The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS

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In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the CIA or any other US government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US government authentication of information or Agency endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.

To the men and women involved in CIA’s fight against terrorists—the finest public servants you will never know

Credit: Courtesy of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism at the University of Chicago.

Preface

The drinks had not even arrived before the first phone call. It was August 4, 2013, and my wife, Mary Beth, and I had taken our daughter Sarah to dinner to celebrate her twentieth birthday. We were sitting outside in the garden of one of the D.C. area’s finest restaurants. L’Auberge Chez Francois is located along the Potomac River in the rolling treelined hills of Great Falls, Virginia. It was a beautiful evening—low seventies and low humidity—and Sarah was beaming. She was with her mom and dad—the latter of whom also just happened to be the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In the span of the next two hours, senior officials from CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) called my cell phone nine times. Each time, I would walk into a field adjacent to the garden for privacy. Several times I had to follow up a call from CTC with my own call—either to CIA Director John Brennan or to President Obama’s White House Counterterrorism Advisor Lisa Monaco. At first Mary Beth and Sarah were frustrated with the calls, saying things like “Not tonight. Not during a birthday dinner.” But as more and more calls came, it became comedic, and the frustration turned to laughter. I would sit down after talking on the phone for five minutes, and then thirty or sixty seconds later, the phone would ring again. Although my phone was on vibrate so as not to bother the other patrons, my frequent walks through an archway into the
field garnered the attention of all. No one, not even Mary Beth and Sarah, knew that each phone call I received that evening related to the most serious terrorist threat to face the United States since al Qa‘ida’s plot in August 2006 to bring down multiple airliners over the Atlantic Ocean. We ordered the birthday cake to go.

* * *

The birthday dinner took place on the Sunday evening before my last week as deputy director. Five days later I would step down from my three-and-a-half-year assignment as the Agency’s deputy director, enter CIA’s Transition Program, and prepare to retire from the Agency after thirty-three years of service.

For the previous fifteen years, I had been obsessed with al Qa‘ida and the threat it posed. In the late 1990s, I monitored increasingly worrisome intelligence coming in about the then-obscure terrorist group. At the time I was the executive assistant to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet. Like Tenet, I was frightened by what I saw and concerned that few in or outside government shared our alarm.

Then, in early 2001, I began an assignment as the daily intelligence briefer for the newly elected president of the United States, George W. Bush. Again and again I would deliver warnings in the President’s Daily Brief that were both ominous in their potential and frustrating in their lack of actionable specificity. You could not have lived through the day of 9/11 at the president’s side and looked down from Air Force One at the smoldering ruins of the Pentagon, as I did, without becoming obsessed by the issue of terrorism or vowing to do everything possible to prevent the recurrence of such a tragedy.

In the decade that followed 9/11, the United States and its premier intelligence agency, CIA, had enormous successes in their fight against terrorism, and a few significant failures. I was part
of both—from CIA’s failure to correctly assess Iraq’s capabilities regarding weapons of mass destruction to the operation that brought Usama bin Ladin to justice. I also had to deal with the political backlash that occurred against the aggressive counterterrorism programs put in place in the aftermath of 9/11. One issue in particular was CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques to acquire information from captured senior al Qa‘ida operatives. A second was the NSA’s operations to ensure that terrorists could never again take advantage of the pre-9/11 seam that had existed between overseas intelligence collection and domestic law enforcement.

* * *

In early October 2013—just weeks after my retirement—I received a phone call from a good and trusted friend. He asked me to consider writing a book. I said, “No, that is not what professional intelligence officers do,” but as I thought about the phone call, I changed my mind. Three things led me to this conclusion—and to this book. First, I wanted to tell the remarkable story of CIA’s fight against the group that killed nearly three thousand people on that beautiful sunny morning in September 2001. No department or agency has done more to keep the country safe than CIA, and I wanted Americans to know that.

Second, without putting our operations at risk, I believed more can and should be shared with the American people about what the Agency does every day. This is important because popular culture creates many myths about the Agency. One is that the Agency is all-powerful—that there is no secret it cannot steal or discover, no threat it cannot disrupt, and no adversary it cannot defeat. This is the “Jack Ryan” myth from countless Tom Clancy novels. Then there is the opposite view, that the Agency is incompetent, made up of people who screw up everything they touch. This is the “Maxwell Smart” myth from the 1960s TV series
Get Smart
and the 2008
movie with the same title. Finally, and most perniciously, is the notion that CIA is a rogue agency—sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, but always pursuing its own agenda, all without the authority, direction, or control of America’s elected leaders. This is the “Jason Bourne” myth, from the wildly popular book and film series.

The truth is that all these myths are wrong. CIA gets many things right and a few things wrong. And in my experience CIA officers always did what they thought was best for the country, and they undertook operations only with the approval, authorization, and direction of our nation’s elected leaders. Creating an accurate picture of CIA is important because the Agency is a secret organization operating in a democracy, and the American people need to have confidence that the Agency is functioning both effectively and within the Constitution and laws of the United States.

Third, and most important, I wanted to tell Americans how deeply concerned I am about the threat that remains to our country from al Qa‘ida and various groups associated with it. The threat of terrorism has not gone away. It did not die in Abbottabad along with Bin Ladin. It is going to be with us for decades to come, and as a nation we must be prepared. If we are not, we will, with certainty, face another devastating attack on our homeland.

Taken together, these three reasons are why I decided to write a book and why I decided to focus it on the Agency’s fight against terrorism—the great war of our time.

* * *

In July 2013, the threat reporting coming out of Yemen skyrocketed. The intelligence was clear—al Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the al Qa‘ida franchise most closely tied to the al Qa‘ida leadership in Pakistan and the one posing the greatest threat to the United States, was planning attacks against American interests. The
reporting pointed to multiple targets and attacks of significance. But, as is almost always the case, the intelligence was frustratingly lacking in details—about targets, locations, and timing.

The hope of a quiet last few weeks on the job turned out to be wishful thinking. I had to cancel many of the visits I had planned throughout the Agency to say thank you to the women and men of CIA for all the hard work that they do for the country and all the work they had done for me as deputy director (and twice acting director). My days, evenings, and nights—including the birthday dinner—were now consumed with the new threat reporting.

Our counterterrorist experts briefed me multiple times a day, and I took their information and analysis to the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee—a policy-making forum of the number two officials from the most important national security departments and agencies in the US government. The Deputies Committee is where departments and agencies share information to understand issues, develop strategies to deal with them, and make policy recommendations to the “principals”—the heads of their agencies—and ultimately to the president. I told my colleagues, “This is the most serious threat reporting I have seen during my three and a half years as deputy director.”

They paid attention. The deputies recommended actions to our bosses on the Principals Committee and to President Obama. The president made decisions to protect our diplomats and to disrupt the terrorists. He ordered embassies in the region closed for a number of days—with some sending their employees home to make the US footprint smaller.

And he ordered a flurry of drone strikes in Yemen. The targets of the drones were those AQAP members the United States knew were at the center of the attack plotting. This action was successful. The plot, which turned out to be simultaneous AQAP attacks against US diplomatic facilities in Yemen as well as Yemeni military
facilities, was disrupted. It was called off because many of the key operatives involved in the plot had been killed by US air strikes. Hundreds of lives were saved. It was another in a line of unheralded intelligence and military successes in the war against al Qa‘ida. And it was the last issue in which I was involved as an intelligence officer—my final engagement in a war that had defined my career.