by Tim Weiner
“Nothing between us needs to be explained,” bin Laden wrote. “There is only killing.”
“WHAT KIND OF WAR?”
The FBI’s investigation into bin Laden was not a paper case. The Bureau had a witness.
An al-Qaeda defector, Jamal al-Fadl, a Sudanese who had stolen $110,000 from bin Laden’s coffers in Khartoum, had turned up at the U.S. Embassy in the neighboring nation of Eritrea, on the Horn of Africa, at the start of the summer. “I have information about people, they want to do something against your government,” he told a State Department officer. “I told her I was in Afghanistan and I work with group and I know in fact those people, they try to make war against your country and they train very hard, they do their best to make war against your country.”
“What kind of war?” she asked al-Fadl.
“Maybe they try to do something inside United States and they try to fight the United States Army outside, and also they try make bomb against some embassy outside,” he replied. “I work with them more than nine years.”
Three CIA officers debriefed al-Fadl for three weeks. Then, in the newfound spirit of counterterrorism cooperation, the Agency turned him over to the FBI.
Daniel Coleman, a grizzled twenty-three-year FBI veteran attached to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York and the CIA’s counterterrorism center, flew to Germany with Patrick Fitzgerald, a young prosecutor in charge of national security cases at the federal courthouse in Manhattan. They talked to al-Fadl every day for two weeks. They brought him back to New York, and he remained in the Bureau’s around-the-clock custody for the next two years. Coleman and his fellow agents came to like him. They nicknamed him Junior.
By January 1997, Junior had given the FBI a deep look at al-Qaeda’s origins, its structure, its ambitions, and its leaders. He told the FBI that bin Laden had been vowing to attack the United States for at least three years. America was a snake, bin Laden had said to his followers. Al-Qaeda had to cut off its head.
That same month, Dale Watson returned to FBI headquarters as chief, International Terrorism Section, National Security Division. On orders from the director, Watson spent an inordinate amount of time chasing shadows in the Khobar Towers case. But he was now more interested in the future than the past. He had learned a lot at the CIA. The Agency had thousands of people sitting and thinking. One of his core missions was to find a way for the FBI to think.
Clinton’s Presidential Decision Directive 39 had ordered the Bureau to analyze secret intelligence on terrorist threats, and to create strategies to disrupt and destroy them before they struck again. Freeh had promised to deploy a squadron of strategic analysts for that mission. Strategic analysis was the big picture, the power to know what your enemy is thinking. It was not about what happened five minutes ago, but what might happen five months from now; not a smart guess, but sifted and refined intelligence. Without it, taking action usually was a shot in the dark.
Watson looked around headquarters wondering: Where were all the analysts? They had been hired in 1995 and 1996, fifty or more of them, many with advanced degrees. But they had been shocked at the state of intelligence at the FBI. Where were the computers? Where were the data? Most of the new hires left within a year. They felt they had been treated like furniture, not federal investigators. By the turn of the century, the FBI had one analyst working on al-Qaeda.
Watson presided over the FBI’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit and a new Osama bin Laden Unit. He had seven agents, including Dan Coleman, working on the bin Laden case, under the assistant special agent in charge of counterterrorism in New York, John O’Neill. But at headquarters, “no one was thinking about the counterterrorism program—what the threat was and what we were trying to do about it,” Watson said. “And when that light came on, I realized that, hey, we are a reactive bunch of people, and reactive will never get us to a prevention.” No one was thinking about where al-Qaeda’s next target might be—and “no one was really looking.”
But one FBI agent was talking about it in public, and that was O’Neill. He was a showboat and a self-promoter, but he studied al-Qaeda with a steely gaze. O’Neill believed, and he would tell anyone who listened, that the group had the capability to strike the United States at a time and place of its choice. “The balance of power has shifted,” he warned in a speech in Chicago that spring. “No intelligent state will attack the United States in the foreseeable future because of our military superiority. So the only way these individuals can attack us and have some effect is through acts of terrorism.”
Freeh had promised to come up with a plan to meet the threat. He assured Congress that he would “double the ‘shoe-leather’ for counterterrorism investigations.” But that promise came after Congress had already tripled his counterterrorism budget to $301 million a year and increased the FBI’s spending from $2.4 billion to $3.4 billion under Clinton. On paper, Freeh had 1,300 agents and an equal number of analysts and support staff assigned to counterterrorism. In reality, the force was not nearly as strong as the numbers made it seem.
The FBI’s fifty-six field offices were supposed to draw up counterterrorism strategies and report to headquarters. Section chiefs at headquarters would incorporate the field office reports into elements of a five-year strategy. Division chiefs would absorb that work and report to the director. The director would come up with a Strategic Plan, capital S, capital P. The FBI had been working on the Strategic Plan since the attack on the World Trade Center. It was never done.
Watson came to confide in Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism chief at the White House. Clarke worked around the clock. His hair had gone gray in his forties, and his skin was as pale as skim milk. He looked like he had been living in a bomb shelter for a decade, waiting for the bombs to fall. In a way, that was true. Clarke had Oliver North’s old office at the National Security Council suite next to the White House. A sign on the mantel of the nineteenth-century fireplace read: THINK GLOBALLY/ACT LOCALLY. Clinton gave him a title to go with his responsibilities: national counterterrorism coordinator.
Clarke was trying to coordinate everything from the Pentagon down to the police. He wanted to raise the fear of terrorism in the United States to the right level. He wanted to protect Americans from attack—a goal he saw as “almost the primary responsibility of the Government”—but he had little faith in Freeh’s ability to assist in that mission. He thought the FBI had no concept of the terrorist threat to America. “They never provided analysis to us, even when we asked for it,” he said. “I don’t think that throughout that ten-year period we really had an analytical capability of what was going on in this country.”
Clarke believed that “Freeh should have been spending his time fixing the mess the FBI had become, an organization of fifty-six princedoms without any modern information technology to support them. He might have spent more time hunting for terrorists in the United States, where Al Qaeda and its affiliates had put down roots.” Instead, he was playing the role of chief investigator in the Khobar Towers and Chinese espionage investigations. But Clarke thought that “his personal involvement appeared to contribute to the cases going down dark alleys, empty wells.”
Watson came to a graver conclusion. He told Clarke: “We have to smash the FBI into bits and rebuild it.”
“I WANTED TO HURT THE BUREAU”
The director was trying to keep that from happening.
Freeh faced a cascading series of calamities as President Clinton was sworn in for his second term, on January 20, 1997. His falling-out with the White House was now complete. Freeh did not speak to the president at all for almost four years.
Attorney General Reno made it clear in public and in private that her trust in Freeh was broken. The break came the week before Clinton’s re-election, when the chief of the FBI’s violent crime section pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice—the highest-ranking headquarters man ever imprisoned for a felony. He had destroyed documents about the Hostage Rescue Team’s killing of the wife of a right-wi
ng militant during a confrontation in the remote Idaho town of Ruby Ridge; an FBI sharpshooter had taken the woman’s life as she cradled her eleven-month-old daughter in her arms. There were no warrants for her arrest. She was not wanted for a crime. Freeh was forced to acknowledge that the FBI had violated the Constitution by allowing its agents to shoot on sight. In a fit of virtue, Freeh then destroyed the career of his deputy director, once his good friend, for sending the team to the scene of the standoff.
Freeh came close to the breaking point himself. He had accused the president of lying, and the president returned his fire, during the four-year-long investigations of campaign contributors and crooked politicos who had tried to influence Clinton. The independent prosecutor who worked these cases in tandem with the FBI was near the end of his rope, after spending $30 million, until he heard that a twenty-four-year-old former White House intern named Monica Lewinsky had granted Clinton sexual favors. The FBI watched over the White House physician as he executed an order to extract Clinton’s DNA, by taking a blood sample from the president’s arm. With that evidence came proof that the president had lied under oath about the affair. Many months of entertaining torment ensued, ending with a formal impeachment in the House, a trial in the Senate, and a hung jury verdict.
Freeh saw the investigation as a matter of principle: Clinton had forfeited his political life and his immortal soul for a few minutes of private pleasure. The president saw it as “a Stalinist show trial,” a political search-and-destroy mission, “an unconscionable waste of the FBI’s assets”—hundreds of agents “who could have been working on crime, drugs, terror, things that actually make a difference”—and thus a danger to the security of the United States. The director of the Secret Service, Lew Merletti, whose job was to protect the president’s life, understandably agreed. While the FBI was “investigating the foibles of the President and Monica,” he said, “a number of senior al Qaeda operatives were traveling the United States.”
Freeh had his own scandals to investigate. A decade earlier, FBI espionage operations in New York had started to go wrong. Now the Bureau thought it knew why. A member of the foreign counterintelligence squad had begun stealing secret documents and selling them to the Russians in the summer of 1987. He had continued to spy for Moscow after the end of the Cold War.
Earl Pitts had seemed like an archetype of an agent: he was good-looking, square-jawed, buttoned-down, once an army captain and a law clerk for a conservative federal judge. But three months after he arrived in his new post, he was spying for Moscow. It took the FBI a decade to detect him.
“I wanted to hurt the Bureau,” he said in a jailhouse confession after he received a twenty-seven-year sentence on June 27, 1997. He insisted that he was a patriot who loved his country, and yet he hated the FBI, in which he had served for fourteen years, with a passion. “The Bureau prides itself on keeping secrets,” he said. “And I was going to hurt that.” His baffled interrogators could only conclude that he was a well-mannered madman. “Nothing was sacred to Pitts,” said the federal prosecutor in the case.
The true cost of the treason committed by the traitors in American counterintelligence during the 1980s and 1990s can be measured in blood and treasure. A dozen or more foreign agents who worked for the Bureau and the CIA were executed. American perceptions of major political and military developments abroad were manipulated by disinformation fed to the United States by Moscow. Many hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the secret development of American weapons went to waste. The Russians, the Chinese, and the Cubans misled and mystified the FBI, sending hundreds of agents down blind alleys for years on end.
Counterintelligence was a crucial ingredient of counterterrorism. It was the one field where the CIA and the FBI had to cooperate at all costs. If they failed, the United States was in danger. Terrorists and spies alike struck at flaws in America’s armor, looking for its heart.
43
AN EASY TARGET
ON AUGUST 21, 1997, the FBI’s Dan Coleman walked out of the United States Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, hunting for al-Qaeda.
Marine sentries guarded the doorway of the ugly brown building, three steps from a sidewalk teeming with street preachers and homeless children. Guided by Kenyan police through the gray streets, Coleman and two CIA colleagues drove through the heart of the biggest city in East Africa.
They arrived at the squalid home of Wahid el-Hage, a naturalized American citizen, born a Catholic in Lebanon, who had lived for years in Texas. He was not home that day. He was in Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden.
Coleman was following a solid lead: Junior al-Fadl had identified el-Hage as al-Qaeda’s African quartermaster. Inside his house, while the Kenyan police double-talked el-Hage’s American wife, Coleman seized diaries, business records, and a PowerBook. A CIA technician copied the computer’s hard drive. It held messages to and from key members of al-Qaeda in Nairobi. “The cell members in East Africa are in great danger,” one message said. “They should know that now they have become America’s primary target.”
The Kenyan police told el-Hage upon his return to Nairobi that his life was in danger. He and his family flew back to the United States. Within days, he was under interrogation by the FBI and the federal grand jury in New York. On September 23, 1997, he was asked about the last time he had seen bin Laden and what he knew about al-Qaeda’s plans to strike American military and diplomatic outposts. He was questioned about al-Qaeda’s operational status in the United States and seventeen other nations, including Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Afghanistan. He was grilled about the people whose names appeared in his notebooks.
One was a man who had been known to the FBI for almost five years: Ali Mohamed.
“I WAS INTRODUCED TO AL QAEDA”
Ali Mohamed had volunteered his services to the FBI shortly after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. At first glance, he must have seemed like a godsend.
Mohamed was a fit, fair-skinned, clean-cut man of forty, a seventeen-year veteran of the Egyptian military, who had offered himself to both the CIA and the United States Army. The army said yes. He had taken a four-month training course for foreign officers at Fort Bragg, California, and he joined the army in 1986. He was only a supply sergeant. But he had given lectures on Islamic terrorism to Green Berets at the Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, and his superiors had commended him for his work.
He applied for a job at the FBI in 1990 and again in 1991, seeking work as an Arabic-language specialist who could conduct interviews, listen to wiretaps, and translate documents. At the time, the Bureau was not accepting Arabic-speakers, but the San Francisco office bit when Mohamed offered up well-concocted stories suggesting a criminal connection between Mexican smugglers and Palestinian terrorists. Though his application to become a full-time translator was still pending, he was on the books as an FBI informant by 1992.
In April 1993, Mohamed had driven to Vancouver to pick up a friend at the airport. But his colleague—a fellow Egyptian army veteran who had joined the jihad—had been detained after he was found to be in possession of two forged Saudi passports. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had questioned Mohamed as well. He explained that he was working for the FBI and he offered the telephone number of his Bureau contact in San Francisco. The Canadians released Mohamed after the agent vouched for him.
When Mohamed returned to California, he told the FBI an astonishing story. The Bureau’s agents did not comprehend him.
Mohamed had revealed that he had secretly joined the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization after his first training course at Fort Bragg. “I was introduced to al Qaeda—al Qaeda is the organization headed by Osama bin Laden—through my involvement with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad,” Mohamed later told a federal judge, recounting what he had told the FBI. He had “conducted military and basic explosives training for al Qaeda in Afghanistan,” as well as “intelligence training … how to create cell structures that could be used for operations.”
I
t was the first time that anyone at the FBI had ever heard of al-Qaeda or bin Laden.
The Bureau’s agents in San Francisco had not reported his revelations to Washington or New York. In the meantime, he had returned to work for al-Qaeda, helping to build the Nairobi cell. At bin Laden’s command, he had gone to Nairobi to stake out potential targets for a bombing. He took photographs of the U.S. Embassy and brought them to bin Laden in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. Bin Laden looked at the pictures and pointed to the ramp leading to an underground garage. He said that would be the best place to drive a truck laden with explosives.
The next time the FBI contacted Ali Mohamed, they had an ominous conversation. A defense lawyer preparing for the sedition trial of the Blind Sheikh notified the federal prosecutor, Andrew McCarthy, that he wanted Mohamed to testify at the trial. On McCarthy’s orders, the FBI’s Harlan Bell, one of the very few Arabic-speaking special agents in the Bureau, tracked down Mohamed by telephone in Nairobi and told him that they needed to talk. Mohamed flew back to California for a tense confrontation with Bell and McCarthy, in a conference room in Santa Barbara on December 9, 1994.
“He had been pitched to me as an engaging friendly by his handlers—FBI agents in Northern California with whom he was purportedly cooperating,” McCarthy recalled. “It quickly became clear who was picking whose pocket.” McCarthy came away from the conversation with a gut feeling that the Bureau was being conned by a terrorist; he thought “the FBI should be investigating him rather than allowing him to infiltrate.” But McCarthy did not have the information he needed to confirm his instinct, because the Bureau had withheld what it knew about its informant: “It was not until much later that I learned Mohamed had told FBI agents in California that bin Laden ran an organization called al Qaeda.”
