by Steve Coll
“Let’s get him,” Rodriguez declared.
Rodriguez did not call back to Langley, which would have been “the cautious thing” but also would have effectively refused Kayani, because “Washington never responds instantly.”8
I.S.I. officers seized Rauf on August 25. That sudden action forced British police to arrest about two dozen people in and around London that same night, before they could be tipped off. The British were furious.
The Al Qaeda plan to blow up half a dozen or more civilian airliners flying to America from London remained weeks or months from being attempted. British surveillance meant the plot would never likely have succeeded. And yet the ambition and technical plausibility of the conspiracy shocked the Bush administration. As the C.I.A. documented the threat posed by British-born, Pakistani-trained radicals who could travel easily to the United States, the Americans started to push British counterparts for permission to run their own unilateral operations on U.K. soil. Eliza Manningham-Buller, then the director-general of MI5, the British equivalent of the F.B.I., had to warn C.I.A. counterparts at one point, “If we find you doing this, we’ll arrest you.”9
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Six Britons, including Abdulla Ahmed Ali, recorded martyrdom videos before the arrests of August 25. Several others may have been prepared to blow up commercial airliners, according to a diary kept by Rauf. As with the testaments recorded by the Underground bombers, Ali’s group described their terrorism as religiously sanctioned warfare.
During the 1990s, Bin Laden’s writings and interviews describing Al Qaeda’s ideology had included arguments for resistance to what he imagined to be American occupation of Saudi Arabia, as well as its military intervention in Somalia and support for Israel. Yet there had also been a millenarian, rambling quality to Bin Laden’s thinking. By now the invasion of Iraq and the deteriorating Afghan war had broadened the appeal of Bin Laden’s messages, attracting literate TV news-watching Muslims genuinely fed up with Western foreign policy and inclined to volunteer for the fight. As Ali put it in his martyrdom video that summer:
We Muslim people have pride. . . . We are brave. We’re not cowards. Enough is enough. We’ve warned you so many times to get out of our lands, leave us alone, but you have persisted in trying to humiliate us, kill us and destroy us. Sheikh Osama warned you many times to leave our lands or you will be destroyed.
Off camera, someone asked him, “What about innocent people? Surely, just because the kuffar kill our innocent does not mean that we should . . . kill theirs?”
Ali answered, “You show more care and concern for animals than you do for the Muslim ummah.”10
The back-to-back American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq had not only attracted new adherents to Al Qaeda, they had revived Bin Laden’s own confidence in his ideas. After Tora Bora, it had taken about nine months for Bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s operatives to reorganize public communication. In October 2002, Bin Laden released a “letter to America” seemingly written in reply to the many magazine covers and newspaper headlines in the West asking, Why do they hate us?
“Here we outline our reply to two questions addressing the Americans,” Bin Laden wrote. “Why are we waging Jihad against you? What advice do we have for you and what do we want from you?” The answer to the first question, he continued, “is very simple: Because you attacked us. . . . You ransack our lands, stealing our treasures and oil.”11
The next month, Al Jazeera released an audiotape from Bin Laden. He spoke about recent suicide and car bombings in Bali, Moscow, and Jordan. The C.I.A. confirmed Bin Laden’s voice; for the first time since late 2001, there could be no doubt that Bin Laden was alive and restored to some sort of leadership role. The Iraq war brought forth a torrent of geopolitical messages from him. At one point, Bin Laden offered a truce to European nations if they withdrew from the Iraq coalition. Al Qaeda bombed train commuters in Madrid in retaliation for Spain’s participation in Iraq.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a squat Jordanian radical who had run a training camp in Afghanistan before 2001 but had never met Bin Laden, formed a vicious network inside Iraq to strike the United States and Iraqi Shiite allies. Zarqawi’s grotesque beheadings on digital video worried Bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri. They wrote to him to urge less sectarian, less ruthless tactics. Yet Bin Laden embraced Al Qaeda in Iraq, as Zarqawi’s network became known, because it positioned Al Qaeda as a resistance force in the most violent war then taking place in the Islamic world. In June 2006, American warplanes killed Zarqawi outside Baghdad. Bin Laden eulogized him as a “knight, the lion of holy war,” and urged that the fight continue.12
By 2006 Al Qaeda producers in Waziristan and elsewhere in Pakistan had also seized upon the digital revolution to launch a next-generation media arm, As-Sahab. From laptops and wireless hot spots its propagandists self-published mainly on Islamist Web sites. Bin Laden continued to communicate sporadically by audiotape and the occasional video. In the four years between 2002 and 2005 Al Qaeda released a total of forty-six messages, by one independent count. In 2006 alone it released fifty-eight, more than one per week.13
The Afghan Taliban and its ideological fellow travelers recovered their public voices in similar fashion. In 2005, a splinter group launched a Web magazine, Tora Bora. “Can anyone of you deny that Afghanistan is an American colony?” one of its writers asked. “Can any Afghan boast about the honor, respect and sacredness of his homeland without being humiliated and snubbed by the Americans? How is it possible for our young boys to introduce themselves as proud Afghans in the world? How can our women prove their chastity in the presence of the over-drunk Americans? Is there any other way than migration and suicides?”14
Tora Bora was more eclectic and less brutally strident than As-Sahab. It published essays on electric fish and gardening and offered disquisitions on Islamic history, law, and conduct. Yet the editors returned to certain themes of wartime propaganda. They offered a revisionist history of the fallen Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan, “a wonderful, peaceful system for the whole world,” in which the “lives and property of all the people were safe.” By comparison, “foreign masters” controlled Hamid Karzai’s American-backed regime. The Karzai cabinet was “made by the C.I.A.” and comprised formerly exiled Afghans who “don’t know the geography of Afghanistan, nor do they know the culture and traditions of Afghans.” These agents of America invited “occupying foreign forces” to intrude into Afghan homes “and do whatever they like; they kill some of them and kidnap others without telling any information about whether they are alive or dead.”15
The authors repeatedly compared Karzai’s regime to the Afghan quislings who collaborated with Soviet Communist occupiers in Kabul during the 1980s. “How can their conscience and morality accept it? They call the cruel America a friendly country and dance to that system which has been imposed by the Americans and call it a democratic gift. Don’t they see that without their permission the Americans conduct their operations underneath their noses and send their innocent sons to Bagram and Cuba?”16
In Al Samood, an official Taliban print magazine revived by 2006, the editors assured readers that the Afghan Taliban were “still united under the leadership of its Supreme Commander Mullah Mohammad Omar al-Mujahed. . . . The Amir supervises all the affairs of the movement through a number of employees who run the day to day work, and the Amir is the only person who takes decisions, after consulting with the Shura on all military, political and organizational affairs.”17
Al Samood also promoted Al Qaeda figures such as Zarqawi, whom it eulogized as “one of the heroes of the Islamic ummah and a knight of the Islamic Emirate.” The magazine published a guest essay from an Arab Al Qaeda prisoner in Bagram. In print as in police and intelligence files there had emerged by 2006 a clear connectivity among Taliban, Arab Al Qaeda, and radicalized individuals in the West, enabled by digital communication, centered on grievances around the twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.18
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The C.I.A. had no counter for Al Qaeda’s digital media strategy. Nor did the agency have a clue where Bin Laden or Zawahiri were hiding. The best-informed C.I.A. analysts had developed a generalized conviction that both Al Qaeda leaders were in Pakistan, but that was about as far as they could get. When Michael Waltz, an aide to Vice President Cheney, obtained clearance to read into the most restricted compartmented C.I.A. and other intelligence collection programs related to Al Qaeda, some so protected that they were listed on classified docket sheets only by their code names, he was surprised to find that some of the operations “were very basic and relatively new, a real disappointment.”19
After the overthrow of the Taliban and the scattering of Al Qaeda, it had taken time for the C.I.A. to narrow the hunt to focus primarily on Pakistan. It was not until late 2002, six months after Operation Anaconda, that the evidence from Kabul Station and Afghan bases led the Counterterrorist Center’s Bin Laden unit, ALEC Station, to conclude that there was not much of Al Qaeda left inside Afghanistan at all. The leaders had migrated, to Pakistan or through Iran homeward toward Iraq and other Arab countries.
Chris Wood had taken charge of ALEC Station in mid-2002. The Saturday Night Live version of the hunt for Bin Laden assumed the Saudi was hiding in a cave, presumably in Afghanistan or along the Pakistani border. ALEC Station’s analysts doubted that; it would be hard for someone like Bin Laden to live for long in the rough in such a barren region without becoming seriously ill. ALEC Station also concluded that other rumors—that Bin Laden had gone to Somalia by sea, or had returned to Saudi Arabia, or had found a refuge in his family’s ancestral home, Yemen—were deeply implausible, although it was hard to rule out anything. Gradually, however, by 2004 or 2005, the unit’s analysts mainly visualized Bin Laden in a Pakistani urban area, in a refuge comparable to the ones Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh had found after 2001 in Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, and Karachi, respectively, before they were each arrested.20
The Omega teams created in early 2002 by Wood and Rich Blee—the blended units of C.I.A. officers and American Special Forces, supported by clandestine Afghan militias—had been designed to carry out reconnaissance by force, to project intelligence collection inside Pakistan’s tribal areas. The border base design worked reasonably well in 2002 and supported Operation Anaconda. When Al Qaeda–affiliated Uzbeks and some Arabs regrouped around Wana, in South Waziristan, local reporting agents run by the C.I.A. out of the Omega base in Shkin collected useful insights, according to participants. Yet the teams’ overall record in reporting on Al Qaeda’s two most senior leaders was spotty to poor. Nor did the embedding of C.I.A. officers inside Pakistani military forts in South and North Waziristan produce any breakthroughs in the search for Bin Laden and Zawahiri.
The border operations did produce false positives. Early in 2005, toward the end of Blee’s tour in Islamabad, Blee and Ambassador Ryan Crocker fought to call off a Navy SEAL raid on a suspected Al Qaeda compound in the tribal areas, based on a single source, because the intelligence hadn’t been vetted. The source had reported Zawahiri might be there. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved the strike and ordered strict secrecy so that neither Blee nor Crocker had been informed of the plan or the intelligence on which it was based. Blee’s experience was that it was never wise to launch a high-risk, cross-border raid on the basis of human sources alone; half the time, agents are lying or confused.
“You might kill a couple of Al Qaeda guys, but it won’t be worth it,” Blee warned. “You’re invading Pakistan. You’re going to kill a bunch of women and children. It will be a fiasco. I’m not defending you.”
Blee woke up Crocker, who called Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. He laughed grimly. “We’re fucked up here.” Some of the planes were in the air when the order was finally issued to stand down.
In Afghanistan, the operators stranded on the tarmac or ordered back in flight were appalled. They believed that a Libyan Al Qaeda operative named Abu Faraj al-Libbi might have been meeting with Faqir Mohammed, a Pakistani Pashtun militant leader, and Zawahiri. After that abandoned attempt, a J.S.O.C. team manned by Army Rangers did clandestinely strike a suspected Al Qaeda compound in the tribal areas in early 2006 and made arrests, but did not capture significant leaders. The raid was neither detected by Pakistan nor announced by the United States. By coincidence, the undeclared American raid took place just as militants in Waziristan overran a Pakistani base, killing soldiers and distracting the army command.21
In 2005, in a paper titled “Inroads,” a C.I.A. analyst at Langley tried to reframe the frustrating search for Bin Laden by identifying four pillars most likely to revive progress: the Saudi’s courier network, his family, his communication with Al Qaeda operators like Abu Ubaydah, and his media statements. The analyst’s paper would prove influential over time, but in the meanwhile, she and her colleagues wasted long hours studying the flora in outdoor videos where Bin Laden appeared or studying the crawl lines on Al Jazeera broadcasts for coded messages.22
The agency became distracted by bureaucratic and leadership problems after 2004. The Bush administration midwifed the birth of a new intelligence coordination agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a reform proposed by the 9/11 Commission, to address failures of intelligence sharing among diverse spy agencies. Inevitably, infighting over the new agency’s prerogatives and budget role drew C.I.A. managers into prolonged interagency struggles. Congress also created a new National Counterterrorism Center, a second C.I.A. rival that focused on analysis but “inexorably” bled the C.I.A.’s parallel Counterterrorism Center “of vital resources,” as Robert Grenier, the former Islamabad station chief, who was now back at Langley, put it. On the Seventh Floor, C.I.A. director Porter Goss never recovered from the high-level resignations of career officers soon after he arrived. The agency surrendered some of its political and operational crown jewels, such as the role of delivering the President’s Daily Brief in person to the White House, which became the responsibility of D.N.I.23
Jose Rodriguez appointed Grenier to run the Counterterrorism Center. After he read into the failing hunt for Bin Laden, he concluded that ALEC Station itself was a serious problem. Long-serving analysts dominated the Bin Laden unit. They were “among the very best Al Qaeda experts we had,” Grenier felt, and their devotion was “legendary.” Yet the more senior among them had become “sometimes arrogant and obsessive and regularly alienated the geographic divisions on whose support we depended. . . . They were definitely a handful to manage.” Several of them still had photos of Michael Scheuer, the unit’s first leader, on the walls of their offices, “like shrines.”24
The unit “had become an anachronism,” Grenier concluded. It focused on the core Al Qaeda organization but after the invasion of Iraq Al Qaeda was metastasizing, forming new branches across the Middle East. The target’s changing shape created fresh conflicts and confusion between the C.I.A.’s geographic divisions and the Counterterrorism Center. Grenier decided to “reorganize” ALEC “out of existence.” He defended the changes by arguing that “the same people, in the same numbers, continued to pursue the same targets, very much to include Bin Laden, but in a more rational structure.” Yet the reorganization of the core Al Qaeda mission team was one more disruption in a long season of them at Langley.25
The C.I.A. decided to work much more independently from I.S.I. as early as 2005, according to British counterparts. Joint Special Operations Command added Task Force Orange specialists in human source recruitment, analysts from the Army and Navy Reserves, and N.S.A. intercept teams to the Omega bases, despite the resource strain of the Iraq war. Since human agent recruiting had proved to be difficult, the push concentrated heavily on signals intelligence collection against cell phones and e-mail. There were few Predators available; the production line went straight to Iraq. A handful of serendipitous walk-in agents—Pakistani or other volun
teers who approached the United States with information about Al Qaeda or the Taliban to sell—provided a baseline of phone numbers and locations in Waziristan and other parts of western Pakistan. During 2006, amid an interrogation at a J.S.O.C. prison in Afghanistan, an Uzbek prisoner directed his interrogators to a wheeled duffel bag he had been toting at the time of his arrest. The Americans found a false bottom with a folded-up paper containing coded information about Al Qaeda safe houses and contact numbers in North Waziristan. This and other C.I.A. mapping operations in Waziristan set the stage for a coming surge of unilateral lethal drone operations on Pakistani territory.26
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Porter Goss resigned as C.I.A. director on May 5, 2006, after less than two years in the position. Bush named as his successor Air Force general Michael Hayden, a former National Security Agency director. Originally from Pittsburgh, Hayden was a balding, management-oriented leader who communicated well in meetings, understood bureaucracy, cooperated with reporters, and got along with diverse colleagues. His consensus-driven approach did not always succeed. While running N.S.A., relying on the judgments of his senior analysts, he had endorsed the inaccurate National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. As a manager, Hayden’s weakness was that he hated to fire people, so he addressed that by hiring tough deputies. For this and other reasons, he thought of persuading Steve Kappes, the senior operations officer and former Marine who had resigned in protest, to return as deputy C.I.A. director. As soon as Hayden learned that Bush was likely to appoint him, he tracked down Kappes, who was living in London. He called him while Kappes was standing on a platform at Waterloo Station.
“Steve, would you consider being the deputy?” Hayden asked.
“That would depend on who the director is,” Kappes replied.
