Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (35 page)

While American national security officers remained unwavering in their belief that Al Qaeda remained just as unwavering in its desire to mount another 9/11-style, mass-casualty attack, they also began acknowledging that the more likely style of terrorist mission was to replicate in the United States an offensive that had claimed the lives and limbs of more American military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan than any other: improvised explosive devices (IEDs) planted in roadways. It made sense, and it worried Michael Vickers at the Pentagon. “If the signature weapon for us is the Predator, then the signature weapon for them is the IED,” he said. Vickers was analyzing those trends as he was being promoted from assistant secretary for special operations to undersecretary for intelligence, joining the inner circle of government intelligence chieftains. He had also recently completed his dissertation, earning a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, a goal long delayed by the tempo of his public service. The dissertation is massive: 1,013 pages, printed in three volumes. Titled “The Structure of Military Revolutions,” the work examines significant changes in war fighting across the core military capabilities: firepower, mobility, protection, sustainment, and the realm of command-and-control, communications, and intelligence.

Vickers was applying military analysis dating back to Clausewitz not only to earn his Ph.D. but also to understand the adaptability of today’s militants and a new weapon of choice: the IED. Explosives can be bought, stolen, or mixed with relative ease in basement laboratories, and there is little in the way of defense. In the case of Faisal Shahzad, it was only an observant street vendor—and the incompetence of the bomber—that prevented an explosive-packed SUV from detonating in Times Square.

Senior commanders agreed. “One of the questions I asked myself back then is, ‘When do they show up here?’” said Admiral Mullen. “The fact that it hasn’t happened, I think, is certainly due to the dramatically improved effort in the interagency, in the government, between governments, among governments on the one hand and, quite frankly, a little bit of luck that one of these hasn’t been pulled off. But we recognized that potential a long time ago, and certainly we think about it.”

The military keeps internal statistics on the spread of IEDs out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and have tracked how they now appear in the thousands, and with devastating effect, in Pakistan and India but also with less notice in Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Colombia, Somalia, and parts of North Africa. Even Russian security forces have faced the devices in the republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan. Jonathan M. George, of HMS Inc., a private company that analyzes IED attacks and advises on countermeasures, maintains a database gathered from public documents and media accounts. He said the number of improvised explosive devices that detonated or were disarmed outside of Iraq and Afghanistan totaled more than 3,000 in 2006, more than 4,000 in 2007, again more than 4,000 in 2008, and dipped to about 2,000 in 2009. They rose again to over 3,000 in 2010. Something else rose, as well: the number of casualties from those attacks, owing to the increasing lethality of each blast. Pakistan had the most improvised explosive attacks outside the war zones, followed by India, Russia, and Thailand. But officials are certain the United States, with its vast, open roadways, will become a target.

“Certainly, it’s a real threat in our country, as well,” Admiral Mullen said.

*   *   *

In his repeat tours as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen has served as the senior military adviser to President Bush and President Obama. He acknowledged that he came to the top military job as agnostic, even skeptical, that the lessons of Cold War deterrence had much to offer in the new age of terror. “This is an area that we sort of put on the shelf for twenty-plus years so we are really at the beginning of trying to understand it again,” he said early in his tenure as chairman. “Deterring them, individuals who will kill themselves, who have no moral boundaries, who just have such a different view of life and what it means—it is not insurmountable, but I haven’t figured out how to do it.”

And so it was notable when Admiral Mullen traveled in the fall of 2010 to Stanford University to address a Hoover Institution conference on deterrence. He declared that traditional strategies to credibly impose costs on adversaries through combinations of threatened punishment and sustained denial had new relevance in counterterrorism. “While not all extremist groups share the same goals or ideology,” he said, “they do retain sufficient autonomy to make their own strategic choices, which in my mind makes them vulnerable to some form of coercion, and perhaps even deterrence.” He underscored the reality that several terrorist organizations—such as Hezbollah and Hamas—had begun the transformation from shadowy, stateless cells to take on attributes of nation-state powers. “The closer aligned the group is to a state, or the more governing responsibilities it assumes, the more susceptible it is to influence,” he said.

To be sure, Osama bin Laden was beyond personal deterrence and, at the other end of the terror cycle, likewise are suicide bombers by the time they strap on a vest of explosives and ball bearings. “To really deter terrorism at that level, the conditions that lead a person to that decision point must be addressed,” Mullen said. “We can continue to hunt and kill their leaders, and we will. But when a person learns to read, he enters a gateway toward independent education and thought. He becomes more capable, more employable, and enjoys a sense of purpose in his life. These accomplishments delegitimize the terrorists’ ideology, replacing the fear they hope to engender with the hope they fear to encounter. Now that is a deterrence of truly strategic nature.”

After his address, Mullen acknowledged that the concepts of the “new deterrence” were not fully formed, but he said it was taking the shape of a strategy and was not simply a slogan sought for adoption by administration officials. “There isn’t a fight that I’m in that I’m not asking the question, ‘What could we have done to avoid this? Or, what can we do to avoid this in the future in terms of the kinds of things that we see?’” he said. “And so many of them these days are network-based, so if you look at who’s in the network and how did it get created—when you look at the structures that are in a network, how is it financed? Who are the people? Where are they coming from? Where do they get their training? What’s their background? And then I think maybe even some of the conventional deterrence theory starts to apply. How do you bring pressure on them, on every aspect of the organization from a deterrence standpoint? How do I raise the ante, how do I raise the price just in simple cost-benefit terms to every aspect of this network? You pick the number: 25 percent of them—the irreconcilables that are the ones that are going to die for what they believe in. And yet they can’t be functional without the 75 percent of their organization that isn’t idealistic but that doesn’t have much of a future.”

Despite the tactical successes, despite efforts to create a new strategy for countering terrorism, Admiral Mullen acknowledged a grim truth: “Everybody believes we’re going to get hit again.”

11

COUNTERSTRIKE IN ABBOTTABAD

When it was over, President Obama called it one of the greatest military and intelligence operations in American history. Yet it was nothing more than the logical culmination of nearly a decade of missteps, mistakes, trial and error under fire, and ultimately lessons not only learned but taken to heart. So it was that the United States succeeded in tracking and killing the man who inspired and planned the terror attacks of 9/11.

The raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, produced an outcome beyond the president’s most optimistic forecast: Osama bin Laden dead, all of the American assaulters safely returned to base with an intelligence bonanza in their rucksacks, and even their bomb-sniffing dog extracted without a scratch. Yet as cabinet secretaries, senior intelligence officers, law enforcement and homeland security chiefs, national security advisers, and media counselors gathered in the White House Situation Room on Sunday, May 1, 2011, in the final hours before the attack, uncertainty reigned. There was no guarantee that the tall man whose every movement in the courtyard of his compound had been logged by CIA watchers in a nearby safe house was truly bin Laden. What would the orders be if Pakistan learned of the raid or heard the operation under way, and rushed police and military forces to confront the American commandos? Were there tunnels for escape or deadly booby-traps? Previous failures haunted this meeting, too: the 1980 Desert One operation that had failed to rescue the American hostages from Iran and the 1993 Black Hawk Down tragedy that had cost the lives of eighteen American soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia. In fact, in the mission’s opening minutes, a super-secret stealth helicopter went down hard in the bin Laden compound and was so damaged that it had to be blown up and left behind, all because the temperature was seventeen degrees warmer than expected, degrading the pilot’s ability to control his descent with a full load of commandos. But, unlike Desert One three decades earlier, this time a backup helicopter was hovering nearby and flew to the compound.

Advance planning for the raid attempted to anticipate, even divine, all of the possible outcomes, from spectacular success to catastrophic failure. Each option presented to the president was accompanied by a list of numerous potential outcomes, each demanding a different response. All of the contingencies were collected in a three-ring binder two inches thick, called the Playbook. The national security, intelligence, and military officials who had spent months gaming out the raid had “red teamed” the scenarios for flaws, drawing up what are called “branches” and “sequels” that attempted to predict and then plan for a rapidly expanding set of potential results. Early that Sunday, as President Obama’s war council convened in the Situation Room, all members had the Playbook in front of them, which meant anything could happen.

When the operation was over, and everyone in the Situation Room was breathing again, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates uttered his ultimate judgment on the complex operation. He noted the many moving parts, assembled across many months, requiring the seamless integration of so many agencies across the entire government, and contrasted it with the capabilities of the intelligence and military communities he had helped manage during his service to eight presidents over the previous four decades. His verdict was straightforward: “This mission simply would not have been possible before.”

*   *   *

Osama bin Laden’s trail had gone cold, at least since 2007, until the summer of 2010, when a team of Pakistanis working with the CIA spotted a white sport-utility vehicle in Peshawar, Pakistan, that they had been seeking. After years of detainee interrogations, document analyses, and electronic signals intercepts, the U.S. government knew the driver only by a nickname, but as the operatives jotted down the SUV’s license-plate number, the CIA launched a process to identify the suspect by name. He was a courier who was believed to be bin Laden’s only link to Al Qaeda and the outside world. In the weeks that followed, intelligence agents conducted an arm’s-length tracking of the man, until he led them to a surprisingly large and well-protected compound in Abbottabad, a well-to-do small city not far from Islamabad, where Pakistan’s prestigious military academy is located and where many retired Pakistani military officers live.

A decade of counterterrorism campaigns had built up the muscles of the vast network of American agencies responsible for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. So when the order went out to develop an “ISR soak” on the walled compound, the system knew how to bring on a brute-force yet almost invisible effort. In addition to the CIA safe house quietly rented to keep direct watch on the compound, the intelligence community turned its electronic eyes and ears on the site, scooping up minute-by-minute information to build a pattern-of-life model on the compound and its residents. Photographs and video from aircraft and satellites were analyzed by specialists who had been trained to assess covert construction in North Korea or Iran. (They usually look for nuclear sites or ballistic missile launchers.) In advance of this mission, the analysts were able to draw up detailed blueprints of the buildings and walls, bringing order to the images of construction and terrain. The CIA and Special Operations officers in charge of the mission would repeatedly say that the “situational awareness” they were given about the compound gave them confidence.

It was obvious, too, that the high-value target inside the compound was operating on trusted experience, apparently enhanced by years of hiding. He had good operational security of his own. The human footprint was small, almost unnoticeable. There was no legion of Arab guards in SUVs with tinted windows, as might have been expected. The compound was far larger than its neighbors, but it had no Internet or telephone connections. And the occupants never turned on their cell phones; in fact, the electronic signals captured from the compound were so faint that it seemed those inside not only turned off their cell phones but even removed the batteries and SIM cards long before entering.

It was a network fighting a network. And, in the end, it was bin Laden’s operational requirement to have a human courier connecting him to his terror network—someone to physically transfer thumb drives with treatises, orders, demands, and videos and to receive feedback from the field—that led the United States to where he was hiding in plain sight.

American intelligence officials had increasing confidence that they were finally closing in on bin Laden. In February 2011, CIA director Leon Panetta summoned Vice Admiral William H. McRaven, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to share what the agency knew about the mysterious compound and to begin planning a military strike. Even a few years earlier, it would have been almost unfathomable that such a conversation would take place. Special Operations zealously guarded its turf, and the CIA’s covert operatives viewed the commandos suspiciously.