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

by Michael Morell

  And one AQAP senior leader is more dangerous than the rest—Ibrahim al-Asiri, a Saudi by birth and AQAP’s chief bomb maker. Asiri is the mastermind behind new explosive devices designed to evade security checks. He is smart and creative, and he is training a new generation of AQAP bomb makers. He undoubtedly has trained dozens over the past couple at years. He may well be the most dangerous terrorist alive today. He is a master at his craft and he is evil.

  He built a rectum bomb and recruited his younger brother, Abdullah, to use it in an attempt to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s most senior security official, Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, the country’s minister of the interior and now deputy crown prince. Abdullah pretended to be a repentant terrorist, and in a meeting with Prince Muhammad designed to symbolize the sincerity of his change of heart, he detonated the device. The two were sitting on pillows on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, when Abdullah hit a button on a cell phone, detonating the explosives. Abdullah was killed instantly—pieces of him were scattered all over the room, including the ceiling—but Prince Muhammad, sitting just inches away, survived with only minor injuries. He did not even spend a night in the hospital. Scientists explain Prince Muhammad’s survival in terms of the physics of the blast, but the prince does not accept this explanation. He thinks that God saved him for a purpose—to continue to help keep his country safe from terrorism, particularly from AQAP, an organization located on the same peninsula as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I find the prince’s reasoning compelling.

  Asiri’s bomb exploits go well beyond killing his own brother. Asiri was the mastermind behind young Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underwear bomb, which nearly brought down an airliner flying from Amsterdam to Detroit. Asiri also built a bomb hidden in a printer cartridge that, once the cartridge was placed in a printer, was nearly impossible to find. The goal was to bring down a cargo plane—or multiple cargo planes. The printer cartridge bomb could not be found on traditional airport scanners, and dogs trained to identify explosives could not find it either. He also built a non-metallic suicide vest, again designed to bring down airliners, and he has experimented with surgically implanting explosive devices inside human bodies.

  AQAP’s capabilities were on full display in Paris in January 2015, when two brothers attacked the offices of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo over the media outlet’s lampooning of the Prophet Muhammad. The attack, which killed twelve, was methodical and demonstrated planning, organization, and precision. The brothers escaped the scene, were found two days later twenty miles northeast of Paris, took hostages, and were finally gunned down by police after a nine-hour siege. At the same time the siege was underway, a third individual conducted a sympathy attack, taking and killing four hostages at a kosher market in Paris, before the police killed him as well. The assault on Charlie Hebdo was the largest terrorist attack in France since 1961. It dominated the news for several days.

  One of the brothers in 2011 had traveled to Yemen, where he attended a terrorist training camp run by AQAP. He met with a leading operative of the group, an American named Anwar al-Awlaki, who was intent on conducting attacks in the United States and Western Europe. During the operation in Paris, the brothers announced their allegiance to AQAP, and subsequently AQAP claimed to have directed the brothers to attack Charlie Hebdo and to have provided them with funding. If AQAP’s claims are true—and I think they are—this would represent AQAP’s first successful attack in the West and the largest al Qa‘ida attack in Western Europe since the London bombings ten years earlier.

  AQSL. So where does the threat to the US homeland from al Qa‘ida in Pakistan, the al Qa‘ida senior leadership, stand today? Al Qa‘ida in Pakistan still has the ability to carry out attacks in the United States, but only small-scale attacks—a singular event that might kill a hundred or fewer. I do not want to understate the significance of such an attack, but al Qa‘ida in Pakistan no longer has the ability to conduct a 9/11-style event.

  It had that capability twice—in the period just before 9/11 and from 2006 to 2010. It was taken from the group the first time by the US paramilitary and military intervention in Afghanistan and by Pakistan’s decision to work with CIA against al Qa‘ida. And it was taken from the group the second time by the aggressive CT operations begun by President Bush in August 2008 and continued by President Obama.

  But just because it does not have that capability today does not mean it will not get it back someday. And that could happen. Indeed, it may even be likely to happen, given trends in Afghanistan. Even in a best-case outcome for Afghanistan post a withdrawal of US forces, in which the government controls Kabul and most cities, the Taliban will control swaths of Afghan territory in the south and east. (The worst-case outcome is that the Taliban will be knocking on the door of Kabul within eighteen months of the departure of US forces.) The al Qa‘ida leadership in the FATA, if not defeated by then, will find safe havens with the Taliban. Some members will stay in Pakistan, but many will move back across the border into Afghanistan. And if the United States cannot or chooses not to contest al Qa‘ida there, the group will rebound, it will resurge, and it will eventually again pose a 9/11-style threat to the homeland. If this were to occur, it would mean that all of our efforts in Afghanistan over the past fourteen years—the longest war in American history—would have been for naught. What a terrible thing that would be.

  And, as in Yemen, there is one particular terrorist in South Asia whom I worry the most about—Farouq al-Qahtani. The al Qa‘ida leadership in Pakistan sent al-Qahtani to Afghanistan as a back-stop so al Qa‘ida could regroup if it lost its sanctuary in Pakistan. Al-Qahtani took his men to one of the most inhospitable places on the planet—Afghanistan’s Kunar and Nuristan Provinces, where steep mountain peaks and narrow river valleys make movement extremely difficult. There al-Qahtani has developed a following among the Taliban and the locals, and his al Qa‘ida branch has grown as more operatives have joined his group.

  Al-Qahtani, a Qatari by birth, is a US counterterrorism expert’s worst nightmare. He is smart and operationally sophisticated. He is also a charismatic leader. He is one of the few al Qa‘ida leaders I worry might have what it takes to replace Bin Ladin. I worry more about al-Qahtani than I do about the current leader of al Qa‘ida, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

  * * *

  Zawahiri became al Qa‘ida’s new leader, its emir, in June 2011, six weeks after Bin Ladin’s death. Zawahiri was born in Egypt in June 1951 and comes from a prominent family. His father’s uncle, Rabi’a al-Zawahiri, was the grand imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar University. His maternal grandfather was a highly regarded academic who served as the president of Cairo University and founded King Saud University in Riyadh. During his teenage years, Zawahiri began a lifelong association with Islamic extremism—to the point where he and some fellow students discussed overthrowing the regime of President Nasser. In 1980, like other ideologically motivated extremists, Zawahiri spent time in Peshawar, a Pakistani city near the Afghan border, where he met and connected with a young Usama bin Ladin. In 1981, after returning from Pakistan, Zawahiri would be implicated, tried, and thrown in prison for allegedly participating in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Some years later, Zawahiri was released from prison and became the new leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), a group which the United States believes helped participate, along with al Qa‘ida, in the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa. Just two years later the collaboration between Bin Ladin’s al Qa‘ida and Zawahiri’s EIJ became a full merger of the two organizations, with Zawahiri taking on the role of second in command.

  Zawahiri is a less charismatic leader than Bin Ladin, possibly one of the reasons that he was not publically named as al Qa‘ida’s new leader until six weeks after the Abbottabad raid. Since assuming his leadership position, he has presided over the group’s global expansion, but this has been much more a result of the regional affiliates’ actions than Zawahiri’s leadership. Zawahiri in 2013 publicly expelled ISIS, suspending its
franchise and stripping it of its status as part of the al Qa‘ida global enterprise, because it had disregarded Zawahiri’s order for ISIS to stay out of Syria. Zawahiri, like Bin Ladin and al Qa‘ida’s other senior leaders, places great importance on maintaining unity, so the move to expel ISIS can be read as a significant step by Zawahiri—but also a failure on his part to bring ISIS into line.

  * * *

  The Khorasan Group. ISIS is not the only terrorist group in Syria. The first jihadist group there to rise against President Assad was Jabhat al-Nusra. While ISIS grew out of the old al Qa‘ida in Iraq, al-Nusra was formed from an old organization of Syrian extremists, who had helped to facilitate the movement of foreign fighters into Iraq, via Syria, during the initial rise of AQI during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Unlike ISIS, al-Nusra is fully in the camp of the al Qa‘ida leadership in Pakistan. Al-Nusra is an official affiliate of al Qa‘ida, and al-Nusra accepts guidance from Zawahiri.

  Early in the fight against Assad, Zawahiri sent a group of his own operatives from Pakistan to Syria. Zawahiri had two objectives for the group: one was to assist al-Nusra in its fight against Assad and the second was to use Syria as a base of operations for attacks the West, to include attacks against the United States. This group of operatives from Pakistan is called the Khorasan Group. Like AQAP and AQSL, the Khorasan Group has the capability to conduct successful attacks in the United States. And, like with ISIS, the more safehaven al-Nusra has in Syria, the more potent their attack capability against the West will become over time.

  Boko Haram. Finally, I worry about Boko Haram. While the group has not yet focused on the US Homeland or on Western Europe, it could do so in the years ahead. And if it does, Boko Haram would pose a particularly worrisome threat because of its savage approach to its cause (Boko Haram kills roughly a thousand Nigerian civilians a year and in 2014 kidnapped two hundred Nigerian school girls because it believes girls should not be in school) and because the worldwide Nigerian diaspora would allow Boko Haram operational advantage. That is, Boko Haram’s operatives could hide in plain sight among the many Nigerians living outside of Nigeria.

  Other Groups. There is a long list of other jihadist groups, largely in Africa—but also more broadly—who pose a local threat to US interests and our allies. These groups regularly conduct attacks—three of the best known are the September 2012 attacks in Benghazi against our diplomatic facility, an attack in September 2013 in Nairobi, Kenya, involving a number of terrorists from the al Qa‘ida–affiliated group al-Shabab assaulting an upscale mall, and the January 2013 attack in In Amenas, Algeria, which involed terrorists from Mali taking hostages at a natural gas facility in eastern Algeria operated by British Petroleum and Norway’s Statoil. In these three attacks, terrorists killed over a hundred people, including seven Americans. The risk to Americans living and traveling overseas has never been greater.

  * * *

  The final part of the “this is not over” warning is the most important part of the briefing. Al Qa‘ida, if given a safe haven for some length of time, will again try to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Al Qa‘ida’s groups in various locations and at various times have shown an interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, radiological devices, chemical weapons, and biological weapons. And they will try again.

  A recent reminder of this desire was the acquisition by the moderate Sunni opposition in Syria of an ISIS computer. ISIS left the computer behind after retreating from a January 2014 firefight with the opposition. The laptop contains 35,347 hidden files, and these files contain a treasure trove of information on the group, including documents that make clear ISIS’s interest in acquiring a biological weapons capability. A nineteen-page document explains how to develop biological weapons, including how to weaponize the bubonic plague from diseased animals, and a twenty-six-page document justifies on religious grounds the use of weapons of mass destruction. The first document states, “The advantage of biological weapons is that they do not cost a lot of money, while the human casualties can be huge.” The second document notes, “If Muslims cannot defeat the unbelievers in a different way, it is permissible to use weapons of mass destruction—even if it kills all of them and wipes them and their descendants off the face of the Earth.” While some of these documents are dated—going back to Bin Ladin’s pre-9/11 days—they underscore the desire of extremists to get their hands on the world’s most dangerous weapons.

  * * *

  Now, to the last part of the briefing, which tries to answer the toughest of questions: how do we deal with the problem of terrorism and how do we end this menace?

  The most important concept that policy-makers—and the American public—must accept is that, if we are to keep the homeland and Americans overseas safe, we must maintain pressure on al Qa‘ida. Always. This concept needs to be the basis of our policy toward al Qa‘ida wherever it takes root.

  But that is not the same thing as saying the United States needs to be the sole actor in putting that pressure on al Qa‘ida. Quite the contrary: it is best if other countries take the lead when they have the necessary capabilities and that we act only when there is no other option. Not only does this make sense from the perspective of not playing into al Qa‘ida’s narrative about the United States, but it also has the best chance of being accepted, long term, by the American people.

  What does this mean in practice? First, the US intelligence community and military must—along with our allies—expend resources and effort to build the intelligence, security, military, and rule of law capabilities of the frontline states against al Qa‘ida—particularly those who have been historically weak and those that have been weakened by the Arab Spring. This is a long-term effort, but it has to be systematic, it has to be sustained, and it has to be funded.

  Second, having the capabilities is not enough—a willingness of the frontline states to use them against extremist groups is also required. And here American diplomacy must take the lead. The State Department needs to be active in convincing countries to fight terrorism within their borders. And the president and his or her senior national security team must actively support this diplomacy. Third, we need to have global partners who are willing to take action outside their own borders when necessary—so that we are not the only country doing so. That’s another job for our country’s diplomats, including our top diplomat, the president of the United States. For example, this is what France did in Mali in January 2013.

  The French government, growing increasingly concerned about the threat from al Qa‘ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), took action. AQIM, reinforced with thousands of weapons from the Libyan stockpile, had taken advantage of a security vacuum in the north caused by the political crisis in Mali. As a result AQIM was able to seize control of a large swath of territory approximately the size of Texas, imposing shari’a law and opening training camps for jihadists of all types. Understanding that France would be AQIM’s number one target, the French responded, putting thousands of troops on the ground and going toe-to-toe with the enemy, killing hundreds of terrorists, driving them back into the mountains, and denying them a vitally important safe haven. The US military supported this effort. The French are to be commended for this action. It is a model for what we need our other allies to do from time to time.

  The Kenyans and Ethiopians took a similar step in Somalia in 2011. Deeply concerned about the growth of al-Shabab, an al Qa‘ida–associated terrorist group in Somalia, both countries acted in concert—the Ethiopians directly with their own troops, and the Kenyans using a surrogate force. As in Mali, this intervention was successful in killing hundreds of terrorists and taking valuable territory from them. Al-Shabab is weaker today as a result. The United States was less supportive of this venture—we had doubts about whether it would work or not—but now that it has, we should be providing as much support as possible.

  Fourth, the United States needs to act when no one else is able. Whether the action is air strikes from manned or unmanned assets, action from Special
Forces personnel on the ground either alone or in close support of others, or even the use of conventional military forces, the United States needs to be willing and able to act. And the leadership of the executive branch and Congress must explain to the American people why this is important. Leadership is not about following public opinion. Leadership is about guiding public opinion to a place that best serves American interests over the longer term.

  * * *

  All of the above is necessary, but it is not enough to win the war over the long term, as more and more terrorists are created every day. To win the war over the longer term, we and our allies must address the issues that create terrorists in the first place. We must address the disease as well as the symptoms. We must undermine the jihadist appeal to disenchanted young Muslims. We must discredit the terrorists’ narrative that hatred and violence are the only mechanisms for dealing with the modern world and the resulting pressures on Islam. This effort essentially requires winning the war of ideas. But it also requires minimizing the number of disenchanted young Muslims through economic and social development. Counter-radicalization is a two-part effort.

  Counter-radicalization has not been a major focus of the United States since 9/11, but action on this front is just as important as action on the intelligence, law enforcement, and military fronts. There have been steps in this direction, but much more needs to be done. Developing the policies to get at the root causes of why young men and some women join terrorist groups has never really gotten off the ground. For every hour that I spent in the Situation Room talking about counter-radicalization, I spent a thousand hours talking about dealing with young men who had already become radicalized. The dollars spent by our government on programs related to counter-radicalization are an infinitesimally small percentage of the government’s overall CT budget.