A Pretext for War (24 page)

At that moment, Kasi pumped a round into another car, this one driven by agency analyst and physician Lansing Bennett, sixty-six, killing him. He then walked between the double line of cars, rapidly snapping the curved steel trigger on the rifle, wounding two CIA employees and an agency contractor before returning to the VW Golf.

Judy Becker-Darling was hunched under the dashboard and heard what sounded to her like balloons popping. When she briefly lifted her head up, she saw that she was looking down the barrel of a gun. “Get down,” her husband yelled again. Bang, bang, bang—Kasi fired three more shots, hitting Frank Darling in the leg, groin, and head and instantly killing him. “I hope he runs out of bullets,” prayed his wife, who saw the image of a gun brush past her window. Then she looked over at her husband. “When I picked my head up, Frank was shot in the head.”

“I shot approximately ten rounds, shooting five people,” Kasi later said. “I aimed for the chest area of the people I shot.” He stopped, he said, only because “there wasn’t anybody else left to shoot.” Then he climbed back into his truck and, after a short while, returned to his apartment a few miles away. The next day, he boarded a plane to Pakistan.

As to the reasons for the sudden burst of violence, Kasi blamed America’s Middle East policies, saying he wanted to “teach a lesson” to the United States. “Like a suicide bomber,” noted
The Washington Post,
“Kasi was willing to sacrifice his life to protest U.S. foreign policy, which he believed was hurting Muslims worldwide.” Kasi’s roommate told the police that Kasi would get incensed watching CNN when he heard how Muslims were being treated. Kasi had said he was going to do “something big” at the White House, the Israeli embassy, or the CIA, but at the time his roommate did not think he was serious.

Kasi pointed specifically to the bombing of Iraq by U.S. aircraft and the “killing of Palestinians by U.S. components,” apparently referring to Israel. “Several days before the shooting,” he said, “I decided to do the shooting at the CIA or the Israeli embassy but decided to shoot at the CIA because it was easier because CIA officials are not armed.” Kasi added that he was “upset with the CIA because of their involvement in Muslim countries.”

It was an early warning of the violent level of hatred building among Muslims around the world caused by America’s fatally flawed Middle East policies. In Pakistan, Kasi’s actions were greeted with cheers, and only weeks later the first World Trade Center bombing would take place.

Because it was believed that Kasi had fled to the Afghan-Pakistani area, DO case officers from the Islamabad station renewed contact with GE/Senior—the cryptonym for a group of Afghan tribal warriors who had served on the agency payroll during the war against the Soviets. They agreed to again work for the agency, now as manhunters on the trail of Kasi, and were assigned a new cryptonym, FD/Trodpint.

The group quickly became one of the best-financed and most heavily armed posses in history. They were supplied with boxloads of AK-47 assault rifles, deadly mines, electronic surveillance equipment, encrypted communications gear, heavy-duty trucks and motorcycles, mobile beacons to pinpoint locations, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.

If FD/Trodpint was able to locate Kasi in Pakistan, the instructions were to immediately notify the CIA station in Islamabad, which would, working with Pakistani authorities, arrange the arrest. But if he was spotted in Afghanistan, the capture would be far more complicated. Without a cooperative arrangement with the Taliban, the agency would have to conduct a secret exfiltration of Kasi and possibly the whole team. That would require locating a usable landing strip, and FD/Trodpint managed to find one in an isolated section of the desert outside Kandahar.

The CIA then closely examined the site with high-resolution satellite imagery and found it acceptable. But the one thing they could not determine was whether the sand was hard-packed enough to accommodate the weight of a sizable aircraft. To answer that question, the agency approved a highly secret covert operation in which a team from the agency’s Special Activities Division, made up mostly of veterans of military special-operations units, would make a lightning-quick dash into Afghanistan from Pakistan. Flown low to the ground and in the dead of night, the team landed at the site undetected. After quickly testing the hardness of the soil and rechecking the satellite coordinates, they zipped back to Pakistan with the positive results. The trip also served as a trial run should Kasi be located in Afghanistan.

But the team of tribal Afghans who made up FD/Trodpint were never able to locate Kasi. Instead, it was the temptation of the CIA’s multimillion-dollar reward that led an informant to the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, in May 1997. Introduced to the CIA’s chief of base, who reported to Islamabad, the Pakistani offered his bona fides—Kasi’s application for a Pakistan driver’s license. Although he was using an alias, the document contained both Kasi’s photograph and his fingerprint.

The man said that a local tribal leader in Kasi’s native Baluchistan, a province in Pakistan alongside the Afghan border, had been protecting and working with the fugitive for the past two years but was now ready to turn him in for the reward. Eventually, a plan was worked out to have Kasi’s associate take him along on a business trip in June to Dera Ghazi Khan in central Pakistan. The CIA station in Islamabad coordinated the operation with the Pakistani intelligence service, which agreed to transport a team of CIA and FBI agents to Multan, near the meeting location, and then to the Shalimar Hotel, where Kasi was to be staying.

About 4:00
A.M.
on June 15, 1997, two FBI special agents from the elite Hostage Rescue Team—Special Agent Brad Garrett, who had been assigned the case minutes after the shooting took place, and CIA Islamabad station chief Gary Schroen—approached the hotel wearing traditional Pakistani clothes to hide their jeans and weapons. “It was surreal,” recalled Garrett. “It’s dark. It’s dusty. I felt like I was in a David Lynch movie. We’re actually starting to sweat it.” Then he began getting concerned. “What if we end up killing him? Or killing the wrong person? Or one of us gets killed?”

In the dark morning, Kasi’s associate knocked on his door in the $3-a-night hotel and yelled that it was time to get up. Upon hearing a response, Garrett kicked in the door, grabbed the man, and pinned him to the floor. But now he wasn’t sure he had the right person. The individual struggling to get up had a beard and was heavier than he thought. “Turn him over,” he ordered several of his fellow agents as he continued to straddle him. Then Garrett grabbed Kasi’s left thumb and pressed it against a flip-open ink pad. With his free hand, the FBI agent pulled a magnifying glass out of his bag, studied the print, and compared it with a sample he had brought along. “It’s a match,” Garrett shouted triumphantly. The team rushed Kasi to the airport, where a CIA helicopter was waiting for them. Gary Schroen grabbed up his secure telephone and passed the good news to headquarters.

On the trip back to the United States, Kasi stated his reasons and offered no regrets. “He was very up-front about what he did. He didn’t try to blame it on anyone. He didn’t try to hide it,” said Virginia prosecutor Robert Horan, Jr. “It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t like hating individuals. It was more institutional,” noted Garrett, adding that back home Kasi had become a hero.

With Kasi captured, the decision was made to turn control of FD/Trodpint, the heavily equipped team of Afghan anti-Soviet warriors turned “bounty hunters,” over to the unit then trying to track down Osama bin Laden. Unlike Kasi, however, bin Laden was only a suspect in a number of past terrorist events; he had not yet been indicted, although a grand jury in New York was—or would be—investigating him about that time. Thus, once FD/Trodpint found him the plan was for the Afghan tribal team to kidnap him and hold him in a cave near Kandahar for about a month while the proper legal papers were obtained. Then he would be exfiltrated using the same landing strip planned for Kasi’s removal.

But in reality, given the great security with which bin Laden constantly surrounded himself, it is unlikely that the Afghan tribal team would ever have been able to capture the Saudi without a major battle. And it is unlikely that the former guerrilla fighters would have cared whether they captured bin Laden dead or alive—whichever happened to be easier. Thus, the plan was likely looked at by officials back at Langley as little more than a fig leaf to protect them from charges of planning an assassination.

By the spring of 1998, the danger to the United States posed by bin Laden was clear for everyone to see. In February, he issued his formal declaration of war: “Jihad Against Jews [Israel] and Crusaders [America].” “We issue the following fatwa to all Muslims,” he wrote. “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”

Then, in late May, he appeared on prime-time network news across the country, telling ABC’s John Miller, “We predict a black day for America and the end of the United States as United States, and will be separate states, and will retreat from our land and collect the bodies of its sons back to America. Allah willing.”

Despite the growing dangers, the CIA’s best hope for capturing bin Laden rested with their small group of tribal warriors. But many on the FD/Trodpint “bigot list”—those officials cleared and with the “need to know” for the operation—were beginning to raise questions. The highly paid mercenaries claimed to have had a shoot-out with bin Laden’s bodyguards, killing several as their main target escaped. But a number of doubts were raised about the account, with suggestions that the event may have been made up to justify their continued employment. The major problem was the agency’s lack of on-site knowledge—the failure to place its own people in the field with the team.

The lapse was part of a historic reluctance by the agency to develop a capability to infiltrate hostile and potentially hostile organizations with its own trusted and trained employees. The CIA unit with the greatest resources for such an operation was the little-known Office of External Development (OED), probably the most secret part of the secret agency.

OED was in charge of the agency’s “non-official cover” (NOC—pronounced “knock”) program, which was made up of employees who work completely undercover. In countries where they are posted, they conduct their secret operations without any overt connection to the U.S. embassy or U.S. government.

They were also the CIA officials who traditionally took the greatest risks because they operated without diplomatic cover. If they got caught passing money or receiving documents from a recruited spy, they could quickly be arrested, sentenced to a long prison term, and the CIA would deny any connections. It was the OED that had the best capabilities to recruit and develop personnel—NOCs—to penetrate Al Qaeda in the years prior to 2001.

Yet throughout those years, that capability was largely squandered and little attention was paid to developing such personnel. Not only was Al Qaeda never penetrated by a NOC—or by any other agency personnel, for that matter—it appears that the CIA never once even tried to infiltrate the group with its own highly trained officers. “As of late 1999, no program to insert NOCs into an Islamic fundamentalist organization abroad had been implemented,” said one former DO official. Another former DO officer who served in the Middle East added, “NOCs haven’t really changed at all since the Cold War. We’re still a group of fake businessmen who live in big houses overseas. We don’t go to mosques and pray.”

“We would almost never in any operation do that, put an agency officer into one of those organizations,” said a senior intelligence official in an interview in December 2003. Seeming surprised even at the question, he added: “The risk that the individual would be identified and then be available for exploitation is just so great that that’s not the operating method of this organization. . . . That’s not the MO of this organization, not just with regard to counterterrorism, but it’s just rare that you would do that—it’s not that we don’t have people with all different kinds of covers, and all different kinds of approaches to penetrating lots of different organizations, but just rarely would we take a staff officer and do something like that.”

Instead, he suggested, the agency would recruit someone local to penetrate the organization. But then you always have the problem of whether that person is telling the truth, as with FD/Trodpint, and who he or she is really working for. “An asset, yes, somebody recruited to do that, yes. But a staff officer—probably not the way you want to do business,” he said.

The philosophy was, and still is, that groups like Al Qaeda are too tough—or too dangerous—to penetrate using agency personnel, so why even try. “You’ve got the close family, tribal ties,” said a senior intelligence official in a December 2003 interview. “It’s a whole different ball game as far as penetrating Al Qaeda.”

Rather than risk using its own officers, the agency depended instead on friendly foreign intelligence organizations, such as Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), and opposition groups in Afghanistan. During the CIA’s covert proxy-war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the ISI proved very helpful to the agency. Throughout much of the 1980s, a ceaseless stream of khaki-shirted CIA specialists, carrying operational plans in locked briefcases, made pilgrimages to the organization’s secret headquarters in Rawalpindi.

But by the late 1990s, the ISI had become riddled with officers and agents sympathetic to Al Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Many ISI officials played major roles in setting up, funding, and directing the Taliban government and its intelligence bureau, Istihbarat. Pakistan benefited by using these groups as talent pools for guerrilla fighters in an attempt to spark an uprising in India-occupied Kashmir, an area long claimed by both countries. Thus, much of the intelligence the CIA obtained from the ISI on bin Laden and Al Qaeda was tainted or compromised.