Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  As his term drew to a close, Calderón broadcast his success in capturing two-thirds of Mexico’s most-wanted drug lords without mentioning the key role that the United States had played. However, when Enrique Nieto replaced Calderón as president in December 2012, he immediately announced that he was abandoning the kingpin strategy. Nieto’s attorney general, Jesus Murillo Karam, revealed soon after taking office that the kingpin strategy had indeed caused the downfall of a few major cartel leaders. But there were now no fewer than sixty–eighty smaller, but no less violent, criminal drug groups operating in the country. Eliminating kingpins, said Karam, had made matters far worse. “It led to the seconds-in-command—generally the most violent, the most capable of killing—starting to be empowered and generating their own groups, generating another type of crime, spawning kidnapping, extortion and protection rackets.”

  Such acknowledgments of cause and effect are rare, certainly when the stakes for interested parties are as high and lucrative as they have been in the drug war or would be in the counterterror and counterinsurgency wars to come. As Barry Crane, Rivolo’s partner at IDA, a successful habitué of national security culture, emphasized to me, “[H]igh value targeting is required for political sustainability. Promotions are usually in order for those who successfully bring down a significant antagonist.”

  This point did not escape the DEA’s senior partners at the CIA, as they contemplated a mission that would come to dwarf anything the drug warriors had ever contemplated. Yet, as we shall see, the same factors that had undermined the kingpin strategy would apply in the world of counterterrorism, a lesson that was driven home at a very, very high cost in lives.

  Counterterrorism at the Central Intelligence Agency had lowly beginnings, born as it was out of William Casey’s quest to exercise greater control over the agency he directed. Casey, an ideologically driven lawyer who had managed Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, was inclined to weaken the power of established bailiwicks such as the Directorate of Intelligence, which had an irritating habit of (occasionally) serving up politically unpalatable assessments. To run the new Counterterrorism Center he selected one of his favorite operations officers, Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, a flamboyantly irresponsible cold warrior who liked to demonstrate his disdain for authority routinely by showing up for work in a flight suit. Clarridge lived the spirit of the wartime OSS (in which Casey had served) and, among other brain waves, conceived the operation to mine Nicaragua’s harbors that earned the United States a condemnation by the World Court in 1986. He was also deeply involved in the illegal Iran-Contra scheme to finance the Nicaraguan Contras through covert arms sales to Iran, which subsequently earned him an indictment on seven counts of perjury (and a pardon from George Bush Sr.). Other senior officials at headquarters approved his appointment, hoping that if Clarridge were confined to the relative obscurity of the new center, he might not cause too much further havoc.

  One novel feature of the Counterterrorism Center was that it employed intelligence analysts from the agency’s intelligence directorate as well as operational officers from the Directorate of Operations and reported directly to Casey. This way Casey could more completely control all intelligence on terrorism, molding it as he saw fit. With Clarridge, with whom he had formed a close working relationship during the Iran-Contra machinations, helming the new center, he could undertake projects without the bother of interference from agency bureaucrats.

  Naturally, this creation did not sit well with established CIA offices, igniting an antipathy that continued after Casey left the scene. Ordered to assign personnel to staff the CTC, they reacted in time-honored fashion by sending over their “deadwood.” In addition, as the Soviet empire crumbled and fell, a huge swath of the agency’s employees found themselves suddenly without a function. “These were people who had done nothing else but look at Russia and Eastern Europe for forty years,” recalled a former senior officer in the agency’s clandestine service. “They knew nothing about the Middle East or Islam.” So it was that, among others, Michael Scheuer, a man who up to that point had enjoyed a relatively placid career as an analyst on the European desk, joined the war on terrorism. (Coincidentally or not, a priority cold war mission for the East European Division had been picking out high-value targets to be attacked in the event of World War III.)

  Whereas counterterrorism in the 1980s had searched for the controlling hand of the Soviet Union, the focus in the early 1990s shifted to Iran, now deemed to be the chief fomenter of terrorist plots. Gradually however, the lengthening shadow of Islamic jihadism, marinated in the West’s cold war crusade against the Soviets in Afghanistan, fell across Washington, and the Counterterrorism Center found its mission. At the core of the new threat, as perceived in Washington, was the intriguing figure of Osama bin Laden, the charismatic Saudi who had secured the loyalty of the CIA’s old Arab Mujaheddin allies from the anti-Soviet Afghan war (a relationship the agency was keen to forget and at pains to obscure) later known as al-Qaeda.

  Therefore, encouraged by the White House, the agency set up a special unit in January 1996 solely dedicated to targeting bin Laden and his network. Whether wittingly or not, the kingpin strategy was thus transplanted to the Middle East. Heading the unit, which he code-named Alec Station after his son, was Michael Scheuer. The new unit, separately housed in a suburban office park a few miles from CIA headquarters and initially employing twelve people, did not impress old hands in the clandestine service. “Scheuer reacted to every threat as if it were existential,” one of them told me later. Another station officer, Fred Turco, was nicknamed “Abu Breathless” for his excited and widely broadcast alarms every time he thought he detected signs of al-Qaeda at work. Although Scheuer’s unit was supposed to be tracking the terrorist network worldwide, his attention was focused almost exclusively on the individual target of bin Laden himself. “They were really meant to be just analysts, but they got caught up in the idea of being ‘operational,’ going out in the field and all that stuff, which they really had no idea how to do,” recalls one former senior officer.

  Scheuer himself paints a different picture, one of an agency and an administration that were halfhearted at best about confronting bin Laden. “When we set up the unit in 1996 we asked the Saudis for some basic material on bin Laden, like his birth certificate, his financial records—obvious stuff,” Scheuer told me. “We got nothing. So the next year we asked again, still nothing, and the year after. Finally in 1999, we get a message from the station chief in Riyadh, a Mr. John Brennan. He said we should stop sending these requests, as it was ‘upsetting the Saudis.’ We had ten opportunities to kill or capture bin Laden. Clinton vetoed every one of them.” It should come as no surprise that given their lowly status, the counterterrorists did not fare well in the inevitable battles for budget allocations, and in fact the bin Laden unit’s operations were funded not out of the agency’s baseline budget but out of a separate supplemental allocation solicited from Congress.

  Coincidentally the CIA already had on the payroll a team of Afghan mercenaries originally recruited, funded, and equipped to hunt for Mir Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani who had gunned down a number of CIA employees on their way into work at Langley back in 1993 before he escaped to the Afghan/Pakistani borderlands. Following Kasi’s capture (with no help from the Afghans) in 1997, the team, code-named FD/Trodpint, was now available to pursue bin Laden. On two occasions they reported that they had in fact located the elusive Saudi, once at the Tarnak Farms compound, an estate outside Kandahar he often visited, and once in January 1999 in western Afghanistan accompanying a falcon-hunting party of wealthy princes from the United Arab Emirates. Despite Scheuer’s heated demands that the United States take the opportunity to strike bin Laden, the White House demurred. Even if the mercenaries’ information had proved correct, a missile attack would have inevitably killed a lot of other people as well. Such concerns loomed larger in those days than they would in decades to come, especially when the collateral damage could have
included, as with the hunting party, numerous wealthy members of a ruling Arabian Gulf family allied with the United States and well connected in Washington. Even when the White House did authorize a cruise missile strike against a bin Laden camp in Khost in eastern Afghanistan in retaliation for the bloody attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, bin Laden himself was absent, having decided to visit Kandahar instead of Khost that day. In retrospect, of course, this sporadic and ill-planned pursuit of bin Laden could be made to look good, so in 2006, when “kill” had become a customary boast in presidential vocabulary, former president Clinton told Fox News, “I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. I got close to killing him.”

  Despite Clinton’s bravado, there was apparently a legal difficulty. Some CIA officials were leery of pursuing bin Laden to the death on the grounds that this might be illegal. According to one former CIA official, “The directive from the Clinton White House was fuzzy, in part due to the strong reservations of [Attorney General] Janet Reno. The agency understood that it had authorization to capture [bin Laden], but that the references regarding the assassination of OBL were not clear.” This official, echoing a common theme, also declared that Scheuer was “typically way off base in alleging that there were good clandestine sources on the actual whereabouts of OBL.”

  His requests denied, Scheuer rendered himself even more unpopular at Langley by broadcasting angry complaints around Washington, complete with specific criticisms of individual officials. Unsurprisingly, he was soon dismissed from the command of Alec and sent off to a more obscure post. Retiring in 2004 and trading on his counterterrorism credentials to establish himself as an expert commentator, Scheuer grew a long beard and took to respectfully citing bin Laden as enjoying worldwide support from the Muslim community. He even earned a word of commendation from the man himself, who declared in a September 2007 video, “If you want to understand what’s going on and if you would like to get to know some of the reasons for your losing the war against us, then read the book of Michael Scheuer.”

  Just as Scheuer exited the bin Laden unit, a new chief was installed as head of the Counterterrorism Center, Cofer Black. Black had spent much of his career in the agency’s Africa Division, engaged in various half-forgotten but often vicious cold war operations, such as the murderous Angolan Civil War, in which the CIA was massively engaged in aiding Jonas Savimbi, an insurgent leader with a taste for burning his enemies alive as witches. Recalled affectionately by a former colleague for his taste for “childish pranks” against the KGB and other opponents, Black was very much in the flamboyant tradition of Dewey Clarridge and other custodians of the old OSS spirit, “an actor,” as another former colleague describes him.

  The hunt had not yet yielded any significant intelligence on the al-Qaeda leader’s plans for future operations. Nor had there been even the slightest success in planting agents inside his network, despite the fact that foreign jihadis, such as the American youth John Walker Lindh, had apparently little trouble in gaining access to extremist camps in Afghanistan. Instead, attention and money were devoted to the Afghan bounty hunters and later an Uzbek group, furnished by their country’s dictator, for zero return. The bloody attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998, which killed 224 people, had therefore come as a complete surprise. The record did not improve following Scheuer’s departure. Though there were fewer histrionics, there was little increase in useful intelligence about al-Qaeda operations, though this was not for want of opportunity.

  In December 1999, the National Security Agency intercepted a phone call to a known al-Qaeda safe house in Yemen mentioning that two members were headed to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. En route, the passport of one, Khalid al-Midhar, who would later help fly American Airlines Flight 77 into the south face of the Pentagon, was copied by Dubai airport security and passed to Alec Station in Washington. Although it bore a multiple-entry visa for the United States that had been issued in Saudi Arabia, the CIA office did not inform the FBI that someone connected to al-Qaeda intended to travel to the United States.

  Amazingly, a pair of FBI agents assigned as liaisons to the bin Laden unit knew that two known terrorists were headed to the U.S. but were forbidden to relay this vital intelligence to their home agency, which was responsible for domestic terrorist threats. As Agent Mark Rossini later related, he told a CIA official, “What’s going on? You know, we’ve got to tell the Bureau about this. These guys clearly are bad. One of them, at least, has a multiple-entry visa to the U.S. We’ve got to tell the FBI,” only to be told by the CIA officer: “No, it’s not the FBI’s case, not the FBI’s jurisdiction.” Regrettably, Rossini did not dare violate the order. As he later excused himself, “If we had picked up the phone and called the Bureau, I would have been violating the law. I would have broken the law. I would have been removed from the building that day. I would have had my clearances suspended, and I would be gone.”

  The CIA’s determination to keep information about al-Midhar and al-Hazmi (the other al-Qaeda member headed to the United States) away from its domestic intelligence colleagues has given rise to a justifiable suspicion, shared by Richard Clarke, who was at the time the senior counterterrorism official at the White House, that the agency was nurturing plans to recruit the pair as agents, something it had signally failed to do at any time before 9/11. The accusation drew a heated denial from CIA Director Tenet, Cofer Black, and Richard Blee, who at the time of 9/11 had been a lower-ranking official in the Counterterrorism Center. In their statement rebutting Clarke, Tenet & Co. blandly conceded that “In early 2000, a number of more junior personnel [including FBI agents on detail to CIA] did see travel information on individuals who later became hijackers but the significance of the data was not adequately recognized at the time.”

  The Kuala Lumpur meeting of assorted al-Qaeda operatives was monitored at CIA request by Malaysian security, though without yielding any actual information as to what was discussed, and the resultant reports were eagerly scrutinized in Washington. But when al-Midhar and al-Hazmi left for Bangkok, the CIA lost track of them. Meanwhile, the two proto-hijackers had flown to Los Angeles and then settled in San Diego, where they opened bank accounts and obtained drivers’ licenses—even a local phone book listing—all in one or both of their real names. They evidently felt no risk as they waited to gain their reward in heaven.

  Two months after the two terrorists had flown out of Bangkok, the CIA bin Laden unit got around to asking Thai security for information on their whereabouts and received word that they had long since departed for Los Angeles and were presumably somewhere in the United States. Though such news would certainly have been of interest to the FBI, it was not passed along, perhaps for unforgivably petty reasons: the CTC had conceived an intense bureaucratic rivalry with and dislike of the chief of the FBI National Security Division in New York, John O’Neill, and therefore felt justified in withholding what was clearly vital information. Had the bureau been aware of their presence, they might have made inquiries of a regular informant in San Diego, Abdusattar Shaikh, from whom, as it happened, al-Midhar and al-Hazmi had rented a room. Shaikh, who later recalled the pair as being “nice, but not what you call extroverted people,” apparently forgot to tell his FBI handler his tenants’ last names or the fact that they were taking flying lessons.

  Settling into their new home, the terrorists stayed in regular contact with the organization by phoning al-Midhar’s father-in-law’s house in Yemen, which served as an al-Qaeda message center. These conversations were duly swept up by the NSA’s omnivorous global eavesdropping system, but the intelligence went no further. Many years later, the electronic intelligence agency, under fire thanks to whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s revelations of its mass surveillance programs, would claim that had such programs been in place before 9/11, they would have nipped the attacks in the bud. President Obama himself, in defending the massive domestic “metadata” phone recor
ds program, repeated this canard. But, as a number of former senior NSA officials swiftly pointed out, the NSA not only had been intercepting calls to and from the Yemeni house since 1996 but also could very easily have traced them back to San Diego. As it was, the pair was left unmolested, with al-Midhar even taking time to return to Yemen and spend time with his family before moving to temporary lodgings—a motel in Laurel, Maryland, within sight of NSA headquarters—in preparation for that last fatal flight.

  Late in the evening of 9/11, the man who succeeded Scheuer as head of the bin Laden unit stopped by the office of an old colleague, a senior agency official not involved in the counterterrorist mission. “We’re fucked,” he said simply, explaining that intelligence about al-Midhar and al-Hazmi living in San Diego and calling al-Qaeda in Yemen had been ignored.

  With scenes of the collapsing trade towers and the burning Pentagon endlessly replaying on the TV screens to a traumatized public, the official was entirely justified in assuming that he and his colleagues who had missed all the warnings would suffer severe consequences. But he was entirely wrong. Far from ignominy and sanctions, the CIA’s counterterrorists had a glorious future ahead of them. As a former senior CIA official who watched the process with cynical detachment later described it to me: “On the morning of September 11, 2001, the Counterterrorism Center was a collection of rejects and cast-offs. On the morning of September 12, it was the most powerful organization in the country. Before, they had had to scramble for pennies; now they could ask for billions of dollars and get it. They were briefing the president of the United States.” The briefings struck just the right note with the president, who loved hearing Cofer Black’s macho posturing about “when we’re through with them they will have flies crawling across their eyeballs” and “bringing bin Laden’s head back in a box.” Speaking with regretful affection of the CTC leadership, the former official remarked, “They were my friends. I had worked with many of them. After 9/11 they turned into,” he paused, seeking the right word, “maniacs.”