Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (5 page)

Also in the Pentagon, Jeff Schloesser and other planners used the visceral image of cutting off the head of the snake to describe their goal. Kill or capture the leaders of Al Qaeda, the strategy dictated, and the organization would wither and die or at least be seriously disrupted and less able to launch major attacks against the homeland. In those early days after 9/11, the government struggled to coordinate the disparate counterterrorism efforts, from CIA clandestine missions to NSA electronic eavesdropping. The Pentagon, with its vast budgets and ability to marshal manpower around the globe, sought a leading role. By early December 2001, the Pentagon’s top policy official, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, had directed Schloesser and his team to prepare a highly classified plan, called Next Steps. The briefing, culled from the recommendations of combatant commanders around the world, outlined a series of secret military operations against Al Qaeda and its affiliates in more than a dozen countries, including Yemen, Somalia, and Sudan.

Feith, a Georgetown University–trained lawyer and self-acclaimed big thinker, was drilling down into the nitty-gritty details of military and intelligence operations against Al Qaeda cells worldwide. Schloesser and other military planners on the Joint Staff were early and ardent advocates for a longer-term strategic plan for the military to combat terrorism, a project normally expected to flow from the Pentagon’s top civilian policy maker. But in this case the call for strategy flowed in the opposite direction. Feith supported the idea, but feeling pressure from Rumsfeld, he was focused on the immediate threat and specific missions to counter it.

“When we would go up and do an early conceptual brief on what we thought the national military strategic plan would be, Feith would say okay, that’s fine, but let’s talk about what we’re going to do next month,” Schloesser recalled. “What are we going to do in Indonesia? What are we going to do in Mali? What are we going to do in the tri-border area of South America? He was very tactically oriented.”

The Next Steps planning quickly took shape. In Somalia and Yemen, countries with weak or virtually no effective central governments capable of identifying and attacking Al Qaeda cells, plans were set in motion to deny safe havens to Al Qaeda and other terrorists. Teams of Special Operations forces and CIA paramilitary officers would target militants with nighttime raids throughout the world. In the Mediterranean, Navy warships would step up patrols to disrupt terrorists’ logistics and snatch militants at sea.

In the Philippines, a new program was envisioned to help train and equip the Philippine military and security force to combat the Abu Sayyaf group, an Islamic militant group linked to Al Qaeda in the southern part of a country made up of over seven thousand islands. In Bosnia and Kosovo, commanders proposed combining an ongoing mission to hunt war criminals from the Balkan wars with a new plan to track Islamic extremists.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz sounded a warning note to nations that might be harboring or otherwise helping terrorists, echoing the “with us or against us” theme that President Bush had articulated in the days after 9/11. At the same time, a handful of influential commanders and analysts began expressing concerns that this strategy would not be enough to slay the terrorist organization and keep its ideology and appeal from spreading. Top commanders like John Abizaid acknowledged that these first series of steps after 9/11 to isolate terrorists in a handful of kill zones in other countries were unrealistic, because of a lack of precise intelligence, a lack of trained forces on the ground, and little understanding of how emerging terrorist cells operated. “We thought we could take our counterterrorist forces, move them decisively to the right place and kill the right people at the right time,” Abizaid explained. “We started to understand very quickly that the intelligence wasn’t good enough to allow us to have a campaign like that. So people are looking for a method to be able to engage, disrupt, defeat terrorist actions.”

“Our ideas about this enemy were very rudimentary at the time,” said Abizaid. “It wasn’t because the professionals that were working on them were bad guys or they were incompetent. It had nothing to do with that. There were very, very few people in the government that were dedicated to the problem, and all of a sudden the shift in our focus showed there were huge intelligence gaps.”

One example illustrates both the bold thinking and wildly unrealistic aims of the military’s initial approach. The plan called for hunting eight to ten senior Al Qaeda leaders and operatives, including at least one of Osama bin Laden’s sons, who had sought refuge in Chalus, an Iranian resort town on the Caspian Sea. In the chaotic days leading up to the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan, in November 2001, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s top leadership made a pivotal decision about its future. Al Qaeda’s leadership had been divided into management and consultative councils, or
shuras
, both of which reported to bin Laden. The management arm, the most important element in the terrorist group’s continued operations, which included bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, would flee east into Pakistan’s rugged tribal areas and teeming cities.

The consultative arm, which included the son, Saad bin Laden, would go west, to northern Iran, where American troops could not pursue them and the Iranians would likely not detain them. The younger bin Laden was a member of Al Qaeda and had been part of a small group of Al Qaeda operatives who fled from Afghanistan and would later become involved in managing the terrorist organization from Iran. But the Shiite clerics running the country placed the Al Qaeda operatives and their family members under virtual house arrest, and they became a shield against possible future attack from the Sunni-based terrorist organization.

At the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Fort Bragg, military planners drew up schemes for Navy SEALs to sneak ashore under the cloak of darkness using state-of-the-art mini-submarines called submersibles. Once they landed, the SEALs would slip past Iranian guards to snatch the Al Qaeda leaders. Another option called for Special Operations helicopters to spirit American commandos into the town and whisk them out again with their quarry. The American commandos went as far as conducting two or three rehearsals of a clandestine kill-or-capture mission into Chalus at an undisclosed location along the Gulf Coast of the United States in early 2002. They conducted small-boat insertion exercises involving about thirty Special Operations personnel, mostly SEALs, and eventually concluded the mission was feasible if they were provided with more detailed intelligence on the location of the Al Qaeda members and the security around them.

The logistics of the mission were daunting. Chalus sits at the edge of the Elburz coastal mountain range about seventy miles north of Tehran, and the failed rescue of the American hostages in Iran in April 1980 loomed large in commanders’ memories. Eventually, General Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rejected the missions as too risky and too politically volatile. In the end, even the JSOC commanders seemed relieved they would not be tasked with such a long-shot operation.

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By March 2002, as the fight in Afghanistan wound down and policy makers in Washington secretly began shifting their attention to Iraq, General Myers was worried that the country was losing sight of the larger global threat posed by Al Qaeda, an enemy that intelligence analysts concluded had the patience, will, and resolve to outlast its Western adversaries. Myers was also deeply frustrated that the early fight against Al Qaeda had been dominated by the military. Myers, a fighter pilot in Vietnam and a student of history, knew that military power alone could not defeat a committed terrorist organization. “You learn very quickly that most insurgencies are not brought to heel through military power alone,” Myers said. “It is using political and diplomatic power and economic power. In my view, they have to be applied simultaneously.”

But in National Security Council meetings, it was easier to talk about deploying another brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division or a squadron of fighter-bombers than mapping out a coherent political and economic recovery plan for a destitute country like Afghanistan. “It is made harder yet, because other departments and agencies are not as well resourced,” Myers said. “And maybe their heart is not in it. Maybe they do not feel the same sense of urgency as the military does because we are dying and we have injured. That was the frustration. It led to the thought that we do not really have a strategy. We do not have an overarching strategy.” Myers and his allies in the Pentagon set about exploring a new strategy that built off Next Steps but also called for more involvement by other parts of the government.

In early March 2002, Myers convened a Saturday meeting of his top staff directors. He looked around the table at some of the military’s best and brightest officers. “Who in this room thinks we have a strategy to defeat Al Qaeda?” he asked. Not a hand went up. Myers assigned his team to come up with a plan by the following Saturday. When the group reassembled a week later, the officers recommended, as a first step, an all-of-government effort to eliminate Al Qaeda’s top leaders and planners, specifically Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri as well as seven leading planners and operational commanders. The plan was dubbed Two + Seven and was drafted by John Tyson and his fellow DIA analysts before going to Schloesser, General Myers, and, ultimately, all the way to President Bush’s desk. (The original plan was actually called Two + Nine, but two of the Al Qaeda leaders were killed before Tyson could brief senior officials on the new concept.) “Two + Seven was pretty crude,” Myers acknowledged later. “It was trying to bring a strategy to what we were doing.”

Myers consulted closely with CIA director George Tenet on the list and on how to carry out the goal of crippling or seriously disrupting Al Qaeda’s planning and operations. Both sides brought strengths and abilities to the plan. The CIA had skilled linguists, experienced case officers with networks of informants on the ground, and finely honed analytical skills. The military had firepower, unparalleled reconnaissance and surveillance abilities from satellites to spy planes, and seasoned teams of Special Operations forces. The Treasury Department, armed with Juan Zarate’s financial sleuths expert at tracking terrorists’ financing, weighed in with critical information that helped diagram the web of connections between terrorists and their suppliers, recruiters, and financiers.

Tyson and the other DIA analysts warned their bosses against getting overly enamored of the new plan to wipe out Al Qaeda’s leadership. Al Qaeda, they pointed out, had already proved surprisingly adept at replacing its fallen leaders. “If you get these guys simultaneously or in quick order, you’re going to have a major impact on the organization,” Tyson said. “If you don’t, it is going to have an effect, but it will be considerably less.”

Senior Pentagon officials brushed the warnings aside. Over the next weeks, Two + Seven became Two + Seven + Thirty, adding another ring of lethal Al Qaeda planners and subcommanders around the world. Each time informants provided enough solid or “actionable” intelligence to target one of the militants on the list, executive orders were drafted and signed by Rumsfeld, sometimes going all the way to the White House for Bush’s approval. The president kept an updated copy of the list in his desk and crossed out each name and photograph after a militant was killed or captured. But this case-by-case approach took time, often time the covert forces didn’t have before an Al Qaeda commander might slip away. Under Myers’s direction, Jeff Schloesser and his Pentagon team looked for ways to speed up the process. They began shepherding through the senior levels of the military, CIA, and National Security Council a list of more than a dozen countries where high-level militants were believed to be operating as well as the preapproved decisions and legal authorities to kill those militants. These authorities were translated into a color-coded matrix that made it clear the military had approval in advance from the president and secretary of defense to attack fleeting targets in countries like Afghanistan. Where more covert means were required, as in Pakistan, the CIA would take the lead. In some countries, such as Iran, there were no preapproved targets. “In the end, it was asking for pre-approval rather than having to go back to the president at three o’clock in the morning,” Schloesser said.

Much of the early effort called for mounting continuous counterterrorism operations on both sides of the border with Pakistan. Handfuls of American military intelligence and communications specialists joined Pakistani forces searching for fugitive fighters in the mountainous tribal border areas traditionally outside the control of the government in Islamabad. In addition, small numbers of Special Operations commandos conducted cross-border reconnaissance missions into Pakistan, ready to strike at Al Qaeda fighters. The Pakistani and American forces were treading gingerly, however, since they were operating for the first time in the Pakistani tribal zones and sought to avoid provoking resistance from Pashtun tribesmen who shared ethnic ties with Taliban fighters.

In Pakistani cities, FBI agents helped the local police and provided information—in rare instances even personnel—to break up what senior American intelligence and law enforcement officials regarded at the time as a depleted but still dangerous network. The traditionally independent American military and law enforcement organizations were now working more closely together than they ever had prior to 9/11, sharing information and expertise as Al Qaeda tried to reconstitute itself in Pakistan. The presence of Al Qaeda in the cities was confirmed by intercepts of cell phone, Internet, and e-mail traffic. The commitment of American troops was relatively light, with no more than two dozen Special Operations forces working in the tribal areas at any given time. The operations, including day-and-night raids and methodical sweeps, were carried out by rapidly moving, highly trained allied soldiers with intensive intelligence-gathering elements to kill or capture specific militants.