Abdullah also wanted to talk about the Palestinians, who now comprised about half of his population. Failure of the Middle East peace process, he said, made everything—like Iran and terrorism—harder. He argued that there was a destructive downward cycle whenever we missed an opportunity: the Palestinian Authority’s credibility was weakened; its status as a viable negotiating partner was undercut; violence then spiked as confidence in the PA waned; Israel then felt justified in taking harsher measures (security, settlements, etc.); and the two sides were then further apart than ever.
Relations between Jordan and Israel weren’t so bad, though, that GID couldn’t hand me off to Mossad at the famous Allenby Bridge over the Jordan River during one of my trips. (I opted for that in lieu of the sixty-six-mile C-17 ride from Amman to Tel Aviv.)
There were other services who turned to us for help. In July 2007, twenty-three very young, very sincere, and very foolish Korean Christian missionaries were kidnapped in Afghanistan. Korea is the most Christian country in Asia, exceptionally devout, and these young Presbyterians had allowed their zeal to outstrip their judgment.
The head of the Korean service was charged with getting them freed, so he flew immediately—not to Kabul, but to CIA headquarters—to ask for our assistance. He needed help on the ground in Afghanistan and knew where to find it. I think I surprised him when I offered him a full-time US officer to accompany him. The young man had deep Afghan experience, but the real trump was played when the chief asked through his interpreter if our officer knew any Korean. Without waiting for the translation, the Korean American case officer responded in the affirmative and in Korean, bringing the first smile of the day to the chief’s face.
Sometimes liaison was a pure joy. In July 2008 the Colombian armed forces staged a dramatic rescue of fifteen hostages, including three American contractors who had been held since their observation plane went down five years earlier.
I had visited Bogotá on one of my liaison trips. A long, hard war against the FARC, an insurgency fueled by drug trafficking, was turning the government’s way. Colombia’s tough president, Alvaro Uribe, had made a big difference since assuming office in 2002, but this was also the product of constant, long-term, unheralded, hard-slogging intelligence work. The kind of stuff that never made the papers or evening news.
When I read of the Colombians’ proposed rescue plan, I thought I was reviewing a grade-B movie script. Two helicopters masquerading as NGO aircraft. A fictitious transfer of the prisoners to senior FARC leadership. Colombian military playing the role of FARC guards. I just shook my head. “Oh, yeah. This’ll work. Sure.”
But it did! The three rescued Americans, whose location was our highest intelligence priority in Colombia for years, were so taken in that one of them resisted the transfer and refused to go. Only after one of the “guards” leaned into him and whispered into his ear, “Trust me, trust me,” did he agree to cooperate.
The rescued Americans visited the agency shortly after their release. Even more touching was the insistence of the Colombian rescue team that they visit Langley as well. I sat with them in my conference room as they informally reviewed the whole operation for me. We took a lot of photos, and they gave me some memorabilia that I still have in my home office. The gratitude ran strong both ways.
One of our most unusual (and productive) liaison relationships wasn’t with a foreign entity at all—it was with the New York City police department. These ties later became controversial, but all along we viewed New York as a special case, an international as well as an American metropolis. Over a third of the city’s residents were born abroad. And New York was certainly at the top of al-Qaeda’s target list. Mayor Bloomberg and his tough police commissioner, Ray Kelly, seemed to agree with us.
Cooperation began informally with a CIA counterterrorism analyst in the city passing threat data to the NYPD. It really took off when Kelly hired Dave Cohen, former head of CIA operations and deputy head of analysis who had also worked in New York, to set up his intelligence division. Cohen built a familiar structure: a directorate for operations (collection) and a directorate for analysis.
Domestic intelligence collection has always been countercultural in America. CIA doesn’t do it; it’s beyond the agency’s charter. Law enforcement is reluctant to do anything without a criminal predicate. No crime, no investigation. Without new attorney general guidelines (which were not forthcoming until December 2008), the FBI would be forever constrained. Besides, NYPD was better qualified for this. They knew their domain cold; they could map threats by zip code.
We decided to embed an analyst within Cohen’s organization. Just like with our other partners, he could help put locally derived information into a global context. He could also engage with the NYPD on the daily threat matrix, which was an almost no-threshold catalogue of dangers. Together with NYPD he studied the local threats to New York and rated them. After all, false positives to industries like fiscal services would lead to the wasteful expenditure of millions of dollars. The threat had to be real.
A lot of this was more or less in place before I arrived, and I saw no reason to change it. I agreed to formal headquarters approval of the ad hoc arrangements in 2007. The bureau wasn’t happy, and I’m sure that we were squeezing more than a paragraph or two of our memorandum of understanding (MOU) with them, but as one of my seniors put it, “This is the right thing to do and, besides, there is no such thing as MOU jail.”
We actually gave NYPD a training slot in our field tradecraft course at the Farm. The idea was to help them develop the tools they needed (since they did have liaison relationships overseas), give them some situational awareness for the counterterrorism business, and sensitize them to counterintelligence threats.
When I was in New York I always tried to drop in on Commissioner Kelly. We struck up a friendship on my first visit as he was proudly showing me the massive desk of one of his predecessors, Theodore Roosevelt. Kelly and I were of like mind on many issues (like the New York Times). To this day I wear NYPD cuff links on occasion; I trust he wears the CIA links that I gave him.
In 2012 two industrious AP reporters won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for a series of stories on the NYPD’s overall counterterrorism effort and CIA’s role in it. The stories intentionally raised all sorts of civil liberties concerns, but although the agency admitted that its effort could have benefited from closer supervision, CIA seemed to reflect the national and city consensus when it responded, “The CIA stepped up cooperation with law enforcement on counterterrorism after 9/11. It’s hard to imagine that anyone is suggesting this was inappropriate or unexpected.”
And we never suggested that this was a generalized model. New York is unique—unique in demographics, unique in size, unique in threat. The NYPD had its main job, fighting crime, under control, and its sheer size (35,000 uniformed officers, about three times the size of the next largest force, Chicago) gave it sufficient scale. NYPD also had strong, veteran leadership in Kelly and unflinching political support from Mayor Bloomberg.
By Dave Cohen’s count, New York City was the target of seventeen terrorist plots between 2002 and the 2011–2013 kerfuffle generated by the AP reporting. Al-Qaeda was 0 for 17. A lot of things contributed to that. One of them was this program. All in all, NYPD was one of the best liaison relationships we had.
It’s probably not surprising that China wasn’t in the same league when it came to intelligence relationships, though it was important enough that I traveled there to meet with a counterpart. In this case it was the head of what we called 3-PLA, the chief of the Third Department of the Chinese general staff, the office responsible for signals intelligence. My host could not have been more gracious, the banquets were spectacular, and we really did have items of common concern—Russian intentions and technical developments, for example.
We also met some political figures in the Great Hall of the People adjacent to the infamo
us Tiananmen Square. The Great Hall is divided into rooms named after Chinese provinces. Pointedly, we met in the Taiwan room and in the Tibet room, provinces over which Chinese sovereignty is contested. The Chinese never miss an opportunity to make a point.
Although my counterpart was gracious, I couldn’t say the same thing about our security guards. In one instance a balky Chinese driver would not get out of the way of our small convoy as we were speeding toward a meeting. When we finally passed him, I could see in the mirror that police in one of the trail vehicles had stopped, pulled him over, and were starting to beat him as they dragged him from the car. During a later tour of the Forbidden City, a phalanx of large, dark-suited escorts shoved Chinese tourists out of the way to clear a path for us. We feigned fatigue and asked to leave as quickly as possible.
It caused me to wonder how the Chinese thought we would react to all that. Did they know so little about us that they thought we wouldn’t mind? Or maybe they did know us, and didn’t care. Or maybe they were trying to send another message. If they were, I didn’t get it.
With all this liaison activity, it’s surprising that neither Steve nor I went to Moscow during our time together. Old habits die hard, I guess. We had little trust in the Russians and in the one area where we should have had common interests: terrorism. Moscow often conflated violent extremism with legitimate dissent.
The Russian resident, the senior intelligence officer at their Washington embassy, came to the agency once for lunch and discussions. It was pleasant enough, but my chief of staff had the security folks sweep the dining room and my office for bugs after the Russian left.
Our bad. Russia stormed back onto the international scene with a vengeance under Putin. Meeting with them would not have stopped any of that, but it would have given us useful insight into how the Russian Federation was thinking and created equally useful contacts in the Russian services, which we knew were feeding Putin’s paranoia about America’s and the West’s intentions. Liaison sometimes means more than just working an intelligence exchange.
George Tenet had proved that. He had been the go-to guy in a complex relationship with the Palestinians and Yasser Arafat. My deputy, Steve Kappes, when he was director of operations, had negotiated a big chunk of Libya’s WMD disarmament with Moussa Koussa, the head of Gaddafi’s service.
I later got my chance with the Pakistanis (chapter 18).
• • •
REVOLUTION IN EGYPT. Hostages along the Andean Ridge and in the Hindu Kush. Russian armor in the Caucasus. The United States has the only intelligence service in the world that is, and is expected to be, global in its field of view. CIA has always tried to live up to that role, but after 9/11 it was a particularly difficult task. As I later told Leon Panetta, we were also America’s combatant command when it came to al-Qaeda.
Years after I left government, I reviewed my Thursday morning briefing scripts for the president and was struck by how much they focused on terrorism, and within terrorism how much they were about South Asia—Pakistan and Afghanistan. And during the last six months of the administration, I was struck that we covered the hunt for HVT-1 (High-Value-Target-1, i.e., bin Laden) and HVT-2 (Zawahiri) in practically every session. We were certainly focused.*
The CT obsession was on my mind when Dave Petraeus came to visit us at our home as he was preparing for his CIA confirmation hearing in 2011. He and his wife, Holly, peppered Jeanine and me with a variety of questions about life at the agency over coffee cake and juice in our kitchen.
As Dave and Holly were leaving, I pulled him aside for one last observation.
“Dave,” I said, “CIA has never looked more like OSS than it does right now.” The reference was to the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II direct action unit under William “Wild Bill” Donovan.
“But it’s not OSS,” I continued. “It’s the nation’s global espionage service. And you’re going to have to work every day—like I had to and I’m sure Leon had to—to impose that reality on yourself and on the agency.”
And make sure you do it without making the country any less safe against terrorism, I silently thought. Tough order.
EIGHTEEN
“THERE WILL BE NO EXPLAINING OUR INACTION”
WASHINGTON, DC, 2002–2009 AND BEYOND
Are you sure sure they’re there?” the one who will make the decision asks.
“Yes, sir.”
“And you’re sure it’s them?”
“We’ve got good HUMINT. We’ve been tracking with streaming video. SIGINT’s checking in now and confirming it’s them. They’re there.”
“How long have you had capture of the target and who else is around?”
“A couple of hours. The family is in the main building. The guys we want are in the big guesthouse here.”
“They’re not very far apart.”
“No, sir. But far enough. And there’s another outbuilding here. Small. In the past we’ve seen AQ people use it when they stop here. We’re here a lot. So are they. It’s a really dirty compound.”
“Anyone in that little building now?”
“Don’t know. Probably not. We haven’t seen anyone since the Pred got capture of the target.”
“What’s the PK [probability of kill] on the big guesthouse look like with a GBU [that would be a GBU-12, a laser-guided five-hundred-pound bomb]?”
“These guys are sure dead. We think the family’s OK.”
“You think they’re OK?”
“They should be. We’ve done the bug splat, but you can never be sure. Structural weakness. They walk out of the house or something.”
“What’s it look like with a couple of Hellfires [a much smaller weapon with a twenty-pound warhead]?”
“We’d bring them in this way. All the energy away from the family quarters. The family quarters are fine. If we hit the right room in the guesthouse, we’ll get all the bad guys. But these internal walls can be thick. If we don’t hit the right room or if one of them is up taking a piss . . .”
There’s a long pause in the room.
Finally, the one responsible for the decision speaks. “Use the Hellfires the way you said.”
An officer leaves the room en route to the ops center with the message.
There is another long pause.
“Tell me again about these guys.”
“Sir, big AQ operators [he recounts names and history]. We’ve been trying to track them forever. They’re really careful. They’ve been hard to find. They’re involved in homeland plotting. They’re the first team. They sure as hell have a track record.”
There is another pause. A long one.
“Use the GBU.”
Another, more senior operator jumps from the table and sprints after the first one.
“And that small building they sometimes use as a dorm . . .”
“Yes, sir.”
“After the GBU hits, if military-age males come out . . .”
“Yes, sir?”
“Kill them.”
Less than an hour later the decision maker is briefed once again.
“Sir, the two targets are dead. There was no damage to the family quarters, but they’ve all left the compound. Pretty upset. They left quick. No effort to see if there were any survivors in the guesthouse. No one came out of the small building. We didn’t hit it.”
“Good.”
Targeted killing has become a core part of the American way of war, and to do that legally and effectively requires the kind of exquisite intelligence reflected here. It also requires some very difficult operational and political decisions.
CIA plays a part in that, and the agency has acknowledged that it has an intelligence interest and an operational role in the US government’s use of drones. Many details on the extent of that interest and that role remain classified, of course, but I can say that during my
time at CIA I was exposed to various aspects of this effort and that I witnessed the kind of decision making described here. Although I won’t discuss details, I can also say that—given my nearly forty years as an air force officer and other senior positions I held in the intelligence community—I was in a unique position to understand, appreciate, and advocate for this effort. I am as much an airman as an intelligence officer, after all.
• • •
WITHIN TWO WEEKS of arriving at Langley I got a handwritten note from Stan McChrystal, commander of JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command. CIA and American special operations claim a common bloodline back to World War II’s Office of Strategic Services and its founder, Wild Bill Donovan. A statue of Donovan stares down at the entrance to CIA’s Original Headquarters Building.*
Coalition forces had just killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the ruthless head of al-Qaeda in Iraq. McChrystal understood better than most the importance of intelligence in the hunt for AMZ. His note was simple. “Mike, Thanks to all of your people. Stan.” “Taking terrorists off the battlefield” was the euphemism the United States used when it killed or captured an al-Qaeda member. Either technique worked, but we obviously preferred capture so we could mine the potential intelligence value of a detainee. That was getting increasingly difficult, though, even in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the American military controlled the environment, and beyond those locations it was getting downright rare.
We were ready to recommend more frequent direct action. We knew that the threat had increased to intolerable levels, both to US forces in South Asia and to the homeland. We were watching terrorist trainees leap off motorbikes, steady themselves, and then begin firing against simulated targets.
We were also confident that the quality of intelligence was good enough to sustain a campaign of very precise attacks. We weren’t claiming perfection. In late 2006 intelligence had enabled a strike on a suspected terrorist, a one-legged chieftain in the Haqqani network. It turned out that the man killed was affiliated with Haqqani, but he wasn’t the senior leader we believed he was. With all the land mines over the past decades, there were a lot of one-legged terrorists in South Asia.
Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror Page 36
