The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS (23 page)

(The next morning we received preliminary DNA tests from a US military lab in Afghanistan, and the results were positive. Later that day we got the final DNA results from a lab in the United States. The lab said that there was only a one in one trillion chance
that it was not Bin Ladin. That was good enough for even the most skeptical of analysts.)

At 11:35 p.m. the president addressed the nation. I watched his remarks from a chair in the Situation Room, where so much planning for the mission had taken place. It turned out that my job was not done for the day, however. Media interest in the events of the raid was, to say the least, enormous. So the White House press office had set up a “press backgrounder.” This is a session with the media, usually led by senior officials, in which the media are able to use whatever the officials say; however, for reasons of sensitivity, such as talking about intelligence matters, they cannot quote the senior officials by name. Instead the ground rules are set ahead of time regarding how the media are permitted to refer to the senior officials—“senior administration official,” “senior military official,” etc.

I was there to explain to the media the intelligence that had led us to conclude that Bin Ladin was probably at the compound. I did so carefully, without giving away any classified information. I was followed by Mike Vickers from the Defense Department, who provided a briefing on the raid itself.

It was probably close to one a.m. when Director Panetta and I walked out of the West Wing and onto West Executive Avenue, where our security details were waiting to take us home. We heard partygoers in nearby Lafayette Square chanting, “USA, USA, USA, CIA, CIA, CIA.” It was surreal, and I said to myself, “I’ll never hear that again.” Panetta and I hugged. It was the second time we’d done so that day—the first being during the raid, when the SEAL commander on the ground in Pakistan—just nineteen minutes after the SEALs’ boots had hit the ground—announced, “For God and country, Geronimo EKIA,” the code words indicating that the SEALs thought they had gotten their man.

In the days that followed, there was a tremendous sense of pride, satisfaction, and relief. I have never had such a mix of emotions.
When I arrived at work the morning after the raid, there was a letter sitting on my desk. It was from a close colleague and friend in a foreign intelligence service, with whom CIA and I had worked closely against al Qa‘ida. It was the first of many such letters, but none was more beautifully written. It read:

Dear Michael,

May I be one of the many who offer you and the Agency my most profound congratulations and deep professional admiration for this outstanding success. Brilliantly developed, conceived, planned, and executed. Exemplary stuff—the CIA at its best. Our world is one where contemporary history is carved in stark events and dates. Today is one on the side of justice and will be remembered for generations. Many successes have come before and many are yet to come before the end of the al Qa‘ida menace, but today the United States has written a new chapter and shown that none may escape. Outstanding. My congratulations to all.

* * *

But despite our success, there was still a lot of work to be done. One major issue was the state of US–Pakistan relations and particularly the relations between CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The ties between our two nations and their intelligence services had long been strained. But in recent months, just before the Bin Ladin raid, they had gotten much worse. In January 2011, Raymond Davis, a United States citizen assigned to the consulate in Lahore, killed two armed men in Lahore, Pakistan, who were trying to rob him. A car from the US consulate coming to the aid of Davis accidentally struck and killed a third Pakistani. Davis was held for almost two months in a Pakistani prison and was released only after intense
diplomatic pressure and payment of $2.4 million in compensation to the families of the dead Pakistanis. Feelings among Pakistanis were more than a little raw over the Davis incident and grew worse with the Bin Ladin raid.

So a few weeks after the raid, the president sent his South Asian special envoy, Marc Grossman, and me to Pakistan to start repairing ties. My job was to meet with the head of the Pakistani ISI, Lieutenant General Ahmad Pasha, one of the most powerful men in a country where civilian institutions are largely subservient to the military. After flying all night to Pakistan I was taken to General Pasha’s home in a military garrison outside of Islamabad. It reminded me of the kind of home one would see on any US military base. I was ushered into a small sitting area where only the two of us were present. No aides, no note takers. A waiter arrived with juice and appetizers. After exchanging greetings and questions about our families, the two of us just sat there looking at each other. The silence went on for a minute or more. We both then laughed because it was so uncomfortable. But the subjects at hand were no laughing matter.

Pasha explained to me that the United States and particularly CIA had deeply embarrassed Pakistan. I clearly understood this. He explained that the embarrassment was twofold: one, embarrassment for his service because it had not found Bin Ladin, and two, embarrassment for the Pakistani military because it could do nothing to stop such a raid deep in its country. Pasha said that if one of the United States’s allies conducted a military raid in the United States, killing a fugitive and hauling his body away, we would be livid—and rightly so.

But I hoped that Pasha understood our position. I explained that we had found the most wanted man in the world living less than a mile away from their military academy—a place where he had apparently resided for years, despite years of Pakistani officials’ arguing that Bin Ladin was not in Pakistan. I reminded Pasha that
the United States—including President Obama—had said publicly that if we found Bin Ladin we would come and get him. There had been ample warning. Finally, I told Pasha that while I knew that neither he nor the most senior officials in Pakistan had been aware of Bin Ladin’s presence in Abbottabad, it was impossible to dismiss the notion that some Pakistani security officials at some level might have been aware of his presence. I said, “Americans find it hard to believe that no one in your Abbottabad detachment or in the Abbottabad police ever questioned what was going in that compound.”

We were in a standoff over the Bin Ladin raid, but we moved on to “Where do we go from here?” We eventually had a fruitful discussion. It was so fruitful that Pasha suddenly decided that we should immediately visit his boss, General Ashfaq Kayani, and continue the conversation with him. Kayani was the chief of the army staff at the time and the most powerful man in Pakistan. It was by now late in the evening, but Pasha was insistent. “Come with me! I will drive us.” I assumed that Kayani lived in the same military cantonment, but it turned out he lived across town. With me in the passenger seat without a cell phone, Pasha sped off for God knew where. As we were driving off, my security detail caught a glimpse of what they thought might be their boss—the guy they were supposed to be protecting—being driven off in the night. They jumped in their cars and started off in hot pursuit. Pasha too had a security detail and they were following their boss, but they had the huge advantage of knowing where they were going. In retrospect the scene was comical—although it certainly did not seem so at the time to my security team, which was racing through the dense traffic to make sure I wasn’t being kidnapped. Nor was it humorous to one of my agents, who bravely pushed his way through Pasha’s security at the entrance to Kayani’s cantonment to make sure I was OK. The head of my detail—who had held his position for over a decade—told me later that it was his worst moment on the job.

* * *

After the Bin Ladin raid, I had one more related mission to complete, one that was considerably more comfortable to perform. President Obama, knowing that I was with President Bush on 9/11, personally asked me to fly down to Dallas, Texas, a few days after the raid and give his predecessor a complete briefing on the operation. It was an incredibly generous gesture on the part of President Obama.

President Bush was gracious as always. But on that day, he was like a kid in a candy shop. He wanted to know every detail. I had taken the senior CIA analyst with me, as well as a senior JSOC officer. We walked the former president through the intelligence picture and the raid itself. At the end the president said, “You know, Laura and I were supposed to go to the movies tonight, but this is better than any movie I will ever see. I think we will stay home.” There was also a personal moment between me and the person I used to brief. He gave me a challenge coin, a highly prized medallion that military commands and some senior officials hand out. It was his commander in chief coin. When he handed it to me and we shook hands, I felt closure for the first time since 9/11.

* * *

When I was serving as deputy director, my staff would put together a reading package every Friday for the weekend. Dozens of highly classified multi-page documents would be sent home with me when I left Langley on a Friday evening. I stored these documents in a safe in what we call a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF for short. The SCIF itself, sort of like a small bank vault, was in my attic and was protected by multiple alarm systems and security cameras. And my security agents were never far from my home.

In August 2011, when I was serving as acting director for the first time, I poured myself a cup of coffee, pulled the weekend reading material from the safe, put the pile on my lap, put my feet up, and started to read. About halfway through the pile was a paper produced by our counterterrorism analysts outlining their take on the information derived from a treasure trove of documents scooped up during the Bin Ladin raid. I had been waiting for this paper, so I settled in for a thorough, word-by-word read.

I was not surprised by most of what I read. One of the many takeaways from the DOCEX (document exploitation) from Bin Ladin’s office at Abbottabad was that al Qa‘ida was still very much intent on attacking the West. The documents showed that Bin Ladin, in the months before his death, had been engaged in ongoing discussions with his key operatives about pursuing mass casualty attacks in the United States and against the infrastructure that operates the global oil industry—oil pipelines, terminals, and tankers. The oil industry has long been a target of al Qa‘ida (in February 2006, al Qa‘ida attacked Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq facility, the largest oil processing facility in the world, responsible for half of Saudi oil exports). And, as expected, Bin Ladin had underscored the group’s enduring interest in attacking commercial airlines.

As I read on, I became more engrossed in the paper. The captured documents also made clear that the United States was still by far the primary target of al Qa‘ida. Bin Ladin considered us enemy number one, calling us “the leader of the nonbelievers.” And although the United States and its partners had done great damage to the terrorist group’s central leadership operating out of the tribal areas of Pakistan, al Qa‘ida, and similar groups inspired by it, was still intent on attacking us and still capable of inflicting significant damage. When I finished reading, I just sat there. The paper had reinforced all my instincts about the group.

The one thing that surprised me was that the analysts made
clear that our pre-raid understanding of Bin Ladin’s role in the organization had been wrong. Before the raid we’d thought that Bin Ladin’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was running the organization on a day-to-day basis, essentially the CEO of al Qa‘ida, while Bin Ladin was the group’s ideological leader, its chairman of the board. But the DOCEX showed something quite different. It showed that Bin Ladin himself had not only been managing the organization from Abbottabad, he had been micromanaging it. He had been approving personnel appointments, approving how money was spent, and intimately involved in attack planning. He had still been very much involved in day-to-day terrorist operations, and he had still been very much involved with al Qa‘ida’s growing offshoots around the world, particularly al Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen. This, of course, magnified the value of removing Bin Ladin from the battlefield.

CHAPTER 8

Al Qa‘ida Spring

A
s a result of having to work through the aftermath of the Bin Ladin raid with him, I became better acquainted with General Pasha. We had many frank conversations—about the counterterrorism work we did together, but also about our countries and their futures. I found him to be a proud and patriotic Pakistani whose thinking was sometimes clouded by his nationalism (Pasha was the most nationalistic Pakistani leader I met). A few months after the Abbottabad raid, we were in my office in Virginia discussing the future of Pakistan and its priorities. Pasha emphasized the absolute importance of Pakistan’s staying focused on India, as, he said, “the Indians have been, are, and will remain an existential threat to the state of Pakistan.” I could not disagree with him more. I told Pasha that India was focused on growing its economy and improving the standard of living of its people. India had moved on long ago from a singular focus on Pakistan. I added that Pasha and his government were stuck in a time warp and that while they worried about India, other much more serious threats were emerging around them. “What is an existential threat to Pakistan is the state of your economy and the growing militancy inside your borders. Look at what is happening across the Arab world,” I said. Pasha did not respond.

* * *

Early in 2012, while I was having this conversation with my Pakistani counterpart, there was a revolution under way in parts of North Africa and the Middle East—one that would bring the most significant change to the region since the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. And, importantly for the threat posed by terrorists, this revolution would end up feeding al Qa‘ida in a way that few people expected.