The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS

by Michael Morell

  A little after three p.m. Eastern Time we landed at Offutt. We were taken on buses to the entrance of the STRATCOM underground bunker. A secure videoconference call was set up in the bunker’s command center. As I entered I saw the president, Andy Card, and the STRATCOM commander, Admiral Richard Mies, at a table in front of a large screen. On the screen, transmitting from three or four different locations, were senior officials in Washington. George Tenet walked the president and others through the information that tied three of the hijackers to al Qa‘ida. When Tenet finished, the president turned and looked me straight in the eye. He didn’t say a word, but his look told me that he felt he had been let down. He hadn’t wanted to learn about this after the fact on a conference call. My look back at him was meant to convey, “I’m sorry but I don’t know what happened.”

  I was angry that we had failed to follow through on the president’s order. I went through every possibility in my mind—was I not clear when I spoke to Cofer Black, did Black not pass on my message to Tenet, did Tenet just forget in the intense activity of the day, or did Tenet knowingly hold back the information because he wanted to brief it himself? I didn’t wait for the videoconference to end but rose from my seat in the back of the command center and walked out the door. I went to a nearby office and phoned the CIA Operations Center and asked to speak with Tenet’s executive assistant. After expressing my frustration—in colorful language—over not having been able to meet the president’s expectations, I asked that the information Tenet had just given the president be sent immediately to Air Force One, as I was certain that Tenet had not covered everything in the teleconference. The president felt he had been let down, I said, and so did I. The assistant told me that he could not send it because the information was embargoed from leaving the building. “Embargoed from the president of the United States?” I shouted. “Just send it!” I slammed the phone down. The stress of the day was starting to get to me.

  When I returned to the secure videoconference there was a debate going on about whether the president should return to Washington. The director of the Secret Service, in Washington, argued, “No, we still do not know if it would be safe for you to come back, Mr. President,” but it was not much of a debate because the president simply and firmly said, “I’m coming home.”

  Shortly thereafter we returned to Air Force One and departed for Washington. A few minutes after takeoff, a steward brought me a written communication from Tenet’s executive assistant. On the cover sheet was a short note: “Michael, sorry. Here’s everything we have.”

  I went through the material several times and highlighted several passages. Andy Card took me forward to see the president and I walked him through the material—some of which suggested that follow-up attacks were a very real possibility. We had already been sobered by the day’s events, and the news brought a new jolt of concern. After reading the documents, the president simply handed them back to me and said, “Thank you, Michael.”

  It was early evening as we approached Andrews Air Force Base. Everyone on board was tired. Inside Air Force One, the lights had been dimmed. The military aide pointed out the window and told me to look. One hundred yards off the tip of our wing was an F-16. The military aide whispered that there was another one off our other wing as well. “They are from the D.C. Air National Guard,” he said. The fighter was so close we could see the pilot’s facial features. In the distance below we could see the Pentagon, smoke still rising from the crash earlier in the day, and lights flashing from emergency vehicles on the scene. It was the darkest of hours. Tears welled up in my eyes for the first but not the last time that day.

  Immediately on arrival at Andrews AFB, the president flew off in Marine One back to the White House, while most of the staff piled into vans to follow him. I waited at the Andrews visitors lounge for a CIA car to take me back to headquarters. For the first time that day, I was able to call Mary Beth. I told her that I was at Andrews and waiting for a ride, adding that I would have much to tell her later. Her voice was reassuring. She simply said, “Get home soon.” Eventually I made it back to the Agency, retrieved my car, and made the trek back home. As I drove off the Agency compound the weight of everything that had happened sank in and I began to cry.

  I pulled into our driveway in northern Virginia, with the radio on and the president about to speak. I sat and listened for a few minutes before going into the house. I found Mary Beth on the sofa in our family room watching the president address a grieving nation. He asked for prayers for the families of the victims, said America would overcome the terrible tragedy, and promised that it would emerge even stronger. And, in a major change in policy that would become part of the Bush Doctrine, the president said the United States “would make no distinction between terrorists and nations that harbor them.”

  After the president finished, I went into each of my three children’s rooms and found them asleep, surrounded by stuffed animals. They looked as they did on any other night, peaceful and content. I thought of the thousands of other children who would never see their parents again. I kissed my three on their foreheads and softly told them I loved them.

  * * *

  Back at Langley, a stunningly patriotic dynamic was playing out. Many of those who had been sent home earlier in the day fought their way back through traffic to return to our headquarters—unable and unwilling to stay away. And we had scores of recently—and not-so-recently—retired Agency officers just drive up to the even-more-heavily-defended-than-usual front gate and say, “I want to come back. I will do anything that needs to be done.”

  * * *

  The 9/11 Commission said that the September 11 attacks resulted, in part, from a failure of imagination. I have never agreed with that characterization. Had I walked into the Oval Office in the spring and early summer of 2001—when the threat reporting was at its highest—and said “Mr. President, the analysts at CIA can imagine that one of the possibilities here is that al Qa‘ida operatives could hijack multiple aircraft in the United States using box cutters missed by airport X-ray machines, take over control of the cockpits, and use the aircraft themselves as weapons by flying them into prominent buildings here at home,” the president’s reaction would have been, “Well, I’m sure analysts can imagine lots of possibilities. What I want to know is exactly what al Qa‘ida is planning.” Imagination, without substantial facts to back it up, never has been and never will be the basis for policy decisions, nor should it be.

  9/11 was a not a failure of imagination. It was a national failure. It is true that one can point to specific lapses by the CIA, FBI, and NSA that might have made a difference—the failure of FBI field offices to follow up on and report to Washington unusual flight training by young Arab men, and the failure of CIA to report to the FBI the travel of two of the 9/11 hijackers to the United States, among others. It is also true that the intelligence community did not penetrate al Qa‘ida sufficiently enough to discover the threat. But the failures that ultimately led to 9/11 are much deeper than those lapses. They include not funding national security–related agencies to a level commensurate with the threat; not implementing all of the twenty sensible recommendations on aviation security made by the 1996 Gore Commission, established by President Clinton after the crash of TWA Flight 800; and not aggressively pursuing al Qa‘ida following the East Africa and Cole bombings.

  I believe that, taken together, these represent a national failure because the American people would not have supported the actions required. They would not have supported significant increases in the resources of the national security community at a time when the rest of the government was facing deep budget cuts; they would not have supported changes to aviation security that would have inconvenienced hundreds of thousands of travelers—the airline industry fought the recommendations of the Gore Commission, for example—and they would not have supported going to war in Afghanistan after the embassy bombings or the Cole bombing. No, it took 9/11 itself to galvanize the necessary support for the
se steps. One of the defining characteristics of America is that we tend to be reactive to events, not proactive. And on 9/11 we paid a significant price for this national trait.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Finest Hours

  On most Saturday mornings, George Tenet and I would drive to Camp David on the Catoctin Mountain of Maryland, where we would meet with the president in his office complex there called Laurel Lodge. Laurel is a comfortable, homey getaway filled with leather couches, overstuffed chairs, and a big, well-used fireplace. (The first time Tenet and I went to Camp David to brief the president we flew by helicopter. When Bush heard this, he said to us, “Sounds expensive.” We never traveled there by helicopter again, instead always driving.) We would typically wend our way to the president’s small personal office in the right rear portion of the cabin. We would almost always be joined by National Security Advisor Rice or her deputy, Steve Hadley. The president often had one foot on his desk, cowboy-style, while I delivered that day’s PDB briefing. Then we would often embark on a wide ranging tour d’horizon, with the president displaying a broad interest in world affairs—including many topics that would not normally arise in the briefings during the week. In the pre-9/11 days, our informal sessions would sometimes last up to two hours. When we were done we were often invited to stay for a buffet breakfast and we would sometimes find ourselves joined by world leaders who happened to be the president’s guests that weekend at Camp David. One time I found myself sitting next to British Prime Minister Tony Blair as he and George Tenet bantered about the intricacies of French politics. What impressed me most that day was that, until that moment, I hadn’t known my boss knew anything about French politics.

  It was on one of those Saturdays in late February 2001 that the president asked to see Tenet alone after the briefing. Little did I know that in the president’s office at Laurel, Bush was asking Tenet to stay on as director of central intelligence. When we got in the director’s armored Suburban to head back to Washington, he told me the news. I was not surprised, as I had watched the relationship between the two men grow significantly in the previous several weeks, but I was deeply proud of my boss. Very few directors of CIA have had the honor of serving more than one president.

  * * *

  On Saturday, September 15, Director Tenet and I took our typical weekend drive to the presidential retreat at Camp David but this was not going to be an ordinary Saturday briefing. Bush had brought his national security team to Camp David for a discussion on how the United States should respond to the attacks on the country just four days earlier. Each department and agency was represented by both its principal—a cabinet-level official—and its deputy, and many had brought in other senior officials as well. Tenet, for example, had brought along both Deputy Director John McLaughlin and Cofer Black, the director of CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.

  But before the National Security Council session started, Tenet and I gave the president his daily PDB. It was the largest crowd in history to ever sit in on a briefing session—the president and vice president, Tenet, Card, Rice, and Hadley, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. I showed the president two reports from CIA sources outlining significant terrorist plotting against US military forces in the Middle East. I noted, however, “Mr. President, we are not putting much stock in these reports as the sources do not have credible access to the information they are sharing.” Rumsfeld snapped, “Then you should not be showing these to the president.” Looking directly at the secretary of defense, I explained, “I was concerned that someone else, perhaps the Situation Room, might bring these to the president’s attention, and I wanted him to know what we think.” The president, sensing the tension, said “Don, it’s OK. Let’s move on.” I chalked it up to everyone being on edge.

  The PDB session was followed by breakfast, with the principals and deputies milling around Laurel Lodge, eating pastries and drinking coffee. I was not invited to the National Security Council session, but I decided to get something to eat before taking a car back to Washington. Near the end of breakfast, the president, Cofer Black, and I were standing to the side of the room talking. A senior State Department official walked over and expressed the opinion to the president that it was critical that America’s first response to the attack be diplomatic—that we should reason with the Taliban and ask them to turn over Bin Ladin and his senior al Qa‘ida leadership. As the official walked off, President Bush looked at Cofer and me and said, “Fuck diplomacy. We are going to war.”

  The president was speaking to Black and me in the emotion of the moment and he was playing to his audience: his CIA briefer and a tough CIA operations officer. In fact, the United States did give the Taliban an opportunity to turn over Bin Ladin and his top lieutenants. The Taliban refused.

  * * *

  At the NSC meeting, Tenet put on the table a detailed and multifaceted plan to go after Bin Ladin and al Qa‘ida. It included the use of force by the United States. CIA was the only department or agency in the room that day that had a plan. Just four days after the terrible events of 9/11, CIA was prepared to respond. Our readiness was no accident. In October 2000, after the bombing of the USS Cole in the Port of Aden and just one month before the presidential election, Tenet had been ready to take the gloves off, and he—along with national security advisor Sandy Berger—had asked the Counterterrorism Center for a plan to aggressively go after and dismantle al Qa‘ida. The CTC in December produced what it called the “Blue Sky” memo. It was remarkably detailed—for example, outlining relationships among the hundreds of different tribes in Afghanistan and how those could be used against the Taliban and al Qa‘ida—and the plan it suggested was remarkably expensive, set to cost more than the entire CIA budget at the time. On 9/11, the Blue Sky memo became the centerpiece of the war plan.

  CIA’s plan was approved, with the president ordering Tenet to put it into action. Less than two weeks later, on September 26, the Agency had its first team of CIA officers on the ground in Afghanistan. Called the Northern Alliance Liaison Team, the eight men entered Afghanistan on a rickety old Russian helicopter that the Agency had bought the year before, and immediately began to organize local forces to rise up against the Taliban leadership that had been providing safe haven for al Qa‘ida. US Special Forces joined Agency officers in Afghanistan on October 17.

  The plan was to have the military forces of the Northern Alliance—a fiercely independent, but well-organized, group of Afghan tribes who had not succumbed to Taliban rule—sweep south and push the Taliban from power. They would be guided by CIA officers and the Special Forces on the ground, and they would be assisted by massive precision US air strikes. At the same time, Pashtun tribes opposed to the Taliban—and organized by CIA—would rise up in the south and east. The Taliban therefore would be facing both a conventional military threat from the Northern Alliance and an insurgent uprising from its own Pashtun ranks.

  Just a few days after 9/11, Tenet brought his Counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, to the White House to outline the plan in more detail. Black had significant charisma, confidence, and a tough-minded approach to the world. He had helped to track down the renowned terrorist Carlos the Jackal years earlier, and garnered widespread respect for it. His oversize personality was on display as we walked into the White House and sat with the president.

  Black brought with him large boards with pictures of and information about the al Qa‘ida leadership. He promised the president the destruction of al Qa‘ida in a matter of weeks, and I eyed Tenet with a look on my face saying, “He cannot deliver on that promise. We don’t have that kind of intelligence. We don’t have the capability to do that.” Black then methodically went through the stack of storyboards, saying, “Bin Ladin, dead,” flipping the chart over his shoulder and back against the wall. “Zawahiri, dead,” and on and on. I looked at Andy Card, and he looked at me. I was thinking—and I was sure Card was thinking—“This is not appropriate for a discussion with the president of th
e United States.”

  Later that day, while speaking to the press, the president said he wanted Bin Ladin “dead or alive.” The next morning the president, after receiving some media criticism for his statement the day before, said to Tenet with a smile, “Cofer got me worked up yesterday. George, maybe it’s best if you don’t bring him to see me for a while.” Card told the president that I had once been Black’s deputy for a short period—a fact I had shared with the chief of staff earlier. The president looked at me with a smile and said, “That’s not possible.”

  * * *

  My briefing workload exploded. Before 9/11 I awoke at three a.m. to arrive at the Agency at four a.m., for an eight a.m. briefing of the president. After 9/11 I awoke at twelve thirty a.m. to begin work at one thirty a.m. After 9/11 there was just that much more material to go through every morning. This included the Threat Matrix, a new overnight compilation of all terrorist threats that had appeared in intelligence traffic during the previous twenty-four hours. The Matrix went on for many pages, typically covering fifty to sixty individual reported threats. I needed to know the Matrix inside and out because the president would often ask me about specific entries (he received it before I saw him in the morning). “Michael, tell me about numbers twelve and twenty-four,” or “Michael, tell me about number fifty-six.” One might be a report of a planned bombing of a US embassy in some part of the world; another might be a plan to assault a US oil tanker transiting the Red Sea; a third might be rumors of an attack on a nuclear power plant in Middle America.

  The amount of threat reporting increased dramatically in the weeks following 9/11. Some of this reflected enhanced collection on the part of the US intelligence community and our allies, providing insights into plots we had not been aware of before. Some of it reflected plans for “copycat” attacks by a variety of extremist groups. Some of it reflected existing sources passing along speculation as well as facts and not being clear about the difference between the two. And some of it reflected individuals reporting threats that they knew not to be true—the CT version of yelling fire in a crowded theater. Bottom line: some of the increase reflected real plots, and some did not. I had to help sort all this out for the president.