Against All Enemies (19 page)

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, present 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 briefings, Gore slipped the questions out of his suit jacket. Some of the CSG regulars saw it coming. “Well, I know you all 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 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 plan 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 all the authority I needed. “Dick, I am going to ask you to pull 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 find 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 place Secret Service snipers with .50 caliber rifles on board to warn off, or take out, aircraft threatening the Olympics. The Defense Department agreed to set up a joint air coordination post with the FAA and to place 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 plan.

Lisa Gordon-Hagerty and Frank Young went to work creating a response team to deal with chemical, biological, or nuclear incidents. Special medical 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 created.

Secret Service began to survey every Olympics venue for vulnerabilities and developed a plan 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 passenger screening. The Energy Department ordered the nuclear reactor shut down temporarily and the nuclear waste moved.

By May we had a plan to move several thousand federal 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 after 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 lone 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 reassuring 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 federal agents, even if the uniforms were raid jackets and baseball caps. Border 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 difficult. 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 all 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 has decided.”

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 police. After his life was ruined by the negative publicity of the detention 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 finally set its sights on Rudolph in 1998, Freeh went to North Carolina to lead the search, using FBI helicopters and hundreds of agents, without success. Rudolph was later arrested by local police in 2003.

After the Olympics in 1996, in order to institutionalize what we had learned in Atlanta, I suggested that we create an official designation of “National Security Special Events.” The CSG could formally designate upcoming public ceremonies as such, and the agencies involved 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 all 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 all of those events. Less obvious were the thousands of special response units with menacing-looking vehicles hidden in buildings nearby, or the hundreds of undercover federal 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.

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1996, shortly before the Atlanta Olympics, word reached Washington of a remarkable discovery made by the Belgian authorities. They had intercepted a shipment en route to Germany. Inside what was labeled as “pickles” was a custom-designed weapon best described 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 additional aircraft carrier battle group in the waters off Iran temporarily, as a deterrent signal to Tehran. The Navy was growing increasingly concerned with anti-ship missiles that Iran was placing on islands in the Persian Gulf and on its coastline, 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 commercial 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 first 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 bottom of the Persian Gulf and Shatt al-Arab, the Fifth Fleet had only one possible enemy: Iran.

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 provided fertile ground for Iran.

In early June, the Bahraini ambassador to Washington called me and asked, on behalf of his 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 install 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 interrogations 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 still more.

The American military had come to Saudi Arabia in August 1990 and was still 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 Force had been given a high-rise housing complex near the village of Khobar. On June 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 suggested that Clinton appoint retired four-star general 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 tell us the truth. Clinton agreed. The Pentagon, civilian and military, was outraged that the President would launch an investigation of military laxness.