by Steve Coll
Hadley insisted that Tenet keep the S.T.E. line open to the White House continuously. Because that channel was occupied, Charles Allen had no way to collect securely the latest intercept reports from the National Security Agency about who might be responsible for the airplane hijackings. Michael Hayden, the N.S.A. director, wanted to send over reports providing preliminary evidence that Al Qaeda was responsible. Allen sent an N.S.A. liaison officer back into C.I.A. headquarters to pull these reports off a secure fax machine and bring them to the printing plant.
Tenet talked to leaders at the F.B.I., the Federal Aviation Administration, State, the National Security Agency, and other counterparts. He also tried to determine whether any C.I.A. officers in the New York station had been killed. (None had, it turned out.)
Cofer Black finally cornered him.
All summer, it had been obvious from intelligence reporting that something big and bad was coming. For weeks, Black had been thinking about how he would handle this day. He had tried to imagine in advance a moment of great pressure when a lot of people would be dead and he would have to speak forcefully to C.T.C.’s workforce and to his superiors on the Seventh Floor.
“Sir, we’re going to have to exempt C.T.C.” from the C.I.A.-wide evacuation, Black told Tenet. They would also need to exempt personnel from the Office of Technical Services, which supported C.T.C. “We need to have our people working the computers.”
“They’re going to be at risk,” Tenet answered.
“We’re going to have to keep them in place. They have the key function to play in a crisis like this.”
“Well, they could die.”
“Well, sir, then they’re just going to have to die.”
Tenet thought it over and replied, “You’re absolutely right.”13
Black walked back toward New Headquarters, into the swarm of evacuating C.I.A. employees.
Inside C.T.C., Black said that their job now was to explain to the president and his cabinet what had just happened to the United States, who did it, and what might be coming next.14
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The Federal Aviation Administration had a liaison officer at C.T.C. He could access airline passenger manifests. Rich Blee and his ALEC Station analysts were by now certain that Al Qaeda had carried out the hijackings but to make that call firmly for the White House they needed proof.
Blee asked the liaison officer to access the F.A.A.’s computers and obtain passenger lists for the four known aircraft seized by hijackers. The officer said he could not do that. These were American airliners filled with American citizens and under the law the C.I.A. could not access private information about U.S. persons, he maintained. Blee was beside himself. He asked F.B.I. agents deployed to ALEC Station to see what they could obtain through the bureau’s channels.15
The Hezbollah Branch’s analysts at C.T.C. were as certain as the ALEC team that the hijackings had been carried out by their terrorists. The attack was a sophisticated, complex operation that required planning and resources. Hezbollah had thousands of fighters in southern Lebanon and a worldwide network strong enough to pull off such a feat. Just a week or two earlier, the branch’s analysts had placed a provocative article in the classified National Intelligence Digest arguing that Hezbollah was a more serious threat to the United States than Al Qaeda. During the past two decades, Hezbollah units had bombed American facilities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Lebanon. The death toll from Hezbollah attacks since the 1980s was higher than the death toll from Al Qaeda strikes, the article had pointed out.
“This is Mughniyeh,” one of the Hezbollah analysts assured Blee, referring to Imad Mughniyeh, then the notorious fugitive leader of Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization.
“It’s not Mughniyeh,” Blee said. Intelligence about a spectacular Al Qaeda attack had been piling up all summer from multiple sources. There was no comparable threat stream about Hezbollah. Yet the Hezbollah analysts were adamant. “Go for it,” Blee finally said. Prove your case.16
The analysts in ALEC Station’s cubicles all knew the history of Ramzi Yousef, the architect of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. It was two years after that when Yousef had also discussed flying a plane into C.I.A. headquarters. The husband of one analyst worked at the Pentagon, which was now in flames. Other analysts had children at home or school.
Blee decided to speak to the group.
He was not an easy man to read. He could be blunt. This morning, he tried to be calm. The sensation of being under fire was not new to him. But for many Washington-bound analysts at ALEC, this was a first.
Blee told them he understood that not everyone would feel that they could stay at work, that some had families they would feel they needed to serve first. It was okay to leave, he said. Still, he continued, “The country needs you. We need you. It’s hard, but try to stay here.”
Blee had been reflecting on the fact that a hijacked plane might strike C.I.A. headquarters at any minute. Yet he felt they would survive. A plane would have to fly above the treetops around the C.I.A. campus and so it would almost inevitably strike the New Headquarters’ upper floors. Even if the building pancaked, Blee figured, C.T.C.’s bunkerlike ground floor would survive intact for a while and there would be time to get outside. Here at last was a reason to be grateful for this miserable office space: Five planes could land on C.I.A., Blee thought, and his workforce would probably crawl out unharmed, like cockroaches.
One of the analysts on the team asked him about the C.I.A.’s defenses. “One of those planes is probably headed our way. Are there surface-to-air missiles on the roof?”
“Sure, there are surface-to-air missiles,” Blee lied. “They’ve got them at the White House. They’ve got them here, too.” His response was spontaneous. He was trying to keep ALEC together. Also, lying was part of a case officer’s profession.
“We’re going to war,” Blee said. ALEC’s days of isolation were over. They would soon be catapulted to the center of national decision making. Any proposals for attacking Al Qaeda that had earlier been turned down by the Seventh Floor or the White House should be revived and reconsidered. “Use your imagination,” Blee said.
All but two of the ALEC Station employees stayed at their desks, according to the recollections of Blee’s colleagues.17
By noon it was clear that the threat of additional kamikaze attacks on Washington had passed. The F.B.I. sent over the passenger manifests for the four hijacked airliners by about 1:00 p.m. ALEC Station’s analysts typically divided their work by geographical region. Some covered Asia, others the Middle East or Africa. An F.B.I. analyst on assignment to C.I.A. kept track of Al Qaeda’s domestic ties. Just a few weeks earlier, while reviewing old cable traffic, she had recognized that a known Al Qaeda associate, Khalid al Mihdhar, had obtained an American visa and flown to the United States in early 2000. She had asked the F.B.I. to look for Mihdhar and a colleague, Nawaf al Hazmi, but the search had barely started. Now the analyst saw their names on the American 77 passenger list.
She approached Blee. “Here’s the smoking gun,” she said.18
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Did September 11 vindicate the C.I.A.’s warnings about Al Qaeda or expose its failure to prevent a disaster the agency might have stopped?
Tenet, Black, and Blee warned the Bush administration about Al Qaeda clearly and repeatedly during 2001. They were not the only people in the government to issue such warnings. Richard Clarke at the National Security Council repeatedly urged Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration leaders to focus on Bin Laden and take more aggressive action. Al Qaeda specialists at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department also understood well the threat Bin Laden posed.
In the two decades before 2001, the C.I.A. had sometimes failed in its mission to alert presidents in advance to strategic risks and threats abroad. The agency’s analysts were late to recognize the forces that swept the Soviet Union away. They were ti
mid about Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s potential as a reformer. The agency failed to detect or predict India’s decision to test a nuclear bomb in 1998. On Al Qaeda, however, in 2001, the C.I.A. had the big picture right and communicated warnings forcefully. In late June, C.T.C. had alerted all station chiefs worldwide about the possibility of an imminent suicide attack, and Tenet asked the chiefs to brief every ambassador. “Over the last several months, we have seen unprecedented indications that Bin Ladin and his supporters have been preparing for a terrorist operation,” that C.T.C. bulletin reported. Other C.I.A. warning reports that month carried the headlines BIN LADIN ATTACKS MAY BE IMMINENT and BIN LADIN AND ASSOCIATES MAKING NEAR-TERM THREATS. A daily C.I.A. analytical product, the Senior Executive Intelligence Brief, carried an article on June 30 entitled BIN LADIN PLANNING HIGH-PROFILE ATTACKS.19
The C.I.A. did not know when or where the attack would occur, however. Blee said that Bin Laden’s pattern in the past had been to have his suicide cells attack only when they were ready, not according to any hard schedule. Based on the totality of the intelligence available, Blee said, “Attack preparations have been made. . . . Multiple and simultaneous attacks are possible, and they will occur with little or no warning.” Yet they had no concrete evidence of any plan to strike inside the United States; their best guess was that Al Qaeda would continue with its established pattern of striking American embassies or defense facilities abroad.20
Why did the C.I.A. have so little insight into the U.S. plot? Despite several years of field operations and the recruitment of more than one hundred reporting agents inside Afghanistan, ALEC Station had not penetrated Bin Laden’s planning. Al Qaeda’s counterintelligence against potential moles was formidable. In counterterrorism, strategic warning is vital, but tactical warning about dates and places saves lives. The C.I.A. had not attained that fidelity about Al Qaeda.
Worse, as the F.B.I. analyst’s instant recognition of the “smoking gun” names on the Flight 77 passenger manifest indicated, agency analysts had possessed for twenty-one months intelligence that might have led to the disruption of the September 11 conspiracy. Yet C.I.A. analysts in multiple stations and branches had failed to act adequately on its importance.
In late 1999, operatives working with Malaysia’s Special Branch police had photographed clandestinely a meeting of suspected Al Qaeda associates in Kuala Lumpur. In January, they discovered Mihdhar’s name and the fact that he had a visa to travel to the United States. In March, they learned his colleague Hazmi’s name as well and the fact that both men had already flown to Los Angeles. Yet they took no action until August 2001. Soon after the information about Mihdhar and Hazmi was discovered, Doug Miller and Mark Rossini, F.B.I. agents assigned to ALEC, drafted a cable reporting the facts to the F.B.I. But a C.I.A. officer blocked them from releasing the cable. It is unclear why. The failure to detect and locate Mihdhar and Hazmi would catalyze blame shifting between the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. for years to come.
According to an investigation by the C.I.A.’s Office of Inspector General completed in 2005 but not declassified for another ten years, fifty to sixty individuals “read one or more of six different C.I.A. cables containing travel information related to these terrorists,” meaning Mihdhar and Hazmi. A majority of those who read the cables worked at C.T.C. They were mainly C.I.A. analysts but also included four F.B.I. agents on assignment to the agency.21
The C.I.A. failed to place either Mihdhar or Hazmi on a State Department–managed terrorist watch list that might have caused the men to be denied entry to the United States or refused visas. (The list was not as significant as watch lists would become after September 11—it did not have a “no fly” provision that airlines could automatically access as passengers checked in, for example.) Mihdhar left the United States once after his initial arrival and then returned, so if he had been on the State Department list, he might have been refused entry the second time. “That so many individuals failed to act in this case reflects a systemic breakdown—a breakdown caused by excessive workload, ambiguities about responsibilities, and mismanagement of the program,” the C.I.A. inspector general’s investigators later concluded. “Basically, there was no coherent, functioning watchlisting program.”22 The investigators recommended that a C.I.A. Accountability Board review Cofer Black, among others, for failing to perform to professional standards, but Porter Goss, the C.I.A.’s director when the recommendation was made, chose not to do so. Goss’s view was, first, that he was not interested in reprimanding anyone who was no longer at C.I.A. (Black had left government by then.) Second, Goss noted that no other agency involved in homeland security before September 11—not the F.B.I., not the Pentagon, not the Federal Aviation Administration—had felt it necessary to single out any individual for responsibility.23
Later e-mail records suggest C.I.A. officers believed the information about Mihdhar and Hazmi had been conveyed to the F.B.I. C.I.A. analysts told the inspector general that they had communicated the details informally, over the telephone. Yet there is no documentary evidence to support these recollections, according to the inspector general. His investigators “found no evidence, and heard no claim from any party, that this information was shared in any manner with the F.B.I. or that anyone in ALEC Station took other appropriate operational action at that time.”24 Well into 2001, various analysts reviewed the files but failed to recognize the significance of their information until it was too late.
These failures are an indelible part of the “what if” history of September 11, the possibility that the attacks might have been stopped, that thousands of lives might have been spared, and that America’s foreign policy might not have pivoted in costly directions. Yet that counterfactual requires a context. The gross domestic product of the United States in 2001 was about $10.6 trillion. The budget of the federal government was about $1.8 trillion. In fiscal 2001, the government enjoyed a $128 billion operating surplus. Yet counterterrorism teams at the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. working on Al Qaeda and allied groups received an infinitesimal fraction of the country’s defense and intelligence budget of roughly $300 billion, the great majority of which went to the Pentagon, to support conventional and missile forces. Bush’s national security deputies did not hold a meeting dedicated to plans to thwart Al Qaeda until September 4, 2001, almost nine months after President Bush took the oath of office. The September 11 conspiracy succeeded in part because the democratically elected government of the United States, including the Congress, did not regard Al Qaeda as a priority.
In the first days and months after the attack, in any event, the country had scant appetite for reflection or accountability. President Bush needed answers and plans for retaliation and the C.I.A. had them. September 11 empowered the Counterterrorist Center and its leaders. It put the C.I.A. in a commanding position within the Bush national security cabinet, with a degree of influence over national policy the agency had not enjoyed at the White House since the days of anti-Communist proxy guerrilla war during the 1980s. Overnight, Cofer Black and Rich Blee and their colleagues, promoted by their persuasive boss, George Tenet, became vital authors of American military and foreign policy.
They proceeded under certain assumptions. They believed that C.T.C.’s covert action against Bin Laden after 1998 had been hamstrung by caution and fecklessness at the White House and among the C.I.A.’s leaders. They feared what might be coming next and believed they had to act quickly. Their aggression in the coming weeks “was not about violence,” Black insisted later, “although we used the vocabulary of violence to shock and impress and inspire various constituencies.” They needed to move fast in order to cause Al Qaeda’s leaders to turn their attention away from planning or executing follow-on attacks, to concentrate instead on self-preservation. The gloves are off, they told colleagues, a phrase that rapidly spread around the agency and the capital as a dangerous, facile cliché.
The professional histories of Black, Blee, and others in leadership at the C
ounterterrorist Center that September included long exposure to unconventional war in Africa—arming and training proxy armies, working behind the scenes with small teams of paramilitaries, empowering strongmen while accepting that few guerrilla leaders were morally admirable. They preferred to let the locals carry the fight, enabled by the C.I.A.’s money and technology, following a script that traced back to the secret operations of the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War, which laid the C.I.A.’s foundations. The Defense Department typically required weeks or months to build the logistics tail to support overseas ground operations. The C.I.A.’s value to the White House over decades—part myth, part valid history—had always been that a hundred operations officers with M4 rifles could go anywhere in a week and create mayhem without a lot of care and feeding. Black’s conception of the C.I.A. as the “anti-military,” as he put it, required improvising fast.25
The American public, shocked and angry on September 11, ready to support retaliation, had no acquaintance with the men in the C.T.C. bunker. Yet the center’s leaders would define the country’s initial reply to Bin Laden—a paramilitary war in Afghanistan, a counterterrorist campaign against Al Qaeda worldwide. And they would influence many of the legal, political, and diplomatic strategies that would shape those campaigns. The coming war in Afghanistan would follow Africa Division rules.
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Shortly after 3:00 p.m. on September 11, Tenet told President Bush during a secure videoconference that the C.I.A. was certain Al Qaeda had carried out the hijackings. He went through the names and case histories of Mihdhar and Hazmi, and the fact that they had been passengers on Flight 77. This was an Al Qaeda operation, the C.I.A. director reported.
Rich Blee called Amrullah Saleh in Dushanbe on their secure line. Saleh had been watching the news coverage but he wasn’t sure what the attacks would mean for America’s willingness to arm the Council of the North. Saleh certainly did not expect the United States to invade Afghanistan. At most, if Massoud’s men were lucky, the C.I.A. might open its checkbook a little more generously, he thought. Saleh had made more lists since his last call with Blee. He had written up an inventory of weapons and military gear the Panjshiri guerrillas would need to hold the valley against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
