Intel Wars
Page 18
When TTIC was renamed the National Counterterrorism Center in 2005 and placed under the command of the newly created director of national intelligence, it had very few assets to call its own and was almost completely dependent on the charity of the rest of the intelligence community for whatever personnel and resources it got. So today, six years after its creation, NCTC is still trying to evolve and develop its own institutional identity as well as its independence from the rest of the intelligence community.
At the present time, the NCTC staff is rather small by American intelligence community standards, consisting of five hundred full-time military and civilian personnel, only about two hundred of whom are actually NCTC employees. The rest are seconded to NCTC for one- or two-year rotations from sixteen U.S. government agencies, including the CIA, NSA, DIA, and FBI, who continue to operate their own larger and better-funded counterterrorism units.
Because NCTC has no sources of its own, it is completely dependent for its supply of raw data on the U.S. intelligence, military, law enforcement, and homeland security communities. The amount of information pouring into NCTC’s operations center every day is mind-boggling—8,000 to 10,000 intelligence reports, each of which has to be read by NCTC’s analysts; plus the names of 10,000 individuals, every one of whom has to be cross-checked through NCTC’s database of known or suspected terrorists (Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE) to determine if the person has any ties to al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. According to data supplied by the NCTC, as of January 2009 the TIDE database contained the names of more than 564,000 individuals, of whom 5 percent were American citizens. The implications of this figure are staggering. According to NCTC there were in 2009 more than 28,000 American citizens known or suspected to be terrorists, or to have had some association with terrorists!
The problem is that TIDE, according to two intelligence analysts who have served recent tours of duty at NCTC, is far from a perfect system. When TIDE was created in 2004, it was not supposed to be the “Mother of all Counterterrorism Databases” that it is today. The system kept growing and growing as thousands of names were added to it every day. NCTC analysts who have used TIDE say that it is sometimes cranky and unresponsive, and not the easiest system to use. Fixing this relatively simple problem has become increasingly more difficult because the size of the database continues to expand without corresponding software upgrades to handle the greater data load and the ever-increasing number of analysts using the system.
Rather than design a new and more comprehensive database comparable to Google, NCTC’s software contractors kept adding on more features and memory on top of the old system, which rather than improve the situation just made the system worse. The system has become so complicated and cumbersome that it isn’t unusual for it to come back with a “no records found” response to requests for information on even the most banal subject.
One former NCTC analyst recounted how she typed into the TIDE search engine the name of a well-known African terrorist leader, only to be told that there were no reports in the database matching her description. To put it mildly, the analyst was more than a little angry since she was the lead analyst on this particular terrorist group, and she had personally entered into the system three reports on the subject the week before, which the system for some reason failed to pick up.
Dozens of complaints have been filed in recent years by NCTC analysts about the problems they have experienced trying to use TIDE. A larger and more capable database that was supposed to replace TIDE has been on the drawing board for years, but for unknown reasons the new system has never moved past the design stage. According to a former NCTC terrorism analyst, “We told [NCTC] management that unless a new system was brought online in the near future one of two things was going to happen: TIDE was going to crash or the system would lose a critical piece of information needed to prevent another 9/11.” NCTC’s management chose not to act on the complaints, however, with the analyst recalling that “we were still waiting for a reply to our complaint when I left a year later.”
Senior officials at the NCTC can rightfully point to some major successes in the war on terror since 9/11. The killing of Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011, tops everyone’s list of major accomplishments, but the NCTC’s analysts are still waiting to see if his death will lead to the collapse of what is left of al Qaeda in Pakistan. In the meantime, there have been other successes against al Qaeda. Not only has there been a marked decrease in the number of terrorist attacks around the world, but al Qaeda has been unable to mount a successful terrorist attack inside the U.S. for the past decade. Whether this is because of the efforts of the intelligence community or the weakened state of al Qaeda is a matter of fierce debate within the intelligence community today.
There have been occasional attempts, but these plots have all failed miserably, largely because of a combination of technical problems and the ineptitude of the individuals chosen to mount the attacks. Take for example the case of the mentally unstable British-born al Qaeda operative named Richard Reid, who on December 22, 2001, attempted to detonate high explosives packed into his shoes over the Atlantic while on a United Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. The bomb failed to detonate, and Reid was overpowered by the plane’s passengers and crew. He is now serving a life sentence in federal prison.
Over the past decade the U.S. intelligence community and its foreign partners have largely succeeded in either destroying or neutralizing the majority of al Qaeda’s terrorist networks outside of the organization’s stronghold in northern Pakistan. The European intelligence and security services, with some assistance from the U.S. intelligence community, have largely succeeded in stripping bare most of al Qaeda’s operational and logistical support networks in Western Europe. European counterterrorism officials believe that today there are only a handful of al Qaeda operatives remaining in Western Europe. Even so, while their numbers are greatly diminished, the remaining al Qaeda operatives in Europe remain potentially lethal.
The Middle East may be the secret success story of the U.S. counterterrorism effort since the Obama administration entered office in 2009. Iran and Syria, the two Middle Eastern countries who are the leading state sponsors of terrorism, have been largely quiescent over the past three years in terms of actively supporting terrorist attacks in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. Both countries continue to provide sanctuary and financial support to a number of Middle East terrorist groups, but these groups have largely written terrorism out of their playbooks in their efforts to become legitimate political forces in their home countries.
For example, there have been almost no major terrorist attacks on Israel since the Obama administration entered office because the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas is now fully occupied trying to govern the Gaza Strip. There have also been no significant terrorist attacks inside Lebanon over the past three years because the Iranian- and Syrian-backed militant group Hezbollah has largely abandoned terrorism in favor of becoming a legitimate political party in Lebanon. Today, Hezbollah is the single most powerful political force in Lebanese politics, holding eleven of the thirty cabinet posts in the Lebanese government until withdrawing from the Lebanese government in early 2011. It still holds a substantial bloc of delegates in the Lebanese parliament. And thanks to substantial financial subsidies from Iran (estimated at $300 million per annum), it largely governs those parts of southern Lebanon where the country’s Shiite population resides independent of the Lebanese government. Behind the scenes, intelligence sources confirm that over the past several years the CIA has succeeded in recruiting a number of agents inside both Hamas and Hezbollah, giving the U.S. intelligence community for the first time relatively reliable information concerning the capabilities and intentions of both these highly secretive organizations.
Iraq is also viewed as a major counterterrorism success within the U.S. intelligence community. Since the Obama administration took power, officials have remained cautiously optimistic about the future
of the country. Despite suffering devastating losses during General David Petraeus’s “Baghdad Surge” offensive in the summer and fall of 2007, al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) continues to soldier on, periodically mounting bloody car and suicide bombings in Baghdad and Mosul, which have killed hundreds of Iraqi civilians. But the terrorist networks in Iraq continue to suffer crippling losses, including many of their top leaders over the past three years. The departure of the last U.S. Army combat brigade from Iraq on August 19, 2010, and the shift of former Iraqi Shiite militants like Moqtada al-Sadr, leader of the so-called Mahdi Army militia, toward becoming legitimate political leaders in Iraqi politics have contributed to a further lessening of tensions in the country.
In Indonesia, the CIA and the Australian foreign intelligence service, ASIS, have provided the Indonesian security services and national police with intelligence and technical support that has resulted in the decimation of the al Qaeda affiliate in that country, Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). JI is best known for being behind a series of bloody terrorist attacks in Indonesia, the most notorious of which was the bombing of a nightclub area on the island of Bali that killed 202 people, most of them Australian tourists. According to Indonesian diplomatic officials, since 2002 their country’s security services have captured or killed more than six hundred JI operatives and sympathizers, but they admit that JI is still very much alive and kicking in the Muslim slums of Djakarta and other Indonesian cities.
In the Philippines over the past decade, a small force of U.S. Army Green Berets from the 1st Special Forces Group and their supporting intelligence operators, using classic counterinsurgency tactics, have secretly helped the Philippine military capture or kill many of the leaders of Abu Sayyaf, a Muslim terrorist group linked to al Qaeda, who had been terrorizing the populace of the island of Mindanao and the nearby Sulu archipelago since the early 1990s.
But Abu Sayyaf is still very much a going concern. A resilient group of about four hundred fighters is still operating on Basilan and Jolo islands off the coast of Mindanao, occasionally emerging from the jungle to ambush a Philippine army unit or police station. On September 29, 2009, Abu Sayyaf guerrillas killed two American Green Berets and a Philippine marine on the island of Jolo. A great amount of frustration has been voiced by intelligence analysts over the fact that just when American Special Forces advisers thought they had Abu Sayyaf cornered and ready for the kill, senior Philippine military commanders could not be coaxed or cajoled into finishing the job. Instead, as one American Green Beret officer put it, “They [the Philippine military] took a siesta and gave them time to rebuild.”
In February 2011, three months before U.S. Navy SEAL commandos killed Osama bin Laden in his hideout in northern Pakistan, senior U.S. intelligence officials told the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees that the U.S. intelligence community still held al Qaeda to be the number one threat to U.S. national security. In fact, well before bin Laden’s death in his compound in Abbottabad, al Qaeda had become, in relative terms, a bit player in global terrorism. Al Qaeda’s decline has been years in the making. In 2008, former CIA intelligence officer Marc Sageman, now a terrorism analyst with the RAND Corporation, correctly predicted in his book Leaderless Jihad that al Qaeda was rapidly declining as a terrorist threat.
The facts back up this contention. According to the latest annual report from the National Counterterrorism Center, al Qaeda accounted for less than 1 percent of the eleven thousand documented terrorist attacks in 2009, indicating the global terrorist threat has evolved dramatically over the past decade to the point where a host of new groups now pose a major threat to U.S. national security and perhaps a greater challenge to the U.S. intelligence community than that formerly posed by al Qaeda. The vast majority of terrorist attacks in 2009 were committed by 240 other terrorist groups around the world, many of whom have lengthier track records of violence and mayhem than al Qaeda. For instance, the worst terrorist incident in all 2009 was not committed by al Qaeda or any other Muslim extremist organization. It occurred on January 17, 2009, near the village of Tora in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, when guerrillas belonging to a group calling itself the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by a messianic individual named Joseph Kony who believes that he is the “spokesperson of God,” massacred four hundred Congolese villagers in an orgy of violence.
There is even a growing terrorist threat on America’s borders to the north and south. In Canada, over a dozen foreign terrorist groups, like the Palestinian group Hamas, Hezbollah from Lebanon, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the Armed Islamic Group from Algeria, the Kurdish Workers’ Party from Turkey, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam from Sri Lanka, and the Basque separatist group ETA, operate openly, raising funds, holding rallies, operating Web sites, and publishing newsletters on behalf of their parent organizations. Although none of these groups has shown any sign of trying to mount a terrorist attack inside Canada or the United States, leaked State Department cables reveal that Canadian security forces have on occasion “vigorously harassed” Hezbollah members living in the Toronto area based on what was described as “non-specific intelligence on possible terrorist operations.”
Just across the Rio Grande from the United States, an increasingly violent war has been raging for more than a decade between Mexico’s government and that country’s powerful drug cartels, which has claimed the lives of over 34,000 people in just the last four years. According to a leaked State Department cable, by 2008 the security situation in Mexico had become “a stew of widespread criminality, drug trafficking, [and] corruption.”
Although the U.S. government has not designated the Mexican drug cartels as terrorists, the Mexican government has. The cartels have assassinated government officials and policemen, thrown hand grenades into street parties, detonated IEDs outside government buildings, and executed en masse hundreds of innocent civilians.
By the time the Obama administration entered office in 2009, the escalating violence in Mexico was beginning to spill over into the United States. Gun battles between rival Mexican gangs took place in the towns along the U.S.-Mexican border. The Mexican military had requested from Washington intelligence on the drug cartels the previous year, but the Bush White House had delayed granting the request because of concern that the information could end up in the hands of the cartels, who had the Mexican government, military, and police thoroughly penetrated. The sharp escalation in violence across the Rio Grande in early 2009 forced DNI Denny Blair to divert precious intelligence resources, including SIGINT intercept personnel and unmanned drones, to try to help the Mexican military and police combat the cartel gunmen, many of whom were former Mexican military special forces officers trained and equipped for counterinsurgency.
In recent months, the tempo of U.S. intelligence collection activity inside Mexico has been dramatically stepped up. The CIA and DEA stations in Mexico City were augmented in 2010 so as to increase the volume of human intelligence reporting on the Mexican drug cartels, and the army began deploying small SIGINT collection units known as Toric Ice Teams to the Rio Grande. Since February 2011, the U.S. Army has been flying unmanned drones over northern Mexico from Biggs Army Airfield on the grounds of Fort Bliss, located just outside El Paso, Texas. Also on Fort Bliss is the El Paso Intelligence Center, where the Drug Enforcement Administration is currently constructing a sophisticated SIGINT facility to intercept the cell phone calls of drug cartel officials across the border in Mexico.
When asked in 2011 why the U.S. intelligence community was investing so much time and effort in combating the Mexican drug cartels, a senior U.S. government official stated, “We had to. To do nothing would have invited disaster. If the drug violence spread into the United States it would have been a catastrophe.”
For the past five years, terrorism has been slowly but inexorably spreading into those parts of the Middle East and North Africa that were peaceful prior to 9/11. A big part of the reason why new terrorist groups, many claiming to be offshoots of al Qaeda, have sprouted up
so rapidly across the Muslim world is that thousands of angry young men from virtually every country in the Middle East and North Africa (the colloquial term for these individuals is jihadis) went off to Iraq to fight the U.S. military after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003. After getting their fill of action, they returned home, bringing with them lethal new skills in terrorist organization, finance, and bomb-making.
The Israeli foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, detected the first wave of these jihadis returning to their home countries in the Middle East and North Africa from Iraq in late 2004 and warned the U.S. intelligence community that this homecoming meant that trouble was on the way. According to a leaked State Department cable, the head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, told a visiting U.S. congressional delegation in 2005 that “Israel has evidence that foreign fighters originating from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Syria and Yemen have arrived back in their home countries, and he [Dagan] assumes that some had returned to Saudi Arabia as well. Dagan predicted that, as with men who fought in Afghanistan during the 80’s and 90’s, these returning militants would stay in touch with each other, forming a network based on their common experiences in Iraq … He worried however, that these militants’ countries of origin—in particular Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and Sudan—are ill-equipped to control the returning jihadis, who might then pose a threat to stability in the region and, ultimately, to Israel.”
Dagan’s prediction quickly came to pass. Two years after the Mossad chief spoke to the visiting congressional delegation, the still-classified version of a June 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism issued by the DNI in Washington revealed that in the four years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, al Qaeda had morphed into something broader based and more insidious as a host of new offshoots suddenly began appearing outside of Pakistan.