Against All Enemies (17 page)

A
LTHOUGH NEITHER
CIA
NOR
FBI had yet heard of al Qaeda, because of the many known terrorism events of 1993, the Clinton team, from the President down, was seized with the issue by 1994. Clinton, Lake, and I believed our response to terrorism should be high on the list of measures to shape the post–Cold War world.

Part of that response was developing a new policy on counterterrorism to replace what Reagan had signed seven years earlier. There had not been a formal counterterrorism policy in the first Bush administration. As I would discover, turf battles could derail even the best efforts at counterterrorism, and (as Tom 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 approval by all of the relevant departments and agencies. First, was terrorism a law enforcement issue or an intelligence issue? While the question was posed that way, what it meant was, would CIA be in charge? or did we just plan to arrest and prosecute terrorists as if they were organized criminals?

The answer that Clinton approved, correctly I believe, was that we would use all the resources of any department or agency that could contribute. If the FBI could contribute by, for example, reassembling the wreckage of Pan Am 103 and determining who put the bomb on board, that was a capability we wanted utilized. CIA did not have significant forensics capabilities and was not good at interviewing hundreds of witnesses to stitch together a post-attack investigation. If we can chase down individual terrorists and arrest them, drag them back to the United States for trial and punishment, we should—even if the FBI has to do it. We had to use every agency that had something to bring to the effort. There were those who said such arrests and trials did not deter terrorists. I did not think that was knowable. I did know that there would be times when the criminal justice process would be feckless in dealing with terrorism and we needed intelligence, military, 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 Security 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 involved. 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 his deputy, Sandy Berger, and me, drove over to the Attorney General's cavernous office. In a room that could have 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 legal pad. I wondered to what extent she had already been captured by the Bureau, or to what extent she would have 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 federal 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 tell a few senior NSC officials what it knows.” Lake and Reno agreed to sign a Memorandum of Understanding enshrining that principle. They never did. FBI and Justice Department lawyers slow-rolled the document for years. Nonetheless, it was the principle that we operated under and when I knew about people or events I was able to use 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 personality of the Clinton administration. It was: what should be the role of the federal government in dealing with the victims of terrorism? For Clinton, Lake, and Reno this issue loomed large. They now knew personally the families of the Pan 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 federal 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 destruction 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 nonproliferation had told me that the counterterrorism and nonproliferation “communities” in the government hardly knew each other. That had to change. No one in the departments objected 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 Presidential 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 vulnerabilities at home and abroad.” Law enforcement, intelligence, military, 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.”

T
HE NEW POLICY SOUNDED GOOD,
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 notice of U.S. intelligence. Unknown to us at the time, he engaged in unsuccessful plots to kill the Pope and later President Clinton, both in the Philippines. Then in January 1995, Manila police responded to a fire 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 announced: “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 plane continues on and blows up. The Filipinos found some of the bombs, but not all. He had the flights all 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 Pan Am 103s, several simultaneously over the Pacific.

“Have you grounded the aircraft?” Lake asked. I had already called FAA and told them to call the airlines and stop flights originating in the Pacific. FAA said it would, but they also told me that only the Secretary of Transportation could ground flights. I told Lake all 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 Federico Peña. “Well,” Panetta decided, “if the secretary has the authority, the President does too. Tell 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 anywhere else a bomb made of batteries, a watch, and a contact lens cleaning 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. Virtually all 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 his 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 official 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, fingerprints, and other evidence. That did not stop author Laurie Mylroie from asserting that the real Ramzi Yousef was not in the federal 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 first World Trade Center bombing. Her writing gathered a small cult following, including the recently relieved CIA Director Jim Woolsey and Wolfowitz.