The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS (7 page)

After the one-time event of Tenet leading the briefing, we went back to our usual format. The threat reporting continued—other pieces were titled “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent” and “Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks”—but I sensed some skepticism about it. The vice president one morning asked me whether all this threat reporting might not be deception on the part of al Qa‘ida—purposely designed to get our attention and to get us to needlessly expend resources in response. We were getting the same question from Donald Rumsfeld’s staff at the Defense Department. Steve Cambone, at that time a special assistant to the secretary of defense, visited Tenet in his office to tell him that the Pentagon’s view was that this was all deception. Tenet told Cambone, “I want you to look in my eyes. I want you to hear what I have to say. This is not deception. This is the real deal.” Still, the vice president deserved an answer. So I had CIA analysts consider that possibility, and they came back with a report titled “UBL Threats Are Real.” When I finished briefing that piece—that day on Air Force One—the president jokingly said to me, “OK, Michael. You’ve covered your ass.” I tell this story only to ensure that the history of this period is recorded with accuracy, as word of the president’s comment spread and it was mistakenly referred to as a response to the now-famous August 6 briefing that I will address shortly. Most important, the president said it to me as a joke. It was not a serious comment on the piece or on the warnings that CIA was providing about an al Qa‘ida attack, which he took seriously.

In mid-July the threat reporting suddenly dried up, with some intelligence even suggesting that the major attacks had been delayed.
At the time we could not explain the lull, nor can we fully explain it today. We do know that a good bit of the reporting we saw in the late spring and early summer resulted from Bin Ladin’s going from training camp to training camp giving pep talks to his troops. During these talks the Sheikh, as he was known to his followers, would speak of “good news to come” and “preparations to strike the idol of the world.” Not surprisingly, this kind of talk spread and we picked up some of it. Why it stopped in mid-July is hard to say. My best guess is that, as the hijackers were moving into position and lying low, Bin Ladin and his leadership stopped talking about attacks even in general terms. They were practicing operational security. As the time for their strike approached, they went silent in an effort to make sure nothing interfered with their murderous plans. There are two times when you need to worry about terrorists: when you pick up their chatter and when you don’t—which means, of course, that you worry all the time.

In August the president went off on an extended vacation to his ranch in Crawford, and I went with him. Earlier in the summer, I had met with each analytic office in the Agency to discuss what it might want to write during the “summer doldrums”—the weeks of late July and August when it was hard to get the number of good PDB pieces we needed because so many people were on vacation. So we did as much preparation as we could. When I met with the terrorism analysts, I asked them to write the now-famous August 6 PDB titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” I asked for this piece because earlier in the year, whenever Tenet and I would brief the president on the al Qa‘ida threat, the president would directly ask us, “Is there any indication that this threat is aimed here at the United States?” He was clearly very worried about that possibility. My answer to that question—supported by Tenet—was always the same: “Mr. President, while there is no
specific
information to suggest that these attacks we are hearing about are aimed at the
homeland, Bin Ladin would like nothing more than to bring the fight here to our shores.” Given the president’s frequent question, I wanted to have the analysts dig deeper into the subject.

The resulting piece later became the first PDB item ever declassified and released. A casual reading makes clear that we thought the threat from al Qa‘ida to the homeland was very real. The threat was not limited to attacks on US interests abroad. But a careful reading also shows that nothing in the item told the president where, when, or how al Qa‘ida might strike our country—or even that we thought there was a link between the threat reporting of spring and early summer and a catastrophic attack on the homeland. Later some analysts would claim—some of them to the 9/11 Commission—that they had intended the piece to convey such a linkage. However, the words on the piece of paper we read that morning simply did not do so.

The August 6 briefing took place in the living room of the president’s ranch. There was only one other person present, Steve Biegun, the executive secretary of the National Security Council, who was filling in for Rice and her deputy, Steve Hadley, who themselves were taking turns spending time with the president at the ranch that August. I teed up the piece by explaining why we had written it. The president then read it closely. I do not recall any further discussion of the piece; we moved on to the next item. I did not treat it as a “hair on fire” or action-forcing piece, and the president did not read it that way either.

* * *

During this period of heightened threat, CIA was not just collecting the intelligence chatter and passing it on to policy-makers. It was also working to disrupt whatever plotting might be under way. As a briefer, I did not have visibility into these operations, but I later learned they included Tenet’s contacting dozens of his foreign
counterparts and urging action. Thanks to these efforts, a number of terrorist suspects were arrested and detained in almost two dozen countries. We helped halt, disrupt, or uncover weapons caches and plans to attack US diplomatic facilities in the Middle East and Europe.

But this level of operational intensity is hard to maintain for a long period, and particularly difficult in the absence of specific threat reporting. So after a period of intense action, we returned to the status quo—still deeply concerned about the next possible attack but no longer on the trigger the way we had been for several months. Without additional intelligence to guide us, there was simply no other place to go.

CHAPTER 3

The Darkest Hours

I
slept fitfully in my hotel room in Sarasota in the early-morning hours of September 11, eyeballing the hotel alarm clock as it ticked toward three thirty a.m., the time I would get up to go to work. My recurring nightmare was oversleeping and standing up the president of the United States.

It was the second week of September, and the president was on a two-day trip to Florida for events focused on his new education policy. As had become standard practice, I had come along to deliver to him the latest intelligence.

As I was stirring in Sarasota, two young men were checking out of the Comfort Inn in Portland, Maine, the same hotel I had stayed in two months earlier when the president spent a long weekend at his father’s ocean-side summer home in Kennebunkport. As I was showering and dressing in Florida, fifteen hundred miles away, these men took a short drive to the Portland International Jetport, where they boarded a six a.m. flight to Boston, connecting to American Airlines Flight 11, bound for Los Angeles. Their names were Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari.

Because we were traveling, only one of the other usual senior
participants, Chief of Staff Andy Card, was scheduled to sit in on the president’s briefing that morning. Navy Captain Deborah Loewer, the director of the White House Situation Room, was also to be present to receive policy-related questions the president might raise and, more important, to communicate items of interest to Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Steve Hadley back in Washington.

At 7:55 a.m., Loewer and I went up the stairs to the presidential suite at the Colony Beach & Tennis Resort. We passed through Secret Service checkpoints and waited in the hallway outside the president’s room. The president had just returned from a four-and-a-half-mile run and was dressing. While we waited and chatted with one of the president’s personal aides, American Airlines Flight 11—a Boeing 767 with ninety-two passengers and crew members aboard—took off from Boston’s Logan Airport. It was the first of the four hijacked flights to take to the air.

A little after eight a.m., Chief of Staff Card opened the door and motioned us in. We found President Bush seated at a table with a cup of coffee and a newspaper. He seemed surrounded by pastries, none of which he had touched. When he saw us, he asked if we had enjoyed our night at the beach. I told the president I had
heard
some waves but had not actually
seen
any. “Michael, you need to get a new job,” he joked. He put down the newspaper and asked, “Anything of interest this morning?” On the most important day of President Bush’s tenure, his intelligence briefing was unremarkable, focusing on the most recent developments in the Palestinian uprising against Israel. Contrary to some media reports, there was nothing regarding terrorist threats in the briefing.

An intelligence report about a phone conversation that the United States had intercepted between two (non-allied) world leaders that I had placed in the president’s binder caught his attention and caused him to pick up the phone to call Dr. Rice in Washington.
They talked for only a couple of minutes. The briefing was over by 8:25 a.m. Only six minutes earlier one of the flight attendants on Flight 11 had contacted American Airlines ground personnel to say, “I don’t know, but I think we are getting hijacked.” And just one minute earlier Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker, was trying to communicate with the cockpit on Flight 11 but had actually contacted air traffic control, saying, “We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you will be okay.”

I left the presidential suite and took the elevator down to take my place in the motorcade that would carry the president to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, where he was scheduled to speak. Soon joining me in the van were several senior White House officials, including political advisor Karl Rove, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, and Director of White House Communications Dan Bartlett. I had become friendly with both Rove and Fleischer during the previous eight months. Fleischer and I would often talk sports, and Rove and I would frequently banter about the PDB. (He was not among the handful of White House officials cleared to see it.) “You don’t have anything in that briefcase that CNN doesn’t have,” he would tease me. “Karl, if you only knew what I know,” I would respond.

During the drive to the school, at 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the north side of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, between the ninety-third and ninety-ninth floors. It was traveling at 490 miles per hour.

Just as we were pulling up to the school, Fleischer’s cell phone rang. He listened for a few seconds and flipped his phone closed. He turned to me and asked, “Michael, do you know anything about a plane hitting the World Trade Center?” I said, “No,” but told him I would make some calls. As the motorcade came to a stop, I said, “Ari, I sure hope this is an accident and not terrorism.” He paused
for a second or two—the word
terrorism
hanging in the air—and said, “I sure hope so too.”

My guess at the time was that a small plane had lost its way in bad weather and, by accident, had crashed into the World Trade Center. From just outside the classroom, I called CIA’s Operations Center. When I got the duty officer on the line he quickly told me that the plane in question was a large commercial airliner. My hope that this was not terrorism started to fade.

As I flipped my phone shut and walked into the senior staff room, I looked at my watch. It was nine a.m. Booker Elementary had placed a television in the room, and everyone was glued to the coverage coming out of New York. At 9:03 we watched as United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767 with sixty-five passengers and crew members on board, slammed into the south side of the South Tower of the World Trade Center between the seventy-seventh and eighty-fifth floors. At impact, UAL Flight 175 was traveling at nearly six hundred miles per hour.

There was now no question—this was a deliberate act of terrorism. In the classroom next door, Andy Card made his way to the president, who was listening, along with sixteen second graders and a large number of reporters and others, to a story about a girl and her pet goat. At 9:05 a.m. Card whispered in the president’s ear, “A second plane has hit the World Trade Center. America is under attack.”

Back at CIA headquarters, one of the many odd coincidences of the day was playing out. While I was briefing the president, several senior CIA officers were having a long-planned breakfast with Commander Kirk Lippold, the commander of the USS
Cole
when it was attacked in Yemen. The group was lamenting that the American public was not sufficiently seized with the threat of terrorism, and Lippold suggested that it would take some “seminal event” to get the public’s attention. Minutes later news of that event reached
the room. The Agency officers quickly turned to their duties, and Lippold rushed back to the Pentagon—arriving just in time to see American Airlines Flight 77 slam into the building.

In Alec Station the reaction was a grim realization. When reports of the second plane’s hitting the World Trade Center reached the Station, everyone instantly thought and said the same thing: “So this is what al Qa‘ida was planning. This is what we were waiting for.”

The president finished the session with the students and joined the senior staff. He made a number of calls on a secure phone that is always with the president for such a contingency. He spoke with the vice president and national security advisor. During one of these calls, on a nearby television, one of the networks played a recording of the second plane hitting the South Tower. A staff member called the president’s attention to the footage, a moment his photographer captured in an unforgettable image that would be published in hundreds of newspapers and magazines. I am in the far left of the photo, holding my briefcase.