Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series)

by Scheuer, Michael

  In addition, one of the main reasons senior FBI officials assigned their officers to the bin Laden unit—and to the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center generally—was to steal information from the CIA. On at least three occasions in which I was personally involved between 1992 and 2004, FBI officers were found to have stolen large numbers of classified CIA documents, removed them from CIA headquarters in an insecure manner, and distributed them to individuals at FBI headquarters and—at least—the FBI office in New York. On each occasion senior CIA officers refused to act to recover the documents.

  8.I make this point so starkly because I have been told by several retired IC officers that after I resigned from the Agency, several of the young officers who worked for me were subjected to very adversarial polygraph examinations. These officers were accused of passing me classified information, were recalled several times for repoly-graphing, and were delayed in taking new assignments because of the prolonged and hostile polygraph process. No serving officer has ever passed me classified information, but because the polygraph can always be used to discipline and harass employees, I want to make my sole responsibility for this book as clear as possible.

  9.A few items in the latter category provide an interesting bit of context to The 9/11 Commission Report. The Report notes that in May 1998 the government of Saudi Arabia agreed to try to purchase Osama bin Laden from the Taliban but failed to do so. Oddly enough, the Clinton administration’s decision to welcome and rely on the Saudis to do what they promised—which was criticized by some in the CIA who had seen Riyadh’s post-1995 noncooperation vis. bin Laden—precisely coincided with both DCI George Tenet’s memorandum advising Mr. Berger to let the Saudis take the lead against bin Laden, and what the former DCI has described with the phrase “I made the decision not to go ahead with the plan” to capture bin Laden, an operation that had been a year in the making and was ready to launch. Some doubt must be cast on Mr. Tenet’s assertion that he alone—not the White House—decided to terminate the operation. As related by the 9/11 Commissioners in chapter 4 of their report, Mr. Tenet told his officers that “cabinet-level officials” had turned down the plan. In addition, and at exactly the same moment, former Senator Wyche Fowler (D-Georgia), then the U.S. ambassador in Saudi Arabia, advised Clinton’s National Security Adviser Sandy Berger to let the Saudis take the lead against bin Laden. Naturally, the Saudis did not keep their promise, and nine weeks later al-Qaeda destroyed two U.S. embassies in East Africa—killing 300 and wounding 5,100 Americans and Africans—proving both the sound advice “put not your trust in kings” and that, although the Cold War is over, U.S. governments are still desperately looking for proxies to do their dirty work. I have often wondered if the documents showing the real reason the May 1998 operation to capture bin Laden was cancelled were among the papers that Mr. Berger placed in his garments and ultimately destroyed with scissors, an act that saved Mr. Clinton’s reputation and Mrs. Clinton’s run at the presidency. See Kean and Hamilton, 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 114–115; George Tenet, Center of the Storm, p. 114; “Complete 9/11 Timeline,” http://www.cooperatiivereserach.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_time line&before_911=huntforbinladen; James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (New York: Free Press, 2006), p. 184; and Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, pp. 516–518.

  10.The other two investigatory panels—the CIA inspector general’s and the Congress’s Goss-Graham—had access to complete documents, whereas the 9/11 Commission did not. I decided to pass the binder to the commission after a session in which I answered questions for Phillip Zelikow, the commission’s executive director. In the session Mr. Zelikow asked a question about a chance to eliminate bin Laden based on a CIA document he held in his hand. I could not understand the question, and when he showed me the document, the reason was clear. The CIA screeners had redacted the document in a way that made it almost incoherent. Having seen the document, I flipped through the pages in my binder and found the same but unredacted document, and we were able to compare the two and have a more cogent conversation.

  11.See, most recently, Larry Margasak, “Clinton Aide Stashed Classified Documents under a Trailer,” Associated Press, December 21, 2006; R. Jeffrey Smith, “Document-theft Probe Criticized,” Washington Post, January 10, 2007, A-4; and “Berger Mystery Deepens,” Boston Herald, January 21, 2007.

  12.George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), xviii.

  13.Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), xiii.

  14.Tenet, Center of the Storm, 249.

  15.Ibid., esp. 123.

  16.Ibid., xxii, 505.

  17.Ibid., 499.

  18.Ibid., 261.

  19.Ibid.

  20.Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, September 8, 1817, in Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 519.

  21.Andrew Bacevich, “Fighting a War in Name Only,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 2004.

  Part I. Getting to 9/11

  1.Lincoln is reported to have said this after learning of the army’s disastrous defeat by Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Fredericksburg in December 1862. Quoted in John D. Wright, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Civil War Quotations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 248.

  Chapter 1. Readying bin Laden’s Way: America and the Muslim World, 1973–1996

  1.Machiavelli, Prince, 80.

  2.Ibid., 81. Although jumping ahead a bit, it is worth noting that the leading neoconservatives, men like Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, and Richard Perle, clearly are among those most in need of advice from Machiavelli. The U.S. disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq, of course, demonstrate that the strictures of neoconservatism have nothing to do with Machiavellian common sense or foreign-policy realism but are rather the yield of an uncompromising ignorance of American and world history and a fantasy-based interpretation of how the world works. Interestingly, the man who is usually cited as the mentor of the leading neoconservatives, the American political philosopher Leo Strauss, believed Machiavelli to be a source of evil in the politics and life of the Western world. See Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

  3.On this issue see Michael F. Scheuer, “Does Israel Conduct Covert Action in America? You Bet It Does,” www.antiwar.com, April 8, 2006. Let me say here, as I did in the article and in public venues, covert political action is a clandestine tool used by all nation-states to further their interests abroad. Only a negligent or Pollyanna-ish government would fail to use such a tool, and it ought to be a source of pride for Israeli citizens that their intelligence services have been so demonstrably successful. Israel’s unparalleled success, however, speaks volumes about the gullibility or cupidity of the U.S. governing elite.

  4.George Washington, “Farewell Address, 1796,” in W. B. Allen, ed., George Washington: A Collection (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1988), 523–24.

  5.Daniel Robinson, American Ideals: Founding a “Republic of Virtue” (Chantilly, Va.: Teaching Company, 2004), disk 5, lecture 10, track 7.

  6.Even as we are on the verge of losing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and are faced with instability that could ultimately require U.S. military intervention to protect oil production in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, the don’t-worry-be-happy oil experts continue to chatter away. “Regardless of the cause, rising oil prices during this decade have helped the national interest in the long term,” wrote Philip Auerswald of George Mason and Harvard universities. “Like the ‘traveling pants’ in the series of teen novels by the same name, the notion that oil imports lead to energy insecurity magically fits everyone who tries it on—environmentalists, military hawks, foreign policy idealists, subsidy-seeking oil executives, and even anti-U.S. propagandists. Yet while the energy insecurity argument fits an array of agendas, it does not fit the facts. Politicians and pundits alike would do well to put thi
s treasured, but frayed notion aside.” Clearly, protecting the “free market” is more important for Auerswald and his ideological colleagues than avoiding wars fought for access to oil. One wonders how eager he is to have his children or grandchildren fighting for oil in the Niger Delta or the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. See Philip E. Auerswald, “Calling an End to Oil Alarmism,” Boston Globe (online version), January 23, 2007.

  7.Allen, George Washington, 525.

  8.George Washington to Bushrod Washington, January 15, 1783, quoted in Bruckner F. Melton Jr., The Quotable Founding Fathers (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2004), 23.

  9.The words are, respectively, those of the Clinton administration’s two top defense officials, General Hugh Shelton, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of Defense William Cohen. See Kean et al., 9/11 Commission Report, 120.

  10.Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 224. The italics in the last sentence are mine. Mr. Clarke here, of course, is constructing another post hoc defense of President Clinton’s failure to defend Americans by holding out the prospect of an Arab-Israeli settlement as a good reason for delaying retaliation for the Cole. Only a nuance-addled senior federal bureaucrat would have forgone the chance to smash al-Qaeda in favor of another iteration of Arab-Israeli talks that have a half-century record of unrelenting failure. One ought never to delay defending his country if what he is delaying for requires a certifiable act of God to achieve.

  11.Although it is a bit of a macabre exercise, some of the documents and Islamist insurgents and terrorists we have captured since 9/11 have provided information about specific individuals who trained at specific camps that had long been on the IC’s radar and that were described in the yearbooks mentioned in the text. We are thus learning the hard way that the camps were imparting effective, professional-level military training on a wide variety of weapons and explosives during the decades when U.S. and Western governments were allowing them to operate without interference.

  12.Even the number one million should not be considered an upper limit. An unknown number of Islamists simply showed up at one or another of the Muslim world’s jihads and insurgencies—Chechnya, Eritrea, Kashmir, Somalia, etc.—and learned how to fight in a kind of on-the-job way. Some of these men got killed before their cold start got very far, but others survived and lived not only to fight but also to train and inspire others. Between fighters produced in formal camps and those produced by on-the-job training, we are looking at very large numbers indeed. And today, in addition to the camps, some would-be insurgents are training at or near their homes using detailed instructional materials downloaded from the Internet.

  13.For a fuller perspective on the threat to America these camps have produced, consider that the Washington Post published an article in late 2005 that claimed that the CIA’s clandestine service then had about a thousand officers deployed worldwide. I have no idea whether this number is high, low, or accurate, as it is a figure that the Agency must go to great pains to protect. But let us assume that the Post’s total is in the ballpark. It is then extremely likely—I would say it is certain—that since 1982 the training camps of al-Qaeda, and of other Sunni and Shia Islamist organizations, have been producing at least as many well-trained insurgents and terrorists annually as the CIA had officers deployed to chase them in 2005. In addition, and as Mr. Tenet has stated, U.S. national security also requires that the vast majority of CIA officers overseas collect intelligence on targets other than training camps, such as Russia, China, nuclear proliferation, and narcotics trafficking. They are also focused on gathering intelligence pertinent to the protection of U.S. forces deployed overseas; in an odd situation, the CIA—the folks who are unarmed—spend much of their time protecting the people who are armed to the teeth. Anyway, in this roughest of estimates in 2008 the trained Islamist fighters are very likely to outnumber the CIA officers available to track and capture them by about 25 to 1—a ratio that would greatly increase if the training camps around the world have since 1982 produced, as seems likely, more than twelve hundred fighters a year. These totals, as noted, would not include the Islamist fighters who have been trained at home by men returning from the formal camps, or those who have downloaded training manuals from the Internet and done their training at makeshift camps near their homes. For CIA overseas personnel totals, see Walter Pincus and Dana Priest, “Goss Reportedly Rebuffed Senior Officials at CIA,” Washington Post, November 14, 2004, A-6.

  14.Omar Nasiri, Inside the Jihad: My Life With al-Qaeda. A Spy’s Story (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 142–44. Nasiri also notes that he was trained intensively on the enemy he would encounter. “Abu Suhail taught us about all the enemy weapons as well,” Nasiri writes. “Abu Suhail would show us photographs of guns—guns from America like the M-16—and teach us all the same things we learned on other weapons, but this time only theoretically. He also taught us what made the enemy weapons distinct; how American mortars, for instance, fired different rounds from the Russian ones we were using.” Ibid., 143. For additional analysis of the al-Qaeda camps and the general environment in which they operated, see the excellent, detailed, and ground-breaking book by Peter L. Bergen, The Osama Bin Laden I Know (New York: Free Press, 2006), xxxiv, and the lengthy firsthand account by bin Laden’s former chief bodyguard, “Interview with Abu Jandal,” Al-Quds Al-Arabi (online version), August 3, 2004, and March 18–29, 2005.

  15.The summer 2006 dismantling by British authorities of an Islamist cell in the U.K. that was planning to destroy U.S. and British airliners flying west across the Atlantic Ocean stimulated a good deal of media reporting about the replacement of al-Qaeda’s Afghanistan-based camps destroyed by the U.S.-led coalition with new camps built on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line. This reporting was then confirmed in a rare public speech by Dame Eliza Manningham Buller, director general of the British Security Service (DG/MI5). Dame Eliza said that MI5 and British police had identified at least sixteen hundred al-Qaeda–related individuals in the U.K. and expressed her confidence that many more had not yet been identified. (Her confidence was justified as MI5 announced in November 2007 that the total is now two thousand al-Qaeda–related individuals.) Many U.K.-based Islamists, Dame Eliza added, “often have links back to al-Qaeda in Pakistan and through these links al-Qaeda gives guidance and training to its largely British foot soldiers here on an extensive and growing scale.” Perhaps we should not be surprised by Dame Eliza’s conclusions as, once again, al-Qaeda publicly announced in 2003 that its South Asia camps were again up and running. Writing in March 2003, senior al-Qaeda lieutenant Sayf al-Adl described a November 2001 action against U.S. forces near Khandahar. The Americans destroyed an al-Qaeda tank, al-Adl recounted: “The entire crew of the tank escaped. Shrapnel hit Khalid in the head, paralyzing the left side of his body. He recovered after four months, except for a slight effect in his left hand. He [has] now [March 2003] resumed training near the Afghan-Pakistani border in one of the secret camps of al-Qaeda.” For solid reporting on the reestablished and new camps see James Gordon Meek, “Qaeda Camps Surge,” New York Daily News, August 13, 2006; “Five Suspects Learnt Bomb Skills at al-Qaeda Camps,” Daily Telegraph, August 12, 2006; and Mohammed Khan and Carlotta Gall, “Accounts after 2005 London Bombings Point to al-Qaeda Role from Pakistan,” New York Times, August 12, 2006. For DG/MI5’s speech, see “Terrorist Threat to UK—MI5 Chief’s Full Speech,” Times Online, November 11, 2006, and “Full Text of MI5 Director’s Speech,” www.telegraph.co.uk, November 6, 2007. For al-Qaeda confirming the continued existence of its South Asia camps see Sayf al-Adl, “The al-Qaeda Organization Writes a Letter to the Iraqi People,” www.alfjr.com, March 5, 2003.

  16.In the years between 9/11 and my resignation from the CIA in November 2004, I was not aware of an ongoing program to identify and track all the terrorist/insurgent training camps operating in the world. Indeed, after U.S. and NATO forces closed the well-known al-Qaeda and Taliban training
camps in eastern and southeastern Afghanistan, the Bush administration often spoke as if there were no more al-Qaeda training camps operating. This, of course, is incorrect, as camps for al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups continue to operate without interference in Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Mindanao, Chechnya, Kashmir, and elsewhere. In addition, al-Qaeda and the Taliban are not the kind of organizations to simply throw up their hands and say: “The Americans have closed our Afghan camps. Oh, woe is us! The infidels are stronger than Allah! Let’s give up and go home.” The odds greatly favor a situation where, after the Afghan camps were closed, the groups set up camps in Pakistan and unoccupied areas of Afghanistan; sent would-be fighters for training in some of the places just listed; and, for al-Qaeda, elsewhere in the world. If there was ever a task worth doing in the post-9/11 world, a worldwide inventory of all terrorist/insurgent training camps was it. Such a survey would at least have allowed the U.S. Intelligence Community to get a handle on the pace at which Islamist groups were and are training additional forces.

  17.Kean et al.: 9/11 Commission Report, 213.

  18.Peter L. Bergen systematically destroys this myth in both of his fine books, The Osama Bin Laden I Know (New York: Free Press, 2006) and Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001), 63.

  19.The indefatigable efforts of Ambassador Tomsen to help the Afghans are admirable, poignant, and relentlessly Western-centric. His advocacy of a U.S.-like federal system for Afghanistan has been consistent for nearly twenty years. See Peter Tomsen, “A Chance for Peace in Afghanistan,” Foreign Affairs 79, no. 1 (January–February 2000), 179–83.