The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS (17 page)

As I worked with British analysts in the days and weeks that followed, I was struck by the relative absence of finger-pointing in the UK. British authorities were quick to do their police and intelligence work, but British politicians and the British media did not seem to share the zeal of their American counterparts in similar circumstances to find someone (other than the terrorists) to blame. This seemed to be part of their normal makeup. From the start the Brits did an excellent job of conducting an investigation into the terrorist cells that had perpetrated the attack, but they did not rush into the second-guessing game. It wasn’t until October 2010 that they initiated an independent inquiry into the attacks. Called a “coroner’s inquest,” it eventually made some recommendations in May 2011 for process improvement but fell well short of the finger-pointing that we saw in America after events ranging from 9/11 to the attack on US interests in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.

The British assessment—and our own—made very clear that the 7/7 attacks in London had been the work of Bin Ladin and al
Qa‘ida. This was not a Madrid situation. This was a group trained in the FATA and our concerns about al Qa‘ida’s growing strength had had their first manifestation on the battlefield.

* * *

While the issues on which I worked with the British most closely were very serious ones—Iraq and al Qa‘ida—my time in the job did have some unique perks. The most significant was an invitation from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth for Mary Beth and me to attend a reception at Buckingham Palace. Interestingly, there was no phone number on the invitation for an RSVP. When I inquired about how to tell the palace that we would be honored to attend, I was told that “there is no need to RSVP as no one says no to an invitation from the queen.” When I relayed this to Mary Beth, she noted that this is not adequately explained in Miss Manners.

The next issue was what to wear. The invitation stated I was to wear “evening dress”—that is, a black tuxedo with tails along with a white tie and white vest. So off to the rental shop I went. The invitation also noted that Mary Beth should wear a full-length gown with gloves above the elbows for a sleeveless gown or regular gloves for a long-sleeve gown. The invite also made clear a black dress was definitely not acceptable—because black is reserved for mourning. Since black was the only color in Mary Beth’s limited repertoire of long gowns, she had to improvise by also renting her dress—at a uniquely named shop in London called One Night Stand.

At the rental shop, Mary Beth was met by two lovely women who kept about eighty different gowns in a whole range of sizes. Chief gown renter Joanna welcomed Mary Beth, looked her up and down, snatched a lovely crimson beaded gown from a rack and said, “Right, dear, try this one.” Mary Beth barely had it on before
Joanna was draping a faux diamond choker around her neck and wrapping a crimson shawl around her shoulders. It was an instant rental. Mary Beth asked how much the dress would cost to purchase, and she almost choked when she heard the answer. It was more than our car cost. These were high-end gowns.

Dressed to the hilt, we arrived at the appointed hour at the palace. Our taxi drove us through layers of security and we found ourselves walking up the red-carpeted Grand Entrance. Mary Beth had been on a tourist visit to the palace but this time, she said, the feeling was completely different—with bejeweled guests arriving and with the Queen’s Guard standing at attention in their dress uniforms. The palace itself was opulence defined: sixty-foot ceilings, gilded molding, and master works of art seemingly everywhere (we passed a Rembrandt at one point). It was jaw-dropping.

After drinks and dinner, we were directed to the Picture Gallery, where we were told we should wait for the queen to greet us. Eventually, three of the Queen’s Guard marched through the room, stomping large and dangerous-looking staffs on the floor to signify the arrival of the royals. First to appear was Sophie, the Countess of Wessex (the wife of the queen’s youngest son). Sophie, the warm-up act, was lovely and outgoing and was wearing a tiara with a huge aquamarine stone as a focal point. Sophie was followed by the queen, looking appropriately regal. She was joined by her husband, Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and by Prince Charles and Camilla, the latter of whom stole the show. Camilla was warm, gracious, and outgoing, and she insisted on shaking everyone’s hand, gushing about what a great time she had just had in America. Mary Beth instantly became a fan for life.

With that, the party—along with our fairy-tale evening—was over. It was really amazing to come out the front door of the
palace and view, from inside the gates, the gold statue of the winged goddess Nike. Mary Beth said, “The queen sure has a great view from her bedroom.” I started thinking about al Qa‘ida again.

* * *

My time as the representative to the British analytic community served to deepen my belief, forged in the crucible of 9/11, that the fight against terrorists was the place to be. So I was thrilled in the fall of 2005 when I was offered a chance to serve as the deputy director of CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. But before I could undertake that mission, the bureaucracy of Washington got in the way.

In late 2005, Philip Zelikow, counselor to Secretary of State Condi Rice, asked to meet with me. After we’d chatted for a while about the lessons learned from the Iraq intelligence failure, Zelikow said to me, “The secretary would like to have you serve as the head of INR [the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research]. Are you interested?” That would be a significant move up the ladder for me—it was a presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed position—and it would give me a seat at the table as head of one of the agencies of the intelligence community. I asked for a day or two to think it over.

After reflection, however, I picked up the phone and told Zelikow that I had already committed to a lower-level position as the deputy director of CTC and that it would be inappropriate to back out. I also told him that combating terrorism was where my heart was.

The very next afternoon, General Mike Hayden, the principal deputy director of national intelligence and a future director of CIA, phoned me. Hayden was, and is, someone I respect immensely.

“Michael,” he said, “I want you to know that when you got that job offer on behalf of Secretary Rice, it was not just the secretary asking—it was John Negroponte [the DNI] and me asking you as
well.” I was now in a fix. The job I really wanted was in CTC, but the two most important men in the US intelligence community—technically the superiors of the director of CIA—wanted me to go to the State Department.

So I called the head of the analytic directorate at CIA—my boss in my assignment at the time—and asked what he thought I should do. “Let me get back to you,” he said. Although I knew nothing about it at the time, soon CIA’s deputy director, a Navy vice admiral and SEAL by the name of Bert Calland, had picked up the phone and attempted to chew out General Hayden for having the temerity to talk to a CIA officer about a job without first going to Director Goss or him.

This all happened during a period when there was enormous tension between CIA and the newly created DNI apparatus that had been placed above it. For years the head of CIA had also been the head of the entire intelligence community, and now that had changed. Outside of CIA, the view was that the Agency had appropriately been knocked down a peg. Inside CIA, the view was that DNI was demanding changes that were either duplicative of what CIA was already doing or were actually putting the country at some risk. There were many issues to be worked out, and there was a fight over almost every one of them.

But in any case, Calland’s move was not a smart one bureaucratically. Hayden told the admiral that, as the DNI’s number two, he could talk to me anytime he wanted about anything he wanted. For some reason, however, the CIA senior leadership decided that it was annoyed at me for what had transpired.

OK, I figured—I guess I am going to the State Department. I relayed my decision to Zelikow, who invited me to meet with Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick—whom I did not know and who wanted to meet me before the nomination process began.

My interview with Zoellick went extremely well, as we discussed
different parts of the globe and differing approaches to analysis. The discussions with the staff from the Office of Presidential Personnel were another matter. These were going very well until I offered up a possible problem. At one point I told the staff that I had been interviewed by Senate Select Committee on Intelligence staff regarding the flawed intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq. I explained that during sessions with the staff I’d said that I believed that members of the vice president’s staff had overstepped their boundaries by trying to inappropriately influence the analysis on the question of al Qa‘ida’s relationship to Iraq. I could tell immediately that this was going to be an issue from the administration’s point of view—possibly even bringing an end to the process.

A couple of days later I got a call from Zelikow, who simply said, “Michael, this isn’t going to work.” My career at the State Department was over before it had begun. And unfortunately, the job I really wanted in CTC had by that time been given to someone else. And I was now persona non grata at CIA. The view among Goss’s aides—not of Goss himself—was that I had been disloyal in agreeing to accept the State Department job. I ended up taking another job outside CIA, at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a new organization staffed with people from across the intelligence community. With a name guaranteed to sow confusion across government, NCTC is quite distinct from CIA’s CTC. I served as the head of analysis for NCTC, trying to ensure that nothing got lost in the seam between domestic intelligence and foreign intelligence with regard to terrorism. It was a good job—but nothing like the ones I had just missed out on.

* * *

After only four months at NCTC, though, I returned to CIA. Mike Hayden replaced Porter Goss in late May 2006, just weeks after
Dusty Foggo, the Agency’s number three, resigned and was later indicted and arrested on fraud charges. Hayden asked me to come back to CIA and replace Foggo.

Hayden was exactly what CIA needed at that moment, and I wanted to be part of his team. Hayden is one the smartest individuals with whom I have ever worked. In grade school his football coach, the legendary owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Dan Rooney, made Hayden the quarterback simply because he was smarter than everyone else. Hayden was also a great briefer—one of the best I have seen. He is a master at explaining complex issues in extremely simple ways, often using sports metaphors to drive home a point. One of his common rhetorical refrains was that US law sets the boundaries of what the Agency can do and, while the country wants its premier intelligence agency to stay within those bounds, it also wants it to get chalk on its cleats—that is, to use all the space the law allows to protect the country. It was both a way to encourage proper risk-taking within the Agency and a way to be clear with the American people about what we would do and what we would not do.

An outstanding leader, Hayden focused CIA on both strategic and tactical objectives. I learned a great deal from him about how to get your arms around a big Agency by dividing what you want to accomplish into manageable chunks. He took the most important issues—substantive ones like Iran and North Korea and management challenges like leadership training and developing language skills—and ordered regular updates. These programmatic reviews held people’s feet to the fire, which resulted in progress.

* * *

So in July 2006 I became a member of CIA’s senior leadership team, at a time when the al Qa‘ida threat from Pakistan was returning to
levels not seen since 9/11. As number three in the Agency’s chain of command, I was tasked largely with keeping the administrative trains running. This side of the business was new to me, and I learned a great deal about information technology, federal budgets, security, and the like. I stayed abreast of substantive developments—on both the analytic and operational sides of the Agency. I made sure I received a daily intelligence briefing—which was the first time the number three at the Agency had ever asked for one—and I attended as many of the daily CT meetings as I could.

The Agency had a serious morale problem. Goss had given his key aides—most of whom he had brought with him from the House Intelligence Committee—too much authority, and they mismanaged the place. Several senior officers were forced out and many retired, with many more contemplating it. Officers like me took rotations in other government agencies. The years between George Tenet’s and Mike Hayden’s tenures were the worst during my three decades of service. Goss’s aides did the damage, but Goss himself bears responsibility for choosing these aides and then giving them too much authority. I’m convinced that had he chosen a different team he would have had a successful tenure in the job. Hayden moved quickly to turn the situation around and did so, using a combination of tactics—frequent written notes to the workforce, regular “all-hands” meetings in which he talked about the key issues facing the Agency and what we were doing about them, and visits to work units both in Washington and overseas.

It was an exceptionally important thing to do, particularly at a time when our biggest threat was on the rebound. Al Qa‘ida’s resurgence would become clearest in August 2006, when we discovered that a group of al Qa‘ida operatives were plotting to blow up somewhere between ten and fifteen airliners flying between London and the United States. The plan was to smuggle different parts of an explosive on board in bottles of everyday liquids and mixed with
innocent-appearing substances such as Tang. If successful, the plot might have been worse than 9/11, killing thousands. The economic impact would have been devastating.

Terrific intelligence and law enforcement work in multiple countries disrupted the plot. The British had the first lead. A British citizen of Pakistani descent had gone to the FATA for training, and the British had learned of his travel. When he returned he was put under surveillance and it soon became clear that he and more than a dozen others were plotting something of significance using liquids in bottles. We learned that another British citizen was in Pakistan working closely with the al Qa‘ida leadership on the plot, and it was CIA analysts remembering the details of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s mid-1990s plan to bring down multiple airliners over the Pacific Ocean who connected the final dots. In that plot, the terrorists also had planned to hide explosives in everyday containers. Arrests were made in Pakistan and the United Kingdom, and the plot was disrupted. The plan showed the 9/11-style ingenuity of al Qa‘ida as well as its ability to place operatives in the UK ready to act. It was a close call and it spoke loudly of al Qa‘ida’s resurgence.