The Watchers

by Shane Harris

  They were out there somewhere, leaving a trace, a tell. He could close his eyes as the sea roiled, befuddling the human senses, and imagine a blackness many feet below the cresting surface. The noise of wind and wave subsided as he sank down, deep. The sound of the waves and the whales faded. The chattering fish fell silent. And now, in the expanding silence, a new sound. A pulsing. A rush of water, followed by an unmistakably man-made, mechanical whirl. Propeller and steel hull, coming out of the black, emerging in this place. He could open his eyes now and see it there in front of him, just where he knew it would be.

  One crisp September morning in 1984, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a 1968 Annapolis graduate and a rising young star on the NSC staff, walked into Poindexter’s tiny West Wing office carrying a stack of photographs snapped by orbiting satellites. He had something he thought Poindexter urgently needed to see.

  The admiral was at his desk, poring over intelligence reports and damage assessments from the latest assault in Beirut. A few days earlier a truck bomber had struck the new U.S. embassy, which had moved to the suburbs to avoid the dangers of the capital. Poindexter examined the set of photos North had brought. Right away, he recognized a familiar scene.

  It was the Sheikh Abdullah barracks, an old military post in the Bekaa Valley now inhabited by fighters of the Amal terror group. He had suspected they were behind this. Not long after the airport bombing the NSC staff and the intelligence agencies had confirmed Amal as the culprit. Under orders from Reagan, plans were put in motion for a joint U.S.-French air strike on the camp. The president wanted to eliminate Amal and send a message to other would-be attackers, especially those who might be operating as Soviet proxy forces intent on driving the United States out of the Middle East.

  But the reprisal never came. Despite Reagan’s unmistakable instructions at an NSC staff meeting the day after the bombing, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger scuttled the U.S. raid moments before the planes were set to launch. A staunch opponent of the Marines’ mission from the beginning, Weinberger thought that an air strike would only inflame hostilities and potentially rupture ties with friendly Arab governments. But in light of the latest embassy bombing, the failure to act had sent an unmistakable message to Amal and their fanatical brethren: They could strike the United States with impunity. As if to confirm that fact, the Marines pulled out of Lebanon altogether in February 1984.

  Poindexter had tried to put the meddlesome secretary behind him. It was harder to forget the 241 men who perished in the attack. The last time the Marines had seen so many fall so fast, they were storming the beach at Iwo Jima.

  Poindexter examined the latest photos of the Abdullah barracks. He had always thought the compound looked more like a medieval castle. Hulking and impressive, it stood out amid the bleak desert expanse. An easy target, for sure. But there was something different about these new images. He looked closer, focusing on a row of gray cylindrical dots.

  Barrels, he thought to himself. No. Oil drums.

  Several of them, arranged in parallel lines, like cones on a driving course. They ran along the perimeter of the barracks, then turned a corner and stopped in front. Within the path, Poindexter could see smudged impressions in the ground. Tire tracks. Then, where the path curved, the tires left skid marks. High-speed turns.

  Poindexter knew that the embassy bomber had driven along the perimeter of the compound, then turned suddenly, careening into the front entrance. All at once the goblin emerged from the darkness, and as Poindexter pulled back from the photograph the realization hit him with the clarity of a single, sustained note. He was looking at a practice course.

  “How long have we had these photos?” he asked North.

  North replied that his CIA contact on terrorism, Charlie Allen, had just brought them to his attention. But they had been taken days before the embassy bombing. None of the photo analysts had realized their significance, and the images were never shared. If the CIA had notified the State Department, the embassy could have installed concrete barriers, or perhaps moved the staff temporarily. The Navy could have dispatched reconnaissance planes, and—hope of all hopes—bombed the damn fortress to the ground once and for all. Poindexter’s mind ticked off the options, each of which was predicated on seeing these photographs before it was too late.

  He had seen a new enemy. But now he recognized, more clearly than ever, that this was a new war. So he went looking for new weapons.

  Scientia est potentia. Knowledge is power. It was an old maxim, and one that Poindexter had lived and prospered by. And in their way, so had the many intelligence agencies—knowledge is power; therefore, do not share your knowledge.

  When he saw the photographs of the Sheikh Abdullah barracks, Poindexter called up his friend CIA director Bill Casey. The two had developed an honest rapport, and Casey was one of the few senior officials Poindexter felt he could speak to frankly.

  “We have got to do a better job sharing this kind of information,” Poindexter said. Casey agreed. It was inexcusable. He turned to Charlie Allen, North’s agency contact, who then set up a secure hotline connecting the State Department, the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the NSC staff with the CIA’s photographic intelligence center. This was the government’s primary resource for imagery analysis, and yet there had never been any data links into or out of it. That was about to change.

  As Poindexter took stock of other imbalances in the system, he found a bureaucracy bowing under its own weight. A slumgullion of nearly three dozen agencies claimed some role in counterterrorism, and collectively they were spending almost $2 billion a year on those activities. From the FBI to the State Department to the IRS, it seemed everyone had a finger in the pot. Each agency possessed an essential skill for preempting terrorism. But not one of them, acting alone, had achieved notable success. The agencies would have to work in concert now, like a well-tuned orchestra. Poindexter wanted to be their conductor.

  He did not assume the position. Indeed, following the disastrous defeats of 1983, the administration became highly motivated to go on the offensive. Reagan, in particular, was deeply moved by the plights of U.S. journalists and academics who’d been killed or kidnapped in Beirut by another Islamic fundamentalist group. The president of American University there had been shot, and in April 1984 the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, was kidnapped at gunpoint outside his apartment. The attack on Buckley, a decorated soldier and career CIA officer, pulled an emotional trigger in Reagan, who tended to see the world through personal stories of triumph and tragedy. He began writing about Buckley and the other hostages in his diary at night, calling them by their first names and displaying an almost familial fondness and concern.

  In April, just weeks after Buckley’s kidnapping, the White House sent four new antiterrorism laws to Congress, an early effort to shore up holes in national defenses and to take a more offensive posture. In a public statement accompanying the bills, the president’s aides coined a new phrase: “war against terrorism.” The White House threw down the rhetorical gauntlet, declaring it was “essential that we act immediately to cope with this menace” and address “this growing threat to our way of life.” The existential frame for a new war was set.

  The intelligence agencies and military Special Forces would have to walk point in this fight, in which preemption was prized above retaliation. Poindexter preferred to make the war a secret campaign, fought mostly out of the public eye and through actions taken without Congress’s approval. Presidential directives and executive orders became the preferred catalyst for jolting the recalcitrant system. And he turned the NSC staff into his base of operations.

  Two senior-level policy groups had been established early in the administration to advise the president during a crisis. But they’d never fulfilled their mandates. Now, Poindexter would reengineer that structure to deal more directly with terrorism. He found a willing ally in Vice President George H. W. Bush, who chaired the NSC’s Special Situation Group set up in Decembe
r of 1981. Bush had stood amid the smoldering stones of the Marine barracks only days after the bombing, and in a prelude to a similar scene two decades later, declared the nation “would not be cowed by terrorists.”

  Bush led a top-to-bottom review of the government’s haphazard counterterrorism and intelligence efforts, culminating in the most comprehensive examination to date. Poindexter headed a policy review group and proposed a slew of recommendations, including a new intelligence clearinghouse that would bring together all the terrorism reporting from across the government. The panel also called for stricter border control, enhanced aviation security, more intelligence sharing with foreign governments, and closer cooperation with the media, both to obtain more favorable coverage and to undercut terrorists’ use of the press as a megaphone.

  While the most senior levels of government tackled terrorism policy, Poindexter dove deeper into the bureaucracy to forge an operational response. Another NSC subcommittee, one without the glitter of a cabinet-level roster, gave him his most influential perch.

  The Crisis Pre-Planning Group had been established in the spring of 1982 to support the higher-level committees offering policy advice to the president. The CPPG focused on the nuts and bolts, the details that decision makers had neither time nor inclination to master. According to the group’s charter, the head was the deputy national security adviser. Poindexter turned the CPPG into the engine of the government’s antiterror campaign.

  The staff consisted of deputies from key national security departments—Defense, State, and Treasury—as well as the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The members had the power to recommend freezing individual and state assets, to develop covert intelligence programs, to communicate with ambassadors at all U.S. embassies, and to send proposals to the military chain of command. They met in the increasingly well-outfitted Situation Room or the Crisis Management Center, tapping into new data sources, holding teleconferences, and crafting a playbook for managing crises—whether caused by bands of terrorists or whole armies. The essential discipline was the same.

  Poindexter’s personal access to the president, a privilege he’d long enjoyed, gave the CPPG a rare bureaucratic muscle that the group flexed in one extraordinary way. By law, the president had to issue an intelligence “finding” whenever he planned to deploy CIA or other clandestine forces abroad. Drawn up at the agency level and eventually passed along to senior members of Congress, findings were customarily reviewed by the national security adviser or his deputy. He ensured they comported with the president’s policies and then passed them along to the commander in chief.

  Poindexter turned the CPPG into the clearinghouse for all intelligence findings. Poindexter and his crisis management team reviewed, vetted, and shaped every plan for covert action. Before anything moved forward for the president’s signature, Poindexter saw it first.

  The intimate group of deputies devised new ways to use covert forces in the field. They challenged themselves to think ahead of time about how to strike, especially with elite Special Forces and small commando teams that moved with stealth and agility. The CPPG had a singular focus: prevent crises before they happened. “Horizon scanning,” Poindexter liked to call it.

  Poindexter oversaw the creation of emergency teams at the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the FBI, all of which reported to command centers set up at their own agencies to stand watch during an emergency. The staff forged personal contacts with working-level intelligence officers, the career spy class that knew how to navigate institutional roadblocks. This was new territory for the White House. Before Poindexter’s arrival, it was not in the business of central control.

  In addition to the CPPG, Poindexter chaired yet another subgroup that focused solely on terrorism preplanning. But he left most of its management details to North, his favorite and, he thought, most capable staff officer. North, ten years Poindexter’s junior, had captivated the admiral, who had a history of taking bright, ambitious young officers into his charge and then occasionally giving them the con.

  North had felt overwhelmed when he arrived at the White House, shortly after Poindexter. Other military officers on the NSC staff held advanced degrees in international relations and political science. They were wonks. North was a Marine; his expertise lay in combat training and field operations.

  But he worked like a dog; he was loath to decline an assignment and often the first to volunteer. He became invaluable. A go-to man whom Poindexter gave responsibilities without questioning his capacity to handle them. While his colleagues struggled to keep up, North sailed ahead, and he never missed the chance to remind them of it. Poindexter knew that North exaggerated his own influence on the NSC staff. That he took credit for creating many of the new rules of which Poindexter was the principal author. He was, as Poindexter often conceded to Ollie’s detractors, flamboyant. But he was also indispensable. A man of seemingly infinite capacity who, Poindexter thought, would protect both their interests. If he pissed people off as he passed them by or stepped over them, then that was their problem, Poindexter figured, not Ollie’s.

  As the months rolled on, Poindexter could sense the system coming into alignment. Order and discipline were taking hold. The once ill-tuned layers of committees understood their roles better now. They had focused. Poindexter and his NSC terror fighters were making sense of information, corralling disparate data sources, and coming up with richer and more informative reports for the president than at any time in recent memory. They were, at last, starting to look like a respectable orchestra. All they needed now was a chance to play.

  CHAPTER 3

  AND HE SHALL PURIFY

  Poindexter arrived to a buzzing West Wing on the morning of Monday, October 7, 1985. The CIA’s operations center had received word less than an hour before that an Italian cruise ship had been taken over by Palestinian gunmen. A radio station in Sweden had picked up the distress call. Apart from those bare facts, the White House knew only that the vessel was somewhere in the Mediterranean.

  Hijack a ship? This was a new tactic. Poindexter was actually grateful that whoever these latest characters were they had chosen a slow-moving, contained vessel to mount their operation. Four months earlier Poindexter and his crisis team had scrambled to keep up with the hijackers of TWA Flight 847, which was en route from Athens to Rome. The terrorists had demanded the release of more than 700 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. For three days they and their 161 prisoners hopscotched around the Middle East, landing to refuel and negotiate as they brandished handguns before throngs of journalists assembled at each airport pit stop. Their demands unmet, the hijackers singled out a twenty-three-year-old Navy diver, Robert Stethem, beat him with the broken arm of a passenger seat, shot him through the head, and then dumped his limp body onto the tarmac at the Beirut airport before rolling cameras. Other passengers were stashed in hiding places in and around Beirut. The ordeal stretched on for two weeks and caused a global media spectacle that the NSC crisis team wished not to repeat.

  TWA 847’s captors had bought invaluable time as they hustled from country to country, involving ever more governments in their escapade. The U.S. military had no time to react. But a ship—that offered some distinct advantages. Presumably the vessel was still in international waters, where the military was freer to act without diplomatic incident.

  But there were other problems. Finding a cruise liner in the vastness of the Mediterranean would be like finding a fly on the wall while looking through a straw. And if the hijackers stayed off the radio, they’d make the search even harder. But if the crisis team could locate the ship and keep it from docking, then a commando team could storm the vessel and take it back. The hijackers also would have no means of escape in the open water. A battle at sea didn’t sound half bad to Poindexter.

  He called a meeting of the Crisis Pre-Planning Group and the Terrorist Incident Working Group, which had been formed in April of 1982 to provide tactical advice and support during an emergency. Ollie North
was in charge, leading a team drawn from the State Department, CIA, Pentagon, and FBI. By now the members had their roles down. They knew one another well, and they understood what their agencies could accomplish on short notice.

  More details trickled in over the next few hours. The ship, the Italian passenger liner Achille Lauro, had been hijacked by gunmen after leaving port in Alexandria, Egypt, on the sixth day of a twelve-day cruise. Americans were on board, though it wasn’t yet clear how many. A number of the passengers had disembarked in Alexandria to tour the pyramids, and they had planned to meet up with the ship again in another port.

  The intelligence agencies hadn’t identified the hijackers, who had yet to signal their intentions. Experience had taught the crisis team not to wait for demands and dead bodies. They must get ahead of the hijackers now, anticipate their next move.

  The team members sent word back to their home agencies. First, isolate the ship. The State Department contacted U.S. ambassadors in countries along the Mediterranean littoral; they should ask their host governments to refuse any docking request from Achille Lauro.

  Next, track the ship. The eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency trained their electronic ears for any radio transmissions from the terrorists or others trying to contact them. Meanwhile, the NSC staff fielded intelligence reports from friendly governments in the region, principally Israel. The Navy launched a search for Achille Lauro using radar and aerial reconnaissance. Poindexter advised to not let any aircraft hover over the ship if they did manage to find it. He didn’t want to give the hijackers a reason to start shooting.