Against All Enemies (36 page)

Bob Gelbard had been a star in the Foreign Service for three decades, had been Ambassador to Bolivia, Assistant Secretary of State for International Law Enforcement and Narcotics, Special Presidential Envoy to the Balkans. He was not the kind of diplomat who worried about place settings, but instead knew about armed helicopters and communications intercepts. He had fought drug lords and Serbian thugs. Now he saw what was taking place in Indonesia: al Qaeda was targeting the largest Islamic nation in the world as its next battlefield.

Arriving in the Pentagon early in 2001, Paul Wolfowitz began calling old acquaintances in Indonesia, where he had earlier been ambassador. What he heard from them was that Gelbard was making things uncomfortable, making too much noise about al Qaeda, being paranoid. Wolfowitz reportedly urged Gelbard's removal. Bob Gelbard came home and retired from the Foreign Service. In October 2002, al Qaeda's local front attacked nightclubs in Bali, killing 202, mainly Australians. Ten months later, they attacked the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, killing 13. The investigations that followed revealed an extensive network of al Qaeda operatives in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia led by those whom Gelbard had suspected and had demanded be stopped.

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HE DELAY IN THE
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EPUTIES
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OMMITTEE
continued in the spring of 2001, in part because of Hadley's methodical, lawyerly style. It was his idea to slowly build a consensus that action was required, “to educate the Deputies.” The truth was also that the Principals Committee was meeting with a full agenda and a backlog of Bush priority issues: the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, the Kyoto environment agreement, and Iraq. There was no time for terrorism.

Winter had turned to spring. The daily NSC Staff meetings were filled with detailed discussion about the ABM Treaty and other issues that I thought were vestigial Cold War concerns. One day I saw an editorial cartoon of Uncle Sam sitting on a throne reading the ABM Treaty, while a fuse ran down on a bomb beneath his seat and a terrorist ran away behind him. The cartoon hit me hard. My frustration was boiling over. I asked to be reassigned.

I had completed the review of the organizational options for homeland defense and critical infrastructure protection that Rice had asked me to conduct. There was agreement to create a separate, senior White House position for Critical Infrastructure Protection and Cyber Security, outside of the NSC Staff. Condi Rice and Steve Hadley assumed that I would continue on the NSC focusing on terrorism and asked whom I had in mind for the new job that would be created outside the NSC. I requested that I be given that assignment, to the apparent surprise of Condi Rice and Steve Hadley. “Perhaps,” I suggested, “I have become too close to the terrorism issue. I have worked it for ten years and to me it seems like a very important issue, but maybe I'm becoming like Captain Ahab with bin Laden as the White Whale. Maybe you need someone less obsessive about it.” I assume that my message was clear enough: you obviously do not think that terrorism is as important as I do since you are taking months to do anything; so get somebody else to do it who can be happy working at it at your pace. We agreed that I would start the new critical infrastructure and cyber job at the beginning of the new fiscal year, October 1.

In the remaining four months, however, I was intent on pushing hard to get an Administration policy in place to go after al Qaeda. Roger Cressey and I rewrote the Pol-Mil Plan as a draft National Security Presidential Decision document for the President's signature. Its goal: eliminate al Qaeda. Some in the Deputies Committee suggested that we say instead “significantly erode al Qaeda.”

George Tenet had also been asked to stay on from Clinton to Bush. He and I regularly commiserated that al Qaeda was not being addressed more seriously by the new administration. Sometimes I would walk into my office and find the Director of Central Intelligence sitting at my desk or the desk of my assistant, Beverly Roundtree, waiting to vent his frustration. We agreed that Tenet would insure that the President's daily briefings would continue to be replete with threat information on al Qaeda. President Bush, reading the intelligence every day and noticing that there was a lot about al Qaeda, asked Condi Rice why it was that we couldn't stop “swatting flies” and eliminate al Qaeda. Rice told me about the conversation and asked how the plan to get al Qaeda was coming in the Deputies Committee. “It can be presented to the Principals in two days, whenever we can get a meeting,” I pressed. Rice promised to get to it soon. Time passed.

For years George Tenet had called me directly when he read a piece of raw intelligence about a threat. Often when I checked out these reports with CIA experts, they would point out that the source was untrustworthy or the report was contradicted by more reliable information. Now Tenet's calls to me about threatening intelligence reports became more frequent and the information was good. There were a growing number of reports that al Qaeda's operational pace was picking up. Cells were discovered and rounded up by security services in Italy, France, and Germany. There were reliable reports of a threat to the U.S. Navy in Bahrain, causing me to call the Bahraini Crown Prince on a yacht in the Mediterranean to ask for increased security for our Navy base and access to recently arrested al Qaeda prisoners. The Italians had credible reports that there would be an attempt to attack the G-7 Summit in Genoa, causing the CSG to review plans for that meeting with Secret Service and DOD.

By late June, Tenet and I were convinced that a major series of attacks was about to come. “It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one,” Tenet told me. No one could have been more concerned about the al Qaeda threat than George, but he had been unable over several years to get his agency to find a way to go after the heart of al Qaeda inside Afghanistan. Now CIA's analysis said the attacks were most likely going to be in Israel or Saudi Arabia. I kept thinking about the Millennium After Action Report's message: they're here.

During the spring as initial policy debates in the Administration began, I e-mailed Condi Rice and NSC Staff colleagues that al Qaeda was trying to kill Americans, to have hundreds of dead in the streets of America. During the first week in July I convened the CSG and asked each agency to consider itself on full alert. I asked the CSG agencies to cancel summer vacations and official travel for the counterterrorism response staffs. Each agency should report anything unusual, even if a sparrow should fall from a tree. I asked FBI to send another warning to the 18,000 police departments, State to alert the embassies, and the Defense Department to go to Threat Condition Delta. The Navy moved ships out of Bahrain.

The next day I asked the senior security officials at FAA, Immigration, Secret Service, Coast Guard, Customs, and the Federal Protective Service to meet at the White House. I asked FAA to send another security warning to the airlines and airports and requested special scrutiny at the ports of entry. We considered a broad public warning, but we had no proof or specificity. What would it say? “A terrorist group you have never heard of may be planning to do something somewhere”?

FBI joined us as well as a senior CIA counterterrorism expert who explained that CIA believed al Qaeda was preparing something. When he was done, I added what I had already told the CSG agencies: “You've just heard that CIA thinks al Qaeda is planning a major attack on us. So do I. You heard CIA say it would probably be in Israel or Saudi Arabia. Maybe. But maybe it will be here. Just because there is no evidence that says that it will be here does not mean it will be overseas. They may try to hit us at home. You have to assume that is what they are going to try to do. Cancel summer vacations, schedule overtime, have your terrorist reaction teams on alert to move fast. Tell me, tell each other, about anything unusual.”

Somewhere in CIA there was information that two known al Qaeda terrorists had come into the United States. Somewhere in FBI there was information that strange things had been going on at flight schools in the United States. I had asked to know if a sparrow fell from a tree that summer. What was buried in CIA and FBI was not a matter of one sparrow falling from a tree; red lights and bells should have been going off. They had specific information about individual terrorists from which one could have deduced what was about to happen. None of that information got to me or the White House. It apparently did not even make it up the FBI chain to Dale Watson, the Executive Assistant Director in charge of counterterrorism. I certainly know what I would have done, for we had done it at the Millennium: a nationwide manhunt, rousting anyone suspected of maybe, possibly, having the slightest connection.

On September 4, 2001, the Principals Committee meeting on al Qaeda that I had called for “urgently” on January 25 finally met. In preparation for that meeting I urged Condi Rice to see the issue cleanly; the Administration could decide that al Qaeda was just a nuisance, a cost of doing business for a superpower (as Reagan and the first President Bush had apparently decided about Hezbollah and Libya when those groups had killed hundreds of Americans), and act accordingly, as it had been doing. Or it could decide that the al Qaeda terrorist group and its affiliates posed an existential threat to the American way of life, in which case we should do everything that might be required to eliminate the threat. There was no in-between. I concluded by noting that before choosing from these alternatives, it would be well for Rice to put herself in her own shoes when in the very near future al Qaeda had killed hundreds of Americans: “What will you wish then that you had already done?”

The Principals meeting, when it finally took place, was largely a nonevent. Tenet and I spoke passionately about the urgency and seriousness of the al Qaeda threat. No one disagreed.

Powell laid out an aggressive strategy for putting pressure on Pakistan to side with us against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Money might be needed, he noted, but there was no plan to find the funds.

Rumsfeld, who looked distracted throughout the session, took the Wolfowitz line that there were other terrorist concerns, like Iraq, and whatever we did on this al Qaeda business, we had to deal with the other sources of terrorism.

Tenet agreed to a series of things that CIA could do to be more aggressive, but the details would be worked offline: what would be the new authorities given CIA, how much money would be spent, where would the money come from. I doubted that process would be fruitful anytime soon. CIA had said it could not find a single dollar in any other program to transfer to the anti–al Qaeda effort. It demanded additional funds from the Congress.

The only heated disagreement came over whether to fly the armed Predator over Afghanistan to attack al Qaeda. Neither CIA nor the Defense Department would agree to run that program. Rice ended the discussion without a solution. She asked that I finalize the broad policy document, a National Security Presidential Directive, on al Qaeda and send it to her for Presidential signature.

C
OULD WE HAVE STOPPED
the September 11 attack? It would be facile to say yes. What is clear is that there were failures in the organizations that we trusted to protect us, failures to get information to the right place at the right time, earlier failures to act boldly to reduce or eliminate the threat.

Had we had any chance of stopping it, had we the knowledge we needed to prevent that day, those of us sitting as members of the CSG would literally have given our lives to do so; many of those around the CSG table had already put their lives at risk for their country. But it must be said in truth that if we had stopped those nineteen deluded fools who acted on September 11, as we should have done, there would have been more later. At some point there would probably still have been a horrific attack that would have required the United States to respond massively and systematically to eliminate al Qaeda and its network. Al Qaeda had emerged from the soil after the Cold War like some long dormant plague, it was on a path of its own, and it would not be swayed. And America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings. Our country seems unable to do all that must be done until there has been some awful calamity that validates the importance of the threat.