88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  Not surprisingly, some of CTC’s cultural problems revolved around Alec as well. Its leaders were sometimes arrogant and obsessive, and regularly alienated the geographic divisions on whose support we depended. I did all I could to change those perceptions of the center, constantly preaching that our role was to support and enable operations, and telling people to remember that others, not we, were conducting them. I moved to embed some of our geographic subunits into the geographic divisions they were supporting. I joked with our “embeds” that they should salute the division chiefs, not me; the point was to cooperate with the divisions.

  Many of the senior members of Alec, disproportionately women, were among the very best al-Qa’ida experts we had, with years of experience. Their devotion to the mission of hunting down al-Qa’ida was legendary. These were people who woke up in a cold sweat at three o’clock in the morning, fearful that they had missed something that put the nation at risk. Their expertise was critical to us, and their dedication heroic, but they were definitely a handful to manage. They were a tight, cultish group. Several had photos of Scheuer, their first boss, hung up in their offices, like shrines. Many, I knew, suspected that the structural reorganization which eliminated Alec was a sort of punishment, part of the cultural change I was promoting. It wasn’t true, but some could not be convinced otherwise.

  I vividly recall an occasion when one of the senior Alec people made a terrorist threat presentation to Director Goss at one of our regular five o’clock briefings. She started out calmly enough, but as she warmed to her subject, she began to rock, forward and back, rhythmically in cadence with her speech. After a few minutes she began punctuating each forward motion by addressing Goss as sir: “—and so, sir . . . we believe, sir . . . and therefore, sir. . . .” A few minutes later, still rocking, she began to embellish each sir with a sharp rap of her knuckles on the conference table. I wasn’t sure what to do. I thought she must be coming unglued, and wondered if I should intervene. Mercifully, the presentation came to an end. As the meeting broke up I pulled my chief of operations aside. He had arranged the briefers.

  “What the hell?” I said. “We can’t put her in front of the Director!”

  He smiled. “Don’t worry about it, Chief. She’s just a little wound up today. We’ll get her back on her medication.” I sighed. When you’re making war on fanatics, it can be a great advantage to have a few fanatics of your own—so long as you keep them under close supervision.

  Perhaps CTC’s greatest contribution to the counterterrorism effort was its targeting—sifting through huge masses of data from many sources to identify and locate terrorists in the places they were hiding, just as it had done so masterfully in Pakistan. The targeters did not sit in one place, but were dispersed, as they should be, to work within the various operational units of the center. But that meant that new innovations in the state of the art being developed in one place were not necessarily shared elsewhere. We organized a new unit within CTC to serve as a home base for the targeters and a repository for technology and expertise, so that knowledge was shared, and innovations developed to confront one set of targets that could be applied to others.

  Conducting a true war on terrorism, though, was not just a matter of finding and attacking targets. At base, the problem of violent extremism in the Muslim world was a broad social, political, and cultural phenomenon. It involved an internal struggle for the future of the Muslim world; it was a struggle in which we in the United States and the West had an important stake, even if it was essentially not our fight. That said, there was much the United States could do from the margins to influence the direction of change in countries of great concern to us. I was much encouraged by President Bush’s second inaugural address, promising a renewed American commitment to democratic change in the world. If we meant to keep those who thought themselves oppressed from using violence and terrorism to redress their grievances, we would be wise to help give them a peaceful, democratic alternative. The primary reason Islamic militants were attacking us in the first place was to discourage U.S. support for what they regarded as impious, tyrannical regimes. I’m not sure the U.S. government has ever really gotten that; but by 2005 the nation was becoming more cognizant of the need to respond to negative perceptions of the United States and the distrust of American motives resulting from the War on Terror. To lead this global PR effort, Bush sent Karen Hughes, perhaps his closest advisor, to serve as under secretary of state for public diplomacy. Diplomacy and democracy promotion were outside our lane; but convinced there was much CTC could do in support of overt U.S. policy, I created a new department within the center, staffing it with the best cultural experts I could find. I gave them broad latitude to do whatever they could to help Ms. Hughes.

  One of the more vexing problems to confront me when I took over CTC was the poor state of our relations with the military leadership at the Pentagon. CIA’s cooperation with deployed military units in the field, now in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan, was excellent. That went especially for our intelligence support to the Joint Special Operations Command, whose leader, General Stanley McChrystal, became a valued friend. But things were not working at the Washington end. We had a number of fleeting opportunities, when a target we had been developing for weeks or months in the field would suddenly come into the crosshairs, and military assistance would be needed to launch a sensitive and risky operation. A secure video conference would be called to brief Secretary Rumsfeld and gain his approval. He would look to his senior uniformed military staff for advice—and find they knew nothing about it. The secretary would then begin to poke at the details of the operation, as was his wont, and ultimately defer a decision. Opportunities were being lost.

  This couldn’t go on. It was a problem of our own making, and I set out to fix it. We needed to ensure that the senior intelligence and operational leaders in the Pentagon’s Joint Staff were aware of the operations which they might eventually be called upon to address, and well in advance, so that they would understand them and the intelligence picture behind them, and feel confident in advising the secretary to go ahead when and if they matured. We had a well-connected senior liaison to the Pentagon who had been generally ignored in the center and excluded from senior meetings. With his help, we set up a committee comprised of my most senior operational managers and members of the Joint Staff, to include General Ron Burgess, the director for intelligence, or “J-2.” We met every two weeks, either in our building or at the Pentagon. At these sessions we circled the globe to keep the Joint Staff up to date on the developing intelligence picture on targets where military assistance might be required. They were extremely grateful. In time, our outreach would pay substantial dividends.

  I also spent considerable time with General Jerry Boykin, Rumsfeld’s deputy under secretary for intelligence, to develop a system whereby DoD personnel and capabilities, normally bound by the Title 10 legal authorities governing military operations, could be quickly and fluidly migrated to be employed under Title 50 authorities governing intelligence, and thus be eligible for use on short notice in CIA operations. In the CIA system, this would have been easy, but in the rigid bureaucratic environment at the Pentagon it was not, and required setting up elaborate protocols. In the spring of 2005, Boykin and I rolled out for John Negroponte, the newly created director of national intelligence, our legal and policy “template” for use of military forces in CIA operations. Again, the investment in time and patience would prove worth it. I’m not sure I can take even a small measure of the credit, but it’s worth noting that when JSOC commandos killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, they did so while operating under the authority of CIA, not the Department of Defense.

  When I took over CTC, there had not been a single town meeting or mass interaction between the center’s senior leadership and the troops in over two years. Soon after my arrival, I inaugurated a series of briefings, alternating between auditoriums in the two buildings where the bulk of center employees were housed, using closed-
circuit TV links to reach the rest of the widely dispersed workforce. I announced the strategic review, and provided regular updates on its progress, its conclusions and, finally, the progressive measures we were taking to implement it. I wanted our people to know where we were as an organization and where we were going, the reasons for the reorganization and the other measures we were taking to improve ourselves and, most of all, what we were doing to address their concerns over lack of training, lack of promotions, and lack of opportunity for overseas assignments. I wanted them to know that we understood that they were paying a high price for their devotion to counterterrorism, with few rewards beyond personal satisfaction. We couldn’t solve our problems overnight, but at least we recognized them and were doing what we could. Since 9/11, we had been operating at an unsustainable sprint. Now we were preparing ourselves for the marathon to come.

  I didn’t share everything with them, though. As I and my key lieutenants sat in our conference room one day, awaiting the start of a briefing by our outside consultants, we silently leafed through the executive summary from an opinion poll taken of the CTC workforce. Among many, many other questions, the force was queried on its attitudes toward senior leaders in the Center. The CTC leadership team was viewed with some skepticism by the rank-and-file, it said, “with the exception of the Director, who is seen as a great improvement over his predecessor.” I burst out laughing.

  “This does not leave the room,” I said, repeating it for emphasis. “If this gets out, Jose will assume that I’m behind it.” It was already becoming obvious that things were not healthy between me and Jose Rodriguez, whom I had replaced and who had recently been given a new title: Director of the National Clandestine Service (D/NCS). I wasn’t going to go out of my way to make things worse.

  The most important part of the review, though, focused on the mission. My analysts prepared a thorough appraisal of the current evolution and future direction of the terrorist threat. This was the template on which all of our long-range planning and resource allocations would be based. We concluded that we needed to be poised to shift our resources rapidly to growing terrorist hot spots around the world—especially Iraq (which was already absorbing a lot of manpower) and a number of other badly underresourced regions—but that we couldn’t shift them just yet, given the lingering threat from al-Qa’ida along the Pak-Afghan border.

  The majority of our resources were still devoted to that theater, and we were achieving remarkable results. Even if bin Laden and Zawahiri were still at large, most of the organization’s senior operational leaders had been captured in raids in Pakisan’s settled areas. Those that remained were being forced to flee into the tribal badlands along the border. Within months, the post of al-Qa’ida’s chief of operations was a revolving door; any new incumbent would have a brief life expectancy. But even as the state of the art for drone strikes was advancing, I knew that they were not a permanent solution. The safehaven in far northwest Pakistan would have to be ended. As I said at the time, the Tribal Areas were a romantic anachronism that the world could no longer afford. The only long-term answer would be to incorporate them fully into Pakistan and bring them under real government control. Even with the rising challenges in other regions of the world, we needed to finish the job in South-Central Asia, in part so that resources currently concentrated there could be migrated elsewhere.

  By spring 2005, with our study complete and most of our strategic goals set, I concluded that we needed to make a major push over the remainder of the year to find, fix, and finish bin Laden, and to eliminate the remnants of the organization responsible for 9/11. I decided to carry that message to the field, on an extended visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan, in late April and early May 2005.

  If I thought that it would be easy to finish al-Qa’ida in the Tribal Areas within the year, I would soon be disabused. In Islamabad, I paid a call on an old friend. Lieutenant General Ashfaq Kayani, the former director-general of military operations of the Pakistan Army, whose prescient warnings I had received three years before, was now director-general of the ISI. He would soon rise further to be the four-star chief of Army Staff, the most powerful man in Pakistan.

  Kayani’s fears of radicalization in the Tribal Areas had been realized. Armed probes to flush out foreign militants, launched in response to American pressure, had touched off a violent reaction from the tribes, just as the ISI chief had predicted. In response, the Pakistan Army had had to forcibly occupy South Waziristan. The al-Qa’ida militants who had been pushed out were now concentrated in North Waziristan, where CIA was feverishly trying to track them and learn their precise locations.

  I made my pitch. The occupation of South Waziristan had been a great success, I said. It had forced al-Qa’ida and the foreign militants to converge on North Waziristan. We hoped Pakistan would make them uncomfortable there, just as it had in South Waziristan, perhaps to the point of shifting the army to occupy North Waziristan as well. As the militants were chased ever northward, they would eventually be hemmed in, and would become easier to track and to finish. We should set a goal, I said, of capturing or killing bin Laden within the year.

  Kayani didn’t need to say a word. I could tell in an instant what he was thinking. ISI, in my view, had few capabilities in the Tribal Areas. It had always been primarily a security service, not an intelligence organization in our sense of the term. Its officers could operate well in areas they controlled, but the tribal agencies were like foreign ground to them. To put pressure on al-Qa’ida in North Waziristan, the Pakistan Army would have to move in. Circumstances may have forced him to occupy South Waziristan, but it seemed to me that Kayani was not spoiling for another fight, especially in an area where the tribal structure had been thoroughly degraded and the influence of radical mullahs was far greater than in South Waziristan.

  Capturing bin Laden, I knew, would be still more problematic. He remained popular in much of Pakistan. If the Americans were to quietly kill or capture him in some remote area, so much the better. But for Pakistan to kill or, worse yet, capture him and turn him over to the Americans, the domestic political consequences would be very unpleasant. Better to ignore the problem, and hope it would go away. ISI had shown considerable capability in capturing al-Qa’ida cadres in the settled areas. Kayani’s steadfast silence signaled he thought it better to continue focusing efforts there.

  As if to underscore the point, as we sat across from one another at breakfast the following morning, an aide entered the room to whisper urgently into the ISI chief’s ear. His mouth curled into a tight smile. Abu Faraj al-Libi, the latest operations chief of al-Qa’ida, had been captured a few hours before, in a late-night raid on a graveyard in Mansehra, where he had been lured by Pakistani agents. I thanked and congratulated Kayani on the success.

  A few hours later, I was looking down from a Pak Army helicopter at the high plateau surrounding Wana, the capital of South Waziristan. I couldn’t believe the contrast from three years before. The Pak Army was deployed in full force, with tents, vehicles, and howitzers everywhere. When I sat down with the local Pakistani political agent, he provided a lucid briefing, complete with PowerPoint slides, on the government’s overall plan. The agency would be pacified, he said, through a coordinated program of military force, economic development, and political reform. The military part we could readily see; he assured me that development projects were also in train, and that elections would soon be held for local councils. It was an impressive exposition. “This guy really gets it,” I thought.

  But if so, he was probably alone. What he was describing demanded a stark departure from the Frontier Crimes Regulation, the 1901 law governing the Tribal Areas since British times and scarcely amended since. The old regulation had never been rescinded. If the Pak government had a comprehensive plan to pacify the Tribal Areas along the lines this fellow had suggested, Kayani certainly hadn’t mentioned it. In any case, it was obvious that if Pakistan were going to tame the Tribal Areas and end the terrorist safehaven, a lot
of American assistance would be required, and not just for intelligence and weaponry.

  Before finally heading over to Afghanistan, I sat down with the head of the Agency for International Development office in Islamabad. Economic development assistance in the Tribal Areas, I said, was at least as important as anything else we were doing in the War on Terror. AID and the State Department were spending hundreds of millions per year in Pakistan. How much was going to the Tribal Areas? The answer: very little. AID had a few boutique projects along the western border, but nearly all development assistance was going elsewhere in the country. We were letting the Japanese, who had a very modest budget, take the lead in the Tribal Areas. I was appalled.

  The U.S. government had been saying for years that we were leading a global “War on Terror,” bringing all aspects of national power to bear. That was the rhetoric. What I could see now in Pakistan was the reality.

  In Kabul, my colleagues were seized with yet another threat. Pakistani militants, based mostly in North Waziristan and outraged at what they saw as the long-term occupation of Afghanistan by a U.S.-led NATO army, were launching increasingly brazen attacks against American and Afghan troops across the Durand Line. The Pakistanis were doing little or nothing to stop them. There were stories about how heavily armed fighters were crossing the border within sight of Pak military checkposts, firing rockets, and then retreating. To my colleagues and to the U.S. military, this looked like complicity. I doubted the Pakistanis were actively aiding and abetting the militants, but was not at all surprised at the lack of Pakistani reaction. We might feel that Pakistan had a solemn responsibility to keep its territory from being used as a base from which to attack an ally. But I knew that to the Pakistanis, these cross-border attacks would look like someone else’s problem. The Pakistanis had troubles enough in the Tribal Areas. They weren’t about to invite more.