The Watchers

by Shane Harris

  Weldon was surprised to hear this. He had read the report, and he didn’t recall a word about Able Danger. His chief of staff grabbed a copy, scanned through it, and told his boss that this code name was nowhere to be found in the pages.

  Shaffer said that he had contacted the commission staff and offered to tell them what he knew about Able Danger. In October 2003, some staffers flew to Bagram, Afghanistan, where Shaffer was stationed, and they interviewed him. It was late in the commission’s work, and back in Washington, members were writing the final report. The commission found Shaffer’s interview unsatisfying; he hadn’t provided enough definitive information, or proof, about Able Danger’s activities, and so the report never mentioned it.

  Weldon was baffled. As he’d just learned, Able Danger was the Special Operations Command’s program to hunt down and kill Al Qaeda members. It had been reviewed and approved by the top echelons of the military. How could this narrative be left out of the final accounting of the 9/11 terrorist attack, particularly since it appeared to show the military was moving in to thwart Al Qaeda? Weldon had no immediate explanation, but his confusion was turned into rage over what he learned next.

  Former members of the Able Danger team now claimed that they had identified the ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta, more than a year before the attacks. Using the IDC’s advanced analytics, they had zeroed in on a sleeper cell in New York. When team members tried to approach the FBI with the information so agents could investigate, they said, they were shut down by higher authorities. Eventually, all the intelligence Able Danger had collected was destroyed.

  It was a bombshell. Weldon had spent a fair share of his career in Congress railing against the intelligence and military bureaucracies. He had pitched the Information Dominance Center as a novel, cutting-edge capability for preventing acts of terrorism like the 9/11 attacks. Now he discovered that when the center had a chance to do just that, no one had lifted a finger. The Able Danger team had apparently been stymied by higher-ups in the Pentagon and dismissed by the FBI.

  Over the next few weeks Shaffer gave Weldon more details about Able Danger. It turned out that Weldon had actually become aware of the program much earlier, without fully realizing it. Two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, staff from the IDC had brought Weldon a smaller version of one of their massive link charts. It measured only two by three feet and was a mock-up prepared by a contractor that had once worked for the center.

  Weldon had acted as if it were a smoking gun. He’d left his office and headed for the White House. He had brought along Eileen Preisser, an analyst who had worked with Kleinsmith. She had become one of the congressman’s “friends” in the intelligence community.

  Weldon had shown the chart to Stephen Hadley, President Bush’s deputy national security adviser. It was a frantic time, with officials bracing for another attack. Weldon had been driven to show Hadley that the very capabilities he’d been promoting all these years had, in fact, revealed something remarkable—an Al Qaeda presence inside the United States.

  Hadley had taken a look at the chart, and he seemed impressed. “I have to show this to the big man,” he said, meaning Bush.

  It was the last Weldon ever saw or heard of that chart. Perhaps the congressman had believed that the NSC staff would investigate, and that he’d learn the truth eventually, because after that meeting with Hadley, Weldon didn’t speak publicly about the chart. Not until he learned that it was the product of a secret program that apparently had identified Atta.

  Throughout the spring and early summer of 2005 Weldon spoke with others who’d worked on the classified program. A new narrative emerged. These bright, innovative analysts from Army intelligence and at Special Operations had zeroed in on the 9/11 hijackers, and in the United States, possibly in Manhattan or Brooklyn. But, true to form, the recalcitrant and hidebound bureaucracy had failed to act.

  Weldon screamed cover-up. In June he took to the House floor in a forty-five-minute address. “For the first time, I can tell our colleagues that one of our agencies not only identified the New York cell of Mohamed Atta and two of the terrorists, but actually made a recommendation to bring the FBI in to take out that cell,” Weldon declared triumphantly. “Why, then, did they not proceed? That is a question that needs to be answered.”

  Weldon went to the press. In August the Able Danger story went national. Weldon was quoted by the wire services and the major papers, and he appeared on the news networks. Shaffer came forward with his own account. He said that he’d tried to alert officials at the FBI, and that he’d even set up meetings, but he was thwarted by senior Pentagon officials. The nation was gripped by this latest twist in the 9/11 saga. Had the United States government actually missed the chance to prevent the mass murder of nearly three thousand people?

  Weldon launched a crusade to expose the FBI and the Pentagon for covering up Able Danger’s discoveries. For him, that was the unforgivable sin. Weldon blasted the 9/11 Commission, which he thought had failed to see the program’s significance because it only conducted limited interviews with the former team members. He declared that the Bush administration’s efforts to dismiss Able Danger amounted to a scandal “worse than Watergate.”

  Weldon was raving. He looked unhinged. He made long, bombastic speeches, extolling the IDC and Able Danger but also rubbing the intelligence community’s nose in their own undeniable failures. He wanted to remind the world that he’d been clamoring for intelligence reform, and of how he’d told many administration officials to look closely at the IDC’s good work. Along with “cover-up” came another refrain: “I told you so.”

  Had a calmer voice spoken, the public might have learned the real truth about Able Danger. The story was far more complex, and more disheartening, than the one Weldon was telling.

  Erik Kleinsmith sure thought so.

  When Kleinsmith finally went public, in September, it was under oath before a Senate panel. He had ceded the media field to Weldon, who sucked all the oxygen out of the story anyway. For weeks Weldon had been raging over destroyed evidence and deleted charts. He railed against the Pentagon lawyers who got in the Able Danger team’s way. “I’ll tell you how stupid it was,” Weldon told the Associated Press during an interview in his office. “They put stickies on the faces of Mohamed Atta on the chart that the military intelligence unit had completed and they said you can’t talk to Atta because he’s here [legally].”

  The kernel of the story was correct. The lawyers did intercede over privacy regulations and concerns about U.S. persons. And the team did stick Post-it notes over the faces of people on the link charts. But Kleinsmith didn’t believe that Atta was among them. And he said so at the hearing.

  “I myself do not remember seeing either a picture or his name on any charts,” Kleinsmith told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

  The chairman, Arlen Specter, a Republican from Weldon’s home state of Pennsylvania, asked Kleinsmith whether he could corroborate the accounts of Preisser, Philpot, Shaffer, and now two others who also claimed they saw Atta.

  “I cannot corroborate them completely and say that, yes, they saw it,” Kleinsmith replied. He tried hard not to refute them. He was sure that they thought what they saw was real. “I believed them implicitly,” Kleinsmith said. But he wouldn’t and couldn’t back up their story.

  Specter asked Kleinsmith whether Able Danger had identified a specific terrorist operation in a U.S. city.

  “No specific operation in the United States,” Kleinsmith said. “Only a presence that was known.”

  Kleinsmith was in the best position to know. And sitting before the imposing dais, he described how he’d personally destroyed all the evidence about Al Qaeda’s global and U.S. presences.

  “We were forced to destroy all data,” he said. All the charts, all the reporting. Anything related to Able Danger was gone, he told the senators.

  They seemed incredulous, as if Kleinsmith was surely mistaken when he said everything was gone. “What
kind of information was deleted?” Specter inquired.

  “Everything,” Kleinsmith replied. “Everything that we had.” How could he say it more clearly? There was nothing left.

  Kleinsmith spelled out how Able Danger progressed, how it moved from an information harvest into a painstaking but technologically enhanced phase of analysis. “We were trying to get a worldwide perspective of exactly where Al Qaeda functioned and operated,” he said. “We were unable to get to the details for specific persons or information in the United States before we were shut down.”

  If Shaffer or Preisser or anyone else had actually seen Atta on the charts, they had only their memories to back them up. All the physical evidence was gone.

  Specter had a report in front of him with a particularly dramatic statement from Kleinsmith. “I want to know if this is an accurate quote, that every night when you go to bed, you believe that if the program had not shut down U.S. intelligence on these subjects, that 9/11 could have been prevented.”

  “That’s not completely accurate,” Kleinsmith replied. “What I have said is, yes, I do go to bed every night, and other members of our team do as well, that if we had not been shut down, we would have been able to at least present something or assist the United States in some way.”

  “Could we have prevented 9/11?” he continued. “I don’t think—” But then he stopped himself. “I can never speculate to that extent we could have done that.”

  Specter followed up. “But you think you might have been able to glean some intelligence that could have been helpful along that line?”

  “Yes, sir,” Kleinsmith replied.

  His was a more nuanced and ambiguous answer. And it was the one ultimately borne out by the record and an extensive investigation. The Defense Department’s inspector general interviewed all the relevant witnesses and found no evidence to corroborate any claim that Able Danger members were prohibited by the Pentagon from contacting the FBI. Officials reviewed more than eighty thousand documents still in the department’s possession. No one found a chart or any record from Able Danger with the name Mohamed Atta.

  If such evidence had existed, the odds of investigators finding them were unlikely, since they’d probably have been destroyed. But in interviews with the investigators, team members who claimed to have seen Atta contradicted themselves, and at times appeared uncertain about what they’d actually seen or could remember years later. The Pentagon’s final report concluded that Able Danger never identified Atta, or any of the other 9/11 terrorists, as possible threats.

  Kleinsmith wanted the senators to understand that it wasn’t his call to destroy the intelligence cache. He had fought against it. But when it came time to sit at his computer, point at the toxic documents, and eradicate them he was doing just as the Army had trained him.

  “I understood that the regulation was written before the Internet, before data mining,” Kleinsmith said. “Yes, I could have conveniently forgotten to delete the data, and we could have kept it.” He had contemplated doing just that. “But I knowingly would have been in violation.”

  Kleinsmith was no hidebound bureaucrat. He was torn up over what had happened. It was his analysis, after all. Weldon later dismissed Kleinsmith as a know-nothing. His version of the narrative didn’t fit with Weldon’s cover-up story.

  Kleinsmith didn’t believe there was one, at least not the conspiracy Weldon was peddling. And he also thought the Atta question was an utter distraction. The bigger story—the real scandal, he thought—was why the Pentagon had shut down a unit that made more progress on a national security threat of historic proportions than even the best analysts in the intelligence community. Kleinsmith thought that officials made their choices out of fear and ignorance. The Pentagon saw “data mining” as a dirty term. It portended an invasion of privacy, a waste of time and money. Kleinsmith thought that the lawyers had missed what it was really all about, from an analyst’s point of view: making connections, finding anomalous patterns, working faster and more accurately.

  But there was another question no one wanted to ask. Even if Able Danger had identified Atta . . . so what? How would the analysts have known who he was? Or why he mattered? Clearly, those who believed now that they’d seen his face then didn’t know Atta’s plans. Able Danger couldn’t draw the contours of a plot. The analysts couldn’t pinpoint the day and time of an attack. And that was the most maddening part of it all. Kleinsmith got nervous when he saw the presence of terrorists in the United States, but he was nearly petrified when he realized that he couldn’t do anything about them.

  Even with the IDC’s hyperanalysis, Kleinsmith simply didn’t have the information he needed. The real travesty, to him, was that he hadn’t been allowed to go look for it.

  Not long after 9/11, Kleinsmith left the military. He took a job with a big Beltway firm teaching intelligence analysis. There his services were more in demand than ever.

  A long list of federal employees wanted to learn his craft. Kleinsmith’s former employer, the IDC, became his biggest customer. It was a poetic twist that never failed to amuse him.

  But feds weren’t the only ones lining up for Kleinsmith’s lessons. State and local police forces and corporate security officials clamored for the intelligence on steroids that he had practiced in government. In an age of terror, everyone wanted to see what was coming. Knowledge had never been more powerful.

  Kleinsmith led a team of more than two dozen instructors. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, five of them deployed to Iraq to run data analysis on the burgeoning insurgency there. Unbeknownst to Kleinsmith, John Poindexter’s technology had played a role there as well. He sat on the board of a start-up firm called Saffron. It was building a tool used by forces in Iraq to help identify “entities,” which were defined as people, places, and things involved in insurgent networks. The tool mimicked human memory by recalling associations among those people, places, and things. Most tools looked merely for the occurrences of words, but Saffron was focused on their context and the frequency of association. Each word representing an entity in a set of data had its own “memory” about all the other words it had ever been associated with. In this way the tool could learn as it ingested more information, the way humans did.

  Like Poindexter, Kleinsmith had become part of an expanding private intelligence industry. A new wave of anxiety swelled as data collection firms like ChoicePoint, which had been hired by the Justice Department after 9/11 to help track terrorist suspects, worked more closely with the government to amass information about individuals. But when news about Able Danger broke, no cries of “domestic spying” were heard.

  Few were concerned that a secret Army team had conducted intelligence operations inside the United States. Indeed, that part of the story—the one that Pentagon lawyers, congressional staffers, and Kleinsmith himself thought would fail the Washington Post smell test—barely played. Instead, people were outraged, and deeply confused, over how the government might have found evidence of the 9/11 plot and done nothing about it—except to destroy all the records. The lesson of Able Danger was the opposite of Total Information Awareness. If data analysis actually could find terrorists, then the public would embrace it. They might even demand it.

  That theory was about to be tested with yet another blockbuster revelation of work done in shadow.

  CHAPTER 25

  REASONABLE BELIEFS

  Mike Hayden was going to stop the New York Times. And the big man was going to help him.

  In early December 2005, the former director of the NSA, now the second most senior spy in government, joined President Bush in an Oval Office meeting with Bill Keller, the Times’s executive editor. The paper’s publisher and Washington bureau chief came along. Two Times reporters had been working up a story on the warrantless surveillance program, after mining a network of sources for months. They had satisfied Keller that the story was solid enough to run. Bush told Keller that was a very bad idea.

  The Times was about to blo
w the cover on one of the most vital weapons in the war on terror, the president argued. Bush said he regarded the NSA’s surveillance as one of the crown jewels of national security. If the targets knew that they were being watched, and how, they might be able to evade detection. If that happened, a vital stream of intelligence could dry up.

  Keller had faced questions before about whether to report on intelligence sources and methods. It was a tricky issue, almost always fraught with tension between the government’s need for stealth and the public’s right to know. This story posed all those challenges.

  But Bush had another message for the newsman. This was no ordinary program. If the story forced the NSA to shut it down, or gave the terrorists enough insight to reverse engineer the government’s surveillance strategy, then the newspaper should feel responsible. “When we’re called up to explain to Congress why there was another attack you should be sitting beside us at the table,” Bush said. The president of the United States was warning him: If we get hit again, you’ll have blood on your hands.

  Keller took the president seriously. He sat on a couch only a few feet from Bush, who was seated next to Hayden. Stephen Hadley, now the national security adviser, was also there, as was Harriet Miers, the president’s counsel. (Alberto Gonzales had become attorney general after Bush won reelection.) Prior to the Oval Office meeting senior-level and cabinet officials had tried to convince the Times not to run the story. The debate had dragged on for more than a year now. Keller had been persuaded to hold off, but now he felt that the reporters had brought home the evidence that this was a good and important story. Keller had pondered it. In the end, he decided that this wasn’t a story about sources and methods but about warrants. It was about the law.

  Keller and his two colleagues left the White House and went to catch taxis. He told the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, that he wanted to sleep on it, but that he didn’t think anything the president said would change his mind. On December 16, the Times published the story on the front page. The program was in the open.