A Pretext for War (19 page)

Two days after it began, on April 13, ambulance driver Abbas Jiha from the village of Mansouri was busy rushing patients wounded in the fighting to a hospital in the town of Sidon. On his return to Mansouri, panic had broken out and explosions were taking place. People began pleading for him to take them to Sidon. Jiha quickly squeezed four of his children into his ambulance along with ten other people, including a family, and began driving toward Sidon.

Suddenly, an Israeli helicopter began chasing his ambulance. Minutes later, two missiles were fired, one of which exploded through the rear door, engulfing the vehicle in fire and smoke and hurling it sixty feet through the air. Thrown clear, Abbas Jiha began running toward the flaming heap of twisted metal. “My God, my God,” he screamed, shaking his fist at the sky, “my family has gone.” In all, six people were killed, including Jiha’s nine-year-old daughter and his wife.

Israeli officials later admitted the ambulance had been targeted but claimed, falsely, that the vehicle was owned by Hezbollah and was transporting one of the group’s fighters. Jiha had no connection with terrorist groups, and the thought that Israel could target an ambulance packed with innocent people, including many children, outraged Muslims throughout the Middle East.

On April 18, one week into Operation Grapes of Wrath, a reporter for London’s newspaper
The Independent
was traveling in southern Lebanon with a United Nations convoy. Robert Fisk, Britain’s most highly decorated foreign correspondent, spent a quarter of a century covering the Middle East and was the recipient of the British International Journalist of the Year Award seven times, including for 1996. As the vehicles were approaching the small village of Qana, Fisk could hear the sound of artillery, he recalled.

The convoy had stopped at Qana that morning and noticed it was crowded with about eight hundred refugees. They had been transported there for their safety by armored UN vehicles from nearby villages that had come under Israeli bombardment. When the convoy finally arrived in Qana shortly after two in the afternoon, fire was everywhere and proximity shells were bursting in the air. Antipersonnel weapons designed to explode about two dozen feet above ground, they would shower down razor-sharp shrapnel, butchering anyone beneath.

“It was a massacre,” wrote Fisk in a front-page story. “Israel’s slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day offensive—206 by last night—has been so cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre. There had been the ambulance attacked on Saturday, the sisters killed in Yohmor the day before, the 2-year-old girl decapitated by an Israeli missile four days ago. And earlier yesterday, the Israelis had slaughtered a family of 12—the youngest was a four-day-old baby—when Israeli helicopter pilots fired missiles into their home.”

The Israeli government later claimed the attack on the UN refugee camp at Qana was a mistake. But a formal, top-level United Nations investigation came to a different conclusion. “It is unlikely” that Israeli gunners simply erred, said the report, and demanded that Israel pay $1.7 million in damages. “Contrary to repeated denials,” said the report, “two Israeli helicopters and a remotely piloted vehicle were present in the Qana area at the time of the shelling.” Amnesty International also conducted an investigation of the massacre, and they concluded “that the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] intentionally attacked the UN compound.”

Arieh Shavit, a columnist for the Israeli daily newspaper
Ha’aretz,
noted: “How easily we killed them [in Qana] without shedding a tear. We did not denounce the crime, did not arrange for a legal clarification, because this time we tried to deny the abominable horror and move on.” And the international edition of
Time
magazine noted, “Around the Middle East . . . Qana is already a byword for martyrdom. The southern Lebanese village figures as a shrine drawing up to 1,000 pilgrims a day: busloads of schoolchildren, Cabinet ministers from Beirut, even a daughter of Iran’s President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Black banners overlooking rows of graves decry the ‘barbarity’ of Israel.”

While largely ignored by the American press, the massacre at Qana was front-page news in London, much of Europe, and throughout the Middle East, where the story continued for days. Already burning with hatred for America and Israel, the pictures of headless Arab babies and other grisly photographs that appeared throughout the media were likely the final shove, pushing bin Laden over the edge and leading him to dedicating his life to war against what he would call the Israeli–United States alliance. From then on, he would often use the massacre at Qana as a battle cry, and it would become the match lighting the fuse that would eventually lead to the World Trade Center on a Tuesday morning five years later.

CHAPTER 7

THE FARM

Determined to reverse the CIA’s decline, George Tenet sent a warning to all employees soon after taking over. Later he would call it the most important thing he would ever say to his workforce. Without radical change, he cautioned, “we will no longer be relevant ten years from now.” Tenet then telegraphed an unmistakable signal. He ordered workers to place a painting of Richard Helms, the controversial former director who had a particular fondness for covert operations, over his private dining area. At his morning meeting with senior agency executives, Tenet would regularly open with the simple question “Who did we recruit last night, and what difference will it make?”

To rebuild the Directorate of Operations and its Clandestine Service, Tenet reached back in time, persuading a retired DO chief to reclaim his seventh-floor office. A fifty-seven-year-old former Marine infantry officer who served two tours in Vietnam, Jack G. Downing was the poster-boy spy. Educated at Harvard, he spoke fluent Russian and Chinese and had the unique distinction of being the only person to serve as CIA station chief in both Beijing and Moscow. He was “a world-renowned operator,” Tenet said, “who reads Chinese poetry for kicks.”

“There was a reluctance to take risks,” Downing said of the agency when he returned. He decided to change that attitude—and to begin at The Farm. Starting immediately, each recruit would be required to bail out of a plane, commando-style, at 1,200 feet. “Ordinary people are not inclined to jump out of an airplane,” Downing said, “and we are not looking for ordinary people.” Soon, the muffled booms returned to The Farm and Harvey Point as the number of clandestine officers—and bomb-training exercises—began increasing.

By 1999, the number of recruits, mostly between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-two, had jumped to 120 and was expected to rise to 180. At an average cost of $450,000 to train a case officer, rebuilding the Clandestine Service involved a significant investment. But Tenet believed it was worth every penny. “At the end of the day,” he said, taking a swipe at NSA and the other technical spy agencies, “the men and women of U.S. intelligence—not satellites or sensors or high-speed computers—are our most precious asset.”

Downing also began placing a major focus on the marriage between humans and machines to revolutionize intelligence collection and created a new unit to exploit it called the Technology Management Group. Picked as its first chief was Hugh Turner, fifty-four, a veteran case officer who was fluent in both Arabic and Turkish and won the Silver Star with the Green Berets during the Vietnam War. Turner’s most important asset was the ultrasecret Special Collection Service, a unique hybrid of technical eavesdropping specialists from the National Security Agency and clandestine operators from the CIA. The joint organization was designed to penetrate foreign targets, from embassies to terrorist meeting sites, with sophisticated listening devices. It was a job made all the more difficult as communications became ever more complex with the growing use of encryption, fiber-optics, and the Internet.

“Yesterday’s code clerk is today’s systems administrator,” said one very senior CIA official. The easiest way to a large amount of secrets is to get into foreign databases, and the best way to do that is to recruit—through bribes or other offers—the people who manage the systems. Also, by bribing someone to plant bugs in the keyboards or other vulnerable parts of a computer network, NSA could intercept the messages before the cryptographic software has a chance to jumble the text.

The chief of the SCS alternates between NSA and CIA officials. SCS is headquartered in a heavily protected compound of modern buildings on Springfield Road in Beltsville, Maryland, a few miles south of NSA. There, in what is known as “the Live Room,” the electronic environment of target cities is re-created in order to test which antennas and receivers would be best for covert interception. Elsewhere, bugs, receivers, and antennas are fabricated into everyday objects so they can be smuggled into foreign countries. “Sometimes that’s a very small antenna and you try to sneak it in,” said former CIA Director Stansfield Turner. “Sometimes the signal you’re intercepting is very small, narrow, limited range, and getting your antenna there is going to be very difficult.”

While in some places NSA or SCS has compromised a nation’s entire communications system by bribing an engineer or telecommunications official, in others much of the necessary eavesdropping can be done from special rooms in U.S. embassies. But in difficult countries, clandestine SCS agents must sometimes fly in disguised as businessmen and covertly implant the necessary eavesdropping equipment. He or she might bring into the target country a parabolic antenna disguised as an umbrella. A receiver and satellite transmitter may be made to appear as a simple radio and laptop computer. The SCS official would then camouflage and plant the equipment in a remote site somewhere along the microwave’s narrow beam—maybe in a tree in a wooded area or in the attic of a rented farmhouse. The signals then captured by the equipment would be remotely retransmitted to a geostationary satellite, which would then relay them to NSA. At other times, no other solution is possible except climbing a telephone pole and hardwiring an eavesdropping device.

The SCS will also play a key role in what is probably the most profound change in the history of signals intelligence—the eventual switch from focusing on information “in motion” such as communications signals, to information “at rest,” such as computer databases. Since the first transatlantic intercept station was erected on Gillin farm in Houlton, Maine, just before the close of World War I, signals intelligence has concentrated on intercepting signals as they travel through the air or space. But as technology makes that increasingly difficult and cost-prohibitive, the tendency, say senior intelligence officials, will be to turn instead to information “at rest”—the vast quantity of information stored on computer databases, disks, and hard drives. This may be done either remotely through cyberspace or physically by the SCS.

In a large sense, the changing philosophy represents the American spy world turned full circle, back to where the best way to get secrets is to steal them from where they are stored. Only this time, it may be a single hard drive containing critical information.

In 1999, Downing retired for the second time and Tenet picked the departing official’s deputy, James L. Pavitt, to replace him. Like Tenet, Pavitt was an enthusiastic booster of the Clandestine Service who would speak proudly of “his” spies. “My spies save the world a little bit every day,” he said. “What in fact they do, day in and day out, is recruit spies and steal secrets. They steal secrets to help protect our country . . . I have thousands of people who work for me around the world.”

Ramrod straight with a shock of snow-white hair, Pavitt first began practicing his tradecraft in 1964 as a freshman at the University of Missouri. “I’ll probably get indicted for this,” he said, “but I was able to take a Missouri driver’s license and change that middle number that allowed me to get into wherever it was to get a six-pack of beer. I was so proud of myself, but little did I know that what I was doing then was what I was going to be doing for the rest of my career . . . It’s a long way from Wallen’s Springs, where I used to go and drink beer as a freshman.”

Eventually majoring in history, Pavitt’s hero during his senior year was Robert F. Kennedy, who was then running for the White House on a promise to pull America out of its deadly quagmire in Vietnam. “I was an idealistic young man given over to the hope that I would not die in Vietnam,” he said, “convinced that perhaps what we were doing in Vietnam was not right.”

On June 8, 1968, he received his diploma in the university’s packed and screaming stadium. “I remember the excitement,” he said. “I remember going home and then getting a phone call in the middle of the night. And it was a call from a friend who said that I have some terribly bad news to tell you, it was not that a member of my family had been killed but rather that someone who was my idol had been shot dead in a hotel lobby in Los Angeles, and that was Senator Robert Kennedy. And I remember to this day that on the day I graduated, the man who was for me at that time a hero, someone who represented something that was good not bad, peaceful not war, had been shot down.”

A Phi Beta Kappa key holder, Pavitt had planned to be a history professor, but a year into his Ph.D. program he was drafted into the army, trained in the blacker arts of intelligence collection, and then posted to Berlin during the height of the Cold War. “I had been trained to do all sorts of things, and had I in fact gone to Vietnam instead of Berlin,” said Pavitt, who speaks German, “I’m sure I never would have returned.” Following the army, he continued to hone his skills at deception, but instead as a speechwriter on Capitol Hill. “I wrote a speech for the congressman [Harold Donahue of Worcester, Massachusetts] once on health care financing, and if you read it you did not have a clue whether the Congressman was for or against it. And it was with that I decided to do something else, and I joined the CIA.”