by Mark Bowden
By now, the United States was willing to use lethal force on bin Laden. President Clinton authorized two cruise missile strikes soon after the embassy bombings, one targeting Al-Shifa, a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum thought to be developing chemical weapons, and the other targeting a bin Laden camp near Khowst. The missiles hit on August 20, fired from ships in the Arabian Sea. The CIA would estimate that twenty to thirty people were killed—but not bin Laden, who had reportedly left the Khowst camp a few hours earlier.
After that, the project for ALEC Station became pinpointing bin Laden long enough in advance to be targeted. They presented the White House with eight such opportunities, Scheuer recalled, and each time the strike was called off, primarily over concerns about collateral damage. The CIA man had always been prickly and eccentric. He was so much more willing to accept collateral casualties than his superiors—was so convinced that the threat posed by bin Laden warranted drastic, immediate action—that he had begun to be regarded with suspicion. He seemed obsessed.
In 1998, on the Sunday before Christmas, ALEC Station learned that bin Laden was staying in the Haji Habash house, part of the governor’s palace in Kandahar. The CIA had a local spy who knew which wing of the building bin Laden was in, and even which room, because he had escorted him there. It was first-rate, firsthand intelligence, and a target that could easily be reached by Tomahawk missiles launched from ships in the Arabian Sea.
“Hit him tonight—we may not get another chance,” advised Gary Schroen, ALEC Station’s field officer.
Scheuer took it directly to the White House, along with Director Tenet and John Gordon, the deputy director. It was snowing. The three men drove from Langley into D.C. together, but inside the White House only Tenet was allowed into the meeting, which the Clinton administration’s principals joined by teleconference. Scheuer and Gordon waited outside for hours. The missile strike was not authorized. According to The 9/11 Commission Report, there was concern that as many as three hundred people might be killed or injured, and that there was thought to be too great a chance of bin Laden moving at the last minute, as he had before. There was also a mosque nearby that might have been damaged. The CIA men drove back up the George Washington Parkway, disappointed yet again. Scheuer was particularly upset by the administration’s worry about damaging a mosque.
The next day, with the opportunity gone, Scheuer wrote to his field officer, Schroen, that he had not been able to sleep. “I’m sure we’ll regret not acting last night.”
“We should have done it last night,” Schroen wrote back. “We may well come to regret the decision not to go ahead.”
Scheuer’s frustration got the better of him. In 1999 he drafted a memo to the heads of the CIA, complaining about the risks being run to collect timely information, the hours of hard work that went into each targeting opportunity, and the unwillingness of the government to take action.
“[It seemed wrong to] me, to some extent, the idea of continually sending your officers into harm’s way to gather information that is credible and usable and to find the government not willing to use it to defend American people for reasons that [exist only in] their own minds,” he explained years later in an interview for this book. “You know, how racist is it to think that 1.4 billion Muslims are going to rise up and attack the United States because some shrapnel hits a stone mosque in Kandahar? You have to have zero respect for the humanity or the common sense of the Muslim world to expect something like that to happen. And yet, that’s the excuse these brilliant Harvard-trained people come up with.”
He was relieved of responsibility for ALEC Station. As he recalled later, he was told, “We want you to tell your people that you are burned out and don’t worry, we’re going to give you a medal and a monetary award.”
Scheuer said he told them, “Stick it in your ass.”
Everything changed after 9/11, of course. Then the questions all became, Why hadn’t the United States acted against bin Laden more aggressively when it could? “Obsessives” like Scheuer and his “cult” at ALEC Station looked prophetic, not overly emotional. The United States had missed its chance to get bin Laden before his biggest plan bore fruit.
After the invasion of Afghanistan there were battlefield leads that pointed American forces toward a rugged redoubt in Tora Bora, which translates to “Black Cave.” It was in the far easternmost part of the country, near the border with Pakistan, and was reputed to have a byzantine maze of caves, natural and man-made. It was also reputed to be bin Laden’s hideout. When American forces and Afghan militiamen took it in 2001, over a five-day siege, they found lots of small caves and some bunkers, but nothing like the fortress they had imagined. It turned out to be another place the Sheik had recently left.
The best reports said he had fled over the White Mountains into Pakistan, probably before the assault even began. After that . . . nothing.
No, not nothing.
Start with thousands of small bits of information. Names, lots and lots of names. Sightings. Rumors. Interrogation transcripts. Phone numbers. Phone calls. Dates. Addresses. Geographic coordinates. Aerial photographs. Ground surveillance photos. Videos. Faces. Iris images. Gaits. Maps. Fingerprints. Old diaries. E-mails. Web sites. Social media. Text messages. Tweets. Old-fashioned letters. Blogs. News reports. Broadcasts. Bills. Payment schedules. Traffic tickets. Rent payments. Credit card numbers. Charges. Bank account numbers. Deposits. Withdrawals. Transfers. License numbers. Passport numbers. Police reports. Arrests. Travel itineraries. Everything and anything that can be transformed into data. When you’re looking for one person in a world of seven billion, and when that one person does not wish to be found, you cast a wide net.
After 9/11, and after bin Laden escaped Tora Bora, it is safe to say that the United States government was fully engaged in hunting him down. Engaged to a degree that makes the uphill battles of little ALEC Station seem like a basement hobby. The Obama administration might invoke “limited bandwidth” and competing priorities to explain why these efforts fell short, but the truth is that every agency and branch of the vast U.S. military-industrial complex was now fully invested. What did that mean? It meant that finding and eliminating bin Laden was not just a preoccupation of a small group working in a storefront near Langley. It was a central goal. No one would be left waiting in the hall at the White House ever again for permission to strike. But finding bin Laden had also become exponentially more difficult. Tools and networks and units had to be developed to find, fix, and finish al Qaeda and other terror networks like it. What would evolve—this thing they called F3EAD—is worth examining in more detail.
You begin with scraps. Anything that can be transformed into data, those names and numbers and other types of information partially enumerated above. All of that and more, intel from every pipeline: detainee interrogations, HUMINT (human intelligence), SIGINT (signals intelligence), GEOINT (geospatial intelligence), and even something called MASINT (measurement and signature intelligence, which converted into searchable data highly technical things like radar or chemical or sound). Each bit is a potentially useful dot in a vast matrix. Collection flowed from a blizzard of agencies, large and small—CIA, FBI, NSA, NGA, and many more. The SEAL and Delta Force warriors ransacked the hideouts they raided for everything that might contain a lead—they called it “pocket litter.” Who knew which stray fact might lead to bin Laden? Or if any of them ever would? At times the CIA had dozens of analysts working on bin Laden full time, but the sheer number and variety of leads was daunting. There was always a good chance, perhaps a better than even chance, that the Sheik would live out his days in hiding and die peacefully in bed, surrounded by his wives and his many children and the devoted members of his intimate circle, perhaps after leveling one last broadside at the “Head of International Unbelief”—thumbing his nose as he entered paradise. For those who believed in such things, evading the grasp of American justice would lend credence to his claim of divine guidance.
In the end, finding
bin Laden would illustrate the most banal of truths about intelligence work. More than genius or courage, it is about effort and patience and will. It is also, of course, about money and time—but when we are talking about a goal assigned top priority by not one but two presidents of the United States, and where time and resources are, in effect, bottomless, it boils down, ultimately, to a steady application of will. President Bush famously kept a chart of wanted terrorists in a desk drawer and would personally X out those who were captured or killed. Bin Laden was always “Number One.” At his regular daily briefings, Bush would routinely ask, “How’re we doing?” and everyone knew what he was talking about. It was the same with Obama. After that impromptu meeting in his office with his new intelligence chiefs in 2009, he would bring it up at nearly every security briefing.
“Are we any closer?”
“What have we learned?”
An intelligence network like America’s is not one but multiple bureaucracies, each with its own specialty—listening, observing, photographing, sensing, probing, analyzing. The strength of such an overlapping structure is that things get looked at more than once, and from every conceivable angle. And the strength of bureaucracy—everyone knows about the weaknesses of bureaucracy but rarely do we consider its strength—is in its limitless capacity for work. Steady, unceasing work, like the trickle of the river that ever so slowly carves a gorge. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, here was an effort that would consume large chunks of the careers of analysts—analysts replaced at intervals with fresher eyes and ears and minds who would eagerly set off down stale trails with new vigor.
Now add supercomputers. Convert those millions of bits of intel gathered from all over the world over years of effort into bytes, and suddenly the impossible, finding the needle in a million haystacks, becomes at least a little more probable.
So when we trace the trail to Abbottabad, this is what we are talking about—a sophisticated targeting engine. Viewed backward, from bin Laden’s hideout to the scraps of intel that led to it, the trail seems obvious. Tracing it from end to beginning obscures the level of difficulty: the years of frustration and patient effort, the technological innovation, the lives lost, the mistakes made, the money spent. Just the special ops piece of the story unfolded over a quarter of a century of trial and error, beginning with the improvised mission to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980.
After Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979, President Jimmy Carter undertook months of fruitless diplomatic efforts to free the more than fifty Americans held hostage there. During that time, the army’s newly formed counterterrorism unit, Delta Force, cobbled together a daring effort to rescue them. They borrowed helicopters from the navy used for minesweeping, and marine pilots unused to the kind of flying required. The mission called for the choppers to fly to a rendezvous point in the desert outside Tehran, called Desert One, refuel the choppers from large fixed-wing aircraft flown in by air force pilots, and then proceed to a hiding place near the city. The following evening Delta Force would emerge from hiding, raid the embassy compound and free the hostages, then assemble in a soccer stadium across the street from the embassy in central Tehran, where they would be picked up by the helicopters and flown to an airport that was to have been seized by U.S. Army Rangers. From there, the rescuers and hostages would be flown out of the country.
This extraordinary bold and complicated mission never made it past the rendezvous point in the desert. Sandstorms damaged choppers and forced several pilots to turn back. With too few helicopters to proceed, the mission was aborted.
As the aircraft maneuvered to fly quietly out of Iran, one of the choppers collided with a plane on the ground, and both exploded, killing eight American servicemen. The disaster ruined hopes of keeping the aborted rescue effort secret. The subsequent embarrassment condemned the hostages to many more months of captivity, handed Iran a large propaganda coup, (they claimed an American “invasion” had been thwarted by God), and likely destroyed Carter’s hopes of being elected to a second term.
That episode would bear a striking similarity to the one that killed bin Laden, and it would illustrate how far the talents and tools of the special ops community had come. That 1980 disaster, in effect, created the Joint Special Operations Command, by demonstrating cruelly what this nation could not do. Progress can be further traced back to the heroic and bloody firefight in Mogadishu in 1993, the battle documented in Black Hawk Down, which resulted when another special ops raid spun off track. Thousands of missions, successful and unsuccessful, large and small, honed the men and machines and tactics that would target the Sheik.
That raid could not be launched until bin Laden was found. Finding him meant reconstituting human spy networks dismantled in the complacent years after the Cold War, when spying was considered unseemly and unlawful and a threat to personal liberties and human rights. After 9/11, the public rediscovered the value of spies on the ground and of eyes and ears overhead. It would speed the development of unblinking aerial platforms and telecommunications networks that would allow constant, real-time surveillance unheard of in the past.
Four months after the attacks, former Admiral John Poindexter was appointed to head a new initiative he had helped devise called Total Information Awareness, which sought to use supercomputers to amass unimaginably huge databases in order to, in essence, collect, as its name suggested, everything. With the right software, you could mine that data in order to identify and locate potential terrorists. The admiral’s history of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra episode did not engender confidence, nor did the inherently scary, Orwellian notion of the government compiling vast pools of data about American citizens. In that sense, the name, Total Information Awareness, was a fatal public relations blunder. The bald, white-mustachioed Poindexter was called the “Pentagon’s Big Brother,” and worse. Congress scotched the program as originally conceived. Poindexter found employment back in the private sector, and the remnants of the project, which was barred from collecting information on American citizens, was tactfully renamed Terrorism Information Awareness.
As wrong a choice as Poindexter was to lead this project, and as tone deaf as he may have been in its presentation, he had the right idea. He had been thinking about it for decades. One of the computer’s great contributions—this ability to store and manipulate vast amounts of data—seemed mundane but was in practice so revolutionary that it was transforming modern life, whether performing a Google search, stocking the shelves at a Walmart from an international supply chain, shipping packages anywhere in the world overnight, or mapping the human genome. So why not put that capacity to work tracing a terrorist network—recognizing clues in what would appear, even to teams of skilled analysts, to be random events?
Poindexter’s concept did more than survive. It would come to undergird the entire war effort: storing every scrap of intel about al Qaeda and related groups gathered by the nation’s very active military and spy agencies, transforming them into data, and then plumbing that data for leads. The hunt for bin Laden and others eventually drew on an unfathomably rich database, accessible to anyone in the world with the proper security clearance, whether a marine officer at an outpost in Afghanistan or a team of analysts working in Langley. Sifting through it required software capable of ranging deep and fast and with keen discernment—a problem the government itself proved less effective at solving than were teams of young software engineers in Silicon Valley. A start-up called Palantir, for instance, came up with a program that elegantly accomplished what TIA had set out to do. Founded in 2004 by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel—the latter is the billionaire cocreator of Paypal and an early Facebook investor—Palantir developed a product that actually deserves the popular designation Killer App. Newly minted software engineers from the best computer schools in the country were put up in a seven-thousand-square-foot workspace in Palo Alto. It was stocked with junk food and video games and nicknamed “the Shire,” the home of t
he Hobbits in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. (The company itself is named after a magical stone in the Tolkien saga that confers special powers of sight and communication.) The software produced from this very unlikely source would help turn America’s special forces into deadly effective hunters. Palantir is now worth billions, and has contracts with, among others, the CIA, the NSA, the Defense Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Department of Homeland Security.
The pace and urgency of war have always accelerated the development of technology and encouraged novel uses of devices that already exist. After rapid initial success toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, American forces found themselves under increasing attack by Sunni extremist groups, the most violent of which was a new branch of al Qaeda, under the direction of an innovative killer named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His group mounted a campaign of roadside bombs and brutal suicide attacks, many of them designed to kill Iraqi civilians indiscriminately—the sort of attacks that bin Laden, in hiding, considered mistakes. Indeed, the mass killings eventually helped turn the Sunni majority in Iraq against the insurgency, marking the turning point in the war. But at the same time, under the direction of General Stanley McChrystal, JSOC was hammering away on insurgent cells of the local al Qaeda killers with increasing effectiveness, mounting mission after mission in rapid succession, capturing and killing at a pace that such operations had never before been able to sustain. They found Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole in the ground in late 2003. Zarqawi himself was killed by an American bomb in 2005. McChrystal’s success, considered to be one of the major military accomplishments of modern times, was something he called “collaborative operations,” by which he meant the fusion of “special operators”—teams of elite shooters from every branch of the service—with this new computational ability, which amassed data from all of the other inputs. The task force built a massive database at Camp Victory in Iraq, and then another at Bagram in Afghanistan, blending the big picture with the small. It meant bringing a different kind of warrior to the front, one more accustomed to clicking a mouse than pulling the trigger.
