Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (38 page)

The nation’s top terrorism watchers express a concern that the United States will come under growing attack from the inside. Much as street gang and organized crime problems crest and fall but are never flat for long, so the best efforts by law enforcement may be unable to prevent homegrown extremism unless communities step up their efforts to police and care for their own. Short of that, officials expect the terrorist tool of choice in overseas combat zones—the IED—to migrate to the United States, as it already has with the attempted Times Square car bombing. Officials have quietly tightened rules on the domestic purchase of explosives and a number of other critical ingredients for homemade bombs, like the ammonium nitrate used by Timothy McVeigh to bring down a federal office building in Oklahoma City.

So when the terrorists do get through, the nation must deal with it and return to normal that day, as has been the practice in Israel and Britain. Within hours after the transit system attacks in July 2005, the London Underground was packed with commuters. The United States must emulate and have in place a robust system of rapid response and a plan for immediate recovery. America must learn to offer a shrug to terror attack that denies the effect being sought. That should be front and center in every major speech by the nation’s leadership on national security, but it is politically risky, as any president’s opponents will charge that the government is offering an implicit acceptance of inevitable attack.

A fundamental message in the battle against violent extremism is that the United States cannot lose sight of its values, as no doubt there will be a growing tension between credible calls for greater surveillance and profiling on one hand, and full-throated defense for privacy and civil liberties on the other.

“In the months before Fort Hood, I was testifying on behalf of the intelligence community, advocating for the extension of certain aspects of the Patriot Act,” recalled Michael Leiter of the National Counterterrorism Center. “For very good reasons, people had some concerns. And I got a lot of, Why should we allow you to continue to spy on Americans? Several weeks later in the wake of Fort Hood, I was back up on the Hill. And I will tell you that a whole lot fewer people were complaining about me spying on Americans and a whole lot more people were complaining that I wasn’t spying enough. That is a tough line to walk. So these are the sorts of tensions that we have. Being whipsawed between these two extremes can be extremely problematic and very difficult to maintain, either security or protection of civil liberties.”

In June 2011, the White House announced that Leiter was stepping down after nearly four years as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. He had contributed a lot of work to the updated counterterrorism strategy that the Obama administration was preparing to unveil in the coming weeks, but now he wanted to spend more time with his new bride. Leiter also believed it was time for someone else to take the helm to “bring fresh eyes to the problems we face.” He felt proud of the progress that the center, and the government overall, had made in combating terrorism, but he also sounded a familiar warning to the nation to remain resilient in the face of a future attack. “We’ll do more to defeat the enemy,” he said, “by not overreacting to the inevitable act of terrorism.”

The nation is without a doubt moving ever closer toward the dangerous precipice of another attack. The length of the journey to that next mass-casualty strike has been extended by years of successful counterstrikes. And it is possible, but not certain, that the severity of the attack—the drop off the cliff—has been diminished. But the attack is coming. The most important thing the nation can do is be resilient. That denies terrorists the strategic victory they seek.

Thomas Schelling’s successors have spoken. Deterrence—updated, expanded, even redefined—is now official American policy for countering Al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist organizations. As the Obama administration prepared for the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in September 2011, the White House and the Pentagon announced that they were adapting the principles of Cold War deterrence in their effort to combat extremists. “Though terrorists are difficult to deter directly, they make cost/benefit calculations and are dependent on states and other stakeholders we are capable of influencing,” declared the National Military Strategy of the United States for 2011. “When directed, we will provide capabilities to hold accountable any government or entity complicit in attacks against the United States or allies to raise the cost of their support. And we must take further steps to deny terrorists the benefits they seek through their attacks.” The United States, the strategy declared, stands ready to retaliate for any attack across the entire spectrum of military, economic, and diplomatic capabilities—and at a time and place of the president’s choosing.

Is that enough?

With the lessons of an Afghanistan tour still fresh in his mind, Jeff Schloesser voiced concerns that the United States had failed to keep pace with the shifting tactics and strategies of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. “They have been able to innovate faster than we have, and we have been relatively unsuccessful in stemming the recruitment of new terrorist wannabes,” he said. “You now actually have a larger number of Americans who want to be revolutionaries against their own country. We have not done a good job about that.” In August 2010 Schloesser retired from active-duty service. He did so in the aftermath of an Army investigation into the conduct of three of his subordinates during a controversial battle at Wanat, Afghanistan, in July 2008 that left nine American soldiers dead and twenty-seven wounded. Though the Army cast no blame on him and exonerated the subordinates, Schloesser chose to retire after thirty-four years of service rather than pursue a promotion to lieutenant general. He left to become president of an aviation services company.

Since leaving government at the end of the Bush administration in January 2009, Juan Zarate has served as senior national security adviser to CBS News and as a senior adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he is directing a major study of the future of Al Qaeda and its affiliates. “Though we are safer now than after 9/11, we still face an adapting terrorist Hydra,” Zarate said in the winter of 2011. “AQ remains a serious threat, but the greatest danger we may face now from terrorism is the ability of a small group of individuals to spark geopolitical crises or the renting of societies with a singular terrorist flashpoint.”

John Tyson, the DIA’s terrorism expert, has been tracking Al Qaeda since Osama bin Laden was just a loudmouth with a large bank account. As the nation approached 9/11’s tenth anniversary, he conceded that he remained pessimistic that the United States will ever be able to declare victory in the campaign against violent extremism. The enemy today, he said, is not the enemy of 9/11. It has spread. It has transformed. It has metastasized. The interlocking global network of Al Qaeda is based on pledges of affiliation as well as on sympathetic action. Terrorism inspired by Al Qaeda cannot be defeated as it is defined today. The task, he said, is to push the threat to a lower level, and manage—and accept—a degree of risk. Even though an American commando raid into Pakistan decapitated Al Qaeda, killing its charismatic founder and strategic leader, the terror network and its affiliates will seek to regroup, adapt, and strike again. The scenes of Americans rallying and cheering outside the White House, at the World Trade Center site, and in Times Square to express national relief and jubilation at the death of bin Laden might have resonated like images from the end of World War II. But, unlike Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in 1945, religious militancy has not been defeated.

“There is not going to be a V-J Day, there is not going to be a Wall coming down,” Tyson said. “Hopefully it will go out with a whimper and not a roar. But it is not something we can defeat. It is something that is going to have to defeat itself. It is something that is going to have to implode on itself, in terms of its widespread popularity, like how communism imploded on itself.”

He paused, collecting his thoughts. “I would consider it a success if we get back to the point where it is still considered a national security issue but it is far down the totem pole, like it was pre–East Africa embassy bombings, where you had generals saying, ‘Why should I care about terrorism?’”

NOTES

This book is drawn from more than two hundred interviews that we conducted with current and former military personnel, diplomats, and intelligence officers, as well as law enforcement, Pentagon, and White House officials who participated in the operations, intelligence analysis, and policy making in the decade following the terrorist attacks on Washington, D.C., and New York City on September 11, 2001. Our reporting for this book led us to sources throughout the United States and in more than a dozen foreign countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Mali, and the Philippines. When possible, we have named the sources who were interviewed in the notes that follow. However, because of the nature of reporting on sensitive military, intelligence, and law enforcement operations and policies, oftentimes involving classified information, many of our sources spoke to us on the condition that they remain anonymous. In each case where we used anonymous sources, we carefully weighed the trade-offs between the need for transparency in reporting this book and the important information that confidential sources could provide.

PROLOGUE: IN THE BEGINNING …

“One of the lamentable principles”: Thomas C. Schelling,
Arms and Influence
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. xi.

“traditional concepts of deterrence will not work”: White House, National Security Strategy of the United States, 2002.

“I don’t believe that. I just don’t believe that”: Author interview with Thomas C. Schelling, Bethesda, Md., December 2009.

“A new deterrence calculus combines”: White House, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, 2006.

“The single biggest threat to U.S. security”: President Barack Obama, “Remarks by President Obama and President Zuma of South Africa Before Bilateral Meeting,” Blair House, Washington, D.C., April 11, 2010.

“First, it is not easy to smuggle out of the country”: Author interview with Thomas C. Schelling, Bethesda, Md., December 2009.

“There have been numerous reports over the years”: John Brennan, Washington Convention Center, Washington, D.C., April 12, 2010.

“I don’t think anybody would argue”: Author interview with John Tyson, Washington, D.C., May 19, 2010.

“My hunch is that by the time they have a bomb”: Author interview with Thomas C. Schelling, Bethesda, Md., December 2009.

1. KNOW THINE ENEMY

At the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait City: The description of Jeffrey Schloesser on September 11, 2001, is from author interview with Major General Jeffrey Schloesser, USA (Ret.), Arlington, Va., February 25, 2010.

Juan Zarate stood at the window: The description of Juan Zarate on September 11, 2001, is from author interview with Juan Zarate, Washington, D.C., August 17, 2010.

“His operational experience spans covert action”: Official Department of Defense Biography of Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Assistant Secretary of Defense (SO/LIC&IC),
http://www.defense.gov/bios/biographydetail.aspx?biographyid=178
.

Vickers was featured in the book
Charlie Wilson’s War
: George Crile,
Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times
(New York: Grove Press, 2003).

“My view of terrorism was shaped by my experiences in the ’80s”: Author interview with Michael Vickers, Arlington, Va., August 26, 2010.

“The
Cole
attack, where they tried to kill our guys”: Author interview with John Tyson, Washington, D.C., September 17, 2010.

Bush, who had begun the day in Florida: The description of Air Force One’s journey on September 11, 2001, is drawn from an e-mail exchange with Mark Knoller, CBS News, April 17, 2010.

“We are not under pretend attack”: Author interview with Admiral Richard W. Mies, USN (Ret.), Arlington, Va., April 21, 2010.

Even as Stratcom was rehearsing: Author interview with former senior military officer, Spring 2010.

“Forget Europe”: The discussion of Schloesser’s Joint Staff assignment is from author interviews with General John Abizaid, USA (Ret.), at the United States Military Academy, West Point, N.Y., January 12, 2010, and with Major General Jeffrey Schloesser, USA (Ret.), Arlington, Va., February 25 and April 13, 2010.

“There were people up and down the hallways who couldn’t spell Al Qaeda”: Author interview with a senior U.S. intelligence official, Northern Virginia, Spring 2010.

“Pretend it’s a box”: Author interview with a senior U.S. intelligence official, northern Virginia, Spring 2010.

“We in no way thought we were giving them leads”: Author interview with former director of Central Intelligence and director of the National Security Agency Michael Hayden, Arlington, Va., April 8, 2010.

“In those early days, believe me, we saw them all”: Author interview with a former staff member, National Security Council, Washington, D.C., April 2010.