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

by Michael Morell

  Not only did I need to answer the president’s questions about the threat reporting being disseminated by the intelligence community, but I also had to brief him on “imaginative” threats. After 9/11, CIA invited Hollywood screenwriters to the Agency to brainstorm possible attack methodologies—as few before 9/11 could have imagined that al Qa‘ida would hijack a plane and use it as a weapon. These scenarios would be presented to the president in a special “Red Cell” format, which had a distinctive design and a disclaimer at the top to remind readers that these were not your typical reports but rather were highly speculative products that employed equal doses of intelligence and imagination. We were looking for ideas on how to keep the country safe, from wherever we could get them. The president studied every one of the Red Cell reports, but I had my doubts about how useful they were to the president.

  There was an exhausting sense of urgency to everything. Rolling through stop signs and red lights, I drove aggressively to work because no one else was on the road and because I was in that much of a hurry. Once I was so tired that I missed my exit for McLean—the closest town to the Agency—and drove nearly all the way to D.C., some ten miles out of my way, before I realized what I had done. As I got back on course that morning, I thought that I was lucky to have survived driving around in such an exhausted state.

  No matter how drained I was, whenever I drove down the long entranceway to CIA, I would be revived by a sense of mission, the signs of which were all around me. Access to the headquarters compound had always been tight, but in the days immediately after 9/11, security was bristling. The normal security protective officers (known as “SPOs”) were even more vigilant than usual. Their numbers were augmented by officers in armored Humvees that were parked on the median strips and along the entrance road.

  Once my badge was carefully scrutinized I would slowly drive onto the 258-acre compound and past a marble sign that declared it the George Bush Center for Intelligence. Congress had bestowed the name in 1999 to honor the forty-first president and the eleventh director of CIA. There are two main buildings on the complex. I worked in what is called the “Original Headquarters Building” or OHB. President Eisenhower laid the cornerstone for the place in 1959, a year after I was born. Connected to the OHB are two six-story glass-encased towers known as the “New Headquarters Building.” The NHB opened in 1991. President Reagan had broken ground for the facility two years earlier. I was among those in the crowd who watched him do so.

  Friends and neighbors would often ask me how many people worked at Langley. The answer I would have to give was “A lot,” because the actual number is classified. But you only have to look at the traffic streaming in and out or view the overhead photos of the massive parking lots to know the Agency is a major presence. It was generally too confusing to try to explain that Langley doesn’t really exist—at least in the legal sense. The actual community where the headquarters is located is called McLean. But everyone calls it Langley anyway. They do not, however, call CIA “the Company”—which seems to be popular only in old movies and novels.

  In more peaceful times the headquarters compound would often be referred to as a “campus.” The barbed-wire fences surround a leafy property with jogging paths and symbolic artwork competing for space with satellite dishes and old spy planes mounted on pedestals. But this was no peaceful time. So I would quickly make my way to my seventh-floor office, where I would work through the night to gather the latest intelligence to bring to the president shortly after sunrise.

  I didn’t work alone. A terrific group of analysts supported me. They were young, talented, and eager to learn. They did everything from finding answers to my many questions—often by waking up the analyst who had written a piece—to making copies of the briefing package. They also bailed me out of fixes on many occasions. One day I showed up for work in the middle of the night as usual. Sometime before dawn I discovered that I was wearing two differently colored shoes—one brown and one black. I did not know what I was going to do until I spotted one of the PDB support analysts and demanded to know his shoe size. Turned out it was a match and I commandeered his shoes so that I could walk into the Oval Office without looking like a disheveled mess. Some of those young analysts who supported me during my year of briefing in 2001 are today making their way to the very top of CIA. I am very proud of them.

  * * *

  The PDB briefings, which before 9/11 had been about intelligence analysis and reporting, now took on an added dimension. Increasingly, operational decisions were made on the spot and orders given on priorities in the war against al Qa‘ida. I would provide the president with updates on exactly what was happening on the ground in Afghanistan, and Tenet would update the president on the latest operational developments.

  Tenet was out for a few days on an overseas trip, and while he was gone, I started using a detailed table-size military map of Afghanistan to update the president. The map showed the disposition of the Northern Alliance and Pashtun forces fighting on behalf of the United States, as well as the Taliban and al Qa‘ida forces defending their territory. I knew the president liked the map. When Tenet returned, he saw, during our prep session, that I was planning to use it, and he made it very clear that he did not want me to do so, arguing it was too detailed for the president.

  “I’m using it,” I said. “Oh, no you’re not,” my boss responded. “Oh, yes I am,” I said. We were like a bickering married couple. I won the day, and when the president walked into the Situation Room and saw the map spread on the table, he said, “Ah, my map. I love that map!” I just looked at Tenet and smiled.

  After the one-time experiment with taking Black to a briefing, Tenet started bringing one of Black’s deputies, Hank Crumpton. Crumpton was the senior CIA officer with the daily job of running our war effort in Afghanistan. Crumpton, a smart, savvy, and likable officer, had been called back from a plum overseas assignment to lead the war against al Qa‘ida. Crumpton’s personality could not be more different from Black’s. Crumpton would sit close to the president and, in a near whisper, methodically walk through the latest information. For his part, I think Black was happy to have Crumpton brief the president. Black believed that his rightful place was with his officers working the problem directly.

  * * *

  While all the pieces for taking on the Taliban and al Qa‘ida were in place in only a few weeks, it took a while for the Northern Alliance to get going—much to the dismay of the president. For days our Afghan allies did not start the push south. They were tentative, concerned about what they would face in battle. And every day the president expressed his frustration to Tenet. “When are they going to get moving?” and “What is taking them so long?” were frequent refrains from the commander in chief. But Tenet got the message and pushed hard for action when he returned to Langley, and, in a short time, the Northern Alliance began to move. Once that happened, the collapse of the Taliban unfolded quickly. They were no match for the well-trained Northern Alliance backed by US air strikes.

  Our Afghan allies took Kabul in mid-November 2001, and by the end of the year had forced the Taliban from power and significantly disrupted al Qa‘ida. Looking back, it is hard to believe that in our military involvement in Afghanistan—which, at this writing, has been going on for over thirteen years—so much was achieved in the first several weeks.

  This was CIA’s finest hour. The paramilitary operation that Crumpton and his officers carried out, led passionately by Cofer Black, was historic. A handful of CIA officers working closely with a small number of military Special Forces operators moved mountains. At one moment they were calling in deadly accurate air strikes and guiding sophisticated bombs precisely to their targets, and the next they were calling in airdrops to receive saddles they needed to accompany their Northern Alliance counterparts in cavalry missions. Twenty-first-century military tactics merged flawlessly with methods from the seventeenth century.

  CIA’s post-9/11 achievement was the result of our planning and our
great flexibility as an organization, but it was also the result of our knowing the turf so well. In the two years before 9/11, CIA officers had traveled multiple times to northern Afghanistan to meet with a group of tribal warlords there. One of my friends once delivered a briefcase holding a million dollars to one of the key Northern Alliance leaders (“It was heavy,” he said). There were long nights of sitting around a campfire under the stars, drinking tea and discussing the history of the Afghan people, Afghan politics, and the future of a country that had been at war for decades. This is how deep and enduring relationships are built in the intelligence business—relationships that made our rapid response to 9/11 and our success possible.

  * * *

  In the months that followed the attacks of 9/11, despite the weight of the enormous tragedy that had befallen our nation, those of us at the Agency received a tremendous boost from the unity of purpose and determination of the American people. And it was not just Americans. CIA benefited from goodwill and good wishes from not only our traditional foreign intelligence partners but also even longtime foes like the Russians.

  It didn’t take long for the national sense of unity to evaporate, however. Sadly, the “we are in this together” attitude eroded in favor of “let’s find someone to blame” for allowing the attacks to happen. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan said publicly, “Prior to September 11, US intelligence officials had terrorist information that if properly handled could have disrupted or possibly prevented the terrorist attacks.… This is not a matter of scapegoating. This is a matter of accountability.” Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama asked, “Has anyone in CIA been held accountable for the failures of September 11 or the events leading up to it?” The officers of the Counterterrorism Center, who had been among the few in the country who recognized the threat and tried to something about it, now felt very much alone.

  A couple of years after I left the briefing job, the finger-pointing even came in my direction. I was on vacation with my family in Normandy when I returned to our hotel to find a note instructing me to call a phone number that I recognized immediately as being at CIA headquarters. I reached Jami Miscik, the deputy director of intelligence and a longtime friend. “Michael, are you sitting down?” she asked. “I am now, what’s up?” I responded. “It seems Steve Biegun [the NSC staffer who had been with me in Crawford on August 6, 2001] is telling people that you told the president there was no need to worry about an al Qa‘ida attack on the homeland when you briefed the August 6 PDB. They want to share this with the 9/11 Commission.” “What!” I said. “That’s absurd. It is wrong. The August 6 PDB made clear that there was plenty to worry about—it just didn’t have the time, place, and means of attack.” It became clear to me that as the political sharks circled the White House, some thought was being given to tossing me—and therefore CIA—over the side. Fortunately, with Miscik’s intercession—along with that of Tenet’s chief of staff, John Moseman—the idea of pinning responsibility on CIA and me did not gain traction at the more senior levels of the White House.

  In fact, senior Bush administration officials later told me that they had not been aware of the idea of throwing me overboard and would have opposed it had it ever reached them. They also told me that President Bush would never have let it happen.

  * * *

  9/11 changed CIA more than any other single event during my time at the Agency, and probably more than any other single event in the history of the organization. Never before had CIA refocused so abruptly and dramatically as we did after 9/11. The number of officers working on terrorism—including contractors—more than tripled, and the dollars flowing to the terrorism problem jumped even more. Terrorism became the focus of nearly every overseas station and operational division in the Agency. As a result, intelligence collection on terrorism improved significantly. Terrorism analysis got better as well. For the first time, terrorism analysts became the fighter pilots of the analytic ranks. Prior to 9/11, terrorism analysts had been seen as second-class citizens by their counterparts who were working more “weighty” geopolitical issues. Terrorism analysis now attracted some of the best and the brightest of the Agency’s analysts, a group who would play a very significant role in the eventual successful hunt for Bin Ladin.

  9/11 would also take the Agency in some ways back to its roots—back to the paramilitary days of the Office of Strategic Services, the country’s World War II intelligence service. Never before had the Agency had as much latitude to conduct paramilitary operations, and it used those authorities aggressively to protect the country. There would, of course, be a downside to the aggressive use of these authorities. CIA suffered political blowback against some of the operations and activities that were covered by these authorities, particularly our detention and enhanced interrogation program in the early years after 9/11.

  Perhaps the biggest downside to our necessary focus on terrorism was the cost to the Agency’s ability to be a global intelligence service—to have the access around the world to be able to warn the president in advance of developments that could undermine US national security. There is no doubt in my mind that the resource shift and focus on terrorism were in part responsible for our failure to more clearly foresee some key global developments such as Russia’s renewed aggressive behavior with its neighbors.

  These failures occurred because the additional personnel resources provided by multiple administrations and Congresses to fight the war against al Qa‘ida never fully covered everything we needed to do that—so we had to rob Peter to pay Paul. During the 1990s, the Agency workforce had shrunk by almost 25 percent—our contribution to the “peace dividend.” It was the leanest of times. And while the workforce grew significantly after 9/11, the number of employees at the Agency today is just slightly larger than it was in 1991—all trying to cover a world that in almost every respect is much more complex than it was in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. But there was no choice; the focus had to be on al Qa‘ida.

  * * *

  So how did our initial victory in Afghanistan—in only months—turn into the longest war in American history? It happened because at some point our goal shifted from ensuring that al Qa‘ida would not again be able to use Afghanistan as a launching pad for attacks against the homeland to something else. The mission changed to trying to permanently alter Afghan politics and society. It was an impossible task to turn Afghanistan’s tribal society and culture into a liberal democracy. It was an impossible task to convince the Taliban that it should operate inside the Afghan political system rather than outside of it. Perhaps we should have walked away from Afghanistan after forcing al Qa‘ida from the country, and we would have told all Afghans, including the Taliban, “If you let al Qa‘ida return, so will we.”

  * * *

  Being a presidential briefer is a killer job under the best of circumstances. The hours and the stress take their toll on bodies and marriages. The thought that Mary Beth and I had had early on, that the job would be good for our family life, had been a poor piece of analysis. In late October we decided to escape to Charlottesville—a two-hour drive from D.C.—for a quick romantic overnight escape to celebrate our wedding anniversary. The thing is, my day had started at twelve thirty a.m. because I’d briefed that morning. Even with a nap during the drive down, I was exhausted. We stayed at a bed-and-breakfast and booked dinner for seven p.m.—early for most but definitely late for me. During dessert I fell asleep at the table. Mary Beth saved me from going face-first into my tarte tatin. As we were walking back to our cottage, I slipped down a flight of stairs, breaking off the railing in the process. Some of the other guests looked at me, clearly thinking, “He is really drunk.” I looked back, smiled, and said, “Not drunk. Just really tired.” I don’t think they believed me. So much for a romantic escape.

  Because the job was so demanding, I had decided early on to do it for only a year. On January 4, 2002, it was time for me to move on. It was my last briefing. The president was in Crawford, and I br
ought with me my successor to show him the ropes and introduce him to the president. We arrived at the trailer where the president did his secure video teleconferences, a few minutes before the appointed hour. The president arrived and, before the teleconference went live, he asked me if there was any news in the briefing. I had no option other than to deliver the headline—that we had learned that Usama bin Ladin had escaped from Tora Bora, Afghanistan.

  The US military had dropped more ordnance on the location than on any other area since World War II, and yet Bin Ladin had escaped. The forces that would have been necessary to box him in, to keep him from fleeing over the border into Pakistan, had simply not been there. Feeling the frustration of the moment, the president shot the messenger—me.

  The president seldom raised his voice, but he did that day. He was angry. He was madder than I have ever seen him. He asked, “How the hell did you lose him? How could he possibly have eluded you? What are your plans now?” I sat there thinking, “I did not have anything to do with this,” but I did not dare say a word.

  You have never really been chewed out until you have had the bark stripped off of you by the most powerful man in the world. My poor successor sat there wide-eyed, no doubt wondering what he had just signed up for. When the videoconference went live and the smiling faces of Cheney, Rice, and Tenet appeared on-screen, the president wasted no time in asking, “What the hell is this? Michael just told me something about Bin Ladin getting away?”