At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  On many occasions, I would be briefed on matters that were, as they say in Washington, “outside my lane.” When that happened, I would tell, say, the FBI representative to call Director Bob Mueller and bring him up to speed on a domestic issue, because we intended to mention it in the next day’s PDB session in the Oval Office. Without doubt, the president was going to turn to Bob and ask what he was doing about this; it was in everyone’s interest that he had a good answer.

  Our morning sessions with the president were also intense. He quickly became steeped in our strategy, with regard to activities not only in Afghanistan but also in the rest of the world. He was focused on results yet at the same time did not seek to micromanage our operations. He spent time with the substantive experts we brought to daily meetings and to longer sessions at Camp David on Saturdays. The president never became the action officer, but there was no doubt the leader was in the trenches with us. If you told him about an imminent operation on Monday, you could be certain after a few days he would ask about it, if we had not provided the necessary follow-up.

  A PDB session would lead to a broader meeting with Bob Mueller, Tom Ridge, later Fran Townsend, and their staffs, to review the threat matrix, the actions that were being taken, the gaps in our knowledge, and the interventions the president or vice president could undertake to help. Over time, at Andy Card’s insistence, we modified the items in the matrix the president would see, to ensure that only those with the necessary weight and quality consumed his attention. When you have been accused of failing to connect the dots, your initial reaction is to ensure that all the dots are briefed. Until our knowledge became more refined, our inclination was to overbrief.

  At the core of our effort was the Counterterrorism Center. It was the hub around which all of our efforts revolved. From there CIA stations worldwide were tapped to work both unilaterally and with host government intelligence services to improve the information sharing we relied upon. The long-standing relationships that Agency officers had with counterparts around the world became essential to our success. Even former adversaries seemed more willing to work with us.

  As we made progress overseas, we found ourselves struggling domestically. It was stunning how little reliable information was immediately available inside our own borders. There was no good data on how many foreigners had overstayed their visas and no tracking system to see if young men who came into this country to attend university had actually shown up for classes—or if they had changed their major from music to nuclear physics. Nor was there any way for a police department in one part of the country to share suspicious activity data with counterparts across the state or the nation. There was no seamless way to communicate from Beirut to Seattle; there was no communications backbone. And while there were mountains of data within the United States, no one knew how to access it all, and little had been done to train people to put it together and report it, much less analyze it. In the early days, what we did not know about what was going on in the United States haunted us. We had to make judgments based on instinct.

  Few understand the palpable sense of uncertainty and even fear that gripped those in the storm’s center in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. One particular concern was the fact that, although there wasn’t any tracking system in place, there were thousands of foreigners in the United States whose visas had expired. The most important thing we needed to do was to prove the negative: that there were not more al-Qa’ida cells within the country poised to conduct a second wave of attacks. At the time, I remember reflecting on testimony Gen. Mike Hayden, then the director of NSA, had given to a public hearing of the House Intelligence Committee in 2000. Mike created quite a stir when he said that if Usama bin Ladin had crossed the bridge from Niagara Falls, Ontario, to Niagara Falls, New York, there were provisions of U.S. law that would offer him protections with regard to how NSA could cover him. Mike would later say that he was using this as a stark hypothetical. On September 12, 2001, it became real.

  After the 9/11 attacks, using his existing authorities, Hayden implemented a program to monitor communications to and from Afghanistan, where the 9/11 attacks were planned. With regard to NSA’s policy of minimization, balancing U.S. privacy and inherent intelligence value, Mike moved from a peacetime to a wartime standard. He briefed me on this, and I approved. By early October 2001, Hayden had briefed the full House Intelligence Committee and the leadership of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

  Soon thereafter, the vice president asked me if NSA could do more. Our ability to monitor al-Qa’ida’s planning was limited because of constraints we had imposed on ourselves through the passing of certain U.S. laws in the late 1970s. I called Mike to relay the vice president’s inquiry. Mike made it clear that he could do no more within the existing authorities. We went to see the vice president together. Mike laid out what could be done that would be feasible, prudent, and effective.

  Within a week new authorities were granted to allow NSA to pursue what is now known as the “terrorist surveillance program.” The rules required that at least one side of the phone call being surveilled be outside the United States and that there be probable cause to believe that at least one end of the communication was with someone associated with al-Qa’ida. Elaborate protocols were set up to ensure that the program was carried out in accordance with these regulations. Within weeks of the program’s inception, senior congressional leaders were called to the White House and briefed on it. Prior to its disclosure, twelve such briefings were hosted by the vice president for the leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. The briefings were thorough and disciplined. From my perspective, Mike gave the members full insight into how the program was being managed, the care that was being taken to ensure that it lived up to its intent, and offered the best analysis he could provide with regard to its results. The program was reauthorized by the president about every forty-five days prior to its disclosure. Each reauthorization was accompanied by an intelligence review, each of which I signed prior to my retirement. This included a comprehensive assessment of the value of continuing the program.

  At one point in 2004 there was even a discussion with the congressional leadership in the White House Situation Room with regard to whether new legislation should be introduced to amend the FISA statute, to put the program on a broader legal foundation. The view that day on the part of members of Congress was that this could not be done without jeopardizing the program.

  Mike Hayden has persuasively argued that the FISA statute enacted in 1978 could not have contemplated the technology available for terrorist use today, nor provided for the speed needed to deter today’s terrorist acts. A bipartisan effort to amend the statute would be wise, so long as it is done in a manner that does not jeopardize critical operational equities. The trauma of 9/11 led, in the words of Mike Hayden, to a program to protect our liberty by making us all feel safer. It was never about violating the privacy of our citizens.

  Had this program existed prior to 9/11, Mike Hayden has said that, in his professional judgment, we would have detected some of the al-Qa’ida operatives in the United States and we would have identified them as such. I agree.

  As we were coming up with the new terrorist surveillance program, our working assumption had always been that the attacks of 9/11 were simply the first wave. Al-Qa’ida had declared its intention to destroy our country. Why then would it be satisfied with just three thousand deaths? It was inconceivable to us that Bin Ladin had not already positioned people to conduct second, and possibly third and fourth waves of attacks inside the United States. Getting people into this country—legally or illegally—was no challenge before 9/11. Al-Qa’ida had to have known that things would tighten up after the attacks, so logic suggested that they would have acted in advance to prepare for that inevitability. We considered the possibility that in addition to carrying out the September 11 attacks, the nineteen hijackers might also have done casing and provided surveillance for whatever attack would come next. Nothing th
at I learned in the ensuing three years ever led me to believe that our initial working assumption that al-Qa’ida had cells here was wrong.

  Increasingly, we began to concentrate on the possible connections between the domestic front and the data we were collecting overseas. We would identify al-Qa’ida members and other terrorists overseas and often discover that they had relatives, acquaintances, or business ties with people in the United States. Each rock overturned abroad led to ants scurrying every which way, including many toward the United States. These concerns, in part, led to the establishment of the NSA program wrongly described by the media as “domestic spying.” The program grew out of concrete evidence that foreign terrorists planning new attacks on America were in communication with colleagues in this country. Oddly, the farther terrorists were from our shores, the more vulnerable they were to our intelligence-collection efforts. In some ways, the safest place for an al-Qa’ida member to hide was inside the United States.

  As much as our government would have liked to capture or kill Usama bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri, we recognized that the key to crippling al-Qa’ida would be to take down the next tier of leadership, the facilitators, planners, financiers, document forgers, and the like. These were the people who would have the actual links to the terrorist operatives. If we could disrupt or destroy the efforts of these individuals, we might prevent the follow-on attack that we feared so much. Our strategy was clear: to weaken al-Qa’ida’s ability to plan and execute attacks, by forcing them to move less capable individuals into positions of leadership. In particular, our focus was on the individuals in charge of planning operations against the United States. Once Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured, Abu Faraj al-Libi took over. He was captured in Pakistan in May 2005 and replaced by Hamza Rabi’a, who was reportedly killed in the North Waziristan province of Pakistan seven months later.

  One of the first dominoes to fall was Abu Zubaydah. Before 9/11, his name had been all over our threat reporting. After the attacks, he gained an even more prominent role in al-Qa’ida, especially once the United States killed the group’s number three man, Mohammed Atef, in a November 2001 air strike in Afghanistan. Time and again in our five o’clock meeting we discussed how to run Abu Zubaydah to the ground.

  By March 2002 we had identified a large number of sites in Pakistan that appeared to be al-Qa’ida safe houses. We got the increasingly helpful Pakistani authorities to raid thirteen of them simultaneously; they captured more than two dozen al-Qa’ida members. We were hopeful that a big fish like Abu Zubaydah would be in one of the safe houses, and we were not disappointed. In Pakistan’s third largest city, Faisalabad, a gunfight broke out when Pakistani security officials stormed a second-floor apartment. Abu Zubaydah, who was inside, was shot three times and critically wounded.

  Ironically, we found ourselves suddenly concerned with trying to save a terrorist’s life. Not that we had any sympathy for Zubaydah; we just didn’t want him dying before we could learn what he might have to tell us about plans for future attacks. Fortunately, Buzzy Krongard, our executive director, was also on the board of directors of Johns Hopkins Medical Center. Using his contacts there, he arranged for a world-class medical expert to jump aboard an aircraft we had chartered so he could be flown to Pakistan and save a killer’s life. Once Abu Zubaydah was stabilized, the Pakistanis turned him over to CIA custody. It was at this point that we got into holding and interrogating high-value detainees—“HVDs,” as we called them—in a serious way.

  Detainees, in general, had become a critical issue. By this time, many Taliban and al-Qa’ida prisoners were in military custody. Yet the quantity and quality of intelligence produced from their interrogation was disappointing. The detainees were either too low ranking to know much or too disciplined to reveal useful information.

  Abu Zubaydah’s capture altered that equation. Now that we had an undoubted resource in our hands—the highest-ranking al-Qa’ida official captured to date—we opened discussions within the National Security Council as to how to handle him, since holding and interrogating large numbers of al-Qa’ida operatives had never been part of our plan. But Zubaydah and a small number of other extremely highly placed terrorists potentially had information that might save thousands of lives. We wondered what we could legitimately do to get that information. Despite what Hollywood might have you believe, in situations like this you don’t call in the tough guys; you call in the lawyers. It took until August to get clear guidance on what Agency officers could legally do. Without such legal determinations from the Department of Justice, our officers would have been at risk for future second-guessing. We knew that, like almost everything else in Washington, the program would eventually be leaked and our Agency and its people would be inaccurately portrayed in the worst possible light. Out of those conversations came a decision that CIA would hold and interrogate a small number of HVDs.

  CIA officers came up with a series of interrogation techniques that would be carefully monitored at all times to ensure the safety of the prisoner. The administration and the Department of Justice were fully briefed and approved the use of these tactics. After we received written Department of Justice guidance on the interrogation issue, we briefed the chairmen and ranking members of our oversight committees. While they were not asked to formally approve the program, as it was conducted under the president’s unilateral authorities, I can recall no objections being raised.

  The most aggressive interrogation techniques conducted by CIA personnel were applied to only a handful of the worst terrorists on the planet, including people who had planned the 9/11 attacks and who, among other things, were responsible for journalist Daniel Pearl’s death. The interrogation of these few individuals was conducted in a precisely monitored, measured way intended to try to prevent what we believed to be an imminent follow-on attack. Information from these interrogations helped disrupt plots aimed at locations in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia.

  The president confirmed the existence of the interrogation program on September 6, 2006, when he announced that fourteen HVDs who had been held under CIA control would be transferred to Guantánamo Bay.

  Like many of the al-Qa’ida detainees, Abu Zubaydah originally thought that he could outsmart his questioners. He would offer up bits and pieces of information that he thought would give the impression of his providing useful material, without really compromising operational security.

  But Abu Zubaydah ultimately provided a motherlode of information, and not just from his interrogation. We were able to exploit data found on his cell phone, computer, and documents in his possession that greatly added to our understanding of his contacts and involvement in terrorism plotting.

  Interrogating Abu Zubaydah led us to Ramzi bin al-Shibh. A Yemeni by birth, Bin al-Shibh had studied in Germany with three of the eventual 9/11 hijackers. He had intended to be one of them and was deterred only after four attempts to obtain a U.S. visa failed. Instead, he served as the primary communication link between the hijackers and al-Qa’ida central, meeting with the plot’s ringleader, Mohammed Atta, in Germany and Spain, and staying in touch with the terrorists via phone and e-mail. With Zubaydah’s unintentional help, Bin al-Shibh was captured by Pakistani authorities on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, after a gun battle in Karachi.

  But no success story lasts long in Washington before someone tries to minimize it. A published report in 2006 contended that Abu Zubaydah was mentally unstable and that the administration had overstated his importance. Baloney. Abu Zubaydah had been at the crossroads of many al-Qa’ida operations and was in position to—and did—share critical information with his interrogators. Apparently, the source of the rumor that Abu Zubaydah was unbalanced was his personal diary, in which he adopted various personas. From that shaky perch, some junior Freudians leapt to the conclusion that Zubaydah had multiple personalities. In fact, Agency psychiatrists eventually determined that in his diary he was using a sophisticated li
terary device to express himself. And, boy, did he express himself.

  Abu Zubaydah’s diary was hundreds of pages long. Agency linguists translated enough of it to determine there was nothing of operational use in it, yet some Pentagon officials, including Paul Wolfowitz, seemed fascinated with the subject and kept bugging us to translate the whole document. We kept resisting. One day Wolfowitz hounded his CIA briefer. “Why wouldn’t we devote the resources to convert the book to English?” he demanded. “We know enough about the diary,” the briefer explained, “to know that it simply contains a young man’s thoughts about life—and especially about what he wanted to do with women.” “Well, what have you learned from that?” Wolfowitz asked. Without missing a beat, the briefer responded, “That men are pigs!” Wolfowitz’s military assistant laughed so hard he fell off his chair.

  But in Afghanistan there was no time for laughter. As we achieved success in driving al-Qa’ida out of Afghanistan, they began to search for other sanctuaries for their leadership. The organization sought places where they could plan future attacks against the United States with impunity from law enforcement, intelligence, and military operations. First, al-Qa’ida established itself in the settled areas of Pakistan. Later they moved into the ungoverned tribal areas of South Waziristan. Later still, Pakistani military operations drove them farther north, to areas where I believe their senior leaders continue to operate.

  In mid-2002 we learned that portions of al-Qa’ida’s leadership structure had relocated to Iran. This became much more problematic, leading to overtures to Iran and eventually face-to-face discussions with Iranian officials in December 2002 and early 2003. Ultimately, the al-Qa’ida leaders in Iran were placed under some form of house arrest, although the Iranians refused to deport them to their countries of origin, as we had requested.