Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (37 page)

In a sign of the cooperative focus on unlocking the trove, a multiagency task force led by the CIA was assembled to triage, catalogue, and analyze this intelligence, all building on the lessons of sensitive-site exploitation learned across Afghanistan and Iraq. As if to prove the enhanced aura of cooperation, government officials repeated the list of those involved in exploiting the intelligence: the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Media Exploitation Center, the National Counterterrorism Center, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Treasury Department.

The first priority was to search for clues on planned or pending attacks, real and aspirational, and to learn Al Qaeda’s assessment of the gaps in America’s defenses. Within hours of bin Laden’s death, security was stepped up along rail lines, since threats to U.S. transportation networks were among the first translated from the documents. A handwritten notebook from February 2010 discussed tampering with tracks to derail a train on a bridge, possibly on Christmas, New Year’s Day, the day of the State of the Union address, or the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. But the government said there was no evidence of a specific imminent plot.

The task force also sought clues to identify and locate the surviving members of Al Qaeda’s senior leadership. Within hours of the raid, the United States would launch a fresh wave of drone strikes into the tribal areas of Pakistan and into the deserts of Yemen. “This was the ultimate raid of its kind, which has been evolving over the past decade,” Michael Vickers said just days after the mission, as the intelligence community was unlocking the secrets of bin Laden’s files. “It was the combination of human skill, technical capabilities, and organizational coordination. All of that came together. It was the fusion of those things. None of those things by themselves would have gotten you there.”

*   *   *

The death of bin Laden marked a major victory for the American military and intelligence agencies. But it also offered the Obama administration a rare opportunity to undercut the terrorist group’s narrative and brand-name appeal.

In the weeks leading up to the raid, White House aides prepared messages and counterarguments to Al Qaeda’s narrative to be used by senior American officials in briefings and interviews in the event bin Laden was killed or captured. They also devised strategies for getting America’s message across on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites. “We essentially prepared a messaging strategy for every possible circumstance to include a good outcome as well as for more difficult, messy situations, even catastrophic ones,” said Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications.

At the State Department, Richard LeBaron’s strategic communications center worked with public affairs officers at U.S. embassies around the world on Arabic and Urdu translations of President Obama’s speech to the nation announcing bin Laden’s death. Arabic speakers at State Department media centers in London and Dubai disseminated the themes in Obama’s address. LeBaron’s office produced talking points for American embassies and consulates on how to address accusations that bin Laden wasn’t really dead or that the Pentagon had violated Islamic law by burying him at sea.

Unlike the military command in Iraq in 2006, which failed to fully exploit the public relations value of the captured video produced by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Obama administration sought to pounce on the propaganda windfall from bin Laden’s death.

The day after bin Laden was killed, White House officials gleefully pointed out that he was living in comfort with his family in a walled, fortresslike house far from the rugged war zones of Pakistan’s tribal areas or southern Afghanistan. “Here is bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million-dollar-plus compound, living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield,” Brennan told reporters. “I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.”

But there were several mistakes in Brennan’s statements, which underscored the continued weakness of the American countermessaging strategy. Within twenty-four hours, the White House was forced to correct the fact there were no women shielding bin Laden when he was shot and killed. A further correction, about whether bin Laden was armed and participated in a firefight with the Navy SEALs (he wasn’t and he didn’t), also had to be made. First accounts of complicated military missions are almost always incomplete or inaccurate. But in his haste to trumpet the mission’s operational success, Brennan heralded details about bin Laden that turned out to be wrong, undermining the credibility of the rest of his message in the Muslim world and elsewhere in the world.

White House officials dismissed the missteps as the normal discrepancies of early combat accounts and said that their broader themes would be more enduring. Bin Laden died, they argued, at a time when Al Qaeda was already struggling to remain relevant in the surging democratic current of popular revolutions that had toppled dictators in Tunisia and Egypt and that had roiled the Arab world from Libya to Syria to Bahrain. They noted that Ayman al-Zawahri, bin Laden’s Egyptian deputy, was an unlikely figure to take up the leader’s mantle, pointing out that he was an irascible micromanager who lacked bin Laden’s charisma and religious stature and did not enjoy the respect of the wealthy Persian Gulf Arabs who are among Al Qaeda’s biggest financial donors. American officials made no secret about trying to sow dissent among senior Al Qaeda leaders as they scrambled to pick a successor to their fallen leader.

The CIA’s release of five videos of bin Laden on May 7, just days after they were recovered from his hideout, illustrated the Obama administration’s efforts to minimize the Al Qaeda leader’s mystique, even among mainstream Muslims who admired him for standing up to the West. The selected outtakes from bin Laden’s recorded messages to his followers appeared to be part of an American effort to underscore bin Laden’s vanity. In one video, bin Laden is shown watching himself on television in his house, and his beard is mostly white. In the other four videos, in which bin Laden addresses the Muslim world, his beard is black. U.S. intelligence officials openly speculated that the Al Qaeda leader had dyed his beard black in those videos in order to appear younger.

In the wake of the raid, American officials were convinced bin Laden’s death offered them a unique opportunity to unnerve other Al Qaeda fighters and commanders. “It demonstrates no terrorist is safe,” Rhodes said. But in light of the fact that the United States was so ineffective in combating Al Qaeda’s narrative while bin Laden was alive, many doubts remained as to how well it will succeed now that he is dead.

*   *   *

As difficult as combating Al Qaeda’s message has proved for American officials, another source of frustration has been to manage the often contentious relationships with pivotal counterterrorism allies. When the Navy SEAL team helicoptered into Osama bin Laden’s compound, relations between the United States and Pakistan were already plummeting to their lowest levels since 9/11.

Bin Laden’s residence—for more than five years—in a house less than a mile from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point, in Abbottabad, a city seventy-five miles from Islamabad, prompted angry American demands that Pakistan’s powerful military and spy agency, the ISI, investigate its ranks for Al Qaeda confederates. A month after bin Laden’s death, U.S. officials said they had no proof of official Pakistani government complicity in sheltering the Al Qaeda leader. But in a country where the lines blur quickly between active and retired ISI officers, many Americans suspected that bin Laden enjoyed at least quasi-official support while in hiding in Abbottabad. “It’s inconceivable that bin Laden did not have a support system in the country that allowed him to remain there for an extended period of time,” said Brennan.

Within days, some members of Congress began calling for slashing all or part of the $3 billion in economic and military aid the United States sends to Pakistan each year and sharply scaling back ties with Islamabad. While neither of these outcomes is likely, the United States has no choice but to recalibrate its security relationship with Pakistan. The stakes are simply too high. The nightmare scenario for Pakistan is that Islamic radicals infiltrate and seize control of the country’s nuclear weapons. Though Pakistan’s arsenal of deployed weapons (estimated in 2011 as at least ninety bombs and warheads) is considered secure, senior American officials remain deeply concerned that weapons-usable fuel, which is kept in laboratories and storage centers, is more vulnerable and could be diverted to terrorists or other radical groups by insiders in Pakistan’s vast nuclear complex.

Moreover, the United States relies on Pakistan for supply routes into Afghanistan to sustain the nearly one hundred thousand American troops in that country. Despite the deteriorating relations between the CIA and ISI, tactical cooperation among U.S., Afghan, and Pakistani troops in the tribal regions of both countries had actually improved in the year prior to the raid. “Simply wishing away Al Qaeda isn’t going to happen,” Nick Rasmussen said. “We’re going to need Pakistan’s help to complete the fight against terrorist networks.”

Without its longtime leader, Al Qaeda is at a crossroads. “What bound the organization together more than anything else was the persona of Osama bin Laden,” said Michael Leiter. “There was an attraction, an aura, a gravitas that only bin Laden had. With bin Laden’s death, a great measure of Al Qaeda’s cohesiveness is destroyed.” Who will lead the organization based in Pakistan? What role will affiliates and like-minded groups in Yemen, North Africa, and Somalia play? How can the United States and embattled allies like Pakistan and Yemen move to exploit vulnerabilities in the organization’s hierarchy and operations? The weeks and months following bin Laden’s death gave the United States and its allies a window of opportunity, as terrorist networks tried to regroup, making them more vulnerable to counterstrikes. “This is not the time to take our foot off the gas,” Obama told his top national security advisers just hours after the Abbottabad mission concluded.

Michael Vickers, reflecting on the mission’s impact, envisioned a difficult battle against a determined foe. “Bin Laden’s death is a tremendous strategic blow to Al Qaeda,” he said. “The top structure, particularly bin Laden, but also Zawahri, are critically important to the strategic defeat of Al Qaeda. But so is taking apart the network so they can no longer function as an organization, taking away their sanctuary and preventing their ability to come back. We are well along that path.”

EPILOGUE

“TELL ME HOW THIS ENDS”

It will be impossible to end terrorism.

It will be impossible to eradicate the root causes of terrorist action: poverty or lack of education or hope; the humiliating corruption in public life across the developing world; a false-prophet interpretation of American foreign policy as a twenty-first-century crusade to occupy sacred Muslim lands. Nor will it be possible to silence everywhere and forever the caustic voices of the misguided minority calling for violence against innocents in the aspiration of creating a better world. Even the task that is far simpler by comparison—to find and finish off terror cells—will never be fully achieved. As uplifting as was the prospect of populist revolts pressing for democracy across the Muslim world, political upheaval in the region risks disorder—and opportunities for terrorist cells to find new safe havens.

“There is a fundamental tension in seeking a counterterrorism ‘grand strategy,’” said the Pentagon’s Michael Vickers. “How do you get at the long-term strategic defeat of these groups? One model that was put forward was that they spring from an unhealthy political and social system. I need to remake that system if I am going to get at the root causes of these problems. We promote democracy, we promote development—we do that no matter what, but are they critical instruments? Is this the only way I can defeat the enemy in counterterrorism? The counter approach is to work with what you have, while not abandoning your long-term goals. Shore up the security institutions. Work with intelligence—more near-term things—but to try and tamp down this threat and drive it to low levels in lots of critical places.”

You can destroy the people in Al Qaeda, including bin Laden himself, but you can’t destroy the idea of Al Qaeda. And as for the brand name of Al Qaeda—an inspiration to a rising tide of terror affiliates across the Islamic world as well as to self-radicalized, individual, lone-wolf extremists in the West—it has barely been dented. American forces are racking and stacking terrorists like cordwood. But America has not killed terrorism.

So, how does this end?

Americans face a challenge, and the nation must alter its thinking about terrorism and terrorist attack. America must adopt a culture of resilience. Yes, every effort must be made to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda and its affiliates. Yes, defenses must be erected to prevent attack and deny terrorists tactical successes that might be trumpeted as strategic victories. Yes, the nation must encourage economic progress in the developing world and seek to empower those who feel powerless. But a demand by the American people for perfection against terrorist attacks, a zero tolerance for error, hands extremists victory anytime they even get close. The Christmas Day bomber failed to set off his bomb. The plane didn’t crash. The printer-package bombs from Yemen were intercepted. Yet it was the nationwide recrimination in the wake of those failed terror attacks that created a sense of terror.

Al Qaeda has adopted a dual-track strategy. It still seeks a weapon of mass destruction to create mass casualties for mass cost or at least for mass public effect. And along with these efforts at mounting a major attack, Al Qaeda inspires affiliates and disaffected, loner jihadists to take fists of pebbles and throw them repeatedly into the cogs of American life and industry. The inevitable calculus is that a few will get through. Do that enough times, and it has the impact of a major attack. A terror operation that costs a few thousand dollars, even if it fails, can prompt the government and industry to spend billions in response. And these repeated tiny assaults are exceedingly difficult to thwart. America has learned a lot and has been fortunate. But the American military, law enforcement, and intelligence communities cannot be lucky and good all the time. The terrorists have learned, too. They only have to be lucky, and good, occasionally.