At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA
Page 23
By August 31, with no FISA warrant in sight to allow access to Moussaoui’s belongings, we began working up a scheme with the FBI that would have had Moussaoui deported to France. Our plan was to load Moussaoui’s belongings separately, then turn his laptop and luggage over to French authorities for exploitation once he arrived in Paris. (The French did not require the same high level of probable cause that the FBI thought it needed in order to conduct a search.)
Ultimately, we learned that the key lay not in Moussaoui’s computer but in his luggage. On September 18, 2001, a week after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we were informed that a trunk belonging to Moussaoui contained letters indicating that he was the U.S. marketing consultant for a Malaysian company called In Focus Tech. The next day, our officers told us that the general manager of In Focus Tech was Yazid Sufaat, and with that the circle closed and things started to come together in a hurry. Recall that this was the same Yazid Sufaat whose condo in Kuala Lumpur had been the venue for what turned out to be the first operational meeting in the planning for 9/11—the meeting, as noted earlier, that was also attended by al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi.
If we’d had those letters in Moussaoui’s luggage connecting him to Sufaat and—through Sufaat, back to al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, who had just been placed on our watchlist—is it possible that enough bells and whistles might have gone off to allow us to make all the necessary connections? While all of us involved lie awake at night asking ourselves this question, I do not believe there was a silver bullet available to us to stop the tragedy of 9/11.
CIA did not watchlist al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar until August 23, 2001. FBI did not get into Moussaoui’s luggage. The famous Phoenix memo, outlining concerns about terrorists being trained at flight schools, was not shared. The FBI’s effort to find al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar was pursued with too few resources. Simply using commercially available software to track their credit card usage might have been decisive, but no such effort was made.
These missed opportunities obscured the hundreds of successful operations conducted by CIA and FBI together and stood out in high relief when discovered. They pointed out larger systemic shortcomings, in resources, people, and technology. They also highlighted something equally important: The al-Qa’ida operatives who killed three thousand people on September 11 understood that the United States had never thought about how to protect itself within its borders. Policies had never been put in place to address just how disconnected our airline security, watchlisting, border control, and visa policies were at the time. There was no comprehensive, layered system of domestic protection in place to compensate for the internal weaknesses that later came into full view. Yes, people made mistakes; every human interaction was far from where it needed to be. We, the entire government, owed the families of 9/11 better than they got from us. All of us.
CHAPTER 12
Into the Sanctuary
We need to go in fast, hard and light,” we told the president. “Everyone, including al-Qa’ida and the Taliban, are expecting us to invade Afghanistan the same way the Soviets did in the 1980s. Bin Ladin and his followers expect a massive invasion. They believe we will withdraw in the face of casualties and never engage them in hand-to-hand combat. They are going to get the surprise of their lives.” Ours was a strategy unlike any other in recent American history. The plan CIA laid out for the president on September 13 and expanded at Camp David two days later stressed one thing: we would be the insurgents. Working closely with military Special Forces, CIA teams would be the ones using speed and agility to dislodge an emplaced foe. Our plan was to build on relationships that had been carefully forged with regional factions over recent years to give us allies who might help oust the Taliban. This war would never be “Americans against Afghans,” we told the president. Rather, it would always be about helping Afghans rid their own country of a foreign menace, al-Qa’ida, and of the Taliban, who had allowed terrorists to hijack their country.
Five times in the two years prior to 9/11, CIA teams deployed to the Panjshir Valley of northern Afghanistan to meet with various tribal warlords, and particularly with Ahmed Shah Masood, the head of the Northern Alliance—a loose network of competitive tribal forces made up largely of ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, and others who fought against the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan. We bolstered Masood’s intelligence capability against Bin Ladin and al-Qa’ida. Masood’s brutal murder by al-Qa’ida on the eve of the 9/11 attacks might have undone our plan before it got under way if we hadn’t maintained contact with other warlords in the north. And we also had long-standing, if much weaker, relationships with Pashtun tribes in the south. We knew who the players and who the pretenders were. By September 10, 2001, CIA had more than one hundred sources and subsources, and relationships with eight tribal networks spread across Afghanistan. Although these sources proved insufficient to steal the secret that would have predicted and prevented the attacks of 9/11, we were confident that, with the right authorities, we could get those responsible for the tragedy.
The president approved our recommendations on Monday, September 17, and provided us broad authorities to engage al-Qa’ida. As Cofer Black later told Congress, “the gloves came off” that day.
At the White House meeting that same day, the president declared, “I want the CIA to be first on the ground.” I sent a memorandum to CIA senior officers stressing that “There can be no bureaucratic impediments to success. All the rules have changed. There must be an absolute and full sharing of information, ideas, and capabilities. We do not have time to hold meetings to fix problems—fix them quickly and smartly. Each person must assume an unprecedented degree of personal responsibility.”
There has been a lot written about how Don Rumsfeld was supposedly unhappy that CIA was playing such a prominent role at the time. I never had that sense. We had a good plan. I was seeing my boss, the president of the United States, every day, and he was telling us “Go, go, go.” It never occurred to me that we should do anything else.
Speed was everything. We needed to get a team into northern Afghanistan as soon as possible, to engage the various anti-Taliban leaders there and to measure the effect that the assassination of Masood had had on the Northern Alliance. Our bench of Afghan experts was strong but not deep, so we moved quickly to enhance it. To lead the mission, we found the perfect person, attending a pre-retirement seminar. Gary Schroen, deeply knowledgeable about the region, was friendly with many of the senior Afghan warlords and fluent in the local languages of Dari and Farsi. Instead of leaving government service as he had been planning before 9/11, Gary arrived in northern Afghanistan within two weeks of the attacks, at the head of a small team that would be the forerunner of Agency operations there for the next several years.
Sending a senior officer like Gary illustrates the way the Agency operates. Gary was equivalent to a three-star general in rank, and he was first in with a squad of eight men who averaged forty-five years of age and twenty-five years of professional experience. Empowered to speak on behalf of the Agency, Gary was able to enter into agreements, make demands, and, not inconsequentially, dole out some of the millions of dollars in cash that he flew in with.
The CIA Northern Alliance Liaison Team, led by Gary Schroen, traveled to Afghanistan on an old Russian helicopter that we had purchased a year before 9/11 to facilitate our movements in the region. The NALT, as the team was known, set up shop in the village of Barak, at an elevation of 6,700 feet and surrounded by mountains as high as 9,000 feet. Living conditions in Barak were spartan to say the least. The NALT reported that sanitation conditions were “circa mid-12th century” but that the team was “healthy, motivated, and working hard.” To remind themselves why they were there, they repainted the tail number on their MI-17 helicopter shortly after arriving, giving it the designation “091101.”
Gary quickly established contact with Fahim Khan, one of the Northern Alliance leaders who figured prominently after the assassination of Masood, while also reaching out to other t
ribal leaders to learn who was with us and who was against us. Simultaneously, NALT team members sent back intelligence that would form the basis of targeting decisions in the military air campaign that was to follow.
Some of the contacts with tribal leaders were face to face. Others were conducted by radio and satellite telephones. Tribal leaders were asked, “Can we count on you to help drive al-Qa’ida and their Taliban protectors out of Afghanistan?” If the answer was yes, food, medical supplies, military equipment, and weapons would soon be air-dropped to them. Between mid-October and mid-December 2001, U.S. aircraft delivered 1.69 million pounds of goods in 108 airdrops to 41 locations throughout Afghanistan. Each drop was tailored to the specific requests and needs of the teams on the ground. One ethnic Uzbek leader told us that his most critical need was horse feed. Others needed saddles. These were shipped along with arms, portable hospitals, and food. Some of our officers slept on millions of dollars in cash, which was used to capitalize on the Afghan tradition of switching sides. A tribal leader who sided with the United States would, within hours, see the answer to his clan’s prayers drop from the sky. It gave those warlords tremendous clout within their organizations. But if a tribal leader refused to work with us, essentially declaring himself and his clan our enemies, his clan might find themselves on the receiving end of a different kind of airdrop—a two-thousand-pound bomb courtesy of the U.S. military. Subtle, it wasn’t, but neither were the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York that had brought us to Afghanistan.
In addition to working with various warlords, Agency officers in Afghanistan also secretly contacted Taliban officials to try to get them to turn over Bin Ladin. In one case, an agency team traveled to a virtual no-man’s-land outside of Kabul for what they hoped would be a meeting with a very senior Taliban intelligence official. CIA headquarters gave the team wide latitude on deciding how to handle the matter. The Taliban official failed to show up, however, but did send his deputy. The stand-in made it clear that they had no intention of being helpful to us. That was a mistake. The CIA team literally rolled him up—in a carpet—threw him in the back of a truck in broad daylight, and spirited him back to U.S.-controlled territory, where he could be questioned. Scores of al-Qa’ida and Taliban were killed in U.S. airstrikes based on what we learned from that Taliban deputy.
On September 26, President Bush paid a visit to CIA headquarters. In a speech in the Agency lobby, in front of a wall of honor memorializing CIA officers who had died in the line of duty, he told our workforce how much confidence he had in them. He also reminded them that the American people expected “a 100-percent effort, a full-time, no-stop effort on not only securing our homeland but bringing to justice terrorists, no matter where they live, no matter where they hide.” That, he noted, was “exactly what we’re going to do.” After the president’s remarks, we briefed him on the first reports coming in from the NALT, which, unbeknownst to most of the world, had landed in Afghanistan that same day.
CIA was built to gather intelligence, not conduct wars. When it became clear that we were going to be asked to play a leading role in ousting al-Qa’ida, we added a new branch to our Counterterrorism Center—CTC Special Operations, or CTC/SO. To head up this new branch, we tapped Hank Crumpton, a slow-talking, quick-witted CIA officer who had recently completed a three-year tour of duty in Washington, including two years in CTC and one working with the FBI. Hank was the perfect man for the mission. He had spent ten years in sub-Saharan Africa working around insurgent groups; had extensive interagency experience, including a recent tour of duty with the FBI; and had led the CIA team that went to Yemen to investigate the USS Cole bombing. Hank and his family had just arrived in an attractive overseas capital for what was supposed to be a three-year posting. A day or so later he got a call from headquarters: Stop unpacking. We need you back in Washington. To no one’s surprise, Hank didn’t hesitate for a moment. He knew that the decision to come back would be tough on his three kids. They’d just made the adjustment to a new home, the family belongings had arrived, they were ensconced in new schools, and the family dog had just gotten out of quarantine. “I know you are unhappy,” Hank told them, “but think about the families of three thousand people who have just lost their lives. You’ve got it good. I need you to suck it up and help your mother repack. Let’s go home.”
Upon his return from overseas, Hank headed directly to Langley from the airport. There, he met with Cofer Black, who outlined his expectations. “Your mission is to find al-Qa’ida, engage it, and destroy it.”
Like Gary Schroen, John M. (who remains undercover and cannot be fully identified), a Naval Academy graduate with twenty-six years of government service, was on his way out of the Agency on 9/11. In fact, he was in the second day of a pre-retirement program at an outlying CIA facility in northern Virginia when the terrorists struck. John jumped in his car and found himself drawn to CIA headquarters. Having no specific assignment, he spent the first day pitching in where he could, delivering messages and helping make sense of a chaotic situation. He told senior officials in the Directorate of Operations that if we had a job for him, he would withdraw his retirement papers. In the meantime, he traveled to New York City and volunteered to help dig through the rubble near the World Trade Center. When Hank heard about John’s determination and availability, he quickly tapped him to be one of his deputies.
Another key player in the effort was Frank A., a hulking longtime veteran of CIA’s clandestine service who planned and implemented the psychological operations of the Afghan campaign. Throughout the war he became one of our most valued strategic thinkers. Frank had enlisted in the Marine Corps as a young man and later joined the Agency, where he served with distinction on three continents. He is a no-nonsense, can-do kind of guy. I remember one Saturday morning, shortly after 9/11, I was in CTC getting a briefing on operations. It turned out that someone had decided that that was a good day to test the headquarters fire alarms. The briefing kept getting interrupted. We could barely hear ourselves think. Frank calmly got up and ripped the wires out of the alarm in the room we were in. The briefing proceeded.
One of the biggest problems we faced in Afghanistan at the outset was how to foster cooperation with the mostly Tajik tribes in the Northern Alliance without alienating the country’s Pashtuns, largely in the south, many of whom had once been supportive of the Taliban. The last thing we wanted on our hands was a civil war.
CIA was split into its own factions on the matter. Some officers, particularly those serving in Pakistan, argued that we should not align ourselves too closely with the Northern Alliance. In general, CTC/SO, our officers in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and the NALT unit in northern Afghanistan disagreed. In their view, we couldn’t wait for opposition forces to rise up in the south. Instead, we had to take advantage of the Northern Alliance’s willingness to engage the enemy right away. I appreciated both arguments, but I agreed with Gary and Hank that momentum was critical.
The original NALT unit was followed by the deployment of six additional CIA teams in the first two months of the war. Like the first, each new team averaged eight members and included experienced officers with Farsi/Dari, Uzbek, Russian, and Arabic language capabilities. These officers were assigned to work with tribal warlords across a broad expanse of northern and western Afghanistan.
The Northern Alliance controlled the mountainous northeastern corner of Afghanistan, including the Panjshir Valley, which led to the Shomali Plains, north of the capital of Kabul, along with some small patches in the central portion of the country. As yet, we had no allies in control of territory in the south. All we could do was hope that the south’s participation would fall in place as events progressed.
The war plan was for Northern Alliance forces, with the aid of U.S. airpower and targeting provided by CIA and Special Forces teams, to drive toward north-central Afghanistan and take the town of Mazar-i-Sharif. From there they could establish a land bridge to Uzbekistan, from which supplies could flow. At the same
time other Northern Alliance forces would attack the town of Konduz, in the north, while still others would try to take Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan. Then Northern Alliance troops, assisted by the NALT, would head south through the Shomali Plains, toward Kabul.
The key to our strategy was in the way our Afghan allies could be motivated. Based on years of experience in the region, CIA officers knew that the way to galvanize the local units was to appeal to their sense of prestige and honor as it was defined in tribal terms. This required a cultural understanding based on trust and confidence.
At the outset of the war in Afghanistan, CIA’s senior officer dealing with Pakistan recommended a limited air campaign in the south, focusing on Taliban air defenses, facilities physically and symbolically associated with Mullah Omar and UBL, and al-Qa’ida–associated training camps. The plan was intended not to alienate the country’s large Pashtun ethnic group, which formed the basis of the Taliban’s support. A heavy bombing campaign against the Taliban and al-Qa’ida in the north might be seen as the U.S. siding with the mostly Tajik Northern Alliance to the detriment of the Pashtuns in the south. The idea was that such a limited campaign might create fissures within the Taliban, and induce Taliban officials to turn over Bin Ladin. None of this happened. The Pashtuns sat on their hands.
The Northern Alliance warlords had the impression that the American bombing effort was tepid at best. CIA officers in the north argued forcefully that the only way to get the Northern Alliance fully into the fight was to show them that we were serious, with a more aggressive bombing campaign. They said that Afghan military resistance and public support for the Taliban would both collapse under increased U.S. military pressure. The Pashtuns would switch sides, as long as they did not face an imminent threat from the Northern Alliance.