The Big Seven
I asked Goss, based on all his experience and all that he has seen—classified and open-source—what countries or trends in the epicenter worried him most thirty years after the Islamic Revolution. Goss laid out seven threats he is tracking closely.
Threat No. 1: Iran
The biggest threat to U.S. national security, to Israel’s security, and to the security of our allies in Europe and the Middle East is the Islamic Republic of Iran, so long as Radicals continue to run the show there, Goss argued.
“Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a populist charismatic energized by a surreal vision,” Goss warned. “He is dangerous. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that Iran is actively pursuing a nuclear military weapon capability that includes a long-range delivery system. They seek the know-how and the hardware from multiple sources and have bought years of time by stringing out less-than-sincere negotiations with the E.U., the U.N., the IAEA. They have played Chinese, Russian, and French self-interest to their advantage. There’s no question in my mind that Ahmadinejad and people in the military in Iran are seeking the Persian Bomb for military purposes. It’s not just about peaceful nuclear power. They have plenty of oil to start with, so that’s a bit of a joke, but that is a very, very dangerous situation. Ahmadinejad really wants to be a player in the nuclear club. If that is allowed to happen, suddenly we’re talking about a nuclear weapon in the hands of a Radical in the caliphate. That would be a huge, huge watershed in the geopolitical world.”
“How long until Iran actually has operational nuclear weapons?” I asked.
“It depends on how they get it,” he replied. “If they cheat and buy one, anything is possible. But my guess is that if they didn’t go out and buy one, if they couldn’t find somebody to buy one from, then I believe the answer is that you could see a weapon, all other things being equal, in the five- to ten-year range. Whether they go the uranium route or the plutonium route doesn’t really much matter. We’re looking at Iran having the know-how in a couple of years, an actual weapon in perhaps five to ten, and then perhaps a capability that makes them a bigger player if the rest of the world stands by and lets it happen, and that’s a piece I cannot judge at this point. I do not know what the rest of the world is going to do. My estimate is formed by some conflicting views and reappraisals over the recent years. But it is not if, it is when.”
“When you think about Iran over the next few years, then, what worries you most?” I asked.
“That somebody who has got passion and no restraint is going to get a nuclear weapon, and the most likely candidate for that right now is Ahmadinejad,” he said.
“Right now” was the most important phrase in that sentence. However, Goss noted that Ahmadinejad’s popularity has been slipping in Iran and that this Persian Radical may not be around much longer.
“This fellow Ahmadinejad is hardly a seasoned politician,” he explained. “He is a bit of a populist. The trouble is it’s not working anymore. . . . His lack of real-time management skills is eroding his appeal among the Iranian citizenry as his campaign platform deliverables are nowhere in sight. . . . Every day, Iranians are much more interested in their daily bread than they are in the return of the Twelfth Imam. So there is now beginning to be a disconnect. That disconnect is being exaggerated by technology today, the Internet. He’s not quite as popular or quite as esteemed as he thinks he should be. I think Ahmadinejad is on a downslope. I don’t think what he’s doing is sustainable.”
In this context, it is important to note that while Ahmadinejad may increasingly be in political trouble, he is not the only leader in Iran who could soon pass from the political scene. The country’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei—born July 17, 1939—is in poor and declining health and has looked more and more enfeebled in public appearances over the past several years. He reportedly has cancer and may have suffered a stroke in December 2006 or January 2007.371 Moreover, both leaders face the possibility of assassination, a coup, a popular rebellion, or regime change by some other means.
At some point in the not-too-distant future, therefore, we could see a dramatic change in Iranian politics. The question is, when Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are no longer in power, which direction would a new Iranian government go? Would a new ayatollah and president continue to export the Revolution; complete Iran’s nuclear weapons development program; do more publicly and privately to hasten the coming of the Mahdi; attempt to seize the “holy lands” of Mecca and Medina from the Sunnis; and launch genocidal attacks against Israel, the United States, and others? Or would they reverse the Radicalism set into motion in 1979, abandon the quest for the Persian Bomb, and either temper the Islamic fanaticism coming from the mullahs or eliminate the Radical threat completely by transforming Iran into a secular, nonviolent, democratic republic or constitutional monarchy?
It all depends, of course, on who would follow Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. But Goss is right—the stakes are high, and for the foreseeable future Iran is one of the most important countries in the Islamic world to watch.
Threat No. 2: Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden and his organization ranked a close second on Goss’s threat list.
“There actually are some people who still don’t think Osama bin Laden exists, that he is just a myth, a Hollywood character or something. I remember the president of the United States after 9/11 had a very hard time convincing some of our close allies that there was a person named Osama bin Laden. But bin Laden is a huge danger. He is now an icon, of course. He has a vision. He has charisma. And he has coupled himself with a magnificent manager/manipulator, a very devious guy who feels like he’s the great victim of all times, a fellow named Zawahiri, from Egypt.
“Some jihadists are true believers, but other motivators such as family or tribal honor, nationalism, schisms in Islam, desperate living conditions, perceived victimization, injustice, and the like can all be involved. But for the top leadership of al Qaeda and many of the Radical imams, it is simply a quest for power based on a hijacked version of the Qur’an. What bin Laden and Zawahiri want is their own way, which includes pursuit of power, revenge, some earthly reward, and a return of Islam to purer Sunniism. Destroying apostates, removing infidels from the holy lands [of Saudi Arabia and Israel], and eventually subjugating infidels elsewhere—including the United States—seems to be the game plan.”
“You were essentially in charge of hunting bin Laden for almost three years,” I noted. “Why has he been so hard to catch? Would you have expected that more than six years after 9/11 he would still be on the run?”
“Why haven’t we caught [bin Laden] after so many years? Well, there are a lot of answers,” Goss sighed. “In the first place, the geography [along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border] is so harsh that you can’t even explain it. Even when you see it you can’t believe it. There are places where the cliffs are so steep, they’re so close together, and the chasm is so narrow that the sun only shines for a few minutes a day at the actual bottom of the chasm. Even with a helicopter you have to sort of peer over and look down. I’ve seen that terrain. I don’t know how anybody wanders around there. But, of course, there are caves all over the place. There are no reference landmarks. Everything looks like everything else. There’s no cover [for U.S. agents or commandos] to be out and about. So this is a very tough area to get into, a very tough area to survive. And you just don’t go in and say, ‘I think I’ll take a room at that lodge over there and see if I can find bin Laden.’ It’s not that kind of place at all. So he’s got himself a built-in surveillance system to keep the bad guys out. The geography works beautifully for him. He also has a message system that he uses that is very hard for us to deal with because he’s learned the hard way about what we can do and what we can’t do, so they’ve taken defensive measures and countermeasures that are very helpful.”
The other part of the story of how bin Laden has been able to elude capture, Goss noted, was that the U.S. is severely limited by
the kind of force it can use, and where it can use such force.
“Let me explain that if I may,” Goss told me. “Say I got a message in my office that said, ‘Mr. Director, we know where Osama bin Laden is; we can pinpoint it right here. We have actual intelligence that is 100 percent certain that Osama bin Laden is right in this place.’ Then you have to ask, can somebody go in and arrest him? I mean, what’s the situation? I’ve just explained that he’s in a very hostile geographic area. Let’s say I’ve got the cave pinpointed and know it’s him. Who goes to the cave? How do you get there? Well, what country is it in? Let’s say it’s Pakistan, because it’s been suggested in the newspapers that he might actually be in the northwest frontier of Pakistan. If that’s true, we have to go to Pakistan if we’re going to use our military. Now, is our military going to be allowed to come into Pakistan to go hunt bin Laden? No, they’re not. Can they go without the Paks’ permission? No, they’re a sovereign state. We’ve signed treaties. So our military is not a player in this unless they’re invited in by the Paks. If the president of Pakistan invited the United States military to come into Pakistan to catch Osama bin Laden, I think he would be the former president very quickly. That stability factor would disappear, and he would have chaos on the streets. So the United States military is not the action agent in all likelihood. Okay, does the United States of America have a capability other than military that they could bring to bear if you had actual intelligence on where Osama bin Laden is? The answer is yes, we do actually have some capabilities. Now the question is, can we use them? And the answer, often, is no.”
On this, Goss declined to elaborate further. He was clearly suggesting that America’s clandestine services—of the sort he himself was once a member—could theoretically raid a safe house along the Pakistan border, but again, operating in the no-man’s-land along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border without the support of the Pakistani government is enormously problematic.
That said, however, Goss was optimistic, believing that the mission would be accomplished. “I think Osama bin Laden will be taken out eventually,” he said. “He’ll be captured or neutralized in some way.”
Threat No. 3: Pakistan
Pakistan loomed large on Goss’s list of threats. A country of 170 million-plus people, Pakistan is a center for extreme Sunni fundamentalism. It has nuclear weapons. And it is not exactly the most politically stable country. Should Radicals suddenly seize control of the country, or should the country disintegrate into chaos or civil war, Pakistan could in a matter of hours or days become the most dangerous country on the face of the planet.
“I feel this is now the new Doomsday Scenario, if one of these nuclear weapons or this capability falls in the hands of irresponsible people who have declared that they want to wipe out our Western form of civilization because it is apostate,” Goss explained. “The all-too-possible nightmare of assassination, chaos, and anarchy in Pakistan could lead to the country’s nuclear capability falling into wrong hands. The ‘wrongest’ of those hands would be the Taliban and related fanatical religious groups who are currently restrained primarily by lack of firepower. It would be a disaster if the Pak military lost control of the serious weaponry in Pakistan—including WMD—and it is worth noting that fissures do exist inside the military itself. It seems to be not unusual for sensitive strategic and tactical information to find its way into the hands of our enemies via the Pak Army and/or intelligence members who are more sympathetic to that [Radical] cause than to ours. Regrettably, some are more sympathetic to the Taliban, especially about Kashmir and ages-old tribal distinctions.”
Should Pakistani nuclear weapons be sold to—or stolen by—al Qaeda or the Taliban and moved to the lawless regions on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, or even into the mountains of Afghanistan itself, Goss said we could be facing “at least the next big war.” Another risk, he noted, was Pak nukes winding up in the hands of the Iranians. “They have somebody who is in control of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who is hardly responsible as a world player,” Goss said of the current regime in Tehran. “Nobody would want to see a nuclear weapon in their hands.”
Washington is “betting Pakistan will evolve successfully along ‘democratic’ norms before the crazies can grab control,” Goss noted, but he added that “progress toward free assembly, women’s rights, parliamentary elections, etc. has been spotty.” This has fueled ever more political instability, and the situation could get much, much worse.
“How big of a disaster, intelligence-wise, was it when Pakistan and India tested nuclear weapons in 1998 and the CIA had no idea they were ready?” I asked. “And what does that tell us about the danger of the CIA not knowing when Iran has the Bomb?”
“The fact that we’ve missed the development of nuclear capability in sovereign states is very worrisome,” Goss conceded. “I think we’ve beefed up our intelligence capability, but it could happen again. The possibility of somebody emerging as a nuclear power or events happening that surprise us on the nuclear stage is still a possibility. It always will be because there’s an awful lot going on behind the scenes. Our intelligence just has to get better on that score.”
At the time I interviewed Goss, Pervez Musharraf was still president of Pakistan, and I asked Goss to evaluate Musharraf’s ability to maintain stability in his country, as well as his ability to evolve into a true Reformer.
“We are a heartbeat away from anarchy in Pakistan if somebody actually has a successful assassination attempt of President Musharraf,” Goss said bluntly. “Now whether you think President Musharraf was the best president or not doesn’t matter. . . . He has tried to be a little bit progressive toward democracy, but his ‘street’ [popular opinion among the Rank-and-File] doesn’t allow him to go too far. He’s got a very, very difficult parade to try and lead over there. He has done a pretty good job, I think, of bringing a measure of stability, of giving the country an opportunity to go forward. At the same time we [in Washington] are being very serious about containing any nuclear proliferation, and we have his cooperation on that, on bringing to a stop what the A. Q. Khan372 organization was doing with other irresponsible people, and in dealing with terrorists. Now, if somebody gets lucky and Musharraf gets taken out, we will have anarchy. Who will emerge from the pile when it’s all over is hard to say. One hopes that the Pak military would be able to keep control of the nuclear suitcase in Pakistan. One assumes that that can happen, and one does what one can to make sure it does happen. But that is not necessarily going to happen. So the question remains: if we have chaos in Pakistan, who emerges with the weapons? And the answer is: it can’t be the wrong people.”
Having survived repeated assassination attempts throughout his tenure—events he recounted so vividly in his memoirs, In the Line of Fire—Pervez Musharraf finally resigned in August of 2008, under tremendous pressure from his political enemies. Perhaps more than ever, then, Pakistan is a country to watch closely.
Threat No. 4: Iraq
Iraq remains a critically important country to U.S. national security and the overall security of Western civilization. Should it implode, this would be seen throughout the Islamic world as a catastrophic defeat for the United States and a success of miraculous proportions for both Shia and Sunni extremist groups that have been waging jihad against Coalition forces since shortly after the liberation of Iraq in 2003. Radical recruitment would soar. Fund-raising for the Radicals would reach new highs. And Iraq could become a new base camp for terrorists who would then fan out all over the world to attack American and Western interests with renewed vengeance and ferocity.
“Iraq has to come out right,” Goss said. “There are no choices other than to get Iraq right, because if we don’t get Iraq right, everything else goes wrong in the region. So whether or not it is the center of the struggle between Radicalism and Reform, it’s the most important chapter today. And we cannot afford to walk away from Iraq without having that country moderated and resolved with a degree of stability and progress, q
uality of life, and so forth, and assurances that we will continue to be their friends toward those goals. I think that will have a huge benign effect on the area. Not having that would have such a catastrophic effect on the area that I think other progress of the area would come unraveled very quickly in nearby states.”
That said, Goss was optimistic about Iraq’s future in February 2008, and he remained so throughout the year. He was opposed to any rapid reduction in U.S. and Coalition troop levels in Iraq that could be perceived as a policy of “cut and run.” But he was encouraged by steady reduction in violence there and, unlike scores of critics and naysayers in Washington, was deeply convinced that Iraq would in time emerge as a peaceful, prosperous country.
“I expect Iraq can evolve into a responsible sovereign nation in the near future,” Goss told me, happily bucking the conventional wisdom at the time. “It is blessed with location, resource, water, fertile soil, and rich history and culture, and it is not particularly vulnerable to foreign enemy invasion. Sorting out the levers of power and sharing the blessings among the Sunni, Shia, and Kurds are not insurmountable tasks. Rebuilding the badly depleted infrastructure and resisting some bad habits from the old days will take time and goodwill. I think the majority of Iraqis would agree today that an investment in time and goodwill is a much better idea than their recent past experience. Positive signs do exist, notably voting and forming a government, getting some businesses up and running, better street security, and confidence that friends in the West can be trusted to assist them. Government services are being reestablished on a professional level, albeit unevenly. Professional military and police training is taking hold, albeit unevenly. I think for us Iraq will be a fairly stable, reliable ally in a tough neighborhood in the decade ahead.”
Inside the Revolution Page 23
