Directorate S

by Steve Coll

  In Pakistan, I owe special thanks to Ahmed Rashid, Najam Sethi, Jugnu Moshin, Waqar Gilani, Zahid Hussain, and Maleeha Lodhi. I first met Ahmed, Najam, and Jugnu when I turned up in Lahore as a wide-eyed rookie newspaper correspondent in 1989. While I was reporting more recently for this book, it became apparent that we had been holding the same conversations, in the same places, about the same subjects—coup rumors, army succession, I.S.I.’s agenda, American blindness—for almost thirty years. Some things have improved in Pakistan along the way, but not enough. None of them is responsible for what I have reported and written here.

  From India, I was fortunate to have the expertise of Rama Lakshmi and Sajid Shapoo. During the research for this book, I participated in several “track two” meetings among American academic, governmental, and think tank specialists on South Asia and Chinese counterparts, which were invaluable in clarifying Beijing’s outlook on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  I started this book while at the New America Foundation, where I was supported by Peter Bergen, Jon Wallace, Victoria Collins, Eric Schmidt, Kati Marton, David Bradley, Rachel White, MaryEllen McGuire, Reid Cramer, and many other friends and colleagues. I finished the project at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. There Sue Radmer and Iris Lee have somehow made the days fit together. I owe thanks as well for support and comradeship from Lee Bollinger, John Coatsworth, Jane Booth, David Stone, Rick Smith, Paul Neely, Keith Goggin, Simon Lee, Ira Lipman, Janine Jaquet, Paul Schuchert, Ernest Sotomayor, Sheila Coronel, Nick Lemann, Bill Grueskin, Sam Freedman, Michael Shapiro, LynNell Hancock, Emily Bell, Mark Hansen, June Cross, Betsy West, Kyle Pope, Todd Gitlin, Alisa Solomon, David Hajdu, Jim Stewart, Alexander Stille, Jonathan Weiner, Marguerite Holloway, Richard John, Andie Tucher, Jelani Cobb, Michael Schudson, Mike Pride, and many other wonderful colleagues too many to list without reprinting our directories.

  The New Yorker made this book possible by supporting reporting trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan; some of those interviews have turned up in these pages. I am especially grateful to Nick Thompson for his enthusiastic supervision of our quixotic search for Mullah Mohammad Omar. I owe gratitude as well to the editing of Jeff Franks, Nick Trautwein, Amy Davidson Sorkin, Alan Burdick, and Virginia Cannon. I cannot adequately express my thanks to David Remnick, Dorothy Wickenden, and Pam McCarthy for their backing since I came to the magazine in 2005. And, as ever, the magazine’s fact-checkers did some of the best reporting that appeared under my byline. The late Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books was another font of encouragement and insight during these years.

  I have been so fortunate to work with Ann Godoff, at what is now Penguin Random House, for more than two decades. On this project again, Ann supported the most ambitious, serious work possible while offering very helpful notes and analysis. Thanks as well, at Penguin, to Karen Mayer, Casey Denis, and Michael J. Burke. Melanie Jackson, my literary agent, has been my steadfast colleague since the early 1980s, and was once again an invaluable reader.

  Finally, I am grateful to the friends who went out of their way during the years of this work: David Finkel, Bill Gerrity, Adam Holzman, Glenn Frankel, Bob Kaiser, Phil Bennett, Steve Feirson, Anne Hull, Liz Spayd, Bob Nickelsberg, Ken Zimmerman, Chris Stone, and Michael Greenhouse. As ever I owe the most to the extended Coll clan: Ally, Emma, Max, Rory, John, Susan, Paul, Geoff, Dan, Alex, Aidan, Lilly, Sarah, Katie, Jonny, Kara, Marian, Frank, Phoebe, Hannah, Louisa, Gigi, the Baldwins, the Broadhursts, the Shoemakes, the many dogs I follow on Instagram, and, of course, young Robert, who traveled by road in his mother’s tummy to Jalalabad during the making of this book. To the inspiring Eliza, I can only express my deepest love and gratitude.

  NOTES

  This book is based primarily on more than 550 interviews conducted in the United States, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Europe between 2007 and 2017 by the author, as well as four researchers, Christina Satkowski, Elizabeth Barber, Mustafa Hameed, and Derek Kravitz. Elizabeth Barber also carried out important additional interviews during 2016 and 2017 while fact-checking the manuscript with its original sources. Many interviewees agreed to multiple sessions or followed up with correspondence. Where possible, we conducted interviews on the record; there are dozens of named individual sources cited below. I also sought contemporary records of events described in the book and was able to rely on such materials in a number of cases. I kept an informal diary of notes from private meetings and conversations I participated in about Afghanistan and Pakistan policy in Washington between 2007 and 2012, when I was both a working journalist at The New Yorker and president of the New America Foundation, a policy research institute. The release by WikiLeaks of State Department cables from the embassies in Kabul and Islamabad, through early 2010, also provided an important source of grounding about dates, intelligence reporting, and high-level meetings. The notes below provide a full accounting of the court records, research papers, memoirs, and books by journalists and scholars that I also relied upon throughout.

  Chapter One: “Something Has Happened to Khalid”

  1. The account of Saleh’s meetings in Germany comes primarily from interviews with Saleh, confirmed by two former senior American officials familiar with the program. By Saleh’s account, the last shipment he had to move on his own from Frankfurt was handed off by the C.I.A. in early September 2001. The former American officials confirmed that Saleh did have to move nonlethal equipment on his own from Frankfurt that summer, but said there was more than one shipment, and they were less certain of the September timing. For the tangled history of American covert aid and policy toward Massoud between 1997 and 2001, see Coll, Ghost Wars, chapters 26–32.

  2. Interviews with Saleh. The C.I.A.’s assessment of him is from interviews with four senior intelligence officers who worked with him around this time.

  3. All quotations from the interviews with Saleh. London accounts, Massoud controlled just over $60 million: Interview with a former senior intelligence official familiar with the reporting. The World Bank reported Pakistan’s G.D.P. as $72.3 billion in 2001.

  4. Saleh’s biography, ibid. The BBC made a short documentary that touched on Saleh’s humanitarian and political work during the early 1990s, A Town Called Taloqan. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n-QrlOeWHo.

  5. “We have a common enemy”: From an interview with Blee, conducted in 2002. The specific equipment ALEC Station supplied: Berntsen, Jawbreaker, p. 57. Berntsen joined a team that visited the Panjshir in March 2000, the last of three C.I.A. visits before worries about Massoud’s helicopters caused the supply lines to move back to Dushanbe and Germany. “We were there to capture Zawahiri,” Berntsen recalled in an interview, but after C.I.A. headquarters received a report out of Europe that Al Qaeda had identified and targeted the team, they were ordered to leave early. “It was over, a mission that cost millions,” according to Berntsen. “We were just in disgust.”

  6. Quotations from an interview with Blee. This account of ALEC Station’s argument to Massoud was confirmed by Saleh as well. On the $150 million covert action program proposed for Massoud, see Coll, Ghost Wars, and the “Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,” hereafter The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 197.

  7. Interviews with Saleh.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Arif’s biography, from interviews with Arif. “Scruffy . . . reliable partner”: Crumpton, The Art of Intelligence, p. 131. Gary Berntsen recalled that Arif’s communications and intercept room “resembled a crazy high school experiment . . . a mixture of old French and Russian components wired together.” Berntsen, Jawbreaker, p. 57.

  10. Massoud’s intelligence operations and history: Interviews with several former Afghan intelligence officials who worked at the directorate in these years and afterward. Head of Taliban intelligence was a reporting agent: Interview with a senior aide to Massoud who was directly involved.

  11. All quotations from interviews with Ari
f. He also recounts these events in a Dari-language memoir.

  12. Interviews with Saleh.

  13. The conversation in the Kulyab garden is from interviews with Saleh, Arif, and Abdullah.

  14. All quotations are from interviews with Saleh. Blee confirmed Saleh’s recollections.

  Chapter Two: Judgment Day

  1. The description and history of C.T.C.’s office is drawn from interviews with people who worked there in 2001 or visited repeatedly, including Cofer Black and Ed Worthington. Dimly lit and sour smelling, with “Dimly lit and sour smelling”: Bennett, National Security Mom, p. 15. List of terrorist target branches in C.T.C.: Crumpton, The Art of Intelligence, p. 132.

  2. Employee survey: “Inspection Report of the DCI Counterterrorist Center Directorate of Operations,” C.I.A. Office of Inspector General, August 2001, partially declassified and released, June 10, 2015. Almost six in ten ALEC Station employees: “Office of Inspector General Report on Central Intelligence Agency Accountability Regarding Findings and Conclusions of the Report of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001,” hereafter OIG Accountability Report, June 2005, partially declassified and released, June 10, 2015, p. 73. (The figure was 57 percent.) Cable traffic numbers: Ibid., p. 75. An average of twenty-three reports on Al Qaeda to the F.B.I. per month: Ibid., p. 52. ALEC Station transmitted 1,018 formal reports, called CIRs, between January 1998 and September 10, 2011.

  3. Area familiarization operations: Interviews with several people who participated in them for C.T.C. The contractors are “sort of cannon fodder”: Author’s interview. Billy Waugh, a legendary C.I.A. operative, has described some of the day-to-day overseas surveillance work summarized here in Waugh and Keown, Hunting the Jackal.

  4. Interviews with Black and Blee.

  5. Interview with Black.

  6. Interview with Blee, who reviewed his recollection with several of the colleagues working at ALEC Station that morning and reported their combined account to the author in early 2015.

  7. “Wherever I go”: Interview with Black. “A lot of yelling and screaming”: Interview with Allen.

  8. 9:40 a.m. videoconference: Tenet, At the Center of the Storm, p. 163. Also, The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 36.

  9. “Let’s get out of here”: Tenet, ibid., p. 164. “We should stay here”: Interview with Allen. He recalled that A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, the C.I.A.’s executive director or chief administrative officer, also recommended that the group stay put.

  10. Tenet, ibid.

  11. Schroen, First In, p. 14.

  12. Alternate campus: Interview with Allen, who worked on continuity of government operations during his long C.I.A. career.

  13. “Sir, we’re going to . . . absolutely right”: Tenet, At the Center of the Storm, p. 165. Black confirms the exchange. Other details of the migration to the printing plant and the efforts of the cabinet to communicate are from interviews with Black, Allen, and others present. See also The 9/11 Commission Report and Morell, The Great War of Our Time, chapter 3.

  14. Interview with Worthington. What happened, who did it, what next: Interview with Black.

  15. Interviews with several officers who were present.

  16. Interviews with Blee and a second C.T.C. officer involved in the debate with Hezbollah branch that morning.

  17. All quotations, interview with Blee.

  18. Ibid.

  19. “Over the last several months”: OIG Accountability Report, p. 17. Other headlines: The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 257–59.

  20. Tenet, At the Center of the Storm, pp. 151–52. Interview with Worthington.

  21. “Read one or more”: OIG Accountability Report, p. xiv. Four FBI agents opened at least one cable related to Mihdhar’s January 2000 visa: Ibid., p. 55. Miller and Rossini have spoken publicly about the blocked cable, i.e., Newsweek, January 14, 2015.

  22. OIG Accountability Report, p. xiv.

  23. Interview with a former C.I.A official.

  24. OIG Accountability Report, p. xv.

  25. All quotations, interviews with Black.

  26. Tenet called Al Qaeda around 3:00 p.m.: Morell, p. 56. “This is a tragedy . . . you cannot imagine”: Interview with Saleh, confirmed by Blee.

  27. Several C.T.C. employees recounted what they remembered of this speech, before Black confirmed the talk in an interview. The quotations used here are mostly from Black’s recollections but a few are from the recollections of officers present.

  Chapter Three: Friends Like These

  1. The author first met Smith at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad in 1989 while reporting on Pakistan’s military for The Washington Post. The account of Smith’s biography and career comes from multiple interviews with Smith over twenty years, including for this book.

  2. As part of the effort to cultivate Mahmud, Smith and the C.I.A. arranged a battlefield tour of Gettysburg. Coll, Ghost Wars, pp. 504–11. Mahmud’s interests: Correspondence with Mahmud.

  3. Stephen Hawking: Grenier, 88 Days to Kandahar, p. 73.

  4. This summary of I.S.I.’s organization is drawn from interviews with serving and former I.S.I. officers, American officials who studied the organization, and published accounts.

  5. “Evident personal enthusiasm”: Ibid. Mahmud considered: Correspondence from Mahmud.

  6. All quotations from author’s interviews and contemporary records. Mahmud, in correspondence, confirmed some of the conversation. “That ‘Islam is misunderstood’ came up during the discussions in nearly all my meetings with the visitors from the West,” he wrote. “It was not as a result of my personal belief system but rather because Islam happens to be intrinsic to the regional environment, which the visitors came to discuss in the first place. Misunderstood Islam is still as intrinsic to the regional environment today as it was when 9/11 happened.” He wrote without elaboration that the account describing his statements about unity of faith and military command “are misquoted.”

  7. Tenet’s travel to Pakistan in summer of 2001: Interviews with U.S. officials. Mahmud in Washington: Correspondence from Mahmud. There have been several published accounts of Mahmud’s breakfast with Goss and Graham in the Capitol on the morning of September 11. According to Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife, p. 28, Goss planned to provide the I.S.I. chief with a gift, a book about the American Civil War, but in the scramble to evacuate, it was left behind.

  8. All quotations, interview with Chamberlin. Musharraf did not respond to requests for comment about Chamberlin’s recollections.

  9. All quotations from interviews with Smith and contemporary records.

  10. “The inconsistency of U.S. attitudes”: Correspondence from Mahmud. All other quotations, State Department cable, Washington to Islamabad, September 14, 2001, redacted version obtained by the National Security Archive, George Washington University. See also Woodward, Bush at War, pp. 58–59, who published substantially the same talking points.

  11. The quotations are primarily from contemporary records. “Come on, General Musharraf” and “Frankly, General Musharraf” are from Chamberlin’s recollection, in an interview. The records show that Chamberlin cut Musharraf off a couple of times and challenged him to be more forthcoming, but Chamberlin recalls being less undiplomatic. After Musharraf declared “unstinting” support, Chamberlin went outside and told CNN that Musharraf had agreed. She spoke on camera immediately because she felt she needed “to lock him in so he can’t backtrack.”

  12. “We were on the borderline . . . all the details”: Rashid, Descent into Chaos, pp. 28–29. “The stakes are high. . .”: Bush, Decision Points, p. 188. “In almost every conversation”: Ibid., p. 213.

  13. All quotations from the meeting are from contemporary records.

  14. Musharraf, In the Line of Fire, p. 216.

  15. From author’s interviews an
d contemporary records.

  16. Rashid, Descent into Chaos, p. 73.

  17. Interviews with several retired C.I.A. officers familiar with Wood’s work.

  18. Interview with McLaughlin.

  19. Grenier, 88 Days to Kandahar, pp. 26–32.

  20. Ibid., pp. 79–80.

  21. All quotations, ibid., pp. 83–87. Grenier’s thinking about making a deal or provoking a Pashtun uprising: Interview with Grenier.

  22. All quotations, correspondence from Mahmud.

  23. All quotations from author’s interviews and contemporary records.

  24. Ibid. The quotations in the paragraph beginning “Omar is frightened” are from a declassified State Department cable, Islamabad to Washington, September 24, 2001, obtained by the National Security Archive, George Washington University. Mahmud wrote in correspondence that he never found Omar to be frightened, although he was, at times, angry.

  25. Schofield, Inside the Pakistan Army, pp. 63–64. Musharraf granted Schofield unusual access to conduct interviews with serving Pakistan Army officers in sensitive positions, including Tarar. Her book contains valuable transcriptions and insights.

  26. Grenier, 88 Days to Kandahar, p. 124.

  27. Zaeef, My Life with the Taliban, pp. 154–55.

  Chapter Four: Risk Management

  1. “Rural mind”: Interview with a former Taliban officeholder. Battlefield scene, “marvelous party . . . flower-like friend”: Zaeef, My Life with the Taliban, pp. 42–43.

  2. Zaeef, ibid., pp. 63–64.

  3. Taliban Sources Project, “The Official Gazette,” September 4, 2001.

  4. Bashir Noorzai: “Draft Transcript” from Noorzai’s interrogation by U.S. defense contractors, filed in U.S. v. Bashir Noorzai, United States District Court, Southern District of New York, 81 05 CR. 19. Omar’s driver: Linschoten and Kuehn, An Enemy We Created, p. 179. Their portrait of the relationship between Bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar, drawn from extensive interviews with Taliban leaders, is the most authoritative available in open sources.