Moscow had turned science on its head. While most scientists struggled to cure the sick and defeat disease, the Soviets had secretly spent billions creating and mobilizing disease for war. The Soviets had harnessed their best brains, virtually unlimited resources, and Russian science to the mass production of epidemics.
Weber and officials like him were promoting programs to understand what Moscow had achieved. Such programs were essential to understanding the Soviet program and how to protect Americans against such pathogens, he argued persuasively, despite the risks. And America, if necessary, might be justified in using force to stop nations such as Iran and Iraq, or rogue groups like Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah, from acquiring similar capabilities.
The United States faced new WMD-based threats, especially twenty-first-century bioweapons that most Americans knew little about. Saddam, I recalled, had continued lying about his germ weapons activities long after he had closed down his nuclear program. And as the Soviet Union was collapsing, its scientists were still struggling to weaponize Marburg and Ebola viruses—which had no proven vaccines or antidotes. Ken Alibek and other defectors had warned us that Russian scientists were still conducting secret work in labs to create new bioweapons, including new “chimera” pathogens that combined several types of microbes. Russia, for instance, had not abandoned its effort to blend the Ebola virus with smallpox, mankind’s greatest scourge. If I did nothing else as a journalist, I had to write about what I had learned from the foreign scientists and officials who had helped create the germ threat and those who were committed to stopping it. If I did nothing else.
— CHAPTER 11 —
AL QAEDA
In the Oval Office on an icy day in January 1999, President Bill Clinton reached out and touched the cast on my leg. He said that he, too, had torn a ligament several years ago. He said it had hurt like hell. Was I in pain?
He won me over at hello.
Having hurt my leg snorkeling over Christmas, I had limped into the White House on crutches alongside Bill Broad to interview the president—the first interview he had given since the Monica Lewinsky scandal a year earlier. We had been trying for months to interview him about the growing threat of biological weapons. His aides had finally, if reluctantly, agreed but insisted that Clinton would address only that issue.
During our interview, Clinton’s lawyers were at the Senate defending him at impeachment proceedings. But he seemed relaxed and focused on germ weapons. A fire burned softly in the Oval Office. A portrait of George Washington gazed down at his successor. The room was quiet, tranquil.
Clinton predicted, presciently, that a biological or chemical attack in America in the next few years was “highly likely.” While a chemical attack would be terrible, a germ attack would spread contagion, particularly if the perpetrators used a pathogen that could not be quickly identified and treated. He said it would be “the gift that keeps on giving.” Bioweapons were cheap, easy to make, and left few fingerprints. They were what kept him awake at night.1
Clinton added that even worse would be a terrorist getting his hands on bioweapons, especially someone like Osama bin Laden, who had been accused of masterminding the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania the previous August, in which 224 people had died, 12 of them Americans. Clinton told us that terrorists were more likely than rogue states to use WMD against Americans. Rogue states were likely to hesitate for fear of retaliation. He asserted that Bin Laden had tried to make chemical weapons and “may have” tried to weaponize germs.
Bill Broad and I looked at each other. We had seen intelligence reports that Bin Laden was recruiting Pakistani scientists to develop such weapons. We would discover only after 9/11 that Al Qaeda had already opened a small lab in Kandahar, Afghanistan, to produce anthrax. Later, experts told me that Al Qaeda’s scientists had failed because they had been unable to acquire appropriate “seed cultures” for Bacillus anthracis: the starter germs needed to make anthrax. Given more time, they probably would have succeeded.
We were impressed by how much the president knew about unconventional weapons that might fall into terrorist hands and sensed that he would do whatever he thought was necessary to prevent such an attack. Only the month before, he had ordered four days of air strikes against Iraq’s missile and suspected WMD sites, Operation Desert Fox, with over a thousand air strikes on some one hundred suspected chemical, germ, and missile sites. Clinton would later write in My Life that his national security team was “unanimous in the belief that we should hit Saddam . . . to minimize the chances that Iraq could disperse its forces and protect its biological and chemical stocks.”2
The political backlash against Clinton’s preventive campaign was fierce. Senior Republicans insisted that Clinton had attacked to delay the House vote on impeachment: Desert Fox was Wag the Dog.3 White House reporters called it “Monica’s war.”
Bill and I tended to believe Clinton. We had already spent a year investigating Iraq’s efforts to hide its germ weapons programs. By the time of the December attacks, Iraq had spurned many attempts by Washington and UNSCOM to close the WMD file. Washington had tried almost every foreign policy tool to counter Saddam’s aggression and secrecy: engagement, diplomatic isolation, inspections, sanctions, travel bans, trade embargoes, no-fly zones. Nothing had made Saddam honor his pledges. Baghdad was still denying UNSCOM information about its WMD efforts. Saddam’s thugs were also harassing and threatening the agency’s inspectors. Only after the UN inspectors had caught Iraqi officials in a series of lies had Baghdad admitted to having loaded botulinum toxin into sixteen warheads, anthrax germs into five warheads, and aflatoxin (which causes liver cancer) into four warheads. Baghdad had also belatedly acknowledged having filled 157 aerial bombs with the same deadly agents and having conducted research on tricothecene mycotoxins (which cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea), wheat cover smut (which ruins food grains), agents that cause hemorrhagic conjunctivitis (which causes extreme pain and temporary blindness), rotavirus (which causes acute diarrhea that can lead to death), and camel pox (a version of smallpox). The UN inspectors said that Iraq, belligerent and uncooperative, had accounted for only 25 of those 157 germ bombs and offered no convincing evidence that even those 25 had been destroyed.
The inspectors came from many different countries, not all of them friendly to the United States. If Saddam wasn’t protecting WMD stockpiles or ongoing programs, why would he reject full inspections?
As Desert Fox got under way in December 1998, Bill and I wrote an article that, in effect, defended Clinton by explaining why most arms control experts doubted Baghdad’s claims. Our story quoted anonymous UN inspectors who told us they suspected that Saddam might be hiding two to five times more deadly germ agents than Iraq had admitting making, plus the warheads to deliver them.4 In his speech to the nation, Clinton said that he had ordered the raids solely “to help contain Saddam’s WMD.” While he had not been “eager” to use force, he asserted, he would not hesitate to do so to protect America’s “vital interests.”
Clinton’s December strike was the second time in a year that he had acted against what he believed to be a WMD threat. On August 20, 1998, thirteen days after Al Qaeda destroyed American embassies in Africa, he authorized cruise missile strikes not only against Bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan but also against the Al Shifa pharmaceutical company in Khartoum. The plant was run by a government entity in which Bin Laden had invested. Based on information that the intelligence agencies had gleaned from highly sensitive sources and methods—both human and electronic, I was told, but asked initially not to print—administration officials believed that the plant was trying to make ingredients of VX, the deadly nerve agent, for Al Qaeda. Critics pounded Clinton for the Sudan strike—arguing that the evidence of illicit chemical weapons activity at that particular plant was contradictory. Having interviewed Sudan’s militant Islamist ruler Omar al-Bashir, who boasted about his warm ties to Bin Laden, whom he was hosting, I believed Clinton and my sources o
n his National Security Council. Soon after the strike, I coauthored a front-page story reporting that intelligence officials had concluded that senior Iraqi scientists were helping the Sudanese try to produce VX ingredients at the plant.5 But the controversy over the accuracy of the intelligence and Clinton’s motives persisted.
After Clinton’s 1998 missile strikes, Russia, China, and France, all of which did considerable business with Iraq, succeeded in disbanding UNSCOM and replacing it with a weaker UN inspection agency6 known as UNMOVIC (United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission). Sensing that the Lewinsky scandal had weakened Clinton at home, Saddam turned what should have been a military defeat into a political victory. “What is an intern?” Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s foreign minister, asked Charles Duelfer, UNSCOM’s deputy director, during a visit to Baghdad in early 1998 as the scandal was unfolding, incredulous that a president’s dalliances with a young woman could have so disrupted American foreign policy.
* * *
By 1999, national security officials in Washington recognized the threat from Osama bin Laden. But that was not true three years earlier when I returned to the Times from an eighteen-month leave of absence to write God Has Ninety-nine Names, a report of the growth of militant Islamist movements. Published in early 1996, the book contained a single paragraph about the young Saudi who had financed the Afghan rebels and other radical Islamist causes. A 1997 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on terrorism, the last of the intelligence community’s secret and most authoritative assessments of the terror threat distributed before 9/11, mentioned Bin Laden only briefly.
Joe Lelyveld, the paper’s executive editor, had assigned me to unpromising investigative work on the culture desk in 1996 after my book leave. This was not my first or even second choice. In a memo to Lelyveld and Dean Baquet, then the national editor and now the paper’s executive editor, I had proposed creating a beat to cover what I called the “new national security threats” which defied the paper’s traditional beats and postings—cyberterrorism, bioengineering, the theft of American intellectual property, assaults on “critical infrastructure,” and the proliferation of “weapons of mass destruction.” “While we have reporters who cover the State Department, the Pentagon, or the FBI, and the CDC in Atlanta,” I wrote, no one was responsible for systematically covering such technologically based unconventional threats to national security “not from a particular building or place but as a theme.” Nor had we written consistently about “the civil liberties challenges inherent in many of the new projects aimed at protecting Americans from such threats.” I never heard from either senior editor. Steve Engelberg, who had recently been appointed investigations editor, knew that I missed covering national security and was irrepressibly competitive. He was helping supervise a team of reporters who were tracking the explosion and crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island in which 230 people died. Many reporters and even senior editors believed that terrorism was to blame. Steve persuaded Joe to let me help Jeff Gerth, who was still in the Washington bureau, write a broader story on terrorism.
Fourteen months into the investigation of the TWA crash, the FBI announced it had found no evidence of terrorism. But our inquiry led Jeff and me to spot an important shift in the pattern of terrorist attacks. In August 1996, a month after the disaster, we wrote a front-page story asserting that counterterrorism officials were now as worried about terrorist groups and their wealthy financiers, especially from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, as about Iran and Libya. The emergence of “sophisticated, privately financed networks of terrorists” posed new, even more daunting challenges for the United States, we wrote. Wealthy Muslim businessmen in the Gulf, for instance, had helped finance Ramzi Yousef, enabling him to carry out the first World Trade Center attack in February 1993, as well as another plot called Bojinka to blow up a dozen American airliners on Pacific routes. Only later would investigators link Yousef to his uncle: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the “principal architect of 9/11,” as the 9/11 Commission called him.
Jeff and I learned that American intelligence agencies were focused on one terrorist financier in particular, Bin Laden. The State Department called Bin Laden “one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world.” In the summer of 1996, when Jeff and I wrote about the government’s shift of focus from rogue states to wealthy groups and individuals, our article was the first major exposé of Bin Laden’s role in jihadi violence.
A few reporters took note. Peter Bergen of CNN, who had been covering militant Islam since the 1993 World Trade Center attack, followed up on our article in Afghanistan. The first, and one of only a handful of reporters, to interview Bin Laden for an American news outlet, Peter often credited our assessment as groundbreaking in his own superb reporting.7
Jeff and I had tried unsuccessfully to get Bin Laden to comment. In his earlier interviews with reporters, he had denied any involvement in terrorism. We quoted his spokesman in London, Khaled al-Fawwaz, as describing the terrorism charge as “rubbish.”
In 1992 I had tried to interview Bin Laden for my book on the resurgence of militant Islam. When I was covering a meeting of Arab extremists hosted by the militant Islamist regime in Khartoum, my interpreter and I drove out to his compound on the outskirts of the capital to try to meet him. But guards with Kalashnikov assault rifles turned us away. I left my business card with some of his aides, one of whom was an associate of Khaled al-Fawwaz. I offered to return to Khartoum to see Bin Laden whenever he liked.
I thought little about my offer until 1996, when Jeff and I were trying to get Bin Laden to comment on our story about him. Fawwaz had promised to relay the request to him in Afghanistan, but we never heard back. Two years later, in the spring of 1998, Fawwaz called me. Was I still interested in interviewing Bin Laden?
Normally, I would have jumped at the invitation. But I hesitated. Richard Clarke, Clinton’s chief counterterrorism adviser, and other officials I trusted had warned me that Bin Laden was becoming more aggressive by the day and his militant networks ever more violent. Bin Laden was no longer a mere financier of terror but a key operator. His goal was to unite disparate militant groups under the single banner of the group he had founded and funded: Al Qaeda, “the base.” He had issued a fatwa calling on all Muslims to kill Americans wherever and whenever they could.
The Times did not like reporters poaching on others’ beats. I had written terrorism stories, but one of our correspondents closer to the region could have interviewed Bin Laden and would have resented my doing so.
What’s more, I was more apprehensive. Perhaps it was the trip’s logistics. I was to fly to Islamabad, Pakistan, and then on to Peshawar, near the Afghanistan border. Someone from Bin Laden’s group whom Fawwaz would not identify would meet me at an as yet undesignated hotel and drive me across the border to Bin Laden’s location at an undisclosed place in the Afghan mountains. I was to tell no one outside the newspaper about the purpose of my visit and take no electronic items with me except a cell phone.
This unnerved me. While Bin Laden had probably not read my book, numerous articles about it and me were on the internet. They would know that I identified myself as Jewish and considered Islamic militants dangerous. I was uneasy enough about the offer not to pursue it with Steve Engelberg or others in the paper’s chain of command. I feared that Bin Laden might decide that killing this particular messenger would send a more powerful message than anything I could write.
Fawwaz didn’t tell me at the time that he had also extended a similar invitation to a colleague: John Miller, no relation, who was then at ABC. John later became the FBI’s spokesman and New York City’s deputy police commissioner for counterterrorism. When I watched his superb interview with Bin Laden on TV in May 1998, I was delighted for him, and also envious. If I had been braver, or better positioned within the paper, I thought at the time, the Times and I could have shared the scoop.
* * *
In the fall of 2000,
two years after I had turned down the chance to interview Bin Laden, I was en route to Afghanistan to interview Ahmed Shah Massoud, the charismatic military leader of the Northern Alliance, the major Afghan opposition to Bin Laden’s Taliban hosts.
I was deeply involved by then in a series about Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the growing jihadi terrorist threat. I felt it was important to understand why young Muslim men had traveled to this forlorn land to fight for the self-declared Islamist state. Since 1996, when the Taliban had seized the Afghan capital, Kabul, the so-called “students” of Islam had turned their country into a nightmare.8 Yet their rule was admired by thousands of foreign-born Muslims who had come to Afghanistan to fight for them. I wanted to understand why.
I had second thoughts about my decision soon after the helicopter lifted off an airstrip near Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital. The Northern Alliance’s Soviet chopper was even older than the one I had taken to Voz Island a year earlier. The Afghan opposition had only four of these vintage vehicles left. The fifth had crashed a few weeks earlier, killing all on board. As I glanced out the mud-splashed window, I saw nothing below us but jagged mountain peaks.
I was relieved when we touched down north of Kabul at a makeshift Massoud camp. But the mortars I could hear seemed awfully close. After offering me tea, an anxious aide told me we had to leave immediately. The Taliban were attacking. Three nerve-racking hours later, our convoy of jeeps and ancient cars arrived in the Panjshir Valley at one of Massoud’s many headquarters. Although it was the end of summer, the house was freezing. There was no heat or power. Later that night, I interviewed the commander by candlelight.
An ethnic Tajik with expressive brown eyes, a well-clipped mustache, and a white-tipped beard, Massoud was very different from the Arab leaders I had covered. He had no interest in small talk, flattery, or inquiries about one’s health, staples of Arab conversation. He spoke fractured French, not English—the result of a few years’ education in a French lycée. And he quickly acknowledged his mistakes. He accepted partial blame for the terrible civil war among Afghanistan’s many Islamic sects and ethnic groups after the Soviets were driven out in 1989.
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