by Steve Coll
The Taliban emir had trusted his fate to Allah. It would be obvious to him how to interpret the outcome: His role on this Earth was incomplete. He told Taliban colleagues, according to one of them, “It is very strange that I am not greedy, for I know my power; my position; my wealth; and my family are in danger. . . . However I am ready to sacrifice myself and I do not want to become a friend of non-Muslims, for non-Muslims are against all my beliefs and my religion.” He said he was “ready to leave everything and believe only in Islam and in my Afghan bravery.”19
“We are living in decisive days that will give rise to a manifest victory for Islam and its people, if Allah wills,” he prophesied in a letter he wrote that autumn. “We will not submit nor become lenient. . . . The full moon of victory has appeared on the horizon.”20
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That fall, the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center grew chaotically, to about 2,000 full-time personnel. Its Office of Terrorism Analysis alone ballooned from 25 to 300. The office annexed entire groups of regional and subject matter experts from the mainstream Directorate of Intelligence. You were following Polish politics yesterday? Today you are analyzing terrorism issues in Central Asia. For a few weeks, Cofer Black slept on a blow-up mattress in his office and some of his deputies slept on cots. Conference rooms became group offices with analysts and reports officers shoulder to shoulder. Computer wires spread like kudzu. Tenet ordered any Directorate of Operations personnel whose skills were tangentially related to terrorism—narcotics teams, illicit finance units—to be folded under Cofer Black’s authority. Tenet thought Black was an enormously talented leader and trusted him. In some sections of the agency, Black’s language and manner rubbed people the wrong way. The Directorate of Operations was a professional shark tank. “You have big personalities and everybody wants to drive the car,” as one senior official put it.21
Black was trampling all over the C.I.A.’s organization chart that autumn, grabbing and dispatching talent, upending careers and prerogatives, not asking permission to have his officers travel across other divisions’ turf. The traditional area chiefs—Senior Intelligence Service officers in charge of Latin America, Europe, or Asia—resisted surrendering their personnel to C.T.C., at least not without some kind of bureaucratic due process. The feeling among Black and his colleagues down at C.T.C. was, essentially: Is it not obvious that we should put all hands on deck to prevent a second-wave Al Qaeda attack on American soil? Are you really going to waste our time on these personnel issues? Black worked to control himself and not fight, “only because fighting was unproductive.” Yet fights went on just about every day. At one meeting that became legendary at C.T.C., an area division manager asked whether the new terrorism-centric order at C.I.A. would affect flextime, a program that allowed employees to work at home some days.22
The prevailing assumption inside the Counterterrorist Center was that Bin Laden probably had additional attackers already in place. Threat reporting about possible follow-on Al Qaeda operations was off the charts. Partly this was a distortion caused by the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency increasing the fidelity on their collection. Both agencies suddenly solicited and listened for every scrap of information about Al Qaeda that might be obtained worldwide. At C.T.C.’s urging, allied intelligence services from Jordan to Egypt to France to Malaysia detained Islamist suspects on whatever pretense was available and interrogated them for clues about Al Qaeda’s next plot. Black, Ben Bonk, and other C.T.C. leaders flew to Libya, Pakistan, Jordan, Russia, Britain, and elsewhere to ask counterparts for every scrap of relevant information they might possess. They heard scary reports—some vetted, some not. But nobody wanted to be blindsided again, and the C.I.A.’s leadership feared that the agency’s very existence would be at stake if they missed a big attack a second time. They were thoroughly convinced that there would be another attack inside the United States soon and that it would be even more spectacular than September 11.23
The panic gripping Washington that autumn had some basis in hard evidence. On September 18, the first of a series of mysterious envelopes containing lethal anthrax spores were mailed to two Democratic senators on Capitol Hill and to the National Enquirer in Florida. The anthrax attack spread to the three major broadcasting networks, ultimately killing five people who inhaled the spores. Nobody knew where the envelopes had originated. The C.I.A. had also learned within weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington that a retired Pakistani nuclear scientist, Sultan Bashirrudin Mahmood, and a retired nuclear engineer, Chaudiri Majeed, had met with Bin Laden in Afghanistan. They had discussed sharing materials for weapons of mass destruction. It appeared that these contacts “with the Taliban and Al Qaeda may have been supported, if not facilitated, by elements within the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment,” as Tenet put it. The C.I.A.’s analysts judged that Al Qaeda wanted chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons “not as a deterrent but to cause mass casualties in the United States.” I.S.I. detained Mahmood and allowed the C.I.A. to interrogate and polygraph him. When the scientist discussed his time in Afghanistan, the polygraph operator reported that Mahmood’s answers showed “deception indicated.”24
The Counterterrorist Center was thrust into an unusual position within the American national security state. It was a locus of government expertise about a poorly understood enemy. It was also the only institution in town that possessed the outline of a war plan to enter into Afghanistan quickly. At the Pentagon, there were no plans on the shelf that had been previously vetted by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Afghanistan was not well understood by the Pentagon’s high command. The relationship between Al Qaeda and the Taliban was a mystery. The feeling among the chiefs of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines, as a general involved put it, was “Where is Afghanistan? Where are the maps?” “The fact was that there was no existing war plan for Afghanistan,” Rumsfeld admitted. “In some cases our analysts were working with decades-old British maps.”25
The C.I.A. was in a better position to influence the White House. Four days after the Al Qaeda attacks, Tenet presented a slide deck entitled “Going to War” to President Bush and his national security cabinet. Rich Blee and Ben Bonk at C.T.C. had prepared the slides. They were adapted from memos composed months earlier in response to periodic requests from Richard Clarke at the White House for “Blue Sky” thinking about what C.I.A. would do to attack Al Qaeda if the agency could spend more money and felt no political constraints. The earlier memos had not been acted upon but they covered substantial ground, such as how to arm and support Massoud’s guerrilla forces and how to identify more aggressive anti-Taliban allies in southern Afghanistan. The slide deck contemplated a light-footprint campaign in Afghanistan that would start quickly with Massoud’s forces in the Panjshir and spread to include other anti-Taliban groups led by Afghan mujaheddin known to the C.I.A. from the 1980s. These warlords included the ethnic Uzbek commander Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former Communist general who had spent years in exile in Turkey; Atta Mohammad Noor, an ethnic Tajik commander allied with Ahmad Shah Massoud; and Ismail Khan, a former C.I.A. client who had been expelled by the Taliban from his stronghold in the western city of Herat. These were the most powerful men under arms who were implacably opposed to the Taliban. They had regional followings and could be used to stabilize and even rule Afghanistan after the Taliban were expelled from office.26
The plan embedded in the “Going to War” slides offered speed to Bush and his cabinet. A second attraction was that a light mobile force of guerrilla advisers with laser targeting equipment could bring to bear America’s precision airpower while minimizing U.S. casualties. Operation Enduring Freedom, the ensuing Afghan campaign by small Special Forces teams, aided by C.I.A. paramilitaries and case officers, some riding on horseback, would later be well chronicled in books, memoirs, and military “lessons learned” reports. The C.I.A. started out in the leading role and transitioned slowly to a more familiar mission of collecting target in
telligence, chasing Al Qaeda fugitives, and running off-the-books militia operations.
The C.I.A.’s first Northern Afghanistan Liaison Team, led by Gary Schroen, landed by helicopter in the Panjshir Valley on September 26. Schroen was a Dari speaker in his early sixties, the equivalent within the C.I.A.’s ranks of a three-star general. He had served several tours in Pakistan and had worked with Ahmad Shah Massoud and his aides for more than a decade. It would take weeks for Pentagon Special Forces units to join the fight. On October 17, Rumsfeld wrote a biting memo to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force General Richard Myers. (General Hugh Shelton had already been scheduled to retire when September 11 took place.) “Given the nature of our world, isn’t it conceivable that the Department ought not to be in a position of near total dependence on C.I.A. in situations such as this?” Rumsfeld asked. Black put Hank Crumpton in charge of the Counterterrorist Center’s part of the war. Crumpton had been C.T.C. operations chief until the summer of 2001, when he rotated to become chief of station in Canberra, Australia. He returned to New Headquarters to work out of a “windowless room filled with maps, photos, books and stacks of paper. It looked like the office of an associate professor at a small, poorly funded liberal arts school.” Once Crumpton arrived, Blee and his operations officer took charge of Al Qaeda missions outside Afghanistan. Their work was folded under a massive covert action program, perhaps the largest in C.I.A. history, under the code name of Greystone. As new officers poured into C.T.C., they organized two new units to track Al Qaeda’s finances and experiments with chemical, biological, and nuclear materials.27
Cofer Black traveled abroad frequently, but when he was at Langley, he tried to buck up his workforce. Many case officers and retirees felt fired by an attitude of war-fighting volunteerism. (Black sent Billy Waugh, a legendary street operative he had worked with in Sudan, forward to Afghanistan, where Waugh celebrated his seventy-third birthday.) Yet some of the Counterterrorist Center’s analysts—desk bound and responsible for finding terrorist needles in overnight cable haystacks—also felt pressured. Some felt guilt and embarrassment and heard even agency colleagues say that September 11 was their fault. “We were all angry, of course,” as an officer then at C.T.C. put it. At the same time, “a kind of guilt feeling comes across. You feel like maybe you let people down, maybe you let the country down because you couldn’t prevent it from happening. You’re at the pointy end of the spear in the Counterterrorist Center. You would like to have thought you could prevent something like this from happening.”
It was inevitable that C.T.C. would take arrows, Black told colleagues: “When the hearings and the retribution and the finger-pointing comes, we are going to get hammered.” They should do what they could, without self-pity, in the time available, before their careers ended, his most ingloriously of all, he said.28
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In the Panjshir Valley, to support the Northern Alliance’s drive on Kabul and the search for Al Qaeda leaders, Gary Schroen’s team set up a joint intelligence cell with Amrullah Saleh and Engineer Arif. With Massoud dead and the C.I.A. on the scene, the two Northern Alliance intelligence leaders moved into critical positions, supporting the C.I.A. officers but also trying to keep track of what they were doing. Schroen’s men had carried in $10 million in boxed cash. They handed out bundles like candy on Halloween. Schroen had recruited onto his team Chris Wood, the Dari-speaking case officer who had worked the Taliban account out of Islamabad. Wood ran the day-to-day intelligence reporting at the joint cell, collecting and synthesizing field radio reports about Taliban and Al Qaeda positions and movements.
Fahim Khan, Massoud’s military chief, commanded the Panjshiris’ war. His deputy on the front line was Bismillah Khan, whose men controlled the mouth of the Panjshir, facing the Shomali Plains. Beyond those plains lay Kabul. To the east, the Northern Alliance line was manned by about two thousand fighters loyal to Abdul Rasoul Sayyaf, a conservative mujaheddin leader from the anti-Soviet war who had once been close to Bin Laden. Schroen visited Sayyaf early on and gave him $100,000 in cash.
Sayyaf’s men showed the C.I.A. team the shadow of an old airstrip near their section of the front line. Vacationing German trout fishermen had used the strip before the Second World War, some locals explained. Others said the owners of a German brewery had used it. Reading a history of Britain’s wars in Afghanistan, one of Schroen’s team eventually discovered that the German military had constructed the field around the time of the First World War. Now it consisted of barely visible ruts.
Schroen suggested to Chris Wood that they hire local men to dig out the field and make it operational. Wood became foreman. Every few days he rolled over to the construction site to check on progress and distribute a cash payroll. He by now sported a full blond beard. Whenever he got out of his S.U.V., his Panjshiri security detail followed him, toting assault rifles.
One mid-October afternoon, a C.I.A. colleague at their main Panjshir base interrupted Schroen. The colleague was on the secure phone to Langley. “This is the mission manager for Predator flights,” the officer explained. “He wants to know if we have any information about a newly constructed airfield on the Shomali Plains near a village named Gul Bahar.”
Schroen took the phone. “Sir, we have a Predator loitering above what appears to be a newly constructed Taliban airfield,” the voice on the other end reported. “C.I.A. confirms this is a new Taliban facility, under construction for the past ten days or so. The Predator is looking at an S.U.V. parked on the dirt landing strip, and there are two men, dressed in Western-style clothing. . . . We think they may be Al Qaeda.”
Schroen assured the caller he was wrong—they were tilting their Hellfire at two C.I.A. officers, including Chris Wood.
The caller asked if he was “sure” and Schroen assured him that he was “positive.” He had forwarded reports on the airstrip’s construction to C.I.A. headquarters, including geocoordinates, several times. Schroen was incredulous. He could understand how the U.S. military might not know about his clandestine airstrip project, but how could the C.I.A. not know about it? Had the officer on duty not thought to call the Panjshir base to check, the Predator might have killed his colleagues. In years to come, Wood would rise in the Senior Intelligence Service to become one of the C.I.A.’s most influential officers in the long Afghan war, serving multiple tours as station chief in Kabul and as an intelligence liaison to the Obama administration’s National Security Council during a critical period of war planning. Wood later led the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, as it would be renamed in 2004, where he commanded the agency’s worldwide drone operations. (The C.I.A.’s center was an internal unit, distinct from the interagency National Counterterrorism Center, which was created as part of a 2004 intelligence reorganization.) Wood had more reason than most to understand that not every tall bearded man surrounded by bodyguards was what he seemed to be.29
Back at Langley, operations that would come to change the character of global air war—lethal drone flights conducted by remote control from far away—evolved from the confusion of October 7 toward a steady tempo. In the Global Response Center, civilian intelligence officers who lived in tract homes and town houses and had never killed anyone followed and watched presumed militants on their screens. They heard the targets’ deaths ordered by a colleague in a suit and tie. They watched the victims be consumed in balls of fire. It was hard to ignore the strangeness of this kind of warfare, the way it severed death and experience.
One day, an armed Predator tracked three Hilux trucks carrying fighters as they moved through Jalalabad. The C.I.A. officers on duty noted that, to avoid civilian deaths, they would have to wait for the trucks to clear out of the city and move into open territory before they took a Hellfire shot. As the officers watched the trucks, they spotted a large dog in the back of one of them. They talked disconcertedly about the possibility that they might have to kill the dog while attacking the guerrillas. Then the trucks stopped
briefly and the dog decided he had better things to do and jumped out. Cheers erupted in the C.I.A.’s Global Response Center. After the wave of emotion subsided, at least one officer in the room thought to himself: That was weird. The C.I.A. officers named the dog “Lucky.” It turned out to be not an unusual nickname for other Afghan and Pakistani dogs at the sites of drone-launched Hellfire strikes. The animals’ hearing was so acute that they sometimes seemed to detect Predators overhead or picked up the whine of missile launches when humans could not, and then got out of the way.30
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In Virginia, one weekend afternoon, while watching one of his kids’ football games, Ric Prado took out a yellow legal pad and sketched out a plan for a roving clandestine team that would hop around the world and photograph and document Al Qaeda network members, much as Counterterrorist Center contractors already did. Prado was the most dangerous-looking senior officer working in the C.T.C. that fall. He served as one of Black’s key deputies. He was a Cuban-born fourth-degree black belt in martial arts who had run paramilitary operations with the Contras in Honduras during the 1980s. He was a trained expert in parachuting, knife fighting, evasive driving, and extreme motorcycle tactics. He was about five feet seven inches tall, then in his early fifties, with a tattoo on one of his biceps. Prado’s field experience in Honduras, Costa Rica, Peru, ALEC Station, and Sudan had included close photographic surveillance operations against diverse targets. (In Sudan, Prado wore elaborate masks that made him look like a black African and drove around Khartoum in a battered car, watching Al Qaeda and other targets.) Prado had come to believe, he told Black, that there was little point in concentrating counterterrorism operations on low-level Al Qaeda shooters and street operatives. Those foot soldiers would always be replaced. Targeting Al Qaeda leaders was obviously the highest priority, but the leaders would always be hard to locate. The plan Prado now proposed would aim at upper-middle “facilitators,” as they were called in government jargon, meaning money traders, weapons suppliers, imams offering safe transit, forgers, bomb makers, counterfeiters, and the like.
