On September 11, all of that would change.
As the World Trade Center towers crumbled to the ground, so too did the system of oversight and review of lethal covert ops that had been carefully constructed over the course of the previous decade.
“ONLY A CRISIS—actual or perceived—produces real change.” So wrote the conservative icon Milton Friedman in his book Capitalism and Freedom. Friedman was a key adviser to successive Republican administrations and held tremendous influence over many officials in the Bush White House. He had mentored Rumsfeld early in his career, and Cheney and the leading neocons in the administration regularly sought his counsel. Friedman preached, “When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
For the senior officials in Bush’s national security and defense teams who spent the eight Clinton years—and more—developing those alternatives, the 9/11 attacks, and almost unanimous support from the Democratic-controlled Congress, provided a tremendous opportunity to make their ideas inevitable. In an eerie prediction of things to come, the neocons of the Project for a New American Century had asserted a year to the month before 9/11 in their report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” Cheney and Rumsfeld may not have been able to see 9/11 coming, but they proved masters at exploiting the attacks. “The 9/11 attack was one of those events in history potent enough to stimulate fresh thought and disturb the complacent,” recalled Feith. “It created an opportunity to give many people—friends and enemies, in the United States and abroad—a new perspective. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and I shared the view that the president had a duty to use his bully pulpit.”
Under the Constitution, it is the Congress, not the president, that has the right to declare war. But seventy-two hours after 9/11, Congress took a radical step in a different direction. On September 14, 2001, the House and Senate gave President Bush unprecedented latitude to wage a global war, passing the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). It stated that “the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” The use of the term “persons” in the authorization was taken by the administration as a green light for assassinations. It passed the House with only one opposing vote and the Senate with no dissent. The lone “Nay” vote against the AUMF came from liberal California Democrat Barbara Lee. “However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint,” Lee declared, voice trembling, as she spoke on the floor of the House that day. “There must be some of us who say, let’s step back for a moment and think through the implications of our actions today—let us more fully understand their consequences,” she added in her submitted remarks. “We must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.” Lee’s two-minute speech was the extent of any congressional push-back to the sweeping war powers and authority the White House was requesting.
Empowered by an overwhelming, bipartisan endorsement of a global, borderless war against a stateless enemy, the Bush administration declared the world a battlefield. We “have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will,” Dick Cheney proclaimed on NBC’s Meet the Press on September 16, 2001, hinting at what was to come. “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful.” The president publicly signed the AUMF into law on September 18, 2001, but it was the order he signed a day earlier in secret that was even more momentous. The secret presidential directive, which remains classified, granted the CIA authority to capture and hold suspected militants across the globe, which would lead to the creation of a network of what administration officials internally referred to as “black sites” that could be used to imprison and interrogate prisoners. The directive also wiped out the roadblocks of oversight and interagency review from the process of authorizing targeted killings. Perhaps most significantly, it ended the practice of the president signing off on each lethal, covert operation. The administration’s lawyers concluded that the ban on assassinations did not apply to people it classified as “terrorists,” and it gave great latitude to the CIA for authorizing kill operations on the go. In the beginning, President Bush wanted the CIA to take the lead. He had just the man for the job.
COFER BLACK spent much of his career in the shadows in Africa. He cut his CIA teeth in Zambia during the Rhodesian War and then in Somalia and South Africa during the apartheid regime’s brutal war against the black majority. During his time in Zaire, Black worked on the Reagan administration’s covert weapons program to arm anti-Communist forces in Angola. In the early 1990s, long before most in the counterterrorism community, Black became obsessed with bin Laden and declared him a major threat who needed to be neutralized. From 1993 to 1995, Black worked, under diplomatic cover, at the US Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, where he served as CIA station chief. Bin Laden was also in Sudan, building up his international network into what the CIA would describe at the end of Black’s tour as “the Ford Foundation of Sunni Islamic terrorism.” Black’s agents, who were tracking bin Laden, worked under a Clinton-era “operating directive” that restricted them to intelligence collection on bin Laden and his network. Black wanted the authority to kill the Saudi billionaire, but the Clinton White House had not yet signed the lethal findings it eventually did after the 1998 African embassy bombings. “Unfortunately, at that time permissions to kill—officially called Lethal Findings—were taboo in the outfit,” said CIA operative Billy Waugh, who worked closely with Black in Sudan. “In the early 1990s we were forced to adhere to the sanctimonious legal counsel and the do-gooders.” Among Waugh’s rejected ideas was allegedly a plot to kill bin Laden in Khartoum and dump his body at the Iranian Embassy in an effort to pin the blame on Tehran, an idea Waugh said Cofer Black “loved.”
In the early days of the Bush administration, Black began agitating once again for authorization to go after bin Laden. “He used to come in my office and regale me with all the times when he had tried to do something about Osama bin Laden, prior to 9/11,” recalled Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the time. He told me Black said that “because of the lack of courage of Delta [Force], and lack of bureaucratic competence in the CIA, he’d never been able to do anything.” According to Wilkerson, Black told him that “every time they presented a possibility to Delta, for example, they would come up with this list of questions they had to answer, like, ‘What kind of nails are in the door?’ ‘What kind of lock is on the door?’ ‘Give us the serial number on the lock,’ and all this kind of stuff, which is just standard SOF [Special Operations Forces] stuff for not wanting to do something.” Much to Black’s satisfaction, such meticulous practices would soon be dispensed with altogether.
On August 6, 2001, President Bush was at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, where he received a presidential daily brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” It twice mentioned the possibility that al Qaeda operatives may try to hijack airplanes, saying FBI information “indicates patterns of suspicious activity in [the United States] consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.” Nine days later, Black addressed a secret Pentagon c
ounterterrorism conference. “We’re going to be struck soon,” Black said. “Many Americans are going to die, and it could be in the U.S.”
After 9/11, Bush and Cheney rewrote the rules of the game. Black no longer needed to hold a gun to anyone’s head to get permission for lethal operations. “My personal emotion was, It is now officially started,” Black recalled. “The analogy would be the junkyard dog that had been chained to the ground was now going to be let go. And I just couldn’t wait.” In his initial meeting with President Bush after the 9/11 attacks, Black outlined how CIA paramilitaries would deploy to Afghanistan to hunt down bin Laden and his henchmen. “When we’re through with them, they will have flies walking across their eyeballs,” Black promised, in a performance that would earn him a designation in the inner circle of the administration as “the flies-on-the-eyeballs guy.” The president reportedly loved Black’s style. When he told Bush the operation would not be bloodless, the president said, “Let’s go. That’s war. That’s what we’re here to win.” Philip Giraldi, a career CIA case officer who went through “The Farm,” the CIA’s training facility in rural Virginia, with Black, recalled running into him in Afghanistan shortly after the first US teams hit the ground post-9/11. “I hadn’t seen him in many years,” Giraldi told me. “I was astonished at how narrow-minded he had become. He would basically keep talking about bringing back bin Laden’s head on a platter—and he meant his head on a platter.” Giraldi said that Black “had a narrow view of things,” and loathed America’s closest European allies, including the British, saying, “He didn’t trust them a bit.” When it came to the emerging US global war, Giraldi said, Black was “a real enthusiast, which is unusual in the Agency. In the Agency, people tend to be kind of skeptical. If you’re an intelligence officer in the field, you get skeptical of a lot of things real fast. But Cofer was one of these enthusiasts.”
On September 19, the CIA team, code-named Jawbreaker, deployed. Black gave his men direct and macabre instructions. “Gentlemen, I want to give you your marching orders, and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed this with the President, and he is in full agreement,” Black told covert CIA operative Gary Schroen and his team. “I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead,” Black demanded. “They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the President. I promised him I would do that.” Schroen said it was the first time in his thirty-year career that he had been ordered to assassinate an adversary rather than attempting a capture. Black asked if he had made himself clear. “Perfectly clear, Cofer,” Schroen told him. “I don’t know where we’ll find dry ice out there in Afghanistan, but I think we can certainly manufacture pikes in the field.” Black later explained why this would be necessary. “You’d need some DNA,” Black said. “There’s a good way to do it. Take a machete, and whack off his head, and you’ll get a bucketful of DNA, so you can see it and test it. It beats lugging the whole body back!” When Russian diplomats meeting with Black in Moscow ahead of the full US invasion of Afghanistan reminded Black of the Soviet defeat at the hands of the US-backed mujahedeen, Black shot back. “We’re going to kill them,” he said. “We’re going to put their heads on sticks. We’re going to rock their world.” In a sign of things to come, the covert operations Black organized immediately after 9/11 relied heavily on private contractors. The initial CIA team consisted of about sixty former Delta Force, ex-SEALs and other Special Forces operators working for Black as independent contractors, making up the majority of the first Americans to go into Afghanistan after 9/11.
In the beginning, the list of people who had been pre-cleared for CIA targeted killing was small: estimates ranged from seven to two dozen people, including bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri. And the operations were largely focused on Afghanistan. On October 7, President Bush officially launched “Operation Enduring Freedom,” and the US military began a campaign of air strikes, followed by a ground invasion. In the early days of the Afghanistan campaign, CIA personnel and Special Forces worked in concert. “We are fighting for the CT [counterterrorism] objectives in the Afghan theater,” the chief of counterterrorist special operations wrote in a memo to CIA personnel in October 2001. “And although this sets high goals in very uncertain, shifting terrain, we are also fighting for the future of CIA/DOD integrated counterterrorism warfare around the globe. While we will make mistakes as we chart new territory and new methodology, our objectives are clear, and our concept of partnership is sound.” At the time, the CIA had a very small paramilitary capability, but as the lead agency responsible for hunting down those responsible for 9/11, the CIA could borrow Special Operations Forces for missions.
Rumsfeld had no interest in being the support team for the CIA, and the Agency’s emerging centrality in the growing US war did not sit well with the defense secretary. Rumsfeld had nothing but contempt for the Clinton administration, and he, Cheney and their neoconservative allies thought that the CIA had become a watered-down liberal iteration of its former self. Covert action, they believed, had been handcuffed by lawyers and unnecessary and intrusive congressional oversight that would hinder what they perceived as life-and-death operations that needed to be conducted in secret. Although Cofer Black shared Rumsfeld’s zeal for killing “terrorists,” that was not enough. Rumsfeld wanted nothing to do with CIA oversight bureaucrats, and he didn’t want his forces under CIA control. Cheney had made clear that under this administration, CIA lawyers and congressional committees would not be viewed as defenders of the law or as part of a necessary system of checks and balances. As Rumsfeld was fond of saying, these institutions were a hindrance to “taking the fight to the terrorists.” Lawyers would be consulted to rubber-stamp secret policies and only certain, select members of Congress would be consulted. Briefings to Congress, including mandated full-access briefings to the elite “Gang of Eight” congressional members who were historically briefed on intelligence operations regarding covert actions, would be censored and redacted internally at the White House, meaning a sanitized version would be given to US lawmakers.
In the months after 9/11, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their teams launched several major initiatives aimed at ensuring that no bureaucracy would stand in the way of their plans for the unchecked use of the darkest US forces. Cheney wanted to disabuse the CIA of the idea that it had any kind of independence. Rather than having the Agency serve as the president’s premier fact-checking and intelligence resource, the CIA’s new job would be to reinforce predetermined policy. Cheney wanted to gut the interagency reviews of proposed lethal actions that were standard under Clinton. Soon after 9/11, the White House convened a group of senior administration lawyers whose job it would be to legally justify torture, kidnapping and assassination. The group secretly dubbed itself the “War Council” and was led by David Addington, Cheney’s counsel and longtime adviser who had worked with him on the “minority report” defending Iran-Contra. It also included White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and his deputy, Tim Flanigan; the Pentagon’s general counsel, William Haynes; and Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo. The War Council explicitly excluded the State Department’s general counsel and other military and Justice Department lawyers who had historically been included in reviewing legal structures for combating terrorism. This point was clear: this group was to develop legal justification for tactics in a covert dirty war, not to independently assess their legality.
To fight its global war, the White House made extensive use of the tactics Cheney had long advocated. Central to its “dark side” campaign would be the use of presidential findings that, by their nature, would greatly limit any effective congressional oversight. According to the National Security Act of 1947, the president is required to issue a finding before undertaking a covert action. The law states that the action must comply with US law and the Constitution. The presidential finding signed by Bush on Septemb
er 17, 2001, was used to create a highly classified, secret program code-named Greystone. GST, as it was referred to in internal documents, would be an umbrella under which many of the most clandestine and legally questionable activities would be authorized and conducted in the early days of the Global War on Terror (GWOT). It relied on the administration’s interpretation of the AUMF passed by Congress, which declared any al Qaeda suspect anywhere in the world a legitimate target. In effect, the presidential finding declared all covert actions to be preauthorized and legal, which critics said violated the spirit of the National Security Act. Under GST, a series of compartmentalized programs were created that, together, effectively formed a global assassination and kidnap operation. Authority for targeted kills was radically streamlined. Such operations no longer needed direct presidential approval on a case-by-case basis. Black, the head of the Counterterrorism Center, could now directly order hits.
The day Bush signed the memorandum of notification, which among other initiatives, authorized a High Value Detainee program, CTC personnel and “selected foreign counterparts” were briefed on it in Washington, DC. “Cofer [Black] presented a new Presidential authorization that broadened our options for dealing with terrorist targets—one of the few times such a thing had happened since the CIA was officially banned from carrying out assassinations in 1976,” recalled Tyler Drumheller, the former head of CIA clandestine ops in Europe. “It was clear that the Administration saw this as a war that would largely be fought by intelligence assets. This required a new way of operating.” John Rizzo, a veteran CIA attorney who helped draft the authorization, later said, “I had never in my experience been part of or ever seen a presidential authorization as far-reaching and as aggressive in scope. It was simply extraordinary.”
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