Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (2 page)

Even President Obama’s own terrorism adviser, John Brennan, has confirmed that Al Qaeda appears to have been hoodwinked in the past on the global radiological black market. “There have been numerous reports over the years, over the past eight or nine years, about attempts throughout the world to obtain various types of purported material that is nuclear-related,” said Brennan, who is in charge of counterterrorism issues on the National Security Council. “We know that Al Qaeda has been involved in a number of these efforts to acquire it. Fortunately, I think they’ve been scammed a number of times.”

But there is no evidence that Al Qaeda has been deterred. “We know that they have continued to pursue that,” Brennan said. “We know individuals within the organization that have been given that responsibility.”

A stocky man with a craggy face and close-cropped hair, Brennan rose through the ranks of the CIA, becoming the agency’s station chief in Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s, then chief of staff to CIA director George Tenet, and later the agency’s deputy executive director. After the September 11 attacks, Brennan helped establish the Terrorism Threat Integration Center. When that became the National Counterterrorism Center, he was its interim director, but he was passed over for the permanent job and left government. Brought in to advise Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, he and the candidate hit it off. After Obama was elected, Brennan’s name was on the short list for the post of CIA director, but his ties to the Bush administration’s war on terror, specifically the secret interrogations program, drew criticism from liberal Democrats. Instead, Obama named Brennan to a White House staff position, deputy national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism, a job that does not require Senate confirmation. From his windowless West Wing basement office, Brennan became the president’s point man on cyberthreats, homegrown extremism, and threats from Al Qaeda and its affiliates. Brennan visited Yemen, where an Al Qaeda affiliate is especially active and worrisome, four times in the administration’s first two years. He spoke frequently by phone with the country’s mercurial leader, Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose regime was tottering on the brink of collapse by May 2011.

For senior intelligence analysts like John Brennan—skeptics by nature—the proof that terrorists have not yet gained access to a weapon of mass destruction is that no such weapons have been used or threatened. “I don’t think anybody would argue that if Al Qaeda had the opportunity, that they wouldn’t use them,” said one senior defense intelligence analyst. “That is why they don’t have it: They would have used it.”

That brought Tom Schelling to ponder the undesirable, the “what-if?” of Al Qaeda acquiring a horror weapon. “My hunch is that by the time they have a bomb, they will have spent more hours thinking and talking about what it is good for than any head of state, any minister of defense, any foreign minister,” he said. “Probably only a few people in think tanks have spent so many hundreds of thousands of hours thinking about what you would do if you were a terrorist and had a bomb. I think they might decide that this bomb is much too valuable to waste killing people.”

Schelling postulated that Al Qaeda with the bomb could think, “We’re the world’s tenth nuclear power. It’s the U.S., Russia, China, France, Britain, India, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea—and us. Why go kill one million people in Los Angeles or Hamburg when we can maybe establish diplomatic relations and start negotiating?” Warming to the subject, he continued, “I think that if they are ingenious they would say: ‘We have already planted a nuclear weapon in one of the following ten American cities.’ Then Al Qaeda would start making its demands.” This, of course, requires an assessment that Al Qaeda would, indeed, engage in a cost-benefit analysis the way a rational nation-state would.

The next question comes quickly: Is it possible to reach out to terrorists and to teach them the rules that responsible nations have followed since becoming nuclear powers? “Should I be out there trying to educate them that if you do get a nuclear weapon there are better things to do than killing people in Baltimore or Boston?” Schelling said. “I’ve been trying to think for a few years, how to reach the Iranians or North Koreans, to explain to them that getting the bomb may be very useful as long as they don’t plan to use it. Then, how do I reach, whoever it is, the terrorist organization? I tend to believe that proving you’ve got one doesn’t require that you detonate one someplace.”

Although the Bush administration, like all of its predecessors, swore never to negotiate with terrorists, it did undertake an extraordinary, and extraordinarily secret, effort to open a line of communication with bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s senior leadership. It was an attempt to replicate how the United States tried to sustain a dialogue with the Soviet Union, even during the darkest days of the Cold War, when White House and Kremlin leaders described in private and in public a set of acceptable behaviors—and described with equal clarity the swift, vicious, even nuclear punishment for gross violations. In the months after the September 11 attacks, Bush’s national security staff made several attempts to get a private message to bin Laden and his inner circle. The messages were sent through business associates of the bin Laden family’s vast financial empire as well as through some of bin Laden’s closest relatives, a number of whom were receptive to opening a secret dialogue to restrain and contain their terrorist kinsman, whom they viewed as a blot on their name. (Other relatives were openly hostile to the American entreaties.) According to a senior American intelligence officer with first-hand knowledge of the effort, the response from Osama bin Laden was silence.

Schelling points out that the United States exploded the first atomic device in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, with the bombing of Hiroshima following three weeks later. But theories of how to deter the use of nightmare weapons evolved slowly. His own landmark work on deterrence theory,
Arms and Influence
, was not published until more than two decades after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And nuclear deterrence theories continued to evolve long after that.

*   *   *

It has been said that America’s failure on September 11, 2001, was a failure of imagination, the consequence of America’s inability to anticipate how a sophisticated terrorist network could infiltrate its operatives into the United States, train them how to fly—but not take off or land—commercial airliners, and use those passenger planes in a fiery assault on national landmarks. But the failures went beyond imagination to gaps in intelligence, in capability, in technology.

In the first years after 9/11, America was lucky and good, and the terrorists were unlucky and not particularly good. Al Qaeda was unable to replicate the success of a simultaneous, mass-casualty attack, but the public must understand that the United States—its military, its intelligence community, and its law enforcement personnel—cannot count on being lucky all the time. Terrorism and counterterrorism are the new Darwinism; both species are evolving. And it is certain that despite improvements in tactical American counterterrorism skills, in time a determined terrorist plot is certain to get through again.

The United States could move from tactical success to tactical success against extremists and still end in stalemate against terrorism. An evolution in strategic thinking was called for in counterterrorism, much as the Cold War necessitated the rise of thinkers like Tom Schelling. This evolution would be carried out over the better portion of a decade after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

1

KNOW THINE ENEMY

At the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait City, Brigadier General Jeffrey Schloesser watched in horror—but not surprise—the sickening images from 6,500 miles away that flickered from the television screen. It was Tuesday afternoon, September 11, 2001.

Schloesser, a forty-seven-year-old former Army Special Operations helicopter pilot from Kansas, was one of a small number of counterterrorism experts in the military’s ranks. He spoke fluent Arabic and was steeped in Middle East politics and history, having earned a master’s degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and served a yearlong tour in Jordan. He was now serving as the embassy’s liaison to the Kuwaiti military.

For Schloesser and for many of his uniformed and civilian colleagues serving in the Middle East, the United States had been in an undeclared war with Al Qaeda long before this day. Eleven months earlier, on October 12, 2000, Al Qaeda operatives in a small skiff had detonated a one-thousand-pound suicide bomb alongside the Navy destroyer USS
Cole
as it refueled in the port of Aden, on Yemen’s southern coast. Seventeen American sailors were killed, and thirty-nine others injured in the blast that ripped a forty-by-forty-foot blackened gash in the ship’s port side. The gloves are coming off now, Schloesser had thought then. But the deadly strike failed to outrage the American public.

After the
Cole
bombing, the movements and travel of American embassy employees and their families in Kuwait were sharply restricted. Al Qaeda had failed in an eerily similar but less publicized attack against the Navy destroyer USS
The Sullivans
earlier that January as part of the 2000 millennium plots. The terrorists’ plan had been to load a boat full of explosives and blow it up near the warship during a port call in Yemen. But the plotters overloaded the skiff, causing it to sink to the bottom of Aden harbor. Months later, after leaving Kuwait, Schloesser would learn that an Al Qaeda operative had been captured carrying a chilling set of blueprints, plans of the house next door to where he and his wife, Patty, had lived. Years later, it gave Patty Schloesser the creeps just thinking about it.

Now, as the searing Kuwaiti summer afternoon gave way to a hazy evening, Schloesser and the CIA station chief looked away from the television images and locked glances with their boss, Ambassador James A. Larocco, a career foreign service officer who had served tours in Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. “Guys, we’ve got to take immediate steps right here,” Larocco said. As the three men rushed out of the station chief’s office to report to superiors in Washington, coordinate with Kuwaiti security forces going on alert, and check in with a spider web of informants and spies for clues to a possible next wave of attacks, each man felt it in his gut: Al Qaeda. For Schloesser, who was already preparing to leave for a new assignment at the Pentagon, a decade of planning and carrying out a secretive counterterrorism campaign against Al Qaeda was just beginning.

*   *   *

Juan Zarate stood at the window of his new fourth-floor office at the Treasury Department in Washington looking south toward the Pentagon. Clouds of billowing black smoke smeared the early morning sky. “Jim, I can tell you right now, the Pentagon’s been hit!” Zarate yelled over the phone to his former boss at the Justice Department, James S. Reynolds, whom he had called to alert to the strikes. “We’re under attack!”

Three weeks earlier, Zarate had been a rising star in the Justice Department’s terrorism and violent crimes section. With degrees from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Zarate had been a young federal prosecutor assisting on some of the biggest cases in the burgeoning field of counterterrorism.

The son of immigrants—his mother from Cuba; his father, a physician, from Mexico—Zarate had already lived a life that was a classic all-American success story. Raised in Orange County, California, in a politically conservative family, he showed an interest in security conflicts at a precocious age. As a fifth grader, he wrote a term paper on the war in Angola in the 1970s and the role of Cuban forces there. Zarate, balding, with rimless glasses, looked older than his thirty years. As a junior-level attorney, he had already participated in the prosecutions of the bombers of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, attacks organized by Al Qaeda that killed 224 people and wounded thousands. Later, his superiors assigned him to cases involving Hamas, the FARC insurgent group in Colombia, and the attack on the USS
Cole
. The
Cole
bombing, in particular, was seared in his mind after he pored over the graphic photos of damage to the ship and the sailors killed on board. “If the American people saw what we’re seeing, they’d demand war,” Zarate said.

When the Treasury Department came calling in August 2001 and offered to make him part of a senior team running its international financial enforcement and sanctions branch, Zarate jumped at the chance to broaden his counterterrorism credentials and delve into the murky world of illicit financing. Three weeks later, on September 11, Zarate could barely find his new office in the cavernous Treasury Department building, much less know which levers to pull and which people to call in a crisis. It left him feeling momentarily helpless. “If I were back at DOJ, I’d know what to do, who to call,” he said. “I didn’t really know what to do here yet.” Zarate followed his instincts, which were screaming, “Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda,” and called his former colleagues at Justice to offer his assistance.

As a Californian, Zarate was quick to remind federal investigators to watch for aircraft flying from the West Coast, not just the East Coast. Zarate had a flashback to an earlier failed Al Qaeda plan: the so-called Bojinka plot, hatched in the Philippines in 1995, to bomb twelve American commercial jets as they flew over the Pacific. That scheme unraveled only after extensive planning and even some trial runs. One of the conspirators in that plot was a man named Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whom authorities would later identify as the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. “Bojinka animated a lot of our thinking,” Zarate said. “We expected more attacks. We anticipated more attacks. The only question in my mind was size and scope.”