by Paul Simpson
In the early nineties, having been thrown out of Saudi Arabia, bin Laden moved to Sudan, where he set up training camps for warriors in a ‘jihad’. One of the first attacks linked to the group was that on the World Trade Center in 1993, when six people were killed and more than a thousand injured by a 500 kg bomb planted in the parking lot. Behind that attack was Ramzi Yousef, the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who in turn claimed to be the instigator of 9/11. (A British security expert based at the World Trade Center, Rick Rescorla, had reported that the parking lot was an obvious target for terrorists two years earlier; this was ignored, as was his subsequent report that the WTC would be attacked from the air. Rescorla lost his life escorting people out of the South Tower on 9/11.)
Al-Qaeda was linked to the downing of two Black Hawk helicopters in Somalia in 1993, as well as the June 1996 bomb at the Khobar Towers, an American military housing complex near Dhahran in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen Americans. Shortly before this, bin Laden moved from Sudan to Afghanistan and in September 1996, called on his followers to ‘launch a guerrilla war against American forces and expel the infidels from the Arabian Peninsula’. A further fatwa (an Islamic legal pronouncement) was issued on 22 February 1998, by bin Laden and four of his associates in the name of the ‘World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders’, calling for the killing of Americans, saying it is the ‘individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it’. Six months later, 225 people were killed, and over four thousand wounded, when bombs were driven into American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which led to airstrikes by the US against al-Qaeda positions in Afghanistan and Sudan. Bin Laden was indicted in the US courts for these attacks. In October 2000, two suicide attackers rammed a boat carrying explosives into the USS Cole near the Yemeni port of Aden, killing seventeen sailors and wounding forty others.
Those weren’t the only attacks linked to al-Qaeda in the nineties by the world’s intelligence services. The 1992 bombing of the Gold Mihor Hotel in Aden and the Luxor Massacre of November 1997 were both al-Qaeda funded operations, while a triple strike planned for January 2000 was foiled by the arrest of the Jordanian cell responsible for one part; the destruction of a skiff planned to sink USS The Sullivans in Yemen; and the arrest of the bomber who was going to set off a device at Los Angeles International Airport.
All this came at a time when the role of the intelligence agencies worldwide was being questioned. The sudden and dramatic end of the Cold War had left many wondering if countries needed secret services such as the CIA or MI6. In Britain, it was decided that the existence of MI6 would be revealed publicly, which, as the then-head of service Sir Colin McColl pointed out, many believed would be the start of a ‘slippery slope… Our work is about trust; trust between government and people running the service; and the service and people all over the world working for it,’ he told a BBC Radio documentary celebrating a hundred years of MI6 in 2009. In the end, what the Intelligence Services Act in 1994 did was simply confirm the services’ existence, but didn’t go into any form of operational detail. A team of management consultants were brought into MI6, who slimmed the service down considerably.
Similar events were happening at MI5, with the first female Director-General, Stella Rimington, taking a much more public role. Consideration was given in 1994 to amalgamating the two services, but this was not implemented. A disaffected MI5 officer, David Shayler, tried to emulate Peter Wright with revelations about the service’s activities (even appearing on light-entertainment programme Have I Got News For You) but like Wright, showed more about his own deficiencies and faults than those of MI5.
President Clinton’s incoming DCI R. James Woolsey, who succeeded Robert Gates, told his confirmation hearings in 1992 that he was considering alternate activities for the CIA, such as possibly sharing their business intelligence with private companies. As he pointed out, the West had ‘slain a large dragon’, but still lived ‘in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes’. There was more intelligence sharing with old enemies — particularly over such issues as the whereabouts of nuclear missiles and other materiel that might have fallen into terrorists’ hands after the breakup of the Soviet Union. ‘We are partners now,’ the chief spokesman of the FSB, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Yuri Kobaladze said in an interview, ‘although it will take some time to find the right way to deal with each other. We have universal problems like proliferation and international terrorism. These are our enemies. That’s why we have to cooperate with the US and the rest of the world.’
For spies, the ground rules had changed. During the Cold War, spies operating undercover in a foreign country could normally expect interrogation and imprisonment followed by the likelihood of exchange (although of course there was always the chance of execution). Former Deputy DCI Admiral Bobby Ray Inman explained in 1993 that terrorists and the drug-traffickers didn’t play by those ‘gentlemanly’ rules. ‘When you try to penetrate them and they suspect you, they don’t put you in jail. They shoot.’
* * *
CIA morale was hit by the cost-cutting insisted on by the administration — although the plans were only for it to revert to the size it had been during the Carter presidency — and even more by the revelation of Aldrich Ames’ treachery. Despite the KGB being wound up when the Soviet Union was dissolved, Ames’ loyalty had continued to be to his Russian paymasters, and he gladly provided material to the SVR.
The CIA had suspected there was a mole as early as 1986, and Jeanne Vertefeuille (often likened to John le Carré’s fictional obsessed researcher Connie Sachs from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) was placed in charge of the investigation, although it was given no priority. Ames was posted to Rome between 1986 and 1989, and did not have a very distinguished career. When he returned, he was assigned to the counterintelligence centre and was therefore able to pass Moscow all the details of the CIA’s actions against the KGB and then the SVR. Suspicions about his spending habits had been voiced and eventually a joint task force was set up with the FBI. The Bureau took over the case in May 1993 and arrested Ames in February 1994. (Ames’ handler Victor Cherkashin believes that Ames and later Robert Hanssen were actually betrayed by a CIA spy within the SVR.)
R. James Woolsey came in for a great deal of criticism over his attitude to the discovery — although verbal reprimands were issued to eleven key staff members (some of whom were retired), no one was fired over the Ames affair. However, the Senate Intelligence Committee called this response ‘seriously inadequate’ for a ‘disaster of unprecedented proportions’. Woolsey resigned in December 1994. He was replaced by Deputy Defence Secretary John Deutch, who continued Woolsey’s policy of declassifying documents relating to the Cold War, and trying to broaden the Agency’s personnel base with more women and minorities (a class action case had been brought against the Agency by various female employees during Woolsey’s time). For the first time since William Casey’s tenure, the DCI was a member of the cabinet, giving him more access to the president. He also brought in new management, in an effort to spring-clean the Agency.
The CIA’s public image suffered further during the mid-nineties when it was revealed that they were continuing to supply aid to Guatemalan military intelligence, despite an instruction in 1992 to sever ties, and were possibly complicit in the deaths of two Americans; this was seen as a continuation of now-outdated Cold War policies and further evidence that the Agency wasn’t moving with the times — as one former agent told Time magazine: ‘If you were going to pick a place where the CIA still has a cowboy mentality, it’s there.’ An internal probe found that the Agency had indeed covered up the deaths.
Other internal investigations launched by Deutch criticized the way in which material supplied by known double agents was passed up the chain of command, often without the relevant warnings attached. This practice was something that would come to haunt intelligence agencies in 2003 when the erroneous information regarding
Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was given far more credence than it would have been had it been flagged correctly. Earlier operations against Saddam gave the Agency another knock when their spies in Northern Iraq, who had been trying to bring Kurdish and Iraqi dissidents together against Saddam, had to make a hasty exit in August 1996, leaving behind many of those who had trusted them. ‘It may be that the CIA actually made tremendous efforts to protect its people,’ a leading Iraqi expert said at the time, ‘but the perception among Iraqis is that having anything to do with Americans is dangerous to your health.’
In November 1996, another Russian spy was found in the CIA ranks. Harold James Nicholson was carrying exposed film and a computer disc with confidential Agency documents when he was arrested by the FBI. For the previous two years he had been working as a teacher at Camp Perry, known as ‘The Farm’, the Agency’s training centre for new agents; prior to that he had been posted to Kuala Lumpur, where he was turned by an FSB officer who Nicholson had claimed he was trying to persuade to work for the CIA — ironically around the time that Aldrich Ames was arrested. Nicholson’s motivation was financial — after he was seen trying to beat a standard polygraph test in 1995, the FBI began investigating his finances, and discovered large sums of money. He eventually pleaded guilty to receiving $180,000 from the Russians and to one specimen charge of espionage, although he had blown the cover of the agents passing through The Farm during his tenure there. Nicholson was a well-regarded agent and many at the Agency believed that he was on the way to becoming ‘a big spy’ for the Russians.
Around this time, the FBI discovered that they too were being betrayed to the Russians — although it wasn’t Robert Hanssen whose treachery had come to light. Earl Edwin Pitts, a senior agent, had contacted the KGB in 1987 when stationed in New York, and for the next five years passed documents to his handler, Rollan G. Dzheikiya. Unfortunately for Pitts, Dzheikiya defected after the fall of the Soviet Union, and became part of a sting operation run by the Bureau to capture Pitts. On his arrest in December 1996, the American claimed he was motivated by rage at the FBI, partly because of his low pay. An investigation into Pitts’ activities made some suspicious that the Russians must have another mole within the Bureau, since they never asked Pitts for anything major. Pitts himself suggested that Robert Hanssen might be a spy. Neither lead was properly followed up, and Hanssen remained undetected.
In a rare demonstration of cooperation between the FBI and the CIA, the two organizations worked together on a four-year manhunt for Aimal Kansi, who had killed two CIA employees outside Langley in 1993. He was eventually tracked down to Pakistan, whose administration allowed the joint task force agents to enter the country to capture him.
John Deutch resigned as DCI in December 1996, and was replaced by his deputy, George Tenet, who, unusually, remained in place after President George W. Bush succeeded President Clinton in 2000 — changes of party in the White House usually led to a new DCI. This provided an element of continuity when major changes were needed following 9/11. Tenet and the CIA would be accused of intelligence failures — and while the criticisms were justified, the Agency did far more in the build-up to 2001 than they have sometimes been given credit for. If information had been shared properly though in the three years before 9/11, the history of the first decade of the twenty-first century would have been very different.
14
THE WAR ON TERROR
It’s easy to be wise after the event. Everyone has 20/20 hindsight, and there has probably been more ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’ regarding the work of the intelligence agencies in the years leading up to 11 September 2001 than any other event in recent history.
In June 2012, many of the key documents relating to what the CIA knew were finally released after a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive, a private business. These were referenced, but not quoted, in the 9/11 Commission’s Report, and, even in a heavily redacted form, show a trail of missed opportunities and interagency bickering that would have catastrophic consequences. Perhaps most worrying of all is the CIA’s own Inspector General report from August 2001, which praised the Counterterrorism Center’s performance for ‘coordinating national intelligence, providing warning, and promoting the effective use of Intelligence Community resources on terrorism issues’ and even noting that the relationship with the FBI was better than it had been in 1994 — mere days before that was conclusively proved to be false.
One of the biggest problems that the CIA and the other intelligence agencies faced when trying to deal with al-Qaeda was the religious fanaticism of its members, which meant it was far harder to infiltrate them. As Agency veteran Robert Dannenberg explained, al-Qaeda operatives weren’t like Soviet agents, who might be persuaded that the American way of life was better by showing them supermarkets ‘because they were driven by many of the same things that we’re driven by: success and taking care of our families’. They did get lucky early on though: Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, described by some as one of the founding members of al-Qaeda, walked into the US Embassy in Eritrea in spring 1996. He had embezzled $110,000 from al-Qaeda and was desperate to defect.
This came shortly after a designated bin Laden unit had been established within the CIA, the first time that the Agency had set up a group specifically to target one person or organization. This ‘virtual station’ operated out of Langley, and was run by Michael Scheuer, previously head of the CTC’s Islamic Extremist Branch, with a predominantly female team. From January 1996 onwards, their aim, according to DCI George Tenet, was ‘to track [bin Laden], collect intelligence on him, run operations against him, disrupt his finances, and warn policymakers about his activities and intentions’. Al-Fadl’s information gave them vital leads regarding al-Qaeda’s plans and hopes. SIGINT operations were put in motion; allies were sought. But even then, not everything was as smooth as it should have been: the NSA and CIA didn’t cooperate over jurisdictional issues.
Following the embassy bombings in 1998, Tenet significantly increased the attention on bin Laden. The CTC carried out a review of strategy, which led to Scheuer’s departure as unit leader and the development of a comprehensive plan of attack against al-Qaeda. Unfortunately, much as what was known as ‘The Plan’ called for a united campaign by the CIA, FBI, NSA and others, this didn’t happen in practice. FBI agents working with the CIA’s bin Laden unit were not allowed to pass relevant information back to the Bureau; the NSA left intercepts of phone calls to the FBI, fearful of going beyond their remit, but the Bureau didn’t obtain the phone records for those who had already been identified as potential hijackers until after 9/11. A briefing by Counterterrorism ‘Tsar’ Richard Clarke briefed representatives of the various agencies about the al-Qaeda threat — but these weren’t passed back properly, and indeed Clarke would suggest the threat wasn’t so pressing at the start of August. In an effort to cope with all the information flowing to the Unit, a new Strategic Assessments Branch was set up — but its new chief only reported for duty on 10 September 2011.
The CIA’s own internal report, following the 9/11 Commission’s verdict that the intelligence community had failed the President, noted that:
Agency officers from the top down worked hard against the al-Qa’ida and Usama Bin Ladin targets. They did not always work effectively and cooperatively, however… If Intelligence Community officers had been able to view and analyse the full range of information available before 11 September 2001, they could have developed a more informed context in which to assess the threat reporting of the spring and summer that year… That so many individuals failed to act in this case reflects a systematic breakdown.
Threats certainly were reported up the chain of command but no one was certain whether the attack would be within the United States or on American interests elsewhere in the world. In June, a briefing suggested ‘operatives linked to Usama Bin Ladin’s organisation expect the near-term attacks they are planning to have dramatic consequences’. A br
iefing for the President on 6 August was headlined ‘Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US’, but wasn’t treated with the urgency it required, as 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey later told CNN. ‘You were told again by briefing officers in August that it was a dire threat,’ Kerrey said of Bush’s claim that he would have moved heaven and earth if he had been aware ahead of time of the al-Qaeda threat. ‘And what did you do? Nothing, so far as we could see on the 9/11 Commission.’
Other agencies around the world similarly received information that confirmed bin Laden was planning a major operation against US targets. MI6 had warned the Americans in 1999 that al-Qaeda was considering using commercial aircraft in ‘unconventional ways… possibly as flying bombs’. Egyptian President Mubarak claimed that his country’s intelligence service had penetrated al-Qaeda and warned of an attack using ‘an airplane stuffed with explosives’, although the target appeared to be the G8 talks held in spring 2001. An MI5 report on 6 July 2001 noted that ‘UBL and those who share his agenda are currently well advanced in operational planning for a number of major attacks on Western interests’, although it thought the most likely location ‘is in the Gulf States, or the wider Middle East’. Mossad sent warnings to their CIA counterparts over the summer of 2001 citing ‘credible chatter’ that their agents had picked up in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen — the CIA forced one paper who reported this to print a retraction. Even the Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil tried to pass on a warning, although this wasn’t taken seriously.
On 11 September 2001, two hijacked planes were flown into the World Trade Center in New York; a third hit the Pentagon in Washington DC. A fourth was hijacked but was retaken by its passengers; it crashed in Pennsylvania killing all on board. There were 2,753 victims at the World Trade Center including 411 emergency workers; 184 died at the Pentagon, and forty were killed in the Pennsylvania crash. The world’s intelligence agencies had failed to read the signs in time. Everything would have to change.
