Against All Enemies (18 page)

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 endeavor arranged by Wolfowitz in September. Apparently obsessed with proving a convoluted theory put forth by American Enterprise Institute adjunct fellow 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 cabalist James Woolsey to the United Kingdom, 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 plan the September 11 attacks, 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 excuse to eliminate the Saddam Hussein regime. Having been involved in the Gulf War's planning and execution, I had been furious when the war had stopped without eliminating the Republican Guard, and 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 have blossomed into a renewed round of major bombing that would have weakened the regime. For the same reason, I had pressed for a major round of bombing of Iraq in 1993 after the Bush assassination attempt was uncovered. More than anyone, I
wanted
the World Trade Center attack to be an Iraqi operation so we could justify reopening the war with Iraq—but there was no good evidence leading to Baghdad's culpability. By 1994, there was a lot of evidence beginning to point to another organization, whose name and outline was still unknown, but which involved a man that the CIA kept referring to as “terrorist financer 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 gunfight 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 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 Security 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.

T
WO MONTHS AFTER
R
AMZI
Y
OUSEF'S ARREST
on a Sunday afternoon in March, I got the news that there had been a terrible explosion in downtown Oklahoma City. It had terrorism written all 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 call. 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 smell right. Simon had already 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 engage 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 legal authority and more money to increase our ability to go on the offensive against terrorism. I was asked to inventory what we needed.

It was the first of several terrorism funding reviews that I led between 1995 and 2000. At a time of a decreasing federal budget, we took the federal 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 authorities for the FBI, including extending organized crime wiretap rules to terrorists, making funding of terrorist groups a felony, easing access to terrorists' travel records, and accelerating deportation of those associated 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 Services Department, the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and other departments whose congressional appropriators did not see “their” agencies as being counterterrorist departments.

I sought the new legal ban on fund-raising for terrorist groups because several people in the administration had thwarted the CSG's attempts 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 Economic Powers Act) to raise funds for or transfer funds to designated terrorist groups or their front organizations. 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 bureaucrat 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 place had been raided. Then FBI Director Louis Freeh and Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin objected. Freeh was concerned with alienating Arabs in America and claimed that use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act might be challenged 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 capital flight from the U.S. and raise objections from other nations concerned with the sanctity of “bank secrecy.” (In a case of strange bedfellows, Republicans 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 legal authorities we sought were not approved by the Congress in 1995. I 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 counterterrorism 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 federal building in downtown Oklahoma City had been smashed to bits, but many in the Congress opposed the counterterrorism 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 have to try again in 1996 to strengthen our ability to fight terrorism.

I
F THE
C
LINTON 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 expected to attack. CIA had not begun to use that phrase in its reports.

The radical 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 Hezbollah terrorists had killed Americans in the 1980s. It had been the behind-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, defending 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 firefights with Iranian ships and aircraft. Then, in 1989, in the middle of such a firefight with Iranian small boats, the USS
Vincennes
had mistaken an Iran Air passenger plane for an attacking Iranian fighter plane, 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. Nonetheless, we said we were neutral. Now that we had killed hundreds of Iranian civilians, I assumed that Tehran would attack us directly 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 Revolution were looking for an excuse to end the war and this would be 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 circumstances 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 his misadventure against Iran, eagerly accepted the cease-fire. The Iran-Iraq War was over. Three hundred and fifty 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 Force (Jerusalem Force), the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), and their own foreign legion of nationals from other countries, Hezbollah. The Arabic 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 economic 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 fighting 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 conventional” 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 all trade with Iran (except humanitarian items) and prohibit U.S. subsidiaries 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 President 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 economic benefit 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 economic ties with Iran, although to little avail.

Not content with administrative action, as 1995 ended Congress passed additional statutory sanctions against Iran and a secret appropriation 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 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. Embassy hostages in 1981, the Iranian government still 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 place 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 Counterterrorism 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 federal 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 April.

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 all they had done. John proudly introduced the team and we all sat back to listen and to view their PowerPoint slides. The briefing was short and uninformative. 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 I'm thinkin'?” O'Neill smiled. “Road trip. The whole CSG. Let's go down there and see how fucked up this thing really is.”

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 local authorities and the Atlanta representatives of the federal 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 noticed when we were touring the Olympic Village that it's really the Georgia 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 place calls.

Steve Simon of the NSC Staff followed. He was a student of military history, as well as being a real expert on the Middle East. “Atlanta is a big railroad hub, all the north-south and east-west trains in the South pass through downtown Atlanta. That's why it was such an important 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 have 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 plan for searching the train cars or diverting the traffic?” They did not.

“Well, the nuclear reactor and the chemical train cars raise the whole question of the plan 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 plan for that?” There was none.

The Washington representative of the Secret Service asked about access control on the Olympic venues, especially the Olympic Stadium 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 metal such as guns using handheld or stationary walk-through magnetometers, the Atlanta Olympic Committee representative revealed its plan 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, I 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 steaming 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 liked to be called “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 call the Air Force if we saw the aircraft violate the ban on radar. But by then it would be too late,” Flynn intoned in his deep baritone. “But, of course, we would not even see them on radar if they shut down the transponder on the aircraft. You see, our radars are not air defense radars. Our air traffic control radars rely on the aircraft sending out a radio signal to us to tell 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 all about that after we shot down the Iranian Airbus,” came the DOD reply.

“Okay, okay. So whose job is it to stop a hijacked aircraft from flying into the Olympic Stadium?” I asked in frustration.

“Don't let them hijack an aircraft in the first place,” 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.