The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS (16 page)

* * *

This was one of the Agency’s most active periods against al Qa‘ida, a period when we put great pressure on the group. And, with new post-9/11 resources and authorities, as well as the Pakistani government’s new commitment to being a partner against al Qa‘ida, our work paid off. Operating largely with our intelligence, the Pakistanis began arresting senior al Qa‘ida operatives—one after another. Zayn al-‘Abidin Abu Zubaydah was the first to be captured, in March 2002. Abu Zubaydah, a leading al Qa‘ida facilitator, had earlier helped Bin Ladin move his men from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996. He’d assisted Ahmad Rashid’s travel and attempted entry into the United States for the millennium-related attack on Los Angeles International Airport. He’d run al Qa‘ida’s document forgery operation as well as a number of the group’s training camps in Afghanistan, including one attended by some of the 9/11 hijackers. And Abu Zubaydah had helped smuggle Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi and over fifty fighters out of Pakistan after 9/11 so they could make their way to Iraq. They would become the main extremist element in Iraq, killing hundreds of US and coalition soldiers during the Iraq War and later evolving to become the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) that has gained so much ground in Syria and Iraq.

Zubaydah’s arrest was followed by others—of Ramzi bin
al-Shibh, a key facilitator in the 9/11 attacks, in Karachi in September 2002, and of KSM in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March 2003. The Pakistanis and we were so successful that most of the remaining al Qa‘ida leadership and its operatives pulled up stakes and moved a second time. Some of the most senior figures moved from Pakistan’s settled areas to Iran, where they were put under house arrest. Most, however, moved to the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (or “FATA”), an area of western Pakistan adjacent to the border with Afghanistan.

The FATA is extremely remote. It is small—roughly the size of Massachusetts—but it is extremely mountainous, with rural villages dotting the valleys. If you count the sides of the mountains as part of the area of the FATA, it grows to the size of Texas (I had a twelve-by-twenty-four-inch topographic map of the FATA hanging on the wall in my office, and the many mountain ranges stood out from the surface of the map by an inch). The FATA is semiautonomous, and its residents are fiercely independent. They barely think of themselves as part of the Pakistani state. It is a dangerous place for the Pakistani military and intelligence officers to venture, and it is exceptionally dangerous for US personnel to operate there.

Because the FATA was new to al Qa‘ida, it had a hard time finding a home there, and the group’s capabilities took a significant turn during this period. Without many of the group’s senior operatives, without a local network of support, and without a financial pipeline, its skills and therefore the threat it posed to the United States diminished. But this would not last for long.

* * *

My year of briefing the president and my time serving as the number three in the Directorate of Intelligence’s front office earned me a new assignment. In the summer of 2003 I became CIA’s senior focal point for liaison with the analytic community in the United
Kingdom. The relationship was a simple one: our objective and that of the British was to share our analysis with each other to see where we agreed and where we did not, and, if we did not, to find out why. This process strengthened the analysis that both of us provided to our senior policy-makers.

I dealt largely with the UK’s Cabinet Office Assessments staff. The analysts there wrote two to four assessments a week for the prime minister and other senior ministers involved in national security. In preparing the assessments, the analysts relied on information they obtained from UK government agencies, from allies such as CIA and the NSA, and from open sources. They were particularly reliant on reporting from the UK’s three intelligence collection agencies—the country’s internal intelligence service, the Security Service (MI5), the nation’s external intelligence service, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), and the UK’s counterpart to the NSA, the General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

The analysts at the Cabinet Office had to present their assessments once a week to the country’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). The JIC—an institution in the British government since 1936—is comprised of both senior leaders from the country’s intelligence agencies and British policy-makers from the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, and the Cabinet Office. The JIC could approve a paper with or without changes, send a paper back for more work, or kill it outright. The JIC was the door that the analysts had to pass through to get their assessments to the prime minister. We did not have anything like it in the United States.

My time as our representative to the British analytic community, from the summer of 2003 to early 2006, was dominated by two issues—Iraq, namely our failure to find weapons of mass destruction and the rapidly deteriorating security and political situation there, and al Qa‘ida, both the immediate threat that the group posed and where it was going over the longer term.

* * *

As I began this assignment, we were still on a hair trigger regarding the threat from terrorists, because, even though al Qa‘ida was now struggling in the FATA, the memories of 9/11 and of the degree of attack plotting in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 were still fresh.

While this intensity of focus is necessary for success against real threats, it can also lead to some false positives. Perhaps none was wilder than a perceived threat that arose in late 2003. A part of the intelligence community, not normally involved in analysis, believed that it had uncovered a fiendishly clever way for the al Qa‘ida leadership to communicate with its operatives abroad. (I am not permitted to explain the method of communication, as it remains highly classified.)

But our terrorism analysts weren’t buying it—there was very little evidence to support the existence of this communication method, it was something we had never seen before, and it seemed beyond al Qa‘ida’s capabilities. Many of the IC’s senior leadership didn’t believe it either, but this was the kind of theory that could not easily be dismissed. What if this analysis was right?

The findings were briefed to the National Security Council staff, the Department of Homeland Security, and others. Some of the information appeared to be very specific, suggesting threats to particular flights on particular days right around the Christmas holiday.

There wasn’t time to investigate the claims enough to achieve complete certainty. If they were dismissed and a number of transatlantic flights were successfully attacked, the US government would rightly be vilified for ignoring the threat. So the Homeland Security Council ordered the cancellation of some transoceanic British Airways and Air France flights.

The whole matter up until that time was a closely held secret.
Several days before Christmas the number two on the analytic side of the Agency called me and walked me through the story. He wanted to make sure that if the Brits raised this with me, I would know what they were talking about. British analysts, like CIA analysts, were not at all convinced about the methodology or conclusions of the theory.

Still the administration went ahead with mitigation steps. The flight cancellations caused some serious disruptions and widespread concern beyond a few specific flights. Just after Christmas my family and our friends the Hynds were in London for the holidays. The Hynds had flown British Airways, and when it came time for them to return home they asked me if it was safe for them to fly. I was stuck in the middle of a classic ethical problem. As an intelligence officer, you cannot selectively provide warnings or advice. You cannot provide advice to friends that is different from the guidance that the government is providing to the general public. And in this case there was a big difference between what our government had to do for the sake of prudence and what most analysts, including me, believed—that the threat reporting was bogus. So in response to the question I mumbled something like, “Well, there are a lot of people working to make those flights safe.”

In the end the Hynds departed as planned on British Airways. Joe, Shannon, and their four daughters were surprised to see US jet fighters escort them on their entry into US airspace and through their safe landing at Dulles Airport. When Shannon called my wife with the news, I said, “See, people were working to keep them safe.”

A few months later I learned of the shaky provenance of the original warning and that the analysis had turned out to be highly questionable. In fact, this turned out to be just plain poor analysis as well as poor oversight of that analysis. But the incident amply illustrates the mind-set at the time and the fact that when it came to the terrorist threat, the attitude was “You can’t be too cautious.”

* * *

What was very real as my time as the representative to the British analytic community proceeded was the growth and rebuilding of al Qa‘ida in the FATA region of Pakistan. Along with Iraq, the rebirth of al Qa‘ida was at the top of the priority list for us and the British. Al Qa‘ida had made its intentions to target Western Europe clear. In the US we tend to look at 9/11 as a singularly American event—but in fact more Brits died in the Twin Towers than in any other single terrorist attack in British history. Our British colleagues were certain that Bin Ladin was not done with them.

As al Qa‘ida spent more time in the FATA, it started building close ties with local militant groups, some of which were Afghan and had crossed the border to avoid the NATO troops in Afghanistan. As al Qa‘ida settled in, the group’s rebuilding began.

Because of the great difficulties of working in the region—and the time it took for the US to figure out how to do so—al Qa‘ida regained its footing. The pressure was off al Qa‘ida during much of this period, and it took advantage of that. And by mid-2005 the group was strong enough to conduct sophisticated operations in the West, and by mid-2006 it had regained enough capability to again conduct large 9/11-style attacks against the US homeland. The rebound was surprising and quick for a group that was continuously on the move and had lost most of its senior leadership.

* * *

In my assignment as CIA’s representative to British analysts, I participated in a number of conversations between Agency analysts from our Counterterrorism Center in which we shared our growing concerns with the British. Perhaps the most important such conversation happened during a fall 2003 visit from the deputy director
of the analytic side of the Center, Philip Mudd. Mudd has a well-deserved reputation for being direct and pointed, with little interest in caveats. His message was profound—we were seeing the resurgence of al Qa‘ida, and if steps were not taken, it would soon rebuild the capabilities it had had on 9/11. Mudd brought along analysts to walk through the details—al Qa‘ida was coalescing in certain cities in the FATA, ingratiating itself with local militants, receiving ample funding again, and once more training operatives for attacks. It was a stark warning.

In March 2004, ten bombs aboard commuter trains in Madrid exploded (three other trains had bombs aboard as well, but they did not detonate). With 191 people killed and over eighteen hundred wounded, it was the worst terrorist attack in Spanish history—and it occurred just three days before Spain’s general elections. Because the attacks were well coordinated and nearly simultaneous, the assumption of much of the world was that this had been the work of al Qa‘ida. But the Spanish investigation and our own intelligence could turn up nothing linking the attack to Bin Ladin and his leadership in the FATA. The attackers had been a group of Moroccans, Syrians, and Algerians, whose only association with al Qa‘ida was that they had been motivated by Bin Ladin’s message. It was the first significant al Qa‘ida–inspired attack. We, and our British friends, now had to worry about plots hatched not only by Bin Ladin and his associates but also by others who admired but had never met him.

Porter Goss, who became CIA director in the fall of 2004, was so worried that we did not have a good enough window into what was happening in the FATA that he ordered a surge of resources against al Qa‘ida, the largest since 9/11. We essentially flooded the zone to maximize our chances of collecting valuable intelligence on al Qa‘ida’s resurgence.

* * *

In early July 2005, I was in London. It was a cool morning and I was at a meeting of UK analysts at the British Ministry of Defence. Shortly before nine a.m., someone walked into the room and simply said, “There have been multiple explosions in London.” At that point everyone got up and left. The meeting was over. The traffic on the streets was horrendous as cars and people flowed away from what I would soon learn was where three suicide bombs had exploded aboard London Underground trains. A short while later a fourth bomb would explode on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square. Altogether, fifty-two people were killed and nearly eight hundred injured.

The first thing I did was pick up the phone and call Mary Beth, who was in Florida with the kids for a summer visit with her parents. It was about five a.m. in Naples when I woke her. “Turn on the TV,” I said. “I’m all right. Love you. Gotta go.” Then I hung up. The rest of the day was spent discussing with the British our early assessments of the attacks.

Finally, late that night, I decided to get some sleep. I could have walked, but that evening, because I was physically and emotionally exhausted, I elected to take the bus. What struck me when I boarded was how absolutely normal all the passengers were acting. This was just twelve hours after a suicide bomber had blown up an identical vehicle fewer than two and a half miles away. Yet the bus was full, and no one seemed nervous. No one was eyeing the other passengers suspiciously. This was the legendary British “Keep Calm and Carry On” attitude at work—borne of surviving the Blitz by Hitler and hundreds of IRA bombings over the years.

A couple of days later, I made an appointment to see my main contact on the Cabinet Office Assessments Staff. He did not seem thrilled to see me. Apparently every intelligence service on the
planet had lined up, trying to get briefings on what the British had discovered so far about the attacks, so that they could impress their headquarters back home. He and his colleagues were too busy analyzing intelligence to be conducting briefings. Sensing his unease, I tried to put his concerns to rest. “I’m not here for a briefing,” I said. “I simply came to express my condolences.” This was a small but heartfelt gesture. I remembered well George Tenet telling President Bush during the PDB briefing on September 13, 2001, that on the previous day Sir Richard Dearlove, chief of MI6, and several top British intelligence officials had flown to the United States for just an evening in order to pay their respects to the US intelligence community. That gesture had touched us all deeply and, in my own small way, I wanted to offer similar support. With that explanation the mood in the room changed dramatically, and my contact graciously gave me an hour of his time.