as the saying goes, "indict a ham sandwich." She certainly could bave obtained an indictment for bin Laden in 1996 had we needed it. In the spring of 1998, she did so. The facts about the supposed Sudanese offer to give us bin Laden are that Turabi was not about to turn over bis partner in terror to us and no real at-tempt to do so ever occurred. Had they wanted to, the National Islamic Front government could bave arrested bin Laden just as they had arrested the legendary terror-ist Ilyich Sānchez ("Carlos the Jackal") when he was uncovered in Khartoum by GIĀ and then by French intelligence in 1994. Carlos, however, was a Ione wolf doing nothing for the NIF. Usama bin Laden was an ideological blood brother, family friend, and benefactor of the NIF leaders. He also had many well-armed followers. Turabi and bin Laden decided to relocate al Qaeda's leadership to Afghanistan to reduce international pressure on the NIF and to help the Taliban finish putting another nation into the Caliphate. Sudan, they thought, was already well on the path. (Turabi was later jailed by the Sudanese military in 2002 and the NIF largely thrown out of government positions.) The CSG did not, however, stop considering U.S. military or CIA raids into Khartoum. Following bin Laden's departure in 1996, a series of intelligence reports established that a bin Laden associate named Abu Hafs al-Muratani was in Khartoum engaged in supporting terror-ist cells elsewhere. The reports became so specific that we knew his hotel and the room in the hotel he was using. I referred the reports to National Security Advisor Sandy Berger with a recommendation that we snatch the terrorist. My CSG colleagues from every agency con-curred. Snatches, or more properly "extraordinary renditions," were oper-ations to apprehend terrorists abroad, usually without the knowledge of and almost always without public acknowledgment of the host government. One terrorist snatch had been conducted in the Reagan administration. Fawaz Yunis, who had participated in a hijacking of a Jordanian aircraft in 1985 in which three Americans were killed, was lured to a boat off the Lebanese shore and then grabbed by FBI agents and Navy SEALs. By the mid-1990s these snatches were becoming routine CSG activity. Sometimes FBI arrest teams, sometimes CIA personnel, had been regularly dragging terrorists back to stand trial in the United States or flying them to incarceration in other countries. Ali but one of the World Trade Center attackers from 1993 had been found and brought to New York. Nonetheless, the proposed snatch in Khartoum went nowhere. Several meetings were held in the White House West Wing with Berger demanding the snatch. The Joint Staff had an answer that they used whenever asked to do something that they did not want to do: • it would take a very large force,- • the operation was risky and might fail, with U.S. forces caught and killed, embarrassing the President; • their "professional military opinion" was not to do it; • but, of course, they would do it if they received orders to do so in writing from the President of the United States; • 144 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Al Qaeda Revealed 145 • and, by the way, military lawyers said it would be a violation of international law. Fletcher School professor Richard Shultz carne to similar conclusions about how the U.S. military would refuse to flght terrorism prior to September 11. His study is summarized in the article "Show Stop-pers" in the January 21, 2004 Weekly Standard. The first time I had proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to ex-plain how it violated international law. Clinton had seemed to be sid-ing with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the argu-ments on both sides for Gore: Lloyd says this. Dick says that. Gore laughed and said, "That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab bis ass." We tried, but failed. We learned that often things change by the time you can get a snatch team in piace. Sometimes in-telligence is wrong. Some governments cooperate with the terrorists. It was worth trying, however, because often enough we succeeded. But in the 1996 discussion of Sudan, Berger turned to George Tenet, asking if CIA could snatch the man in the Khartoum hotel room. Tenet responded that they had no capability to do that in that hostile environment, nor could they find a friendly intelligence ser-vice that could (or would) do it. Mike Sheehan, the Army Special Forces colonel who had worked with me on terrorism, Somalia, and Haiti, offered to go to Khartoum and do the snatch himself. He was only half joking. "This guy doesn't even bave bodyguards. Hit him over the head and throw him in a Chevy Suburban." To the complete frustration of Berger, Albright, and me, the CIA finally admitted it could do nothing to effect a snatch in Khartoum. DOD was only able to generate options, once again, that looked like going to war with Sudan. Two years later Sheehan was vis-iting the headquarters of the Joint Special Operations Command (which includes Delta Porce) at Fort Bragg. He struck up a conversa-tion with two fellow Green Berets. They told each other stories about Operations they had done and about "the ones that got away," mis-sions planned but not carried out. The two told Sheehan about the pian they had to snatch an al Qaeda leader in a Khartoum hotel. "Woulda been so sweet. Six guys. Two cars. In and out. Easy egress across the border and fly out, low-risk. " "Really?" Sheehan asked, pretending not to know about the proposed snatch. "What happened? Why didn't you get to do it?" "Fuckin' White House," the Green Beret said in disgust. "Clinton said no." "How do you know that?" Mike innocently inquired. "Pentagon told us ali about it." Whether it was catching war criminals in Yugoslavia or terrorists in Africa and the Middle East, it was the same story. The White House wanted action. The senior military did not and made it almost impos-sible for the President to overcome their objections. When in 1993 the White House had leaned on the military to snatch Aideed in Somalia, they had bobbled the operation and blamed the White House in off-the-record conversations with reporters and Congressmen. What White House advisor would want a repeat of that? Often though, we learned, senior military officers let the word spread down the ranks that the politicians in the White House were the ones reluctant to act. The fact is, President Clinton approved every snatch that he was asked to review. Every snatch CIA, Justice, or Defense proposed dur-ing my tenure as CSG chairman, from 1992 to 2001, was approved. Skipping ahead in the chronology, I should mention that CIA was able to operate near Khartoum in 1998. Reports had been reaching us for several years that Sudan sought to make chemical weapons. The reports from several sources, including UNSCOM, indicated that Sudan was making chemical bombs and artillery shells. There were few places in Sudan where the needed chemicals could be created. One was a chemical plant at Shifa. The intelligence reports indicated that the plant had benefited from investment by the Sudan Military Indus-try Commission, which in turn had received investments by bin Laden. Bin Laden had created an investment company, Taba Investments, upon moving to Khartoum. Separately, there were numerous 146 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Al Qaeda Revealed 147 sources reporting that bin Laden was seeking chemical weapons, even nuclear weapons. Prior to the reports of the chemical plant in Sudan, it was not clear from where he would obtain the weapons. Satellite photography of Shif a revealed a plant like many others in the world, capable of compounding a variety of chemicals both innocent and military. In 1991 and 1992,1 had worked with Arms Contro! Director Ron Lehman to write an international chemical ban with an inspection procedure that could verify compliance. In the process of that negotiation I had literally crawled through chemical plants and learned a lot from chemical engineers. In the international negotiation that followed in 1992, the nations participating had agreed that many chemical plants were capable of making nerve agent one day and paint, fertilizer, or medicine the next. The Chemical Weapons Convention Treaty, therefore, provided for international inspection of "innocent" chemical plants to insure they had not recently been used to make weapons material. The Treaty provided that the international inspectors could take soil samples from inside and outside the plants in order to do trace analysis. Sudan had refused to sign the Treaty. There were also two other facilities near Shifa. One was a high-walled, heavily secured set of buildings that human sources said was a weapons-related facility. The other was an artillery shell Storage site. It was very plausible that chemical weapons precursor compounds were created at Shifa occasionally, and moved to the nearby develop-ment site for mixing into lethal agents and insertion into artillery shells, which were then moved to the Storage dump down the road. CIA sought to determine whether the Shifa plant might be spend-ing some of its time making lethal gas for weapons. To do so, CIA sent an agent to Khartoum to collect trace material that would have floated away from the plants in the air or in liquid runoff. It was a risky mis-sion to drive up to the plant and scoop up soil samples, but it was suc-cessfully conducted. The samples were then taken to an independent, nongovernmental analysis laboratory with a well-established reputa-tion for reliability. Their tests revealed a chemical substance known as EMPTA. EMPTA is a compound that had been used as a prime ingredient in Iraqi nerve gas. It had no other known use, nor had any other nation employed EMPTA to our knowledge for any purpose. What was an Iraqi chemical weapons agent doing in Sudan? UNSCOM and other U.S. government sources had claimed that the Iraqis were working on something at a facility near Shifa. Could Sudan, using bin Laden's money, have hired some Iraqis to make chemical weapons? It seemed chillingly possible. The Khartoum regime was, after ali, engaged in a campaign that seemed intended to eradicate the blacks who lived in southern Sudan. Numerous international relief organizations had provided evidence of such outrages as bombing feeding stations. Chemical weapons would allow Khartoum to accelerate the killing and to chase the survivors out of the country. It was also likely that bin Laden's friends in the Khartoum regime might provide the terrorists with some of the chemical weapons production. In 2001 during questioning conducted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Pat Fitzgerald, al Qaeda operative Jamal al-Fadl matter-of-factly de-scribed his role in traveling to Sudan for his terrorist organization. He said that his assignment was to follow the work al Qaeda had under way in Khartoum to develop chemical weapons. DURINO HIS FIRST FOUR YEARS IN SUDAN, bin Laden had kept in the shadows, not overtly confronting the U.S. There were signs in 1995 of his money and support in Bosnia, Chechnya, the Philippines, Egypt, Morocco, and in Europe. Rumors connected him to attacks in New York, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. But they were only rumors. He might know Khalid Sheik Muhammad, who might be the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, who attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 and had tried to attack 747s over the Pacific. Perhaps one of bin Laden's brothers-in-law, Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, moved money to terrorist groups like the bag carrier in the 1950s television show The Millionaiie. fin January 1995, Khalifa was detained by U.S. Customs at San Francisco International. Jim Reynolds at the Justice Department tried hard, at my request, to find grounds to indict Khalifa in connection with the World Trade Center attack or any other 148 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Al Qaeda Revealed 149 crime. Unfortunately, the Justice Department could not generate an indictment and Khalifa was extradited to Jordan, where he was subse-quently released for lack of evidence there too.) In the summer of 1995, bin Laden had written a public letter to Saudi King Fahd, denouncing the U.S. troop presence. CIA, under White House pressure and with the support of staff in its Counter-terrorism Center, began to develop plans for a station dedicated to in-vestigating what they now agreed was a "bin Laden network." Not wanting to risk putting the station in Khartoum, where bin Laden was, they began to develop a proposai for an innovation, a "virtual station." The virtual station would be structured like an overseas office. Physically, it would not even be in CIA headquarters. Then in the spring of 1996, two chess pieces moved. Bin Laden flew to Afghanistan, closing some of his Khartoum companies and houses. After he left, Jamal al-Fadl, who had been privy to much of the "bin Laden network" based in Sudan, sought U.S. protection. He had been siphoning off funds and feared al Qaeda would kill him. Fadl's in-terrogation helped the new virtual station discover the size and shape of the network. What they found was widespread and active, with a presence through affiliate groups or sleeper cells in over flfty coun-tries. Ramzi Yousef and the blind sheik had been part of it. Bin Laden was not just its fmancier, he was its mastermind. The network also had a name, we learned: the foundation or base, as in the foundation of a building. Usama bin Laden, son of a building contractor, had called his terrorist network by an Arabie word, al Qaeda. It was the flrst piece, the necessary base for the edifice that would be a global theocracy, the great Caliphate. The Taliban welcomed bin Laden enthusiastically back to Afghanistan. He had been funding terrorist training camps there while in Sudan. Fighters caught in Chechnya and Bosnia had been taught at these facilities. Now the camps expanded with new recruits from across the Islamic world. Those who did well graduated either to the 55th Brigade, a unit bin Laden created to help the Taliban fight its Afghan opponents, or were dispatched to sleeper cells around the world. By 1996 and 1997 the CSG was developing plans to snatch bin Laden from Afghanistan. One pian called for an Afghan snatch team to drive a bound-and-gagged bin Laden to a dirt strip on which a CIA-owned aircraft would briefly land and then head back out of Afghanistan, flying low to evade radar. Although normally reluctant to operate inside Afghanistan, CIA made an exception long enough to inspect the dirt strip to see if it could support the aircraft's landing, turn-around, and takeoff. The unmarked aircraft was flown into posi-tion in a nearby country. The flaw that developed in the snatch was our inability to know when it would occur. If the grab would take piace when the opportu-nity arrived and not at a time of our choosing, the snatch team would have to hold him for almost a day until the aircraft arrived. During that day, bin Laden's men and the Taliban would be hunting for him. The chances of them detecting the aircraft, and perhaps capturing CIA staff, were large. A variation on the pian was developed. The Afghan snatch team would not just wait for bin Laden to drive by, they would go pick him up at his "farm" at the same time the CIA aircraft was flying into the country. It sounded good. I asked to see photographs and maps. Tarnak farm looked more like Gunga Din's fort than Dorothy's farm in The Wizard of Oz. It certainly wasn't in Kansas. The farm complex was several dozen houses surrounded by a twelve-foot wall. At each corner of the wall there was a machine gun nest. Parked out-side were two T-55 tanks. A frontal assault by the Afghan team would probably have resulted in the deaths of the few assets the CIA had in that country. The CSG unanimously decided against an assault. (One of the many urban legends about al Qaeda that emerged after Septem-ber 11 was that Attorney General Janet Reno had vetoed the opera-tion. Not true. George Tenet and I did, to avoid getting ali of our Afghan assets killed for nothing.) Instead, the CIA's Afghans would look for another way to get the leader of al Qaeda. ALTHOUGH WE FAILED TO SNATCH BIN LADEN, the CIA did succeed in another revenge snatch in 1997. Ever since Mir Amai Kansi •„•*ŧ(•• 150 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Al Qaeda Revealed 151 had shot Agency employees on the doorstep of the Agency, the GIĀ had been promising revenge for the victims' families. Within a day of the shooting they had known Kansi's name. Yet he had calmly boarded a flight back to Pakistan, and no one stopped him. No one from GIĀ was waiting for him when he arrived in Pakistan. Like the much more significant Usama bin Laden, Kansi was the black sheep of a large and wealthy family. Although troubled by what he had done, the Kansis bought protection for Mir Amai from an Afghan warlord. For four years GIĀ plotted, trying various schemes to track Kansi precisely and to snatch him. Despite real creativity, none of the plans worked. What was notable about the plans, however, was that in none of them did GIĀ decide simply to inserė a GIĀ or Defense Department team into the Afghan fort in which Kansi was hiding out. Once again, GIĀ was reluctant to put its personnel into Afghanistan. After a while, however, Kansi started to assume that GIĀ had forgotten about him. He began to make trips into Pakistan. People in Pakistan talked. Fi-nally, GIĀ lured Kansi to a meeting, a supposed business deal about gunrunning. The CSG went over the snatch pian in detail. We agreed that the suspect should be handed over to the Fairfax, Virginia, police for prosecution by the Commonwealth's Attorney. It would be faster than the federai courts. Then we waited for the night of the meeting. The GIĀ parking lot was almost empty that weekend. The front door was locked. I went around and entered by a side door with a sleepy guard. Instead of going to the Operations Center, with its War Room fiat screens, I went to the Counterterrorism Center's communi-cations room, a darkened closet filled with racks of electronics. There, a small group huddled around a radio console. It was a scene reminis-cent of London calling a French underground unit in World War II. The radio man was instead calling a Chevy Suburban that had pulled up outside a Chinese restaurant and hotel in a Pakistani city not far from the Afghan border. In the Suburban a joint CIA-FBI team was getting ready for the morning cali to prayer. Our source had placed Mir Amai Kansi on the third floor of the hotel. Kansi expected a knock on the door around 4:00 a.m., from a friend who would accompany him to the mosque. We expected some-thing else. The clock in the radio room rolled passed 4:00 a.m. Pakistani time. The radio remained silent. I looked around in the red-lighted room and noticed George Tenet in a sweat suit chomping a cigar. George had suffered a mild heart attack when we worked together at the White House, thus ending our occasionai escapes to walk together to a nearby cigar store. Now, he just chewed on them. His deputy, General John Gordon, hovered by the door. Although Gordon had learned patience commanding a wing of MX missiles, where there never was any real action (thank God), his patience was obviously wearing thin. With tension building in the crowded, overheated room, Tenet could not take it anymore: "Where the shit are they? Ask them where they are, it's 4:15 there." "Red Rover, Red Rover, come in, over." The radio operator tried to hail the fleld team. Nothing. By 4:30 people were pacing in the corridor outside the radio room. Finally, the radio crackled. "Base, base, this is Red Rover. The package is aloft. Repeat, the package is aloft." Instantly champagne bottles ap-peared from under seats and were popped amid cheers and embraces. Tenet lit the cigar, looked at me, and said, "Don't teli my wife." Kansi had answered the knock on the door and suddenly found himself lying facedown on the floor of his small room, hearing not the cali to prayer but the Miranda rights statement from the FBI. Within two minutes the Suburban was whipping through the empty city streets to the airport, where a C-12 waited, engines running. For four years the Agency had tried everything it knew to get one man, one man who had embarrassed them by attacking their very headquarters and killing their own people. Now it had flnally partially erased the embarrassment. There was a light ground fog as I left the building. As I drove out the gate onto Route 123, I saw the crosses by the road where they had died. It would be some solace to their families that the killer was now in custody and would probably die on Virginia's death row. George Tenet was calling the families now as I drove home. It had meant a lot to the Agency to get this guy, but it had taken a very long time even when the entire Agency was moti-vated. 152 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Al Qaeda Revealed 153 THE KANSI SNATCH made the Agency feel good about itself, four years after he had attacked its headquarters. In addition to Kansi, the CSG was routinely reviewing, arranging, and implementing rendi-tions of terrorists to the United States and elsewhere. Unfortunately, we failed in another attempted snatch, one that might bave prevented 9/11. Ali but one of those directly involved in the World Trade Center attack in 1993 had been brought back to the U.S. The ringleader was Ramzi Yousef, who was linked to another al Qaeda operative, Khalid Sheik Muhammad. In 1996 a New York federai grand jury had indicted Muhammad for supporting that plot from overseas, and for indirect in-volvement in the pian to attack 747s over the Pacific. The FBI told the CSG that he was the uncle of Yousef, but they portrayed Yousef as the mastermind and Muhammad as merely the bad influence in bis life. Stili, we wanted Muhammad. Within a year of the indictment, we learned that Khalid Sheik Muhammad was located in Doha, Qatar, where he allegedly worked in the Water Ministry. Having spent some time in Qatar, I was not eager to allow the locai police to try to arrest him. I remembered them as a comedy act. In 1991, Qatari police cars that were escorting my motorcade managed to crash into each other in a city with alrnost no traffic. I also recalled their duplicity in 1990 over how they had obtained Stinger missiles (they had bought them in Afghanistan, but refused to admit it) and their later attempts to engagé in diplomacy with Iran at a time when Tehran was engaged in anti-U.S. operations throughout the region. Given ali of that, I wanted to know if we could perform the rendition without the knowledge of the Qatari government. Unfortunately, both the CIA and FBI claimed to bave no capability to operate a covert snatch in Qatar. The Defense Department's plans for their version of a snatch, as usuai, involved a force more appropriate for conquering the entire nation than for arresting one man. Our ambassador to Qatar was a professional, and an alumnus of the CSG, Patrick Theros. I asked Theros if it would be possible for him to go to the Chamberlain, the Emir's Minister of Palace Affairs, and obtain the Emir's approvai for a snatch, without that word getting to anyone else. He thought it could be done, but gave no guarantee. Nonetheless, with no other option available, the CSG agreed to try an approach in which an FBI arrest team would go in with permission, with a small number of senior Qatari security officials accompanying them to the arrest. Despite Qatari assurances that only a few senior officials knew about our pian, Khalid Sheik Muhammad learned of it and fled the country ahead of the FBI arrest team's arrivai. We were, of course, out-raged at Qatari security and assumed the leak carne from within the palace. One report said that Khalid Sheik Muhammad had fled the country on a passport provided by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Unfortunately, the CSG knew much less than the full story. Khalid Sheik Muhammad was not merely a bad influence on bis mastermind nephew, it was the uncle who was the terrorist mastermind. Not only did he pian the World Trade Center attack in 1993 and the 747 plot in 1995, Khalid Sheik Muhammad was a close associate of bin Laden and al Qaeda's chief operational leader. Had the CSG been told that, the NSC would bave insisted on a CIA or military snatch team, despite their protestation of inability. Had we been told of Khalid Sheik Muhammad's role even after he escaped, we would bave insisted on an all-out effort to find him. Instead, the role of this key al Qaeda figure did not become clear to CIA or FBI until after the September 11 at-tacks. Other countries also reportedly failed to cooperate in snatches. Adam Garfinkle in the Spring 2002 National Interest reported that in 1997 Imad Mugniyah was the subject of a U.S. arrest attempi when he was aboard an aircraft scheduled to land in Saudi Arabia, but the Saudi government waved the aircraft off rather than cooperate with the U.S. in apprehending the Hezbollah leader." As 1998 DAWNED, al Qaeda grew stronger thanks to a merger with Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The FBI had uncovered the role of Egyptian Sheik Abdul Rahman in plans to commit terrorism in New York in 1993. By 1996, he was sentenced to life in prison in the United States. 154 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES His friends, including Usama bin Laden and Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader Ayman Zawahiri, had planned revenge and plotted to gain his release. In 1997, they struck tourists at Luxor, Egypt, killing sixty-two. Egyptian police found bodies slit open, stuffed with leaflets de-manding the release of the blind sheik. Faced with the collapse of the tourism industry, Egypt cracked down against the jihadists with even greater ferocity than it had employed after the attempt on President Mubarak's life in Ethiopia. Weakened, Egyptian Islamic Jihad grew closer to bin Laden. The blind sheik's son attached himself to bin Laden and promised revenge on the United States. In February 1998, EIJ and al Qaeda were among several groups that jointly issued a declaration of war against Egypt, the United States, and other governments. It did not come as a shock to us. We had considered ourselves at war with al Qaeda even before we knew its name or its reach. We had been working with friendly governments for at least three years to identify and destroy sleeper cells in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. We had arranged snatches of many al Qaeda operatives and had been planning to snatch bin Laden himself. In the spring of 1998, bin Laden was indicted by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White's federai grand jury. The CSG wanted to add bin Laden to our list of snatched terrorists. In early 1998, we wanted to go on the offensive against al Qaeda. We also wanted to begin a major program to protect the homeland against ter-rorism, whether from al Qaeda or other groups. The events of 1998 would make it easier to persuade the Congress and the media that we needed to do both. Chapter 7 BEGINNING HOMELAND PROTECTION w HEN THE SITUATION RooM called me on a Sunday night in 1995 with the word that something had happened in Tokyo, the flrst reports had indicated chemical weapons. First reports are usu-ally wrong, but I drove in to the Situation Room just in case. The media accounts were pretty convincing that some chemical weapon had been released by somebody. My calls to GIĀ, FBI, and State told me nothing more than CNN had. So I called the Department of Health and Human Services. I had earlier formed an interagency working group on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Two people had stood out as can-do activists who were as worried as I was at the possibility of Ramzi Yousef's mysterious organization getting its hands on a chemical weapon or a nuclear device. One was Lisa Gordon-Hagerty at the Department of Energy. She had linked up the scientists at the depart-ment's nuclear labs with the commandos of the Joint Special Operations Command and was conducting fleld exercises on what you do when you have to get a nuclear bomb away from terrorists. The other impressive member of the group was Frank Young at the Public Health Service of HHS. The Public Health Service is a bizarre civilian-military hybrid. Part of HHS, the officers of the Public Health Service wear Navy uniforms and use Navy ranks. So Frank was not just a doctor, he was also an admiral. In his spare time, he was a Protestant minister. Frank had created a nationwide network of chemical and biological weapons experts and medicai personnel to investi- 156 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Beginning Homeland Protection 157 gate whether any unusual medicai reports that might come in from time to time were actually reflecting covert terrorist use of chemical or biological weapons. On that Sunday night in March 1995,1 called Frank from the Situ-ation Room. "Admiral, Doctor, Reverend, Frank," I began. "Some-thing funny going on in Tokyo." "From the press reports it sounds like a nerve agent gas was re-leased." Frank replied. "Not the kind of thing that the Japanese mili-tary has. If it's ali right, I am putting together a team to fly out there as soon as possible and help the Japanese figure it out. l'm also calling my Japanese counterparts. It's Monday there now." "Sounds good, Frank. I will teli State to get Embassy Tokyo to help your team. See what you can find out and we will bave a CSG in the morning." That Monday morning was the first time Health and Human Services had ever attended a meeting of the core Counter-terrorism Security Group in the Situation Room. Frank Young, sitting at the opposite end of the table from the chair, in his admiral's uniform, had a full report ready: "The agent em-ployed was sarin nerve gas, but apparently not at full military dose. The group responsible was a religious cult known as the Aum Shin-rikyo." By now I had enough experience with CIA and FBI to doubt that they would ever bave even heard of the Aum. I was not disappointed. Except for press reports from the previous twelve hours, they had nothing in their fėles on the Aum. I had come to respect the new FBI representative on the CSG, John O'Neill. He had worked closely with me to coordinate the previous month's arrest of Ramzi Yousef. That arrest occurred during O'Neill's first week on the job, after arriv-ing in Washington from an organized crime assignment in Chicago. He had worked straight through for days without going home and he had thought of every detail. O'Neill was obviously very bright and activist, but also playful. Like me, he was from a working-class background and he tended to straight talk that some found abrasive. I decided to push a little to see how he'd respond. "How can you be so sure there are no Aum bere, John, just because you don't bave an FBI file on them? Did you look them up in the Manhattan phone hook to see if they're there?" "You serious? " O'Neill asked, not sure whether I was being funny. When I assured him that I meant it, he directed his deputy to leave the conf erence room and cali FBI New York. A while later the FBI agent re-turned to the room and handed O'Neill a note. O'Neill glanced at it and said, "Fuck. They're in the phone book, on East 48th Street at Fifth." Everyone in that CSG meeting had the same thought at the same moment: sarin in the New York City subway. O'Neill called for backup. "We need some chemical weapons decon guys up there quick. Some guys who can detect and diagnose chemicals. The Army." The Pentagon representatives at the meeting were not keen on the idea of olive green Army trucks rumbling through Midtown, disgorg-ing troops in space suits while the lunch crowd at Rockefeller Center watched in growing panie. Besides, the nearest chemical unit was in Maryland, four hours down Interstate 95. The Pentagon guys also raised the same mantra in Latin that Defense Department representa-tives chanted whenever asked to do something in the United States, posse comitatus. The phrase refers to an 1876 law, passed at the end of Reconstruction, that prohibited federai military authorities from ex-ercising civilian police powers inside the United States (as they had in the occupied Confederacy from 1865 to 1876). The law contains a clause allowing the President to waive it in an emergency. I had drafted a fill-in-the-blanks waiver in my desk drawer, unsigned. I did not bave to deploy the posse comitatus waiver. O'Neill per-suaded the Pentagon to stage the unit to a National Guard armory in Manhattan, while the U.S. Attorney tried to develop enough of a story to get a search warrant. In the meantime, a "fire marshal" conducted a surprise inspection of the building. He found that the Aum were mov-ing out, carrying boxes into a rental van. An FBI surveillance car fol-lowed the van out onto Fifth Avenue for several blocks, but then lost the truck in Midtown traffic. When that news got to us in the Situation Room, it looked like O'Neill's veins were going to pop: chemical weapons lost in Manhattan, on his watch. I thought I should go see the National Security Advisor. 158 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Beginniag Homeland Protection 159 While Tony Lake and I were contemplating the mechanics of evac-uating large portions of New York, O'Neill called. They had the van. They had a warrant. They had found nothing but boxes of books. The office on 48th Street was clean. We later learned that the Aum had made not only sarin nerve gas, but also an anthrax weapon. They had spray ed their homemade an-thrax at a U.S. military facility in Japan, but they had the spore size wrong and the attack failed to sicken anyone. It also failed to be no-ticed. I had insisted that the Presidential Decision Directive on terror-ism issued in 1995 address the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on chemical, biological, or nuclear materials. It was now the Presidenti policy that there was no higher priority than the preven-tion of such acquisition, or if terrorists were actually found to have such weapons, no greater priority than removing that capability. The policy also called for planning on how to handle a situation in which such weapons were used. In 1996, however, we had no capability to deal with a chemical or biological weapon being used in the United States. The old Cold War-era Civil Defense program had withered and died even before the Cold War itself had ended. Senators Sam Nunn, Dick Lugar, and Pete Domenici had been focusing on the disposition of Soviet nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, now that the Soviet Union had dis-solved. The three senators had sponsored money to account for, se-cure, and destroy the weapons. They had sought to fund alternative employment for the Soviet weapons scientists. Finally, they put aside a small amount of federai dollars to begin to train emergency respon-ders in big U.S. cities to deal with such weapons, just in case some fell into the wrong hands and ended up bere. The three senators' program, my own interest, and Bill Clinton's reading habits carne together to begin to create some domestic pre-paredness capability. My interest stemmed from experiences in the Cold War and the Gulf War. In the last year of the Cold War, as an Assistant Secretary of State, I was visited by a State Department Intelligence Bureau officer carrying a locked case, the kind approved by CIA for carrying the most sensitive intelligence documents. I did not know what I was aboutto read, only that I was to be one of flve people in the State Department allowed to read it. Inside the bag was the debriefing of a senior Soviet officiai who had defected to the British. He told about something that the U.S. intelligence community had believed did not exist, a massive Soviet program to develop and deploy biological weapons. The Soviet Union, the United States, and other nations had signed a treaty outlawing biological weapons in 1973. We had proceededto destroy ours. The Soviet Union had claimed to have done the sartie. They had lied. Not only had they not destroyed their bioweapons program, they had expanded it and developed weapons with truly borrirle capability. Their labs had worked on Marburg and Eboia, strains that made the victim bleed to death from every oriflce and organ. They had perfected bombs, artillery shells, and other weapons to disperse such agents as anthrax, botulinum, smallpox, and antibiotic-resistant strains of the plague. Then they had actually filled weapons with these agents and stockpiled them. Over 100,000 Soviets were employed in the secret program at facilities throughout the Soviet Union. More-over, the friendly senior Soviet officials with whom we were negotiat-ing arms control treaties had known ali about the illegai program and the efforts to keep it secret from us. It was not the kind of news that any of us had wanted to bear, but it was definitely not what Secretary of State Jim Baker needed. Baker had told the Pentagon, the Congress, and the President that we could safely sign several major arms control agreements with the Soviets. He had said it was highly unlikely that these Soviet leaders wouldrisk getting caught violating an international arms control agreement and, moreover, if they did, U.S. intelligence would catch a violation using "national technical means." Now he was faced with the reality that the same Soviets had risked getting caught in a big violation and that U.S. "national technical means" had failed to flnd a major nationwide program. Were it not for one senior Soviet scientisti faith in British intelligence, we would not have known about an enormous biological weapons threat. Baker's flrst reaction had been to keep the knowledge about the Soviet program restricted, until he could get the Soviet leadership to 160 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Beginning Homeland Piotection 161 admit it existed and promise to destroy the program in front of U.S. observers. Unfortunately, the Soviets were not quite so ready to cooperate when confronted. They claimed that the U.S. must have such a program too. They wanted to inspect our facilities. Discussions went on for some time until the Soviets did agree to destroy everything and permit limited reciprocai "visits," but I was never satisfied that the Soviets had given us the two things we really needed: fėrst, a complete list of everything they had developed (and destroyed), and second, the antidotes they had developed to whatever new strains of disease had festered up in their pots. Two years later, when the First Gulf War was looming after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, I had been asked to develop our policy for dealing with Iraqi chemical and other "special" weapons. The CIA knew Iraq had chemical weapons then; they had used them by the ton on the Iranians. Iraq was one of two dozen nations that the U.S. gov-ernment said had nuclear, chemical, and/or biological weapons. With my British counterparts in a joint U.K.-U.S. working group in the fall of 1990, we tried to assess how many chemical-protective suits and gas masks we needed for our troops, and for the several hun-dred thousand other allied troops from over thirty countries, not to mention the civilians in the region, that could be hit by Iraqi Scud missiles. It was a hopeless task. There were probably not enough pro-tective suits in the world to cover the population at risk. We agreed to recommend that "nonessential" British and American civilians fly home. My Deputy, Bill Rope, doggedly tried to steal masks from state-side military units to send to U.S. embassies' staffs. Years before, Is-rael had equipped its entire population with gas masks and had hundreds of thousands of special medicine kits in the hands of its citi-zens. We weren't even prepared to do that for our armed forces. The policy on inoculating U.S. and U.K. front-line troops was also problematic. There was no agreement about which diseases troops should be vaccinated against, and there were concerns about the side effects of some medicines. I asked to be briefed by the Army's experts from Fort Dietrich on the state of our vaccination supply. A colonel, who was also a medicai doctor, carne to the State Department with his team of experts. "Well, Colonel, let's start with anthrax. What is the size of our supply of vaccines?" "We have a horse," he replied with evident embarrassment. Not-ing my puzzlement, he continued. "We have gradually shot this poor horse up with a lot of anthrax and she is now totally immune. We could use ber blood to make tens of thousands of shots." There was only one response I thought possible. "We need you to •' get some more horses, Colonel." Worse than its absence of infected horses, our Army had no mod-ern chem-bio detection vehicles and so had borrowed some Fox ar-mored vehicles from the German Bundeswehr for that purpose. The Foxes had the unfortunate habit of triggering false alarms with some regularity, to the point where troops were no longer responding by jumping into their heavy, sweaty, uncomfortable protective gear. The fact was we could not assemble a decent defensive capability in time for the war. We therefore turned to deterrence and retaliation. What would we do if Iraq used chemical or biological weapons? We had one report that they were planning to scare us with a simulated nuclear weapon. The alleged pian was to set off several truckloads of high explosives, mixed with radiological material. The U.S. would detect both the major ex-plosion and then the radioactivity and assume Iraq had just tested a nuclear weapon. That according to the reported Iraqi pian, was sup-posed to deter us from invading. But could we deter Iraq? If we did not, there were few decent op-tions for an American response. We had no biological weapons, our own chemical weapons left over from the 1960s and 1970s were immobile, leaky, and a risk to anyone who went near them. Using nuclear weapons seemed out of the question and, in any event, what would we use them on? Iraqis who had been forced to fighi for Saddam Hussein? We took the issue to the "inner cabinet" of Principals chaired by Brent Scowcroft. Seated around Scowcroft's coffee table on a couch and in wing-back chairs were Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Chair-man of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell, and a few others. It was one of those problems Principals hate, one with no solution. Scowcroft, 162 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES i^-iėg Homet*=*md Protection 163 cracking open some peanuts, turned to Cheney. "Mr. Secretary, what would you recommend?" Cheney then looked at Powell in a way that said they had talked and disagreed. "Go on, Colin, say what you think," Cheney urged. Powell shrugged and, with a sheepish look on his face, said, "I just think chemical weapons are goofy." Amused, Scowcroft, a retired Air Porce generai, looked at Powell, "Goofy? Is that some Army terminology? " Growing more serious, Powell explained. "Chemical weapons will just slow us down a little. We will batten up the tanks and drive through. I don't think Saddam will use biological weapons because they are not really suited for the battlefield. They take too long. Be-sides ali of this shit can literally blow back on you. And nuclear, I don't think he has nuclear." Cheney jumped in, now agreeing with Powell. "Besides, we're ai-ready planning to throw the kitchen sink at them. There is not a lot more we could do, except give priority to taking out ammunition piles that may have chem or bio." He paused. "What we should do is just teli Saddam that if he uses any of this stuff, we'll go to Baghdad and hanghim." In the end, Secretary Baker carried a letter from President Bush to Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz at a meeting in Switzerland. There has been some contro ver sy about the exact wording of the U.S. threat in that letter. Whatever it said, Tariq Aziz handed it back after reading it. He later noted that if he had given Saddam anything that said that, Saddam would have had him shot. As far as we know, Saddam did not use chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in the First Gulf War. These experiences led me to worry greatly about the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on such weapons. President Clinton's concern about the same issue, however, had less to do with me than with his own reading. Clinton's reading habits had always amazed me. He was an eclectic reader, who apparently stayed up very late almost every night devouring a hook. After the Tokyo attack, he began reading fictional accounts like Rainbow Six and The Cobra Event in which terrorists wield chemical and biological weapons. Some books he sent to us for our comments. Some he discussed directly with ex- perts outside the govermrrnent. Th^^ books just reinforced what he had akeady decided: we neeeded to d__o more to prevent terrorists from getting their hands on thaese weapcrsns and we needed to be ready if they did. Cespite the 1995 Pr&s~ idential d^ecision Directive on the subject, only the Defense Departnment was taking the chem-bio threat seri-ously, and the Pentagon's c^oncern se emed limited to the saf ety of their troopsfrom such weapons-. NIo one t^Dok responsibility for the saf ety of ali theother Americans wttio might fc>e hit with chemical or biological, or evennuclear, weapons. The otherr- departments were not taking my hints that they should pu_t some se=rious money in their budgets for this purpose. Sandy Berger had mov- ed up froinŧi Deputy to become the National Security Advisor in 1997. I -wanted him to have the President inserė funds for the programs intro Avhat w -as, after ali, called the Presidenti Budget Request to Congre=ss. Berger advised against it. "If the departments don't want the momiey, they' ZII just go around our backs to the Congress and teli them tco shift th^s funds back to the departments' own pet rocks." It was a di _sappointi:ŧn.gly realistic assessment of White House power. "What you Mia ve to do, Dick, is scare the shit out of the Cabinet members the way^ you hav^s scared me with this stuff. Make them want to do somethimg about ifc. Make it their idea." That seemed like an : invitatici^ŧ.. "You assemble them. FU scare them," I responded. They assembled in the= oddly prL un and proper Blair House, a series of connected townhouses opposite the Executive Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Bla^ir House ė_s owned by the Protocol Office of the State Department anoH is mean-fc to house visiting heads of state, not tohost Cabinet meeti_ngs. Non^theless, in March 1998 the Cabinet members and other s^erxior offė^ials showed up, from State, Defense, CIA, Justice, FBI, FUealth andL Human Services, FEMA, Energy, OMB, and other White F^ioxise offi. ces. Attendance was mandatory. Berger had told everyone tMiat the President wanted them there, but he had never said the Presidemt would -j oin them. When they showed up, Berger made me the chairrmem of thŦe meeting, to the surprise of Cabinet members who might bna-we thou^ht that it would be the President. 164 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Beginning Homeland Protection 165 It was to be a "tabletop exercise," a simulation of a Cabinet meeting during which certain events would unfold. They assembled around a large U-shaped series of tables in a ball-room. At the open end of the table was a large screen on which we pro-jected "facts" as the events began to happen. I stood in the middle of the U with a cordless microphone, feeling like the host of a daytime television talk show. Within the CSG, we held exercises like this for years to smoke out operational difficulties, coordination problems, and practical shortcomings. The Cabinet had never done one before. We began with a report on the big screen of a spreading infection in the Soutwest. It could be a naturai outbreak, which sometimes hap-pened in New Mexico (what one scientist called the "land of the flea and the home of the plague"). Then another report: the infected pa-tients were diagnosed with Marburg or Eboia, which was incurable and contagious. I walked over to Secretary Donna Shalala of Health and Human Services and asked, "This would seem to be your prob-lem. What are you going to do? Will you quarantine the area? Do you have that authority? Who goes in to help?" While those questions hung in the air, I moved in front of Attor-ney General Reno. She had never cared what anyone's rank was and had taken to calling me directly on my private line whenever she had a problem or idea that she thought was in my portfolio. I asked ber "Let's say for the sake of argument that we can quarantine the area. How can we stop people who want to leave the quarantine zone? Do you order them to be shot if they resist?" No Cabinet member knew the answer. While they had views, which differed, it was clear that there was no pian. The second scenario described a chemical weapon released in a U.S. city. The group dealt better with that, but stili realized that most cities had neither the training nor the equipment to deal with such an event. The third scenario hit close to home, literally. In that scenario a terrorist group called the FBI and announced that it had a nuclear weapon in Washington. The report went on to state that the joint Energy-Defense search team, acting on a tip from the Coast Guard, lo-cated the weapon on a cabin cruiser tied up in a yacht club less than two miles from the White House. The blast radius would take out most of downtown Washington. "FBI, do you hit the boat with a SWAT team?" I asked. They wanted to, but were then told that only the Defense Department commando team was trained in what to do with a nuclear weapon and that team was not stationed in Washington. "Do we wait?" I then asked. We agreed to wait and to cali for the commando unit. Then the slide on the screen asked the question that provoked the most debate: "Do we teli the citizens of Washington?" If we told the citizens to evacuate, the terrorists might immediately ex-plode the weapon. If we did not teli them and the weapon went off two hours later, people would needlessly die. In the evolving scenario, the special Army commandos with nuclear weapons training arrived and set up near the boat. Then, sud-denly, the commandos attacked the terrorists and soon thereafter shot the nuclear weapon to disable it. "Wasn't there some risk in that?" I asked, "What if the shot had caused the bomb to go off?" The Penta-gon participants were quick to reassure everyone that no special Army commando unit would ever disobey orders in that way. "Ah, but they didn't, " I contended. "We ordered them to deploy near the boat. When we did that, we gave them implicit authority to act if they saw things happening that led them to believe that the terrorists were going to detonate the weapon. And when they got on the boat and saw a timer clicking down, they had the implicit authority to take whatever ac-tion they judged best to stop it from going off. If they believe that they do not have time to ask for permission in order to save several hundred thousand lives, shouldn't they act?" Another debate ensued. I asked "If the bomb did go off, FEMA, what would you guys do? Do you have units trained in recovery operations in radioactive environments?" At the end of the half day, a collection of black Cadillacs fanned out from Blair House carrying appropriately frightened senior officials back to their offices. Most were calling ahead to their headquarters to convene meetings. They knew now these programs would need more money, but most of ali they knew their departments would need some plans. In a few weeks it was time for more, this time with the President attending in the White House Cabinet Room. When the Cabinet 166 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Beginning Homeland Protection 167 members arrived, they found their naturai places at the table taken by strangers. Instead, the name tags for the Cabinet were in the row of seats along the wall seats that were typically reserved for their staff, the people known as "back benchers." The strangers at the table had been assembled, at my request, by Admiral Frank Young, who had just retired from the Public Health Service. They included a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, several other scientists and researchers on antidotes for biological weapons, and the New York City emergency services director. Together they had drafted a budget proposai for an aggressive pian for responding to a biological weapons attack. They briefed the President. Their pian would do in one year what I hoped to fund over fėve years. Clinton looked over to the OMB officials attend-ing. "I think we really have to do this stuff. Let's see if we can flnd the money." It had become pretty clear to Sandy Berger that terrorism and do-mestic preparedness were major problems, presidential priorities, and should be among the very few growing budgets in Washington. These issues could not continue to be handled by only one of the dozen Special Assistants to the President who made up the senior level of the NSC Staff. Nor could we continue to point to presidential speeches as officiai guidance to the departments and agencies. Berger thought we needed a "terrorism czar," and he wanted it to be me. We already had one job in Washington with the unf or lunate nickname of "czar," the head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. With a title that long, it was little wonder the press called him "the Drug Czar." The few people who had held that job had not acquitted them-selves well. In fact, I had urged that there be a personnel switch in 1996 and argued that Army General Barry McCaffrey should be given the job. By 1998 McCaffrey was doing better than anyone had before, but there were stili huge coordination and bureaucratic rivalry problems in the U.S. counter-narcotics program. I did not want to repeat that in counterterrorism and feared that the departments would see a czar as a challenge to their authority. Nonetheless, Berger floated the idea of a "National Coordinator" for counterterrorism and proposed that we codify it with a new Presidential Decision Directive. We did need new, more detailed Presiden- tial policy guidance. I drafted three new directives and circulated them under the tentative draft titles of PDD-X, Y, and Z. Z updated our Continuity of Government program, which had been allowed to fall apart when the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack had gone away. If terrorists could attack Washington, particularly with weapons of mass destruction, we needed to have a robust System of command and control, with plans to devolve authority and capabil-ities to officials outside Washington. Y addressed something with the clumsy name of "criticai infra-structure protection and cyber security." After the Oklahoma City bombing, the President had asked the Attorney General and her Deputy, Jamie Gorelick, to conduct a quick review of the vulnerabili-ties of key domestic facilities. One of their conclusions surprised us: the nation was increasingly dependent on networked computers that were vulneratale to nonexplosive attack—hacking. To address that weakness, the President had appointed a large Presidential Commis-sion on Criticai Infrastructure Protection under former Air Porce General Tom Marsh. The Commission had come back with a meticu-lously researched and lengthy report that could be boiled down to one sentence: ali over the United States we have begun to rely upon vul-nerable computer networks to run transportation, banking, power sys-tems, and other "criticai infrastructures." In classifled documents accompanying the report, the commissioners pointed out that the U.S. intelligence and military communities could do some real dam-age if we faced a foe as dependent upon computers as we were. If the U.S. could do it to others, others could do it to us. PDD-Y created a program to address this new problem. X was the overall policy document. Although most of the text detailed policies on counterterrorism, X also set up an overall management structure. There would be ten components to the U.S. policy and programs for counterterrorism and security. For each program, there would be clarity about responsibility, which department or agencies were in charge. The CSG would officially become not just a crisis response committee, but a policy formulation body with a budget and programmatic role. Moreover, the CSG would have to oversee how the ten programs were run, the same way that a congres- 168 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Beginning Homeland Protection 169 sional committee had oversight of an Administration program. The ten programs were: 1. Apprehension, Extradition or Rendition, and Prosecution of Terrorists. Although we did not see terrorism as primarily a law enforcement issue, there was a police component to coun- tering terrorism. This program involved finding individuai terrorists, wherever they were, and bringing them before U.S. courts. The lead was given to the Justice Department and its component, the FBI. 2. Disruption of Terrorist Groups. This program called for de- struction of terrorist groups by means other than those used by law enforcement. The lead was given to GIĀ. 3. International Cooperation against Terrorists. This was a pro gram of persuading other countries to flght terrorism and giv- ing those who needed it the training and other means to do so. The lead was given to the State Department. 4. Preventing Terrorists from Acquiring Weapons of Mass De- struction. In this program, plans and capabilities would be de- veloped to detect and destroy any effort by a terrorist group to develop or procure chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. The lead was shared by CIA and Defense. 5. Consequence Management of Terrorist Attacks. It was in pro gram flve that ali of the WMD preparedness activities were contained. The lead was shared by Health and Human Ser vices and FEMA, with signiflcant roles for Defense and Jus tice. 6. Transportation Security. Designed to implement the recom- mendations of the Gore Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, program six focused on preventing terrorism involv- ing aircraft. The lead was assigned to the Department of Transportation. 7. Protection of Criticai Infrastructure and Cyber Systems. To implement the Marsh Commission on criticai infrastructure protection, this program was elaborated in detail in PDD-Y. The lead was shared by Justice (FBI) and, because so many of the computer networks were owned and operated by the private sector, by Commerce. DOD was also given a major role. 8. Continuity of Government. This program was designed to in- sure that there be both a President and a functioning Federai government, even after an attempi to decapitate the U.S. gov- ernment. It was detailed in the highly classified PDD-Z. 9. Countering the Foreign Terrorist Threat in the U.S. Although FBI officially believed that there were no sleeper cells in the U.S. we created a program to prevent such cells and fėnd them if they existed. Justice (FBI) was given the lead, with roles for Immigration and Treasury. 10. Protection of Americans Overseas. Terrorists had attacked a U.S. military base overseas and had tried to attack civilians, including at our embassies. This program created missions of Force Protection, Diplomatic Security, and overall concern for the safety and welfare of Americans abroad. It was shared between DOD and the State Department. To coordinate these efforts, there would be four committees made up of senior and midlevel managers from the departments. The Coun-terterrorism Security Group would continue, running programs 1-3, 6, 9, and 10. A new Criticai Infrastructure Coordination Group would run program 7. A Weapons of Mass Destruction and Preparedness Group would run programs 4 and 5. The existing Continuity of Government Interagency Group would run program 8. A new position, a "National Coordinator, " was created to chair ali four committees. The four committees would report to the Principals Committee. The National Coordinator would also serve as a member of the Cabinet-level Principals Committee, and would bave two NSC Staff Senior Directors reporting to him, along with other NSC Staff. Predictably, most departments and agencies saw it as a White House power grab. No one, however, had a better idea. No agency wanted to see one department given ali of this responsibility. In 1997 there was no support for creating a new agency because of the disruptiveness of such a move, which would shift everyone's focus from terrorists out-side the government to bureaucrats within. 170 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Beginning Protei i sixt> f 171 . ' 'Set -By for *ed- %^t e e} * N *od / M i sp U i PDD-X went ahead, but with clear limits on the power of the National Coordinator inserted by various agencies and departments. Un-like the Drug Czar, who had a budget of several hundred million dollars, the National Coordinator would not bave direct control of any funds. He could only recommend budgets to the President. The Drug Czar had several hundred staff; the National Coordinator would bave twelve. Finally, just to make it clear that the National Coordinator was just a White House staff job, the directive contained language not-ing that he could not order law enf orcement agents, troops, or spies to do anything, only their agencies could. Some czar. On balance, how-ever, it was a slight improvement to bave a National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism. With a title that long, however, it quickly became "Terrorism Czar" to the media. It was clearly an improvement to bave ten programs with clear accountability and responsibility focused in the departments and agencies, but the notion that there was a Terrorism Czar was mislead-ing. In fact, what the departments had insisted on and the White House had acquiesced to was that there would not be a czar with a staff, budget, or operational decision making. I now had the appear-ance of responsibility for counterterrorism, but none of the tools or authority to get the job done. With everyone satisfėed, X, Y, and Z went to the President and became PDD-62, PDD-63, and after a few weeks, PDD-67. The President announced them in bis commencement address to the Naval Acad-emy in June 1998. The title of PDD-62 was "Counterterrorism and Protection of the Homeland," in recognition that the threat was not just overseas. Later, others would claim they began the focus on pro-tecting the homeland. Clinton's directive began, "Because of our mili-tary superiority, potential enemies, be they nations or terrorist groups . . . are increasingly likely to attack us in unconventional ways . .. to exploit vulnerabilities . .. against civilians." PDD-62 had come at that point in the year, June, when departments begin to prepare their proposed programs for the White House budget review process that culminates at the end of the year in presi-dential decisions. Those decisions, announced in January or February, then begin a second journey of eight or nine months through the Con- invit ^t., gress. It is a bit like two pregnanc168 in a row, V with ali the potential for miscarri^S6 - O If PDD-62 had given me anytrŧin&, it was a f * funding for counterterrorism andsecurity prog'r January, the President was set to ask^ the Cong^11 counterterrorism, security, weafon^ of mass / ness, and infrastructure protectitf11- Ecfore the ?y? _ went to the Congress, however, t*16 White Hd, /ontėes week-long series of "Theme Days " On each dafy^tne Ģti go to a location associated with of bis budg ^^ou^e { speech outlining how the new Budget suppoM ))iave t^, week began and the fėrst event wa* n^ld. The cations staff called and informed ^s that we wc^' for "ali that counterterrorism stu^-" We had ab^ fėnd a venue, get an audience, nlOv^ in what people called "show-and-tells," ai^ draft a spee ' M \r 4. f~~^t sonable demand seemed normal it1 tAe Clinton ) Ju ^-U the White House staff always ro#e t(ā these eh// good events, the last-minute style ^sted throv* f' WHĖ, years. ,^n C(^v We called the National Aca^^ly of Scie^.^ US111^ S(.,. blocks from the White House, hac^an auditoriuff ^ gia^t K ^ ^ ' ^ ir\ semble scientists to fili it. The fhetne would technology to increase our secur^y- We order^/^nad V said that, to bang behind the President. Our offi^ction, ing people inside and outside the Ģovernment w/V TheV initiatives for counterterrorism, nomeland p^ ^ Aca^e mass destruction preparedness, ai^ Cyber secury/ent to the speech and invited to set uf a display in t'jty l at CQ. j^g cally asked the Arlington, Virgin^' Pire Depar7^xPOsed t 1(1 prototype Mass Decontaminatiorŧ Chicle, a tn/. ^ "^ to wasji down hundreds of people who had bee/^^to the ,1 at weapons. My view was that ever/ major city sl^ , lt: Ollt, „ ^h ^ one such MDV, so I wrote that ^nnOuncemen<'/ė<'n ^erai ^i Presidenti speech. Attorney Ger>eral Reno toc*/ cities should decide for themselv^8 what to do v 172 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Begėnning Homeland Protection 173 for domestic preparedness against weapons of mass destruction. That exchange reflected a struggle over priorities that continues today, causing a waste of billions of dollars of homeland security funds, as lo-calities buy things they do not need and ignore necessary procurement. Reno and I had disagreed before about how to disburse money to the cities to prepare them for chemical, biological, or radiological dis-aster. She was concerned that we satisfy the "stakeholders," which I learned meant not people with backyard grills, but the locai authori-ties. I was concerned that the locai authorities would not know what to buy or would justify some purchase that had little to do with chem-bio defense. Moreover, I was concerned that we develop metropolitan-area plans incorporating more than just the core cities. Arlington, for example, had the first MDV and parked it three miles from the White House. Should we ignore that and buy another one for Washington, D.C. before Cleveland got its first MDV? I wanted to use the promise of federai money as a way of coercing cities and suburbs into cooperating in the development of unified disaster plans, as we had with the Metropolitan Medicai Strike Teams of doctors and medicai staffs. Reno, a former Dade County prosecutor, would not budge. The money was ai-ready going into her Department's budget, so she didn't have to budge. When our Theme Day dawned, I went to the Ovai Office to at-tempt to do a "pre-brief." For every public event on the Presidenti schedule, there was a preceding ten-minute slot called a pre-brief in which a member of the staff would explain to the President what the event was about and what he should do at it. Although it was abun-dantly clear that Clinton did not need, and in any event would not ac-cept, pre-briefs, the schedule continued to carry them. One of two things happened during the assigned time slots. Either you were left sitting outside the Ovai Office waiting, or you were invited in and the President would discuss with you something other than the upcoming event. On our Theme Day it was the latter. I feared he would discuss the Impeachment, which was dominating the media and Washington chatter. Instead, the President chose to discuss the problems facing his cousin, a woman who administered public housing in Arkansas. We continued to discuss that topic as we walked to the limousine and drove through Foggy Bottoni with sirens wailing. I sat next to him with a notebook filled with PowerPoint slides and backup material to answer any conceivable question about the $10 billion budget pro-posal. As the motorcade drove into the basement garage of the Acad-emy, the President acknowledged my apparent concern that we talk about the topic at hand. His mood changed from the affable Arkansas country boy to the analytical President, the duality that both charmed and frightened the White House staff close to the President. "I read the speech, you know, " he said to cairn any concern I might have had that he thought this was health care theme day. "The way I see this whole problem, it's like arrows and shields ..." "Huh? " I asked as we sat in the car and Secret Service agents stood waiting to open the doors. "Yeah, you know, like some guy invents the bow and arrow and he's ahead for a while until some guy invents the shield that catches ali the arrows. Guy puts a wall around the town and the enemy invents the catapult to get over the wall. Offense, defense, action, reac-tion. Now we got new offensive weapons facing us and we need new defensive ones. Am I right?" I acknowledged that was one way to look at the problem and we went into the Academy where a full auditorium was awaiting us. As we did, my pager beeped and carried a message: "DC police are towing away the Arlington MVD." My best show-and-tell had parked in an area that Secret Service decided to have cleared. There was never enough time to get these events done flawlessly. Sitting in the front row of the auditorium, I noticed that Clinton seemed to be rewriting the speech during the long introductory re-marks. When he spoke, however, he used the text we had given him and I followed along with my copy. Then my text ended—and the President did not. He stepped out from behind the podium and leaned on it and smiled at me. My stomach dropped because we had seen him do this before and knew what it meant: he was about to wing it, to ad-lib in a way that would either get us ali in trouble or be the best part of the speech, or both. "What we are seeing here, as any military person in the audience can teli you, goes back to the dawn of time ... an offensive weapon is 174 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Beginning Homeland Protection 175 developed and it takes time to develop the defense ..." He talked of bows, arrows, castles, moats. Then he noted how things were differ-ent, "because of the speed with which change is occurring" and tech-nology is evolving. New offensive technologies were being developed and defenses were not yet available. The President said he had strug-gled to alert the nation to the dangers of terrorism without frightening people into believing that anything they saw in a new action movie might happen the next day. We were meeting terrorism "in ways I can and in ways I cannot discuss, " but we needed new defensive capabili-ties and only scientists and engineers like those assembled could create those protections. The President appealed to the audience to use the funds he sought to get our best scientific minds to close the gap be-tween the introduction of the new weapons of terror and the creation of new defenses. The room erupted in applause. Clinton plunged into the audience and shook hands. When he got to me, he grabbed me and whispered in my ear, "You liked that ending, didn't you?" He had identifled a new problem and was ramming through a major initiative to deal with it, even at a time of tight federai budgets. From having had no domestic capability to deal with the effects of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, we were funding training and equipment for public health departments, hospitals, flre depart-ments, and emergency services units. We were buying specialized medicines and vaccines, stockpiling them secretly around the country, and arranging for on-call mass production of more. There would be research and development of new detection, diagnostic, and deconta-mination technologies, along with new pharmaceuticals. There would also be even more funds for many departments to ad-dress terrorism. New agencies would be created and funded to protect the nation's cyber networks. After the speech, Attorney General Reno, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, and I briefed the White House press corps on ali of the initiatives. I knew we had made the conceptual breakthrough when Shalala began by saying, "HHS is now a key part in the flght against terrorism." Shalala would later join me and Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen on one of a fėve-part series of shows on Nightline, entitled BioWai, focusing on the need for homeland protection against terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. Throughout the country exercises were held, both tabletops in- volving simulations in a room, and field exercises with units actually deploying. In one field exercise, hundreds of FBI, Energy, and Defense Department personnel quickly set up a temporary camp outside Nor folk when simulated intelligence reports indir0*-"-4-^ .~*A would infiltrate a nuclear weapon into the headquarters of the Navy's fleet. The CSG members went to the exercise and played our real roles, as we had done so many times in tabletops in Washington. In a field exercise, however, counterterrorism action units actually assault targets. In the Norfolk exercise, Navy SEALs hit a boat playing the ter-rorist mother ship, while FBI's Hostage Rescue Team crashed into a house in which the sleeper celi was waiting. A special nuclear bomb squad moved in to defuse the weapon, while staff from several agencies pretended to be reporters and peppered officials with tough ques-tions at a simulated press conference. As part of the Annapolis announcements, I had become the National Coordinator and began emerging from the shadows of national security and intelligence to meet with the media and brief members of Congress. As I feared, having the world's press running profiles of the new American Terrorism Czar resulted in the kind of attention I did not want. Walking into my office one morning in 1999,1 sensed some-thing was wrong. It was the way that the normally cheery Coast Guard Chief Jack Robinson greeted me. It was the look that my assis-tant of over ten years, Beverly Roundtree, gave me as I walked by her desk. I no sooner sat down in front of my computer than Lisa Gordon-Hagerty walked in with that "this is really serious shit" expression on her face. "Have you read the cable?" Lisa asked. I had no idea what she was talking about. She showed me. An Arab leader had called our consul generai,the night before, saying he had urgent and important informa-tion to share, the consul should drive over immediately. When he did, the Arab leader gave him an "intelligence report" that had a long, de- 176 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Beginning Homeland Protection 177 tailed account. The bottom line of the report was that Usama bin Laden had put out a contract on the American Terrorism Czar, Dick Clarke. I was to be killed in Washington. "Well, that's an interesting way to start the day," I joked, but Lisa did not see anything funny about the report. "Look, Lis, we get garbage reports ali the time. That's probably what this is." She looked daggers at me and said softly and slowly, "And what if it'snot?" "Well, as Mr. Spock said to Captain Kirk, if you die we ali move up one in rank." I was stili reading the details in the report, some of which looked plausible. She was not amused. "Don't you get it, Dick, Usama is trying to get you killed." "Well, that's not surprising, since I'm trying to get him killed," I replied as Lisa left the office with a purposeful stride. She was not going to let it go. Neither was Sandy Berger, whom I had earlier brow-beaten into having a Secret Service protective detail with him twenty-four hours a day. By the end of the day at Berger's request, the President had signed a memo designating me as a "protectee," which made me eligible for the same kind of Secret Service blanket. I called the Secret Service Director. "Look, having me run around in a bullet-proof Caddy with Suburbans front and back will only make it easier for someone to flnd me. Can't we try something else?" After a few minutes trying to persuade me, he asked, "Well, are you willing to be a target, see if we can flush them out?" I agreed. Being a target meant that it would appear as though nothing had changed, that I had no protection. In reality, there would be agents hid-ing around my neighborhood and staged along the routes that I drove. Unmarked cars would follow a few cars behind me, looking for someone looking for me. My house would be given new locks, alarms, and exterior lights. And I would go to Secret Service agent school to learn evasive driving and, more frightening for my staff, how to shoot the .357 Sig Sauerhandgun. For someone who believed in greater gun con-trol, walking around with a cannon under my coat seemed strange, but only at flrst. I dined one night at a sidewalk café in Washington's Adams Morgan neighborhood with a visiting Arab cabinet minister who had said he wanted to see the real Washington. After a while of looking un-comfortable, he said, "Don't they give you protection, bodyguards?" It had not occurred to me that he would have thought that being with me made him vulnerable too. I tried to make him feel better, telling him, "See that beggar on the sidewalk, that guy over at the bar—they are protecting us." My Arab friend looked skeptical, until his limousine returned to pick him up after dinner, only to be blo^i"-J by a Suburban that appeared from nowW~ - ' ' —.nuus-iooking Secret Service agents.\ After weeks of investigation and surveillance, we concluded the threat to me was probably bogus. Some of the security went away, but some of it stayed and my hatred for bin Laden grew even more personal, even though I was "safe" because I lived in America. Despite the unwanted attention publicity brought, explaining to the press about terrorism was necessary to achieve Clinton's goal of preparing, but not frightening, the public. As part of a campaign of press brieflngs and speeches, I agreed to bring Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes to a secret location where we had stored tons of specialized med-icines and equipment for dealing with a chemical or biological attack in the mid-Atlantic region. As the CBS cameras filmed, I broke open a crate and took out an auto-injector needle of atropine, a nerve gas antidote, and demonstrated how one would drive it into one's thigh. Stahl asked whether ali of this would actually do any good. I replied that were there an attack, such as the use of anthrax, these secret stockpiles could save thousands of lives. Three years later, faced with an actual anthrax attack, we ordered the stockpiled medicines distrib-uted. Stahl and I also discussed Usama bin Laden on that 60 Minutes segment. I acknowledged that al Qaeda sought weapons of mass de-struction. For years we had been receiving raw intelligence reports and finished CIA analyses saying that al Qaeda was seeking chemical or nuclear weapons. When we asked for further details, however, there were none. Frustrated, in early 2001 I called Charlie Allen, who had 178 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Beginning Homeland Protection 179 become the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Collection, a kind of overall coordinator of what ali U.S. intelligence agencies were doing to get information. We agreed to assemble everyone from every intelligence agency who had any responsibility for collecting or ana-lyzing information about al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction. We met in a secret location in Virginia. There were a lot of people in attendance. Each agency briefed on what they knew. More rumors and shadows. Nothing specific, credible, or actionable. To break the mold, Charlie Allen and I split the group into two teams. The flrst team was told to assume the role of al Qaeda and to develop plans for acquiring weapons of mass destruction without the Americans knowing it. They had the rest of the day to develop the-pian and report back. The second team was told they were in charge of American intelligence. They were told to assume that al Qaeda did actually have chemical and nuclear activities under way and had been successful hiding them. The U.S. team could use any method or capability to fėnd the activities, but they needed to do so quickly be-cause, in the exercise, we knew that al Qaeda planned to use the weapons soon. Charlie asked the group: "Assume they have special weapons and they are well hidden so you can't see the weapons. What would you see? What would they be saying, doing? What are the collateral indicators?" Forcing the analysts from several agenies to work together and think differently about the problem reenergized them. The exercise taught us three lessons: fėrst, there had not been a co-ordinated U.S. intelligence effort to think creatively about how to fėnd any al Qaeda weapons of mass destruction; second, it was easier to hide such a program than to discover it; and finally, it is impossible to prove a negative, i.e., we could not prove that al Qaeda had no weapons of mass destruction. The exercise resulted in a renewed intelligence effort. As part of that effort, a third-country national work-ing for GIĀ made it into an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan where reports said chemical weapons were being made. The agent took sam-ples, but analysis of them showed nothing. CIA took pride in the risks that the third-country national had run in going to the camp. (Later, Judy Miller of the New York Times would go to Afghanistan and drive up to the gate of an al Qaeda camp reputed to have chemical weapons, as part of her preparations for a week-long series on al Qaeda.) The U.S. analysts playing al Qaeda in our exercise had identifled one area as a good piace to hide. As a result, it was photographed re-peatedly and its cave entrances mapped. The region was a valley in Afghanistan called Torā Bora. Chapter 8 DELENDA EST o UR EMBASSIES IN TANZANIA AN^ T' . iA/ mEast Africa, were struck alrnost sim>iU -^y on August 7, 1998. Our ern-bassy in Tanzanė" - _.*uiy damaged. In Kenya, there was carnage. Two hurė -~u rifty-seven were dead and flve thousand wounded. Among the fatalities were twelve Americans. Al Qaeda had now fol-lowed up a fatwa, or religious ruling, earlier in 1998 declaring war on the United States with an actual act of war. The CSG met by secure video conference at flve in the morning. I asked Gayle Smith, Special Assistant to the President for Africa, to sit on my right. On the video screen we could see that at the State Department site Gayle's predecessor and now the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Susan Rice, joined the regular counterterror-ism crew. Susan Rice was one of the rare breed of hands-on and "get it done" policy makers. On my left was Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, who had just joined my NSC team from Energy. She had come to the White House to help build the homeland protection program, but her flrst task was going to be relief and recovery in Africa. "Let's begin. We are going to bave to triage this, sequence it," I started the meeting. "First, rescue. We need to get teams in there fast. Urban heavy search-and-rescue. We may stili have people alive inside and I doubt there are locai units that can handle this. FEMA, who is on deck? We need two." The Federai Emergency Management Agency had paid for some locai fėre departments to hire extra staff, get special-ized training, and procure equipment for searching through building collapses for bodies, dead and alive. That morning the Fairfax County, Virginia, fire department was the first that could roll. "We will need 182 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Air Porce medicai Nightingale flights to get our wounded out to Europe. Those hospitals can't handle this load." In Europe, the Air Porce kept medicai teams on standby to fly into a disaster area and evacuate the injured on flying ambulances. "Then we are going to bave to get medicai help in those countries for their wounded," Rice added. "It's mainly their people who bave been hurt because of an attack on us." "Second, security. DOD, what bave you got nearby that can se-cure the two sites and the stuff we will be sending?" The Navy had created Fleet Anti-terrorism Support Teams (FAST)—units of Marines to do specialized security at sensitive sites. The Marines got the cali. "Third, investigation. I assume FBI will want to send Evidence Recovery Teams to both locations right away before the sites get tram-pled. And investigators to help the locai police?" John O'Neill had teams on standby in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Washington. The New York unit had its equipment at a nearby Air Porce base in New Jersey. They went out first. "Fourth, coordination. We bave no embassies in these countries now and we are descending upon them with hundreds of staff. State, can we launch two FESTs?" The FEST was the Foreign Emergency Support Team, an interagency response group led by a senior State Department officiai. Their mission was to go into a country where there had been a terrorist attack and provide highly trained staff to the U.S. ambassador. Most embassies did not bave the numbers or type of people they needed to handle an emergency like this. The FEST did. A customized FEST aircraft was always on four-hour or less standby. Susan Rice wanted to get people from ber bureau on the two FEST flights to relieve and assist her two ambassadors. "Fifth, lift. We just agreed on enough people and equipment to fili up a dozen C-141s or C-5s. I know we bave only two or three on standby, so we are going to bave to pulė priority bere and cancel other flights. If we can get midair refueling for them that will get us there quicker. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty is going to serve as the overall mission controller for the President." Lisa looked aghast at me and I 183 Delenda Est mouthed "Why me?" I continued, "She decides what goes first, how much we need. If there are problems in the flow of assets to Africa, Lisa decides. "Sixth, stopping the next one. We can't assume this is it. There may be more attacks planned. Susan, let's shut down ali embassies in Africa. Let's also button down ali embassies around the world. If any ambassador thinks somebody is threatening their post, they can close it without calling Washington. "Finally, attribution and response. CIA, let's meet in my office at 7:30 to go over the evidence. The senior office1" ' .. cach CSG agency isinvited. Isuspect weallknow wh-^ ' . ^ \adence will show. We will need to give the Presiden*- - ^is." I was pleasp'J .. we had become adept at responding to terrorist attar1'- _,. aeeply bothered that we had had to do so. FEMA, FBI, V ^^ate, CIA, the Marines, and the other agencies reacted with alacrity. The Air Porce did not. Pilots needed crew rest. Aircraft broke down. Aerial tankers were unavailable. The first foreign rescue team to ar-rive on the scene was from Israel. When my Israeli counterpart had heard about the attack, he had launched an aircraft with a heavy search-and-rescue team on a dedicated aircraft they kept loaded with equipment and on Constant alert. The Israelis had not called us to ask; they knew we would be busy. The smaller, in-person meeting of the CSG that morning revealed initial evidence that al Qaeda had launched the attacks. CIA knew there had been an al Qaeda celi in Kenya, but they had thought that, working with the Kenyan police, the U.S. government had broken it up. More troublesome, the CIA brought reports to the meeting that suggested that al Qaeda planned more attacks. An attack in Albania seemed about to happen. Another in Uganda or Rwanda was possible, although we had just closed those two embassies. From my office, the CSG members called back to their departments on secure phones. The State Department closed our embassy in Tirana, Albania. The Defense Department agreed to dispatch a heavily armed Marine FAST unit to surround the embassy in Tirana. The U.S. government was working with the Albanian police to round up the al Qaeda celi. 184 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Delenda Est 185 Because we were ali pretty certain where this was going, I asked CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to create a joint team to develop re-sponse options against al Qaeda. If it turned out to be somebody else that did the attacks, we would develop different plans. None of us thought that would be necessary. That day and the next several were consumed with meetings with the President and the Principals, coordination of the "flow" to Africa, and preparation to receive the bodies of our dead. A week passed in a flash. Seven days after the attack, the Principals met again with the President. Just before going to the meeting, I read a CIA report from a source in Afghanistan that bin Laden and his top staff were planning a meeting on August 20 to review the results of their attacks and pian the next wave. Terrorist coordinators from outside Afghanistan had been summoned back for the session. As we sat down in the Cabinet Room, I slipped the report to George Tenet, who was sitting next to me. On it, I penned, "You thinking what l'm thinking?" He passed it back with a note on it, "You better believe I am. " We had both come to the conclusion that this report meant we had the opportunity not merely to stage a retaliatory bombing, but also a chance to get bin Laden and his top deputies, if the President would agree to a strike now during the white-hot "Monica" scandal press coverage. At that moment, Tenet and I were the only ones in the Cabinet Room that knew about the CIA report. In the meeting, CIA and FBI provided detailed evidence that the operation had been al Qaeda. "This one is a slam dunk, Mr. President," Tenet began. "There is no doubt that this was an al Qaeda operation. Both we and the bureau have plenty of evidence." Some arrests had already been made. Tenet described the upcoming meeting in Afghanistan for the President and the other Principals, drawing nods around the table. The Principals were resolute: if al Qaeda could issue fatwas declaring war on us, we could do the same and more to them. Although we had been going after al Qaeda for several years, now it would be the top priority to eliminate the organization. The President asked National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to coordinate ali of the moving parts necessary for a military response, tentatively planned for August 20, six days later. Any targets in addition to the al Qaeda meeting piace were to be nominated by CIA and the Defense Department. Military assets had to be moved into piace. Pakistan would have to be dealt with in some way. Clinton also asked Berger to pulė together an overall pian to deal with al Qaeda. "Listen, retaliating for these attacks is ali well and good, but we gotta get rid of these guys once and for ali," Clinton said, looking seriously over his half glasses at Tenet, Cohen, and Berger, "You understand what l'm telling you?" We had been dealing with al Qaeda as one of several terrorist threats. Now, I hoped, we would gain interagency agreement that destro-^- ,. Qaeda was one of our top na-tional security objectives - ^i urgent one. Although th" ' .^tėtanis were helping us with the investigation follow'- -^ embassy attacks by looking for people who had fled -.ca before and after the attack for Afghanistan, they had been less than helpful before. Al Qaeda members had moved freely through Pakistan to Afghanistan. Cespite the fact that Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate was training, equipping, and advising the Tal-iban in Afghanistan, they professed no ability to influence that group to dose terrorist camps and hand over bin Laden. Any U.S. military strike on Afghanistan would have to cross Pakistani airspace. If they were not told in advance, they might shoot down our aircraf t or cruise missiles. If they were told in advance, some of us believed that the ISID would alert the Taliban and possibly al Qaeda. The State Department Deputy Secretary, Strobe Talbott, also feared that the Pakistanis would see the U.S. attack coming and assume it was an Indian air raid. Talbott thought that Pakistan would not hesitate to launch an attack on India, even before confirming what was going on, and that could trigger a nuclear war between the two South Asian rivals (each of which now had nuclear bombs). Ali of this was taking piace against the backdrop of the continuing Monica scandal. Like most of his advisors, I was beyond mad that the President had not shown enough discretion or self-control, although from what I knew of Presidential history, maritai fldelity had also been a problem for several of his illustrious predecessors. I was an-grier, almost incredulous, that the bitterness of Clinton's enemies knew no bounds, that they intended to hurt not just Clinton but the 186 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Delenda Est 187 country by turning the President's personal problem into a global, public circus for their own politicai ends. Now I feared that the tirning of the President's interrogation about the scandal, August 17, would get in the way of our hitting the al Qaeda meeting. It did not. Clinton made clear that we were to give him our best national security advice, without regard to bis personal problems. "Do you ali recommend that we strike on the 20th? Fine. Do not give me politicai advice or personal advice about the timing. That's my problem. Let me worry about that." If we thought this was the best time to hit the Afghan camps, he would order it and take the heat for "Wag the Dog" criticism that we ali knew would happen, for the media and congressional reaction that would say that he was using a military strike to divert attention from his deposition in the investi-gation. (Wag the Dog was a movie that had been released that year, in which flctional presidential advisors create an artiflcial crisis with Albania to attack it and divert attention from domestic problems. Ironi-cally, Clinton was blamed for a "Wag the Dog" strategy in 1998 dealing with the rea! threat from al Qaeda but no one labeled Bush's * 2003 war on Iraq as a "Wag the Dog" move even though the "crisis" was manufactured and Bush politicai advisor Karl Rove was telling Republicans to "run on the war.") Clinton testified on the 17th and then flew to Martha's Vineyard. He had had one full day of vacation when Don Kerrick arrived. Kerrick was an Army generai who had served several times on the NSC staff and had been a key player in the Bosnia crisis. Now, as the Deputy National Security Advisor, he was taking the final plans for the attack on al Qaeda to the little island off the Massachusetts coast. CIA and the Joint Chiefs had nominated not just buildings at the al Qaeda camp scheduled to host the meetings, but also other al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and facilities in Sudan that bin Laden had in-vested in. They recommended that the attack be conducted only with cruise missiles, not commandos or piloted aircraft, either of which could result in U.S. casualties or prisoners. Joint Chiefs Vice Chair-man Joe Ralston had agreed to fly to Pakistan, stopping at the airport allegedly for refueling en route from somewhere else. He had called the head of the Pakistani military and invited him to a one-on-one din- ner meeting on the 20th, at the airport, to discuss the tensions be-tween the United States and Pakistan. The Pakistani generai, a friend of Ralston's, had accepted. The cruise missiles wo-uld hit Pakistani airspace and be detected while the dinner was going on. Ralston would explain that they were our missiles and should not t> Ŧ shot at. The pian called for Ralston to get on his piane and leave t>efore dessert was served. The U.S. military are particularly sensitive to civilians telling them how to do their job, or even asking them how^ they intend to do it. The officer corps have ali been taught to teli civiLians "Just give me the objective. l'il figure out how f* ' ^." This response has its roots in Vietnam, when Lyndo^- " _,ison sat in the Sitxi^tion Room going over maps and pir<- „, ruling out bombing targets. It was this tradi-tion that r>v' ^ted us from knowing how the military would go after Ai<^' ąn Somalia—otherwise, we would have suggested that re-peated daytime raids from helicopters in a city was not a good idea. It was this tradition that also meant I could not for-mally become in-volved in discussions about what platforms would be used to launch the cruise missiles. Nonetheless, I called my friend s on the Joint Staff to raise the issue that the Pakistani military rnight Ŧdetect strange U.S. Navy activity off their coast long before Joe Ralstor*. was sipping curry soup. I was assured the missiles would be fėred frorrx submerged attack subs. There might be a destroyer employed, b-ut the ore was often a U.S. destroyer passing by the Pakistani coast. Up to this point the number of people in the U. S. government who knew that a retaliatory response was imminent was small, essentially those of us on the Principals Committee. Sudi a military operation, however, requires paperwork. There must be a presidential announce-ment, press briefings at several agencies, briefings :f or the Congress, a War Powers Notification to the Congress, explanations given at the U.N. and passed to our embassies for use with covintries around the world, stepped-up security at U.S. facilities in Pakis. tan and elsewhere, and more. To do ali of that before the attack, I neecded the CSG mem-bers and some of their staffs to draft and approve -the materials. The Principals, however, were worried about a leak getxing out that an attack was imminent. The Principals finally agreed t liat I could pulė to- 188 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Delenda Est 189 gether a meeting in the late afternoon, teli the CSG members what was about to happen, and put them to work drafting. The catch was that they could not leave the White House complex until the attack took piace (or at least until after the news cycle and the next day's newspapers had gone to bed). It was not the CSG members that anyone thought would leak word of the attack. Each of them, however, had staffs, which taken to-gether numbered in the hundreds. Many of the staff had people in their lives that they trusted with exciting secrets like an upcoming military attack. None of the CSG members protested when I surprised them at the meeting by saying that they would be staying awhile and needed to come up with good excuses for their offices and families. Senior people like Under Secretary of State Tom Pickering (who b^-5 ~id eight Senate confirmation jobs in bis illustrious career1 .ciy rolled up their sleeves and asked for a computer to start <\ ..ang. One CIA of-ficer however, protested the inclusion of targets in Sudan. I explained that it was CIA and the Defense Department that had chosen the targets, that the Principals (including George Tenet) had nominated the targets, and that the President had approved them. Nonetheless, I could sense that he felt left out of the process by bis own agency and would probably complain about the targets later, to the press or con-gressional staff. While the night went on, I assumed the targets were locked in. The President, however, was stili wondering about one commerciai facility in Sudan owned by bin Laden. At the last possible minute, he pulled that target off the list because it had no military or offensive value to al Qaeda. He left on the list the Shifa chemical plant that CIA had linked to al Qaeda and to a unique chemical weapons compound. It turned out my friends on the Joint Staff had given me hollow as-surances about the Navy's plans. In the northern Arabian Sea, U.S. de-stroyers were lining up, their missiles spinning in their launch tubes; it wasn't just a single ship. Sure enough, the Pakistani navy noticed and alerted Islamabad. ISID received the alert. Then the first of seventy-five missiles were launched. Some circled until others were launched, and then they ali flew toward the Pakistani coast at about four hundred miles an hour. Almost two hours later, they would hit the al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. Other Tomahawks were being fired from the Red Sea toward Shifa in Sudan. Reports differ concerning how close the cruise missile attack carne to hitting the al Qaeda leadership. Whatever the truth is, bin Laden was not killed in the raid. Apparently, however, Pakistani ISID officers were killed. The Pakistanis were reported by media sources to be present at the camp training Kashmiri terrorists. ISID had several offices aro-- Afghanistan and was assisting the Taliban in its fight to ga'~ ^itrol of the northern part of the country where the Northern rtlliance stili held out. I believed that if Pakistani ISID wanted to cap-ture bin Laden or teli us where he was, they could bave done so with little effort. They did not cooperate with us because ISID saw al Qaeda as helpful to the Taliban. ISID also saw al Qaeda and its affiliates as helpful in pressuring India, particularly in Kashmir. Some, like General Hamid Gul, the former director of ISID, also appeared to share bin Laden's anti-Western ideology. The American public's reaction to the U.S. retaliation over the next several days was about as adverse as we could bave been imag-ined. According to the media and many in Congress, Clinton had launched a military strike to divert attention from the Monica scan-dal; CIA Chief Tenet was probably making up the story of an al Qaeda meeting because bin Laden was stili alive,- the Sudanese were to be believed that they had never made chemical weapons precursors at Shifa or, if they had, it was certainly just to kill weeds,- the Defense Department had wasted valuable cruise missiles attacking huts and tents; and Clinton stopped the military from putting "boots on the ground" in Afghanistan and had insisted on the ineffectual cruise missiles; real men use commandos. Our response to two deadly terrorist attacks was an attempi to wipe out al Qaeda leadership, yet it quickly became grist for the right-wing talk radio mili and part of the Get Clinton campaign. That reaction made it more difficult to get approvai for follow-up attacks on al Qaeda, such as my later attempts to persuade the Principals to forget about flnding bin Laden and just bomb the training camps. What was particularly frustrating was that Clinton had pulled Joint Staff Chairman Hugh Shelton and me aside after the Cabinet 190 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Delenda Est 19L1 Room meeting, saying to the former Special Forces commander, "Hugh, what I think would scare the shit out of these al Qaeda guys more than any emise missile ... would be the sight of U.S. commandos, Ninja guys in black suits, jumping out of helicopters into their camps, spraying machine guns. Even if we don't get the big guys, it will bave a good effect." Shelton looked pained. He explained that the camps were a long way away from anywhere we could launch a heli-copter raid. Nonetheless, America's top military officer agreed to "look into it." ON THE SAME DAY that we sent cruise missiles into Afghanistan President Clinton signed Executive Order 13099, imposing sa^ ^is against Usama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Some months la<-~ .^ese sanc-tions would be extended to the Taliban, as we fa' .xiined that there was effectively little difference between th-- ' .^adership and that of al Qaeda. With these orders, the focr ^ U.S. strategy to combat al Qaeda's financial network moved from a narrow approach focused pri-marily on law enforcement to a wider approach that aimed to bring into the fėght ali the varied tools and resources of the U.S. government. We would need to improve and coordinate intelligence, diplo-matic, law enforcement, and regulatory efforts across the dozens of government departments, agencies, and offices that would bave to be involved. Most of these bureaucracies had little or no experience in fo-cusing on terrorist fėnancing. Many approached the issue from their own limited perspective, uninterested in a unifled strategy. Some were involved in longstanding turf battles against what they saw as competing parts of the government. But the President wanted answers and actions, so these constraints would need to be pushed aside. I asked Will Wechsler of my staff to lead a new CSG Sub-Group on Terrorist fėnancing. Will carne to my office from the Pentagon, where he had been a civilian aide to General Shalikashvili, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Will and I quickly carne to the conclusion that the departments were generally doing a lousy job of tracking and disrupting international criminals' flnancial networks and had done little or nothing against terrorist fėnancing. One of our few impor tanttt victories against criminal fėnancing had come a few years earlier w^herrn the President had invoked the International Emergency Powers Act against the Cali drug cartel. Now we were going to the same approach to al Qaeda. Will began by meeting with Rick Newcomb, the head of the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Contro I 1 (OFAC) and the architect of the effort against the Cali cartel. Togestheicr they asked ali those in the intelligence community, law enforcerŧnenŧt agencies, and the State Department who were supposed to k;novw about terrorist fėnancing what they knew about al Qaeda's financŦss. Will carne into my office looking worried after his first round ozif meetings. "This is insane," he said. "FBI thinks we should just 1-cavee this to them, but they can't teli me anything I can't read in the nŦe\vs -papers. CIA has given us a data dump of everything they've ever c-omese across on the subject and thinks that answers the question. TherŦe aroe no formai assessments at ali, no understanding of the whole pictvure o. -f where the money is coming from. As far as I can teli, there are otily sa handful of people at CIA who know anything about how bad ,guy=s move money around the world and none of them are part of the C oun _-terterrorism Center. The generai impression I get out there is that thi= s is ali a waste of time because, they keep saying, it doesn't take rtiuctn money to blow something up and Usama's got ali he needs frorcn daddy." "You need to put together a small group of people who will ge t thŦe answers," I told him. "Use Rick and his staff and whoever you caix fėncxl at the CIA who will be helpful. Keep the rest of the interagenc-y in_a-volved, but don't let them slow you down. Ask the questions. I Ŧdon' *t need precision, just some answers that can get us started. The CI^5^. guys are crazy if they think bin Laden is doing this global network 01*1 thecheap." As it happened, not long after this conversation I had an opportnŧ-nity to raise this issue at a Principals Committee meeting on terrocr-ism. George Tenet gave the summary version of the CIA data dump. (Hf you overload people with a large number of small facts, sometime ^s they don't notice that it doesn't add up to anything.) "George," I saicS, 192 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES T Delenda Est 193 "that was a great briefing, but it didn't teli us everything about al Qaeda's finances. We stili need to know how much money they have, where they get it, how they move it, and where they keep it." George was not amused, but then again neither were the other Principals, nor the President, who had ordered GIĀ to go after terrorists' money in PDD-39 in 1995 and PDD-63 earlier in 1998. Wechsler carne back some weeks later with what they had come to cali the new "theory of the case." As too often happens in govern-ment, after they went through everything in CIA's data dump a picture emerged that was the exact opposite of the initial conventional wis-dom: Although any one terrorist act might cost a little only, it took a lot of money to run everything that al Qaeda was up to. And while v ' Laden's own personal fortune was undoubtedly useful in .=Ŧ" -6 up al Qaeda, the organization's financial network was far 1 , ^nd one man's wallet. Instead, we were looking at a vast, p1"' - iUndraising machine. This machine involved both le<-' ^ate businesses and criminal enterprises. But it was eie?" .ai the most important source of al Qaeda's money was its continuous fundraising efforts through Islamic charities and nongovernmental organizations. The terrorists moved their money though old-fashioned smuggling, but also by bank trans-fers through the unsuspecting (and often unregulated) holes in the global financial system, as well as the growing Islamic banking sys-tem. Some of the specifics were stili uncertain, but the "theory of the case" looked very solid. Will called my attention to reports that would vaguely reference "money exchange" offices without any real explanation of what kinds of businesses were being described. Smiling, he told me that he had found one person in the bowels of Treasury's Financial Crimes En-forcement Network who knew what the references meant. That's how we first learned ali about the hawala system, an ancient underground system that offers money transfers without money movement—and virtually no paper trail. GIĀ knew little about the system, but set about learning. FBI knew even less, and set about doing nothing. When I asked FBI to iden-tify some hawalas in the United States, they at first said "What's a wala?" and, when told, carne back with word that there were none. Wechsler found several in New York City by searching the Internet. Despite our repeated requests over the following years, nobody from FBI ever could answer even our most basic questions about the num-ber, location, and activities of major hawalas in the U.S.—much less take action. And it eventually became clear that this subject was not a priority for FinCEN either, as they eventually let go the expert who had originally briefed us on the hawala system. Once they had developed their theory of the case, Will, Rick, and their small team then set about strategizing what to do about it. We clearly needed more intelligence, but we couldn't afford to wait to act until we knew ali the details. One thing was clear: a lot of the money being raised was coming from people in Saudi Arabia. Many Saudi charities being used by al Qaeda were quasi-governmental entities that the regime used to spread its version of Isiam abroad. Moreover, the Saudi government seemed to have little in the way of laws or regulations that would help them know much about the money flows inside their country—even if they mustered the politicai will to want to know. We decided that we needed to have a serious talk with the Saudis as well as with a few of the financial centers in the region. We recog-nized that the Saudi regime had been largely uncooperative on previ-ous law enforcement-focused investigations of terrorism, including the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers that killed nineteen members of the U.S. Air Force. So we wanted a different approach. First, although law enforcement issues would play a role, this would be primarily an attempt to talk with the Saudis on a politicai level. Our goal would be map the important "nodes" in the al Qaeda fėnancial network and then disrupt or destroy them using any avail-able tool of the U.S. government. We were eager to take action, but we also knew the damage we could do to our credibility if we were seen to take action on the basis of flimsy intelligence—and at this point much of our intelligence was flimsy. Second, we would use the leverage inherent in the presidential order to block al Qaeda accounts and the accounts of anyone else later deemed to be providing "material assistance" to the terrorists—a characterization that could apply potentially to significant actors within Saudi Arabia. Third, we would need buy-in from the highest 194 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Delenda Est 195 levels of the Saudi government, so we asked Vice President Gore to talk to the Crown Prince about the problem and about accepting a U.S. delegation that would meet to discuss only this subject with represen-tatives of ali relevant Saudi agencies together, so there could be no run-around. And fourth—perhaps most important—we decided to lay our cards on the table and show Saudi Arabia what we knew about al Qaeda's flnances, what we didn't know, and what we suspected and ask them to fili in the blanks. We wanted to avoid a typical pattern of Saudi behavior we had seen: achingly slow progress, broken promises, denial, and cooperation limited to specific answers to specific questions. At the same time, we thought that, as longstanding friends of the U.S., the Sant'i deserved the opportunity to establish a new kind of relatio*- * ^ with us on counterterrorism. We were looking for a full r-" -iship, behind the scenes, of course. We recognized that tV>'~ -*ight not have the politicai will to strike such a partners^' ^ut we thought it was worth a try—keeping the threat of ^ " -~ sanctions against Saudi entities in reserve if it didn't w~ " Some U.S, ^vernment agencies didn't seem to like this different approach we were recommending. Some at State didn't like the idea of threatening sanctions, even though that authority was implicit in the Presidenti executive order. Some at FBI really didn't like the fact that discussions of terrorist financing with the Saudis were going to take piace outside their channels and without their being in charge. Soon after we told FBI about the initiative, a leak found its way to the New York Times, almost forcing us to cancel the trip. And some in the intelligence community who jealously guarded "their" channels with Saudi intelligence also didn't like this approach. Turf is a powerful thing in Washington. This objection contin-ued even after GIĀ cleared every piece of information we would be discussing with the Saudis. There was even a last ditch attempt by some in CIA's operation's directorate on the day that Wechsler's meet-ings were to take piace—to deny our ability to hand over already cleared information. Despite the interagency obstructionists, the meetings in the re-gion went on as planned. We got answers to some questions. We forced the regulators in Saudi Arabia to talk with the police and intelligence agencies, something that they were clearly not used to doing. Some important actions were taken, such as the denial of landing rights to Ariana Airlines by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Ariana, Afghanistan's national airline, had been taken over by the Taliban and had, in many ways, become al Qaeda's direct lifeline to the outside world. When governments understood the leverage inherent in the Executive Order and were then f aced with the possibility of having to choose between doing business with Ariana Airlines or with American Airlines—well, asking the question gave you the answer. Later we worked with Russia through the U.N. Security Council to add a multilateral aspect to these sanctions. In the end, however, despite Saudi promises to provide additional information and support, little was forthcoming in the months after the visit, nor after a subsequent visit from Rick Newcomb to follow up. The Saudis protested our focus on continuing contacts between Usama and his wealthy, influential family, who were supposed to have broken ali ties with him years before. "How can we teli a mother not to cali her son?" they asked. They reacted defensively when we pointed out some weaknesses in their regulatory regime, pointedly noting that many in the U.S. Congress had recently sought to weaken aspects of the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act. And they were right about the U.S. Congress; although the Clinton administration had sought tougher money laundering provisions, only after 9/11 did Congress muster the politicai will to strengthen the U.S. laws to fight terrorist financing and money laundering. So we went back to the drawing board. Mike Sheehan at the State Department sought unsuccessfully within his bureaucracy to raise the politicai stakes with Saudi Arabia and other countries unless we got more support in flghting terrorism fėnancing. Rick Newcomb began to think about which entities in Saudi Arabia might deserve tar-geting sanctions. GIĀ went back to trying to map the important "nodes" in al Qaeda's fėnancial network. This was important and ex-tremely difficult work, but necessary if we were to take unilateral actions without real Saudi cooperation. After Secretary Robert Rubin stepped down, it was easier to get co- 196 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Delenda Est 197 operation from Treasury. Rubin had opposed our use of the International Economie Emergency Powers Act to go after terrorist flnancing fronts in the United States. His attitude toward strengthening inter-national money laundering rules had been less than enthusiastic. The new Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, was surprisingly a breath of fresh air. He asked Will Wechsler to join him for the last year of the Clinton administration in developing a multilateral approach to "name and shame" foreign money laundering havens that were pro-viding "no questions asked" financial services for al Qaeda and other terrorists and criminals. This initiative made countries pay a price in the flnancial markets for their lack of cooperation and thus success-fully forced o ver a dozen countries to rewrite their laws. Liechte^stein and the Bahamas later used those new laws after 9/11 *' ' ^ us track down and freeze a key part of al Qaeda's finar"-' .^cwork. When the Bush administration f- ^ito office, I wanted to raise the profile of our efforts to •"' ^L terrorist financing, but found little interest. The new ^ ^uent's economie advisor, Larry Lindsey, had long arg^"'' . weakening U.S. anti-money laundering laws in a way that would undercut international standards. The new Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill, was lukewarm at best toward the multilateral efforts to "name and shame" foreign money laundering havens, and allowed the process to shut down before the status of Saudi Ara-bian cooperation was ever assessed. In generai, the Bush appointees distrusted anything invented by the Clinton administration and anything of a multilateral nature—so the international terrorist financing effort had two strikes against it. The new Bush focus in early 2001 was on confronting China, with-drawing from various multilateral obligations, and spending much more money on an antimissile defense system—not on looking into al Qaeda's fėnancial network. Will Wechsler quit Treasury within months of the change of administration. ALTHOUGH HE HAD APPROVED the retaliatory bombing and the sanctions after the attacks on the African embassies, Clinton had also asked Berger for an overall pian to deal with al Qaeda. My team set out to develop what we had taken to calling a "Pol-Mil Pian." A politico-military pian was something we had first invented to deal with Haiti. When General Shalikashvili, Hugh Shelton's predecessor, had pre-sented Clinton with a military pian to invade Haiti, the President had been impressed by the detail, responsibilities being assigned, time-lines, resources. Clinton asked for the civilian pian, saying, "Because the military will take over Haiti in a few hours. If they don't, we sure bave been wasting billions of dollars over there at the Pentagon. But after they do—then what? We need this kind of detail on what happens after the shooting." The Pol-Mil Pian for Haiti (and then others for Bosnia, Kosovo, Iran, and Iraq) carne in the form of a thick loose-leaf notebook with tabs for every conceivable issue. It was full of advance planning, antic-ipation of possible contingencies, specification of goals and objectives, identification of means of achieving the goals, estėmation of resources required, timelines, and assignment of responsibilities. Pol-Mil Pian Haiti went through several iterations and exercises before U.S. forces moved onto the island. For the Principals the existence of the detailed Pol-Mil Pian was a security blanket that increased their confidence. Now we drafted one for dealing with al Qaeda. Every military operation has a codeword or phrase, such as Infinite Reach, Just Cause, El Dorado Canyon, Provide Comfort. To ex-press the intent of the Pol-Mil Pian for al Qaeda, I borrowed a phrase from Cato the Elder, Roman Senator and famous orator who in 201 B.C.E. had encouraged war by ending every speech with the line "Carthage must be destroyed," or as Cato would bave said it, "Carthago delenda est." When the Pol-Mil Pian was handed out it was labeled "Top Secret Delenda." The Under Secretaries of State and Defense, Tona Pickering and Walt Slocombe, looked up from their copies knowingly. "You're right," Pickering said. "Al Qaeda must be destroyed." Destroying al Qaeda would require a multifaceted, detailed pian. Intelligence agencies would need to identify and break up al Qaeda's cells, fėnd its money, train and arm its enemies, and eliminate its lead-ers. Law enforcement agencies had similar responsibilities, including 198 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Delenda Est 199 flnding sleeper cells in the U.S. The State Department would persuade other governments to assist us, would provide international approvai of our actions, and would fund nations that needed help to join in our efforts. The Defense and State Departments would reduce the number of low-hanging-fruit targets by hardening facilities. Treasury would seize al Qaeda funds here and work the international banking system to freeze them elsewhere. Resources were needed and were identifled. Additional legai authorities were required and plans to obtain them were detailed. Military plans were requested for additional bombing and possible commando operations. During their review of the Pol-Mil Pian, the principals had agreed that we should stop referring publicly to Usama bir>T - ' , ,/ho had survived the August 20 missile strikel ŧ*-J ' _^ actention on the network, al Qaeda. Unfortn^"' ' , .~w ot the Principals then did so in their publif ~' _^n.s. Like the media, the Principals were flxated on one\ .^0.0., the leader of this group that had declared war on us for no good reason. We ali knew that killing bin Laden would not make al Qaeda go away. In fact, immediately after his death there would be a negative backlash against us. There was also the certainty that he would become a popular martyr, as the Latin American Communist Che Guevara had become after GIĀ had hunted him down in Bolivia. Nonetheless bin Laden obviously had something special. He had done what no one else had been able to do previously, he had united uncon-nected dissidents from dozens of countries. Maybe without him that network would fall apart over time. Thus, while we ali knew we had to destroy the organization and had set out to do so, one of the flrst steps along that path was to eliminate its leader. My past experience with our attempts to find rogue f oreign leaders had been mixed. I had spent Christmas Eve 1989 in the State Department Operations Center as troops swept Panama looking for Manuel Noriega. From the Ops Center I had watched midnight Mass from the Vatican and looked to see the Vatican foreign minister being handed our note saying that we had trapped Noriega in the Vatican embassy in Panama. Yet despite having invaded the country and hit Noriega's known hangouts with Special Forces, he had eluded our operations for days. From the White House, I had also helped to coordinate the effort to get Fabio Escobar, the leader of one of the Colombian drug cartels. Although we had the help of the Colombian police and military, Escobar stayed at large for years before he was shot by a special Colombian unit. I had agreed with Jonathan Howe that we should arrest Farah Aideed for killing U.N. peacekeepers, then watched as months went by and Aideed prepared for us, until flnally U.S. Special Forces tried in vain to capture him and were killed in the process, along with a thou- sand Somalis. Given the reluctance of the military to pian seriously for commando operations in Afghanistan and the fecklessness to date of CIA's Afghan friends, the best option to get bin Laden seemed to be to hit a building in which he was staying. For that purpose, the Defense Department was asked to keep cruise missile platforms off the Pakistani coast. This time we specified that they had to be in submarines. Aboard the submarines, the cruise missiles had multiple target op-tions preloaded. The targets were places bin Ladin was thought to have been before, houses and villa complexes in several cities. Now ali we needed was word that he was at one of those places again, and would likely stay there for a few hours. That proved hard to get. CIA's assets in Afghanistan could usually teli us where bin Laden had been a few days earlier. They did not know, except rarely, where he would be the next day. On a few occasions, they were able to teli us where they thought he was at that moment. When word carne through that we had a contemporaneous sighting from our informants, the CSG met immediately by secure video conference. In three meetings during 1998 and 1999, the CSG requested emergency meetings of the Principals to recommend to the President a cruise missile strike on the facility in which bin Laden was believed to be at the time. We had to act quickly. By the time the information reached the CSG, it was already getting old. By the time the Principals met and recommended action to the President, another hour or two would have passed. After presidential approvai, it would take at least two hours for the missiles to hit the target. Bin Laden had to stay put throughout that time, perhaps six hours or more. Working with CIA 200 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Delenda Est 201 and the Joint Chiefs, we tried to compress that time. General John Maher established a procedure whereby the attack submarines moved to their launch positions and readied their missiles for flring as soon as the CSG recommended an emergency Principals meeting, shaving off almost an hour. On each of the three occasions when we thought we had an oppor- tunity, however, there was reason not to fire the missiles. Twice, George Tenet admitted to the Principals that the information carne from a single source that was not always right. There was a risk we would be firing on a building that did not contain bin Laden. He rec ommended against the attacks. "Look, I w-""- • __^0 guy as much as any of you. More R"'- • .„ 7ou tnat I have 100 percent, 90 per- f""- ._^c m these reports, no. This is one source, no corrobora- tion, what we cali 'single threaded' reporting." On the third occasion, Tenet and I carefully examined satellite photos of CIA's proposed target and determined that it looked a lot more like a luxury mobile home camp than a terrorist hideout. We feared that the target was not al Qaeda, but a falcon hunting party from a friendly Arab state. Per-haps our source was being used to cause us to attack one of our friends and drive a rift between us. Tenet and I recommended against that attack. The planned attack was canceled. Tenet's later review of the three events, using other sources who were able to report later on, revealed that on only one of the occasions was bin Laden actually at the proposed target when we thought he was. On that occasion, the house bin Laden was in was located next to a hospital, which would have received collateral damage from a cruise missile attack. GIĀ was extremely sensitive to the possibility that its sources might be wrong and the Agency would take the blame when the U.S. attacked the wrong piace. On May 7, 1999, U.S. bombs had fallen on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the NATO bombing of Serbia. An investigation showed that the aircraft had hit the building it was assigned to strike, but the GIĀ had erroneously thought that the building was a Serbian government compound. U.S. relations with China had been badly, if temporarily, damaged by the mistaken bombing. On these three occasions and during the presentation of the Pol- Mil Pian, I tried to make the case to the Principals that we should strike at known al Qaeda camps whether or not bin Laden was in them. "I know that you don't want to blow up al Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan trying to get bin Laden only to have the bastard show up the next day at a press conference saying how feckless we are. So don't say we were trying to get bin Laden; say we were trying to destroy the camps. If we get him, so much the better." The response I received from ali the other members of the Principals usually went along the lines of: "So we spend millions of dollars' worth of cruise missiles and bombs blowing up a buck flfty's worth of jungle gyms and mud huts again?" Sometimes I heard, "Look, we are bombing Iraq every week. We may have to bomb Serbia. European, Russian, Islamic press are already calling us the Mad Bomber. You want to bomb a third country?" Several times I tried the line of argument that the camps, what-ever it cost to build them, were churning out thousands of trained ter-rorists, who were going home and setting up cells in countries ali over the world. "We have to stop this conveyor belt, this production line. Blow them up every once in a while and recruits won't want to go there." This line of reasoning had some impact on the Principals but not enough. General Shelton noted that the regional commander, General Anthony Zinni of CENTCOM, advised against further bombings be-cause of the negative effect they had in Pakistan. Zinni was afraid that we would cause a public outcry in Pakistan that would force that nu-clear power to distance itself from us. We could lose the leverage nec-essary to prevent India and Pakistan from going to war, nuclear war. Both Madeleine Albright at the State Department and Bill Cohen at Defense found the routine and regular bombing of Afghanistan an un-appealing concept. I had thought that I had a special relationship with Albright and could persuade ber, raising the politicai risk of inaction. Albright and I and a handful of others (Michael Sheehan, Jamie Rubin) had entered into a pact together in 1996 to oust Boutros-Ghali as Secretary General of the United Nations, a secret pian we had called Operation Ori-ent Express, reflecting our hope that many nations would join us in 202 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Delenda Est 203 doing in the U.N. head. In the end, the U.S. had to do it alone (with its U.N. veto) and Sheehan and I had to prevent the President from giving in to pressure from world leaders and extending Boutros-Ghali's tenure, often by our racing to the Ovai Office when we were alerted „ . „ „* ^vŧ^ ,,^ uolephoning the President. In the end Clinton was impressed that we had managed not only to oust Boutros-Ghali but to bave Kofi Annan selected to replace him. (Clinton told Sheehan and me, "Get me a crow, I should eat crow, because I said you would never pulė it off.") The entire operation had strengthened Albright's hand in the competition to be Secretary of State in the second Clinton administration. Our personal relationship meant I had access to Al-bright and could talk frankly, but she was also hearing from her Deputy Secretary, Strobe Talbott, who was adamantly opposed to making the terrorist camps in Afghanistan a free-flre zone for routine American bombing. Talbott thought it was bad enough that we had made southern Iraq such a "bomb anytėme" area. He knew bis Russ-ian friends were making hay by labeling America "the Mad Bomber." It was ironie that people had once worried whether Bill Clinton would use force and now there was criticism that he was using too much. In the Islamic world, there was criticism that Clinton was stili bombing Iraq. After the start of hostilities with Belgrade, there were days when U.S. forces bombed both Serbia and Iraq. General Shelton and General Zinni looked on the idea of regular strikes against Afghanistan as another burden on an already stretched military. An aircraft carrier would bave to be maintained off the Pakistani coast, tying down a major U.S. military asset. Nonetheless, the idea of bombing ali of the al Qaeda infrastruc-ture was never ruled out. Indeed, the Joint Chiefs were instructed to prepare plans to hit the facilities not only with cruise missiles, but with B-l, B-2, andB-52 strategiebomber strikes. The targeters went to work, matching specific types of bombs and missiles to individuai buildings at camps and sites across Afghanistan. They planned the choreography necessary to coordinate which aircraft and missiles went where, and in what sequence, as well as where the aerial tankers would circle and how rescue units would be stationed to get downed pilots. I waited for another opportunity to make the case. WHILE THERE WAS LITTLE SUPPORT for a large-scale bombing campaign, there continued to be interest in eliminating the al Qaeda leadership. For years we had assumed that the Executive Order against U.S. agencies engaging in assassination was a firm ban against the use of lethal force in nonmilitary situations. The issue was not merely a legai one. There were moral issues as well as pragmatic considera-tions. Israel had adopted a program to kill terrorists after the massacre of their Olympic team at Munich. Mossad, Israeli intelligence, sent hit teams around the Middle East and Europe, assassinating those in-volved with the Munich attack. On at least one occasion, they killed the wrong man as a result of mistaken identity. The assassinations had also done little to deter further attacks on Israelis. Indeed, Israel had become caught in a vortex of assassination and retaliation that seemed to get progressively worse. Al Qaeda and bin Laden tested our own restraint. They seemed intent on continuing to kill innocent people, Americans and others. The U.S. military had been unable to come up with a way of attacking the al Qaeda leadership effectively. Gradually, the Principals accepted the idea that we needed to examine our policy on targeted assassination. Beginning in the Reagan administration, U.S. policy had permit-ted the use of lethal force against a terrorist if the lethal act was necessary to stop an imminent attack. It was clear that there were going to be more al Qaeda attacks. What did "imminent" mean? Did we bave to know the exact date and location of the next al Qaeda attack in order to use lethal force? What seemed particularly absurd to the Principals about our policy on the use of force was that it did not apply to the U.S. military. We could fire a cruise missile into Afghanistan or ask a pilot to drop a bomb with the intention of killing al Qaeda leaders, but we could not ask an Afghan to go shoot bin Laden. If we used a bomber, the chances of collateral damage were higher. Moreover, using a B-l meant that we had to publicly acknowledge our role and subject friendly govern- 204 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES ments like Pakistan to public criticism for their support or tolerance of it. On the issue of the White House authorizing CIA to kill bin T aderė, much has been written. Several reporters, including Barton tėeilman in the Washington Posi of December 19, 2001, nave written that President Clinton approved multiple intelligence documents authorizing CIA to use lethal force against Usama bin Laden and his deputies. Sandy Berger elaborated before the Joint House-Senate In-quiry Committee, saying, "We received rulings in the Department of Justice not to prohibit our efforts to try to kill bin Laden, because [the assassination ban] did not apply to situations in which you're acting in self-defense or you're acting against command-and-control targets against an enemy, which he certainly was." Yet bin Laden was not killed. President Clinton as reported in USA Today (November 12, 2001 ) reflected his frustration by noting, "I tried to take bin Laden out... the last four years I was in office." I stili to this day do not understand why it was impossible for the United States to find a competent group of Afghans, Americans, third-country nationals, or some combination who could locate bin Laden in Afghanistan and kill him. Some have claimed that the lethal au-thorizations were convoluted and the "people in the field" did not know what they could do. Every time such an objection was raised during those years, an additional authorization was drafted with the involvement of ali the concerned agencies, and approved by the Presi-dent's signature. The Principals and the President did not want to open the Pandora's box that the Israelis had found after Munich, they did not want a broad assassination policy and hit list, but the Presi-dent's intent was very clear: kill bin Laden. I believe that those who in CIA who claim the authorizations were insufficient or unclear are throwing up that claim as an excuse to cover the fact that they were pathetically unable to accomplish the mission. Chapter 9 MILLENNIUM ALERT e ARLY IN DECEMBER 1999, THE HEAD of CLA's Counter-terrorism Center, Cofer Black, called. "We have to go to battle sta-tions." "Cofer, it's not Friday," I joked. It had become something of a tra-dition that either Black or FBI Assistant Director Dale Watson would cali on Friday afternoons with late-breaking news that would cause us to spend the weekend in the office. We called the regular Friday after-noon CSG meetings the "Friday Follies." "No, Dick, this is the real deal," Black insisted. "Jordan infiltrated a celi, planning lots of bang-bang for New Year's. The Radisson Hotel, Christian tourist sites, lots of dead Americans. Deal is, Dick, I don't think this is it. You know bin Laden, he likes attacks in multiple loca-tions. They're like cockroaches. You see one, but you know that means there is a whole nest of them." Cofer Black was a hard-charging, get-it-done kind of CIA officer who had proved himself in the back alleys of unsavory places. He was what the CIA needed a lot more of, but had little of. I had urged George Tenet to flnd such a guy to run the Counterterrorism Center, someone who shared Tenet's view and mine that we had to go on the offensive. Unfortunately, Black reported to Tenet through the CIA's Deputy Director for Operations, Jim Pavitt, and Pavitt thought both Tenet and I were exaggerating the whole al Qaeda threat and would get CIA in trouble. Now, however, Black had proof that al Qaeda was planning attacks around the Millennium rollover. 206 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Millennium Aleit 207 IN THE MONTHS leading up to Cofer's phone cali, much had been done to reduce our vulnerabilities at home and abroad. We had hundreds of foreign diplomatic facilities (embassies, con-sulates, ambassadors' residences, and so on) in over 180 nations. A handful were built using the security guidelines adopted after Em-bassy Beirut was destroyed in the 1980s. Many, however, were so vul-nerable that they invited attack. The institutional culture of the Department of State, however, resisted protecting the embassies. U.S. diplomats hated being housed in fortresses, walled off from the societies they were supposed to be serving. If there were new funds, the Department of State had many things it wanted to do with the money other than build more fortresses. I had found this attitude dismaying, since it was Department of State personnel who would be killed in embassy attacks. The Department should bave been trying to do everything necessary to protect its own people. I knew that Madeleine Albright would understand the problem. After one Principals meeting in the West Wing, I had asked to speak one on one and we walked together up West Executive Drive while ber motorcade waited. "What do you think will happen if you lose another embassy? The Republicans in the Congress will go after you." I had ber attention. She shot back, "First of ali, I didn't lose these two embassies. I inherited them in the shape they were." Then the Secretary of State, realizing that I was a friend who had tried to help ber get the job, smiled coyly at me. "I know you, Dick. You bave a pian. What is it you want me to approve?" "Share the burden. These embassies don't just house State Department people, they bave staff from a dozen agencies in them. Let's get them on the hook too. Let me run an interagency process to survey the embassies and identify which ones need quick fixes, which ones we may bave to close. Then let me go after the money to build new ones, to put defenses around others. " With Secretary Albright's approvai, the White House took on the embassy security mission. I sent teams of Diplomatic Security, Secret Service, FBI, FEMA, and Defense Department experts to cities around the world to survey our embassies the way that a terrorist would. What streets did we need to close to prevent a truck bomb from get-ting too close? Were there enough locai police and were they doing their job? Where did we need machine guns and fire zones? If there was a Street that needed to be closed, the U.S. Ambassador was to go see the Foreign Minister personally. If that did not work in a week, the Secretary of State or National Security Advisor would be on the tele-phone. If we stili did not get results, we would publicly announce that we were suspending diplomatic and consular services in the country and would advise U.S. citizens and businesses to stay away. The teams carne back with lists of immediate steps to harden scores of embassies. They also had embassies that could not be saved, where nothing could be done to make them safe. Those embassies were closed and the State Department sent out property buyers to find new locations. We were able, in the wake of the embassy attacks, to persuade Congress to provide another Emergency Supplemental appropriation to cover the costs of the first wave of embassy hardening and to begin building two fortress-style embassies to replace the facilities we had lost. The CSG sat around the conference table in the Situation Room critiquing architectural plans for new embassies from Beijing to Berlin. Yet when it carne time for the fiscal year 2000 budget, the State Department's submission to the White House did not include the funds to continue the embassy-hardening program. In a matter of four months from the attacks in Africa, embassy protection had slipped back to a low budget priority. I called Josh Gottbaum, the number three person at the Office of Management and Budget and the officiai designated to work with me to make sure the President's terrorism and homeland protection prior-ities were funded. I explained the problem. Josh got it. "Well, it seems to me that it's the President's embassies and it's the President's budget . . . not the State Department's. Let me see bere . . . yes, I think we will just drop several hundred million from what they want and add sev-eral hundred million of what we know the President would want. Done." Meanwhile, the State Department had been hard at work trying to put pressure on the Taliban to close the terrorist camps in Afghanistan 208 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Millennium Alert 209 and hand over the terrorists. Unfortunately, we had little leverage with the Taliban. The three nations that did bave leverage were Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. They alone had diplomatic relations with Afghanistan. The Saudis and the Emirates also provided substantial foreign aid to that war-devastated land. Ali three had appealed on our behalf to the Taliban to cooperate on bin Laden. We also spoke directly to the Taliban. The answers that carne back from Kandahar were transparent rejections. The Taliban had talked of their Islamic obligation as a host to take in those who sought shelter. They had spoken of convening a court of Islamic scholars to try bin Laden, if we would like to provide the evidence and accusa-tions. They had assured us that they were preventing bin Laden from engaging in any terrorism. In response, we had adopted a three-part strategy. First, I granted a media interview in which I stated that if there were any further al Qaeda terrorism against the United States, we would hold the Taliban responsible and retaliate against them the next time. There was some complaining that I had not obtained proper approvai for that an-nouncement, but nobody retracted it. Second, we asked the Saudis and UAE rulers to terminate diplomatic relations with Afghanistan and terminate foreign aid. The UAE agreed to cooperate fully, and did. The Saudis, too, terminated diplomatic relations. Both also sent their own emissaries to reason with the Taliban. The Saudi emissary was Intelli-gence Minister Prince Turki. Press reports suggested that he offered to increase aid to the Taliban if they would give up bin Laden. Turki was rebuffed, something that seldom happens in the life of a senior Saudi prince. Third, we had sought economie sanctions against the Taliban. The President ordered ali Taliban assets in the United States seized. In a rare show of solidarity, the United States and Russia co-sponsored sanctions in the U.N. Security Council. There were two problems that had prevented progress with the Taliban. The first was that the Taliban rightly believed that if they evicted bin Laden, as Sudan had done, the U.S. would then bave other objections that would block aid. America would want the Taliban to insure women's rights and would insist on verifying an end to opium production. The second problem was that Taliban leaders, including I Mullah Ornar, completely agreed with bin Laden and al Qaeda's goals. There were stories of intermarriage between the bin Laden and Ornar families. There were also economie, military, and politicai ties that were mviolable. One Taliban officiai, speaking honestly, told Assis-tant Secretary of State Rick Inderfurth, "If we give you bin Laden, we will face a revolt against us." WHILE ALL THIS WAS GOING ON, of course, al Qaeda was busy laying the groundwork for an attack against us. The Millennium was approaching, and it was a temptingly symbolic occasion upon which, as Cofer Black would help discover, they couldn't resisi seizing. From my position at the time of Cofer's phone cali, not yet know-ing of al Qaeda's plans, I had only limited options. I had tried to argue that the U.S. work harder to fight against the Taliban in its civil war in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance stili held sway over a third of the country but provinces switched sides as a result of combat or cash, and much of the combatants and ali of the cash carne from bin Laden to help the Taliban. It was only a matter of time before the Alliance crumbled. I argued that we could provide the counterweight, sending arms and funds to Massoud's northern forces. If Massoud posed a seri-ous threat to the Taliban, bin Laden would bave to devote bis arms and men to the fight against the Northern Alliance rather than fight-ing us. Massoud had at least token support from India, Russia, and Uzbekistan. CIA had kept open contaci with him, but had refused to provide him with significant assistance. Once again, CIA's career management saw my proposai to aid the Northern Alliance as a risk to CIA. For those who had spent fifteen, twenty, or more years in CIA, there was a clear pattern: Whoever was in the White House would get worked up over the cause du jour. He would be unable to get the rest of the government to produce results, so he would turn to the CIA. He would push the CIA to do risky, po-tentially controversial things. Later, after things went badly, the White House people would be gone and CIA would get the blame. It was through this template that the Agency saw the Northern Al- 210 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Millennium Alert 211 liance: Sure, Massoud was a good guy now, but later the Congress, or the media, or some other White House staff would focus on the fact that he sold opium, abused human rights, and had killed civilians. They would blame CIA. Audits of the GIĀ assistance would undoubt-edly show that some funds had gone for questionable purposes. In the final analysis, the CIA proclaimed the Northern Alliance was feckless and no match for the Taliban. Although CIA staff would admit their Agency's bias to me in private, in officiai meetings they nodded and said they would prepare to help Massoud and bis Northern Alliance. Of course, they first needed their internai legai review to be complete and then there would bave to be an interagency legai review. The money to help Massoud, apart from token aid that the CIA called "trinkets," would bave to be given to the Agency over and above ali funds already available to them. This reluctance to fund the Northern Alliance without "found money" caused me to wonder exactly what CIA was doing with ali of the counterterrorism budget increases that the White House had given them through several Emergency Supplemental budgets. Work-ing with the Office of Management and Budget and CIA's own audi-tors, we discovered that almost ali of the Agency's activities against al Qaeda were being paid for by the Emergency Supplementals. There were almost no baseline CIA funds going into the effort. In 2000 and in 2001 we asked CIA to identify some funds, any money, earmarked for other activities that were less important than the fight against al Qaeda, so that those funds could be transferred to the higher priority of countering bin Laden. The formai, officiai CIA response was that there were none. Another way to say that was that everything they were doing was more important than flghting al Qaeda. This institutional response was in sharp contrast with George Tenet's personal fixation with al Qaeda. Tenet often called me alarmed about raw intelligence reports of al Qaeda activity. He testi-fled before congressional committees that al Qaeda was the major threat to the United States. It was also in sharp contrast to the attitude in the Counterterrorism Center at CIA, which by 1997 was led by the hard-charging Cofer Black. Black wanted to destroy al Qaeda as much as I did, if only the Directorate of Operations would let him. WHEN BLACK CALLED THAT DAY IN 1999, wequicklyconvened a CSG meeting and sent out warnings to U.S. embassies, military bases, and to the 18,000 police agencies in the United States. The mes-sage: Be advised, al Qaeda terrorists may be planning attacks around the time of the Millennium. Be on heightened alert for suspicious activity. And then we waited. That message went overseas, but also to ali federai law enforce-ment agents, as well as many county sheriffs, state troopers, highway patrol officers, and city cops. The break carne in an unlikely location. A pleasant boat ride from British Columbia to Washington state ended with a routine screening by U.S. Customs officers. One passenger in line fidgeted, would not make eye contact. When the Customs officer, Diana Dean, went to pulė him out of line, he bolted and ran off the boat, leaving bis car on the ferry. Dean gave chase and called for backup. A few minutes later Ahmed Ressam was in custody. His car held explosives, and a map of Los Angeles International Airport. If that were not enough to send us spinning, CIA had learned fur-ther details about the al Qaeda plot in Jordan. The head of the celi, who had helped assemble the bombs, had recently quit bis job—as a cab driver in Boston. The Jordanian Crown Prince, visiting the bomb factory hidden in an upper-middle-class home, had been amazed at the size of the haul. "They weren't planning terrorism, they were planning a revolution." The King immediately declared a state of emergency and flooded the streets with soldiers and armored vehicles. More than the usuai sus-pects were swept up and interrogated. The investigation led to an al Qaeda operative in Pakistan, and to another American who had lived not far from Los Angeles International Airport. In the flfteen months since the embassy bombings, National Se-curity Advisor Sandy Berger had held dozens of Principals meetings on al Qaeda. He knew their names, their modus operandi, and he feared they would strike again before we could cripple their organization. He convened the Principals in crisis mode. "We bave stopped two sets of attacks planned for the Millennium. You can bet your measly federai 212 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Millennium Aleit 213 paycheck that there are more out there and we have to stop them too. I spoke with the President and he wants you ali to know ..." Berger looked at Janet Reno, Louis Freeh, George Tenet, "... this is it, noth-ing more important, ali assets. We stop this fucker." (It was the sort of attention we needed in the summer of 2001, but we got only in the CSG, not in the Principals Committee.) Following the first of these Principals meetings, we prepared, at Berger's request, a Pol-Mil Pian for the Millennium Alert, alerting units, increasing security, rounding up suspects around the world. Berger was, in generai, a cautious lawyer who had an unparalleled skill in seeing the many ways something could develop and go wrong, how people could under some circumstances blame you even if you carne up with the cure for cancer. That skill kept the Administration out of a lot of hot water. He had also become, however, a true believer in the flght against al Qaeda, understanding early on the nature of the threat. Berger had a coldly cynical and accurate understanding of the flaws and weaknesses of the various departments and agencies. He did not think we could just trust that FBI, GIĀ, and the military would au-tomatically do the right things to protect us. This time, however, FBI did respond well. It did one of the things it is very good at: it threw bodies at the problem. Thousands of agents fanned out, pulling at strings. The strings from Ressam, the man on the ferry, led to a sleeper celi of Algerian mujahedeen in Montreal. How the Canadians had missed the celi was diffėcult to understand, but now they were cooperating. The leads the Royal Canadian Mounted Police provided went to what looked like cells in Boston and New York. By the time I called John O'Neill (by then the FBI Special Agent in Charge of National Security in New York City) to ask what he was doing, he was on a back Street in Brooklyn where bis agents had just arrested an al Qaeda operative connected to Ressam. The Justice Department normally reviewed FBI requests for na-tional security wiretaps with a skeptical eye. Justice correctly wanted to insure there were no abuses, lest the Congress restrict their ability to do any electronic surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Sur-veillance Act. In the weeks before the Millennium, however, Fran Townsend and ber staff at Justice brought dozens of FISA requests to the special intelligence court judges. More happened in a week than normally took piace in a year. For the next several days as Christmas and then the Millennium approached, Berger held daily Principals meetings that often sounded like the pre-watch briefėngs on Hill Street Blues. The Attorney General and FBI Director gave reports that included descriptions of sus-pect vans and results of search warrants. We ali learned what BOLO meant in cop talk (Be on the Lookout for... ). Tenet called bis key counterparts around the world, wringing out details, cajoling security services into preemptive raids on possible cells. In addition to coordinating the offensive, the CSG prepared for the worst. Disaster recovery units were prepositioned. Ali the assets we had used after the African bombings were mobilized. No one in the counterterrorism business was going to have any holidays, especially on New Year's Eve. On Christmas Day, Berger and I spent the morning at FBI headquarters with scores of agents and the afternoon at CIA's Counterterrorism Center with dozens of analysts. Again, we waited. In Yemen, a U.S. Navy destroyer was planning a port cali in Aden harbor as part of CENTCOM's effort to increase military-to-military contacts and cooperation. The destroyer, named after four brothers who had ali died on the same ship in World War II, was the USS The Sullivans. As we later learned, Al Qaeda had it in the crosshairs. A small boat was loaded with high explosives in order to be driven right into the destroyer. Al Qaeda planned that attack to be simultaneous with others: Los Angeles Airport exploding in blood and glass; the Amman Radisson collapsing in flames and dust, Christian tourists gunned down at Mount Nebo. Perhaps the Yemen celi knew as they loaded the boat that the Los Angeles and Amman plans had been dis-rupted. Perhaps they knew they were the only part of the plot that the Americans had not discovered. As they pushed the boat down the landing and into the water, however, it moved off a little into the harbor, and sank. The explosives weighed too much. In a vault just off the floor of the Y2K Coordination Center, we waited for midnight in Riyadh, then in Paris. There were no major computer failures, no explosions. I went down the list, calling each command center and monitoring post that would detect something 214 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Millennium Alert 215 happening. CIA noted that more than half the world had celebrated the rollover without incident. FAA said that almost no one was flying that night and airlines had canceled flights. Secret Service was ready to move the President to the Lincoln Memorial for the Washington celebration. FEMA said the disaster units were at air bases and pre-positioned in cities. Coast Guard had filled New York Harbor and its rivers with armed cutters. Energy had deployed its nuclear weapons detection teams. I could hardly hear John O'Neill when I called his celi phone; he was at the New York Police Command Post in Time Square. "We've shaken every tree, but I figure if they're gonna do any-thing in New York, they're gonna do it here," he explained. "So l'm here." At midnight I went to the roof to look down on the celebration at the Lincoln Memorial. Fireworks burst in the cold night sky. As the celebration ended and the Presidenti motorcade began to return to the White House to continue the party, Sandy Berger called from the limousine. "So far, so good. Any signs of trouble?" "No, but Los Angeles celebrates in three hours," I answered, won-dering how I would stay awake until then. It had been a long three weeks. "Well, thank everybody for the President and for me. I think we dodged the bullet, but we also learned a lot. We got a lot of work to do." Berger was right. For anyone who doubted it before, the Boston taxi driver, the Los Angeles airport, the Brooklyn connection, the Montreal celi had ali said one thing: they're here. At 3:00 a.m. we went back to the rooftop and popped open a bottle. THE MILITARY HAVE A PRACTiCE known as "Lessons Learned" or "After Action Review." Whenever a major military operation or ex-ercise is conducted, a formai process analyzes what went right and what could have been done better. In the military tradition of not wanting to fight for the same hill twice, the U.S. military is not eager to, as Santayana said, "be condemned to repeat" something out of fail-ure to learn the lesson the first lime. After what became known as the Millennium Terrorist Alert of December 1999, the Principals char-tered the CSG to prepare a Millennium After Action Review. Each agency examined what it had learned and the group collectively looked at our shortcomings. The list of shortcomings clustered around one fact, that there were probably al Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States. I had believed for at least five years that al Qaeda was here. I had not had much luck convincing the FBI to pay close attention. Offi-cially, the FBI said they knew of only a handful of sympathizers who were under surveillance. There were no active cells, no indigenously based threat, according to the Bureau. John O'Neill and I believed oth-erwise, but O'Neill had transferred to the New York Office. It was the most important FBI office in the country and O'Neill had made it the operational arm of the FBI for going after al Qaeda overseas. Nonethe-less, most field offices and much of FBI Headquarters was focused elsewhere. Louis Freeh's interest in foreign-based terrorism seemed to be almost entirely focused on investigating the Khobar attack. The National Security Division, where the terrorism account was located, was consumed with Russian and Chinese espionage, the case of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, the American spying for the Russians, and the case of Wen Ho Lee and the possible spying at the nuclear labs. In the fifty-six Field Offices (except New York) the emphasis was on drugs, organized crime, and other issues that generated arrests and prosecutions. The managers of these offices had little time for surveillance and infiltration of possible Islamic radicals. In some cities, we had created Joint Terrorism Task Forces that brought together repre-sentatives from ali the locai federai law enforcement agencies with the state and locai police. I had assumed that these JTTFs were hunt-ing al Qaeda. To test that proposition, I traveled around the country visiting FBI offices and JTTFs. What I found was deeply disturbing. In every instance, the Special Agents in Charge and their JTTF di-rectors ali professed that there was no al Qaeda presence in their re-gion, but they had taken almost no steps to uncover any in the first piace. Instead, they were following whatever terrorist organization was making itself obvious. In some cases it was the Irish Republican Army, in others it was Indian Sikhs, or domestic militias. 216 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Millennium Alert 217 "Is there an al Qaeda presence in this city?" I would ask. Often I would get the response, "What's al Qaeda? Is that that Been Layding guy? He hasn't been here." Roger Cressey or Paul Kurtz would follow up. "What do they say about jihad at the mosques, after the services? What do they pass out? What do they collect money for?" "Hell, we can't go to a mosque or even a church unless we have cause. Can't send in a source either," would always be the answer. Then they would add, "Listen, we go for prosecutions and the U.S. At-torney here isn't interested in some minor infraction for supporting terrorism. Shit, we don't even have any Assistant U.S. Attorneys who have top secret clearance." They ali noted that the Attorney General's Guidelines made it im-possible for them to do things without already knowing about a prob-able crime. They could not, without someone providing them an initial lead, attend services at mosques or sit in on meetings of student groups. They were prohibited from printing organization's Web pages unless they suspected a crime was in progress. In many cities the agents did not even have Internet access. The Attorney General's Guidelines were initially adopted in the wake of the Watergate era scandals of the early 1970s. During that pe-riod it had been revealed that the FBI had kept flles on people and groups for no reason other than J. Edgar Hoover's whim. To correct that kind of abuse, the Justice Department had put the FBI in a strait-jacket and they were stili in it. The lack of computer support, however, was a failure of the Bureau's leadership. Locai police departments throughout the country had far more advanced data systems than the FBI. In New York I saw piles of terrorism flles on the floor of the JTTF. There was only one low-paid file clerk there, and he could not keep up with the volume of paper that was being generated. There was no way for one agent to know what information another agent had collected, even in the same office. Wiretap recordings lay around for weeks because there were too few Arabie or Farsi or Pashto translators. Ali translations were done in the city in which the conversations were recorded. When the FBI did uncover something interesting and report it to Washington, no written record of it ever left the Bureau. This was in marked contras! to CIA, NSA, and the State Department, which flooded my secure e-mail with over one hundred detailed reports every day. The only way that we knew what FBI Headquarters knew was by secure telephone calls or meetings. The volume of the reporting from other agencies became so great that we established a Threat Subgroup that tracked leads on an Excel spreadsheet called the Threat Matrix. The subgroup went through the reports, asking: what was the source of the information, was the source ever right before, is there any independent way to verify the report, what should we do to deal with the possible threat? The subgroup then followed up, going back to the report until it could be "negated," struck from the list of active threats. The subgroup had representatives from FBI, CIA, Secret Service, NSA, DOD, State, FAA, and often other agencies. Steve Simon and later Roger Cressey chaired the Threat Subgroup. It was not unusual for them to report that whoever the FBI representa-tive was that day, was not really participating, causing me to have to cali higher levels of the Bureau. On one day I speciflcally remember, mild-mannered Cressey marched into my office after a Threat Subgroup meeting and announced, "That fucker is going to get some Americans killed. He just sits there like a bump on a log. Nothing to report. No comment on anybody else's work. Doesn't want to check anything out." I knew he was talking about an FBI representa ti ve. When we would ask FBI if there were criminal violations of support to terrorism such as establishing Web sites soliciting funds or other means of terrorist fėnancing, we would get blank stares. Rick Newcomb's office at Treasury was trying to give the FBI some guid-ance on where to look for terrorist money, but to little avail. When FBI said there were no Web sites in the U.S. that were recruiting jihadists for training in Afghanistan or soliciting money for terrorist front groups, I asked Steve Emerson to check. Emerson had written the hook American Jihad, which had told me more than the FBI ever had about radicai Islamic groups in the U.S. Within days, Emerson had a long list of Web sites sitting on servers in the United States. I passed the list to Justice and the FBI. Nothing appeared to happen as a result, 218 AGAINST ALL ENEMIES Millennium Alert 219 although the Justice Department staff did note how difficult it was to prosecute "free speech" cases. The two bright lights in the FBI were John O'Neill and Dale Wat-son, who replaced O'Neill in Washington when John went to the New York Office. They were a study in contrasts. O'Neill could have passed for a Boston Irish Congressman who read GQ magazine. Watson pre-tended to he a "good old boy" and actually chewed tobacco. To en-courage CIA-FBI cooperation after forty years of mutuai hostility, the two organizations had exchanged senior counterterrorism managers. Watson had come to the FBI Headquarters job having spent two years in the GIĀ Counterterrorism Center. He knew his stuff. When Dale Watson sat down with me to develop the Millennium After Action Review he knew he had a problem. "We have to smash the FBI into bits and rebuild it to do terrorism, " Dale conflded. "We're off running around after crooks who rob banks when there are people planning to kill Americans right bere in the USA." Hallelujah! I thought. Watson got Freeh to approve a meeting in Tampa for ali senior FBI supervisors from ali flfty-six offices. He asked me to begin the meeting by telling the audience what al Qaeda was and what they wanted to do. I began, "Al Qaeda is a worldwide politicai conspiracy masquerad-ing as a religious sect. It engages in murder of innocent people to grab attention. Its goal is a fourteenth-century-style theocracy in which women have no rights, everyone is forced to be a Muslim, and the Sharia legai System is used to cut off hands and stone people to death. It also uses a global banking network and flnancial System to support its activities. These people are smart, many trained in our colleges, and they have a very long view. They think it may take them a century to accomplish their goals, one of which is the destruction of the United States of America. They have good spy tradecraft and employ sleeper cells and front groups that pian for years before acting. They are our number one enemy and they are amongst us, in your cities. Findthem." Watson followed me: "They are the FBI's number one priority in terronsm. Yo -Ŧ wiu find them If you haye t