Intel Wars (26 page)

In Pakistan, despite killing Osama bin Laden and hundreds of his fellow terrorists over the past three years, the U.S. intelligence community still has not been able to destroy the last battered vestiges of al Qaeda because it cannot uproot them from their sanctuaries in the FATA. Nor does the Pakistani military appear to have the capacity, or the willingness, to do the job. As long as al Qaeda continues to survive and some of its top leaders, like Osama bin Laden's longtime deputy and al Qaeda's new leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, remain at large, everything that has been accomplished to date could potentially come undone, especially if the Pakistani government ceases cooperating with the CIA in the fight against al Qaeda.

While many Americans rejoiced at the news of Osama bin Laden's death, many in the intelligence community believe that his death will probably not be the end of al Qaeda, or terrorism in general.
In the fall of 2006, a team of U.S. government officials and consultants
sat down at the Pentagon to consider what the U.S. strategy should be in order to win what was then popularly called “the Long War.” The panel concluded that even if al Qaeda was crushed and Osama bin Laden was captured or killed, that would not be the end of the struggle: A war on terrorism would almost certainly continue for at least another generation or even longer, because as long as even a small number of angry Muslim men hate America, extremism and the terrorism that it breeds will continue to exist well after al Qaeda is dead and gone.

If there is a single overarching lesson to be taken away from America's decade-long war on terrorism, it may very well be that no matter how hard we try, for every terrorist group that we neutralize or every jihadi fighter we kill, more will take their place. In reality, Osama bin Laden's death, while an emotional milestone for the American public, does not change the dynamics of the war on terrorism in any meaningful way. This idea is just now beginning to sink in at the White House and elsewhere around Washington, with one senior Obama administration counterterrorism official lamenting, “Killing him [Osama bin Laden] will probably change nothing.”

CHAPTER 6

Men of Zeal

Homeland Security and Domestic Terrorism

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

—U.S. SUPREME COURT JUSTICE LOUIS D. BRANDEIS (1928)

On most days, the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing of the White House hums with activity. On weekdays there is almost always a meeting taking place in the Sit Room's famous conference room. President Obama comes down to the Sit Room several times a week to chair National Security Council meetings with all of his senior national security advisers, as well as to chair the weekly meetings of his homeland security and Afghanistan-Pakistan policy teams.

Unlike how it is portrayed in popular television shows like
The West Wing
, the Sit Room's windowless conference room is cramped and somewhat claustrophobic. The room's wooden conference table can seat only a dozen or so people, and not particularly comfortably. Complaints about the cold in the Sit Room are legion because the system is set to keep the room at near-arctic temperatures.

It used to be much worse, before the advent of laptop computers and powerful air-conditioning systems. President Richard Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, hated the Sit Room's conference room, describing it in less than glowing terms as a “
tiny, uncomfortable, low-ceilinged, windowless room
.”

During the weekly National Security Council principals' meetings, the president sits at the head of the conference table with an ever-present can of Diet Coke in front of him. Vice President Joe Biden sits on his right, usually reading through a pile of unread policy papers while sipping on a bottle of water. Until he was fired in October 2010, Obama's national security adviser, retired General James L. Jones, or Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, sat on the president's left. Against either wall of the conference room are rows of leather chairs that can seat up to twenty junior staffers and note takers. On most occasions, the large video screens at the far end of the conference room display the visages of foreign government officials or senior American military commanders thousands of miles away who have been patched in so that they can participate in the conference via secure video teleconferencing technology.

But the Sit Room is much more than just a snazzy high-tech conference room. Since it was created back in the summer of 1961 in what used to be the White House bowling alley, the Sit Room's principal function has been to be the president's eyes and ears on the world, a combination of watch center and intelligence fusion facility, whose mission is to provide the president with up-to-the-minute intelligence and alerts of significant events taking place around the globe, as well as with secure communications allowing him and his senior staff to talk securely to cabinet secretaries, military commanders, and the nation's top intelligence officials anywhere around the world, twenty-four hours a day.
*

The Sit Room has its own staff of thirty senior intelligence officers and military personnel seconded by the CIA and other branches of the U.S. intelligence community, who work in a cramped watch office in rotating eight-hour shifts scanning the more than one thousand classified messages and intelligence reports, plus over a thousand wire service reports, that come into the Sit Room every day, looking for anything that might rise to the level that requires informing the president immediately. Even at night, the Sit Room staff is responsible for keeping the president and all of his senior national security staff informed if a crisis situation happens anywhere around the world. Because of who they work for, these men and women are cleared for access to virtually every type of classified information generated by the U.S. government. A former Sit Room watch officer recalled that when he returned to his regular job at the National Security Agency, he had to spend the better part of an hour signing a stack of forms taking away the dozens of special security clearances that he had formerly held.

Intelligence reporting on terrorist incidents at home and abroad comes into the Sit Room every day of the week. Both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security operations centers have standing orders to inform the White House Sit Room immediately of any significant domestic terrorist incidents or arrests. There were ten instances in 2009 when the yellow-colored secure phones in the Sit Room rang, with the FBI watch officer on the other end reporting a major arrest of a terrorist suspect inside the United States.

During the first ten months of 2009
, the FBI successfully broke up plots by groups of homegrown terrorists who were planning attacks in Boston, Massachusetts; Dallas, Texas; Newburgh, New York; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Springfield, Illinois. All had been duly reported to the White House. Only two of the plots involved individuals with ties to foreign terrorist groups. One, Najibullah Zazi, was arrested in September 2009 on charges of going to Pakistan to get explosives training from al Qaeda with the intent of planting bombs on New York City subways.
The second, David C. Headley, was arrested in Chicago
in October 2009 and charged with scouting the locations for the November 2008 attack by Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists in Mumbai, India. All in all, according to one of the counterterrorism analysts at the NCTC, it had been a “pretty hum-drum year.”

Then, as described in the previous chapter, on November 5, 2009, a Muslim U.S. Army psychiatrist named Major Nidal Malik Hasan went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas, killing thirteen American soldiers and wounding thirty-two more.
Two months later, on Christmas Day 2009, a twenty-three-year-old Nigerian national
named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab failed to bring down his Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam while it was on final approach to Detroit International Airport. Disaster was averted only because the crude explosive device sewn into his underwear failed to detonate, earning him for all eternity the nickname of “the Tighty Whities Bomber.”

The Hasan and Abdulmutallab incidents proved to be huge embarrassments for the U.S. intelligence community because they showed that the terrorists had adapted their tactics and found new chinks in the armor of America's homeland security defenses. For years before the incidents, a number of NCTC analysts had tried to get their superiors to pay greater heed to the growing terror threats to the homeland, but failed. The leadership of the U.S. intelligence community and the White House were focused on al Qaeda in Pakistan and the growing threat posed by al Qaeda in Yemen and, according to the analysts, did not take the domestic terrorism problem very seriously, placing the problem way down on their counterterrorism priority lists.

Both incidents also confirmed that there were still serious systemic problems in the U.S. intelligence community's counterterrorism effort. In both cases the U.S. intelligence community possessed information that, if properly analyzed and correlated, would have allowed the United States to prevent the attack from happening. But the intelligence analysts overlooked key pieces of intelligence, and for the information they did have, they failed to “connect the dots.”

In the case of Major Hasan, three postmortem reviews found that the intelligence community “collectively had sufficient information to have detected Hasan's radicalization to violent Islamic extremism but failed to understand and to act on it.” Months before the shooting rampage, Major Hasan had exchanged more than a dozen e-mails with the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was then hiding in southern Yemen. The e-mails were intercepted by NSA and examined by FBI counterterrorism analysts, who concluded that there was nothing in them which warranted further action. This should not have been the end of the matter, though. At the very least someone at the FBI should have told Hasan's army superiors that the major was communicating with an individual on the U.S. intelligence community's terrorism watch list. As a congressional investigation later revealed, the FBI committed the unpardonable sin of failing “
to inform Hasan's
military chain of command and Army security officials of the fact that he was communicating with a suspected violent Islamist extremist.”

Insofar as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was concerned, three separate internal reviews of the incident
found that exactly the same glaring mistakes were made as in the case of Major Hasan. Four months before Abdulmutallab had been allowed to board Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in Amsterdam, NSA had intercepted al Qaeda cell phone calls in Yemen indicating that an unidentified Nigerian was being trained for a terrorist attack. In and of itself, this was not enough to cause anyone to do anything. But the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington failed to link the intercepts with information obtained from Adulmutallab's father, who on November 20, 2009, told officials at the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, that he had received text messages revealing that his son was in Yemen and “had become a fervent radical.” For reasons nobody seems to be able to explain, nobody at NCTC connected the dots between these two disparate pieces of information.

President Obama was understandably furious. Even before he was inaugurated, he had been assured in briefings by President Bush's DNI, Admiral Mike McConnell, that the most serious systemic deficiencies identified by the 9/11 Commission in its 2004 report had been fixed. He had received the same assurances from his own DNI, Denny Blair. Seeking to assuage the president's anger, Blair told Obama that he should not rush to a premature judgment before all the facts were in.

The Abdulmutallab affair marked the beginning of the end of Blair's tenure as DNI. President Obama, rightly or wrongly, blamed Blair for Abdulmutallab being allowed to get onto the Northwest airliner, not the analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center for failing to connect the dots. It did not help that Blair's enemies inside the intelligence community joined in the barrage of criticism aimed at him. John O. Brennan, the president's counterterrorism adviser, and Blair's nemesis within the intelligence community, CIA director Leon Panetta, both blamed Blair for the Christmas Day intelligence failure.

According to one of Blair's former deputies, the criticism from Panetta was particularly hard for Blair to bear. He and Panetta had known each other for years, and Blair thought that he would not have any problems working with the easygoing Californian when he was named DNI in January 2009.

But relations between the two men quickly soured as the hard-nosed Panetta furiously resisted all attempts by Blair to assert his office's authority over the CIA. Underestimating Panetta's bureaucratic infighting skills was to prove to be Blair's undoing. For instance, on May 19, 2009, Blair sent out a memo announcing that his office would hereafter appoint all CIA chiefs of station, not Langley. Within hours of Blair's memo going out, Panetta sent out his own message to his staff telling them, in essence, to ignore Blair's memo. Blair refused to back down and demanded that the White House confirm his statutory authority over the CIA. The fighting between the two escalated to the point that in the fall of 2009 the White House felt that it had to intervene and settle the dispute once and for all. In early December, Obama's national security adviser, General James L. Jones, issued an order that came down firmly on the side of the CIA, finding that Panetta alone had the authority not only to appoint the agency's station chiefs but also to direct the CIA's covert action operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the CIA's Predator drone strikes in northern Pakistan.

The Abdulmutallab affair was the final straw. On May 20, 2010, President Obama fired Denny Blair after only sixteen months on the job as DNI. Blair had learned earlier in the day what the president intended to do and had tried repeatedly to make an appointment to see him. Blair knew that his time was up when Obama, who was at the time hosting a state visit by President Felipe Calderón of Mexico, did not answer his phone calls. When the two men finally spoke later that day, the president told Blair that he intended to replace him as DNI. Blair told the president that he would have his letter of resignation by the end of business. Word quickly leaked to the White House press corps that Blair was on his way out.

In retrospect, Blair was a tragic figure. Unlike his predecessors, he had tried to assert the authority of his office over the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, and lost his job for his troubles. He had not committed any egregious mistakes that warranted his dismissal, although he clearly failed to establish anything approaching an intimate relationship with his top client, President Obama. In his short time in office he could point to some significant successes. For instance, he had largely fixed the relationships with America's foreign intelligence partners that had been damaged during the Bush administration.
Full intelligence-sharing relations were restored with New Zealand in August 2009
; they had been broken off in 1985 after New Zealand refused to allow U.S. Navy warships armed with nuclear weapons to dock in its ports. Also in 2009, Canada, France, and Germany once again became full-fledged partners of the U.S. intelligence community, ending nearly seven years spent without access to high-level American intelligence because their governments had refused to back the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The only problem area was the U.S. intelligence community's
relationship with the Mossad and the other Israeli intelligence services, which continued to slowly deteriorate because of differences between the two countries over whether Iran intended to build a nuclear weapon. Blair had also increased the number of intelligence resources in Afghanistan, ramped up the number of unmanned drone attacks on al Qaeda in northern Pakistan,
and responded quickly to the growing narco-violence in Mexico
, to name a few of his successes. Those mistakes that had been made on his watch, such as failure to “connect the dots” in the cases of Major Nidal Malik Hasan and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, were not in any way directly attributable to his actions.