Enemies: A History of the FBI (64 page)

On April 24, the president of the California Forestry Association, the timber industry lobbying group, was killed by a bomb inside a package mailed to his office. It was the latest of sixteen deadly attacks attributed by the FBI to an unknown suspect. The investigation—called UNABOM because the first targets were universities and airlines—had been going on for seventeen years.

This eleven-week barrage of bombs and plots seemed disconnected—a madman in the Midwest, a millennial cult in Japan, a jihad cell in Manila. But there were patterns in it. Bomb throwers once wanted to create political theater. Now they wanted to burn the theater down. Terrorism once had been a game of nations. Now it was starting to look like a global gang war.

Terrorism was in a state of transformation. Counterterrorism was not.

After the Manila bomb plot was discovered, President Clinton sought a dramatic expansion of the FBI’s wiretapping and surveillance powers. The most conservative Congress in twenty years stopped him. Congress stripped the bill of its major statutes—and revived them all six years later in the Patriot Act.

Months of haggling left only three meaningful measures. The new legislation controlled the sale of explosives. It created secret trial procedures for terrorism suspects. And it gave the president a green light to “
disrupt, dismantle and destroy international infrastructures used by international terrorists.”
International infrastructures
was political language. The intent of the law was clear: destroy the terrorists. But first the United States had to find them.

On June 21, 1995, Clinton signed a secret order intended to create a new regime of American counterterrorism. He placed the FBI at its pinnacle. How this could work when the president and the FBI director would not speak was left, like so much else, unsaid.

“
We will not allow terrorism to succeed,” Presidential Decision Directive 39 (PDD 39) began. “Through our law-enforcement efforts, we shall make
clear that there is no higher priority than the pursuit, arrest, and prosecution of terrorists.”

PDD 39 placed the FBI in charge of detecting hidden arsenals of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons with “robust and rapidly deployable counterterrorism teams.” Hoover had started worrying about that threat nearly fifty years before. The FBI had fewer than five agents dedicated to weapons of mass destruction in 1995. Attorney General Reno immediately asked Congress for 175 more. She got them.

The directive made the rendition of terrorist suspects—kidnapping them abroad and bringing them to trial—“a matter of the highest priority” for the FBI. Rendition had been used rarely, and with fanfare, under Presidents Reagan and Bush in the past decade. It would become a commonplace under Clinton, but carried out in secret.

The president told the Bureau to “collect, analyze and disseminate intelligence on terrorist groups and on activities of international terrorists in the United States.” That order had no real precedent. The FBI could gather intelligence well enough. But it had no capacity to analyze it. It lacked three essential elements: it did not have the people, it did not have the computers, and it did not have the time.

The directive contained one hurdle still higher: “The Directors of Central Intelligence and FBI together shall personally ensure that their Agencies achieve maximum cooperation regarding terrorism,” it said. “The CIA and FBI shall ensure timely exchanges of terrorist information.” They had to share intelligence. They had to talk to one another. They had to work together.

The task of enforcing this shotgun wedding fell to one of the authors of the presidential directive, the intelligence director of the National Security Council, a cigar-chomping, tightly wound, forty-two-year-old staff man named George J. Tenet. On July 3, 1995, twelve days after the president signed the order, Tenet took office as the deputy director of Central Intelligence. He ran the CIA from day to day, and he continued to run it for the next nine years. He soon became the acting director, then the director, and Louis Freeh swore him in at his ascension.

Forging links with the FBI was one of the many seemingly impossible missions Tenet faced. He thought he could make it happen. He started by making friends with Freeh. Tenet’s parents ran a Greek diner in Queens. Freeh’s father had been a trucking company dispatcher in Brooklyn. The
two men got along; they trusted each other. Maybe the FBI and the CIA could get along as well.

They decided to trade counterterrorism chiefs. Four senior FBI agents were seconded to the Agency; four CIA officers were deputized at the Bureau. The swap became known as the hostage exchange program. Almost no one volunteered.

Dale Watson, the FBI assistant special agent in charge in Kansas City, was selected as the first hostage. He was informed that he would become the number-two man at the CIA’s new counterterrorism center. He was as qualified as anyone: he had worked the Oklahoma City bombing as well as the Bureau’s counterintelligence operations against Iranian spies. Watson weighed the chances of success and decided to stay in Kansas City. He said no twice. The third time was an order. He would rise in two years’ time to become the FBI’s counterterrorist in chief.

Watson learned quickly on his new assignment that the Bureau and the Agency could perform remarkable feats of detection together. What to do with the intelligence they gathered was another question.

The FBI had obtained Ramzi Yousef’s address book from the police in the Philippines. Tracing the names and telephone numbers in the book, the Bureau discovered that a man in the emirate of Qatar using the name Khalid Sheikh had sent a $660 wire transfer to one of the World Trade Center bombers only days before the attack. The CIA learned five facts about the man in Qatar. He worked as a government engineer. He was Ramzi Yousef’s uncle. He was deeply involved in the plot to blow up 747s. He had been associated with al-Qaeda and its affiliates for seven years. His full name was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

A sealed and secret indictment against him was handed up by a federal grand jury in New York at the start of 1996. The CIA and the FBI located him in Doha, the capital of Qatar, a nation newly allied with the American military. They conferred in secret with the American ambassador, Patrick Theros, who had been the State Department’s counterterrorism deputy. Together they decided to ask the emir of Qatar for his help in hunting down Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The emir stalled. One of his ministers sent word to the suspect that the Americans were after him. Fleeing to a remote province of Pakistan, beyond the reach of American intelligence and law enforcement, and then across the border to Afghanistan, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed began working with al-Qaeda on a plan to finish what the World Trade Center bombers had started.

Watson came to understand that terrorists in the most remote nations on earth could strike the United States at will, attacking embassies, military bases, and other symbols of American power. The FBI as constituted could not dismantle or destroy them. It would have to be remade for that mission.

The Bureau had received hundreds of millions of dollars in extra funds from Congress to hire hundreds of new agents and intelligence analysts for the war on terror. Freeh doubled the number of his overseas legal attachés, creating an FBI presence in nations like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. He met with dozens of kings, princes, emirs, and other heads of state in his effort to create a worldwide intelligence service. The FBI now had unquestioned authority to take the lead when terrorists killed Americans abroad. Freeh himself took command of the investigation of the bombing of Khobar Towers in Dhahran, on the edge of the Persian Gulf in Saudi Arabia, on June 25, 1996.

Nineteen American military personnel had been killed, and 372 injured, when a tanker truck packed with explosives destroyed the eight-story Khobar Towers housing complex. The bomb was slightly bigger than the one in Oklahoma City. The dead were members of the 4404th Fighter Wing, which patrolled the skies over Iraq, enforcing a no-fly zone from the King Abdul Aziz Airbase.

Freeh dispatched hundreds of agents and forensics experts to Dhahran, and he personally went with them. He remembered them sifting through tons of debris in the blazing heat, “
exhausted, many sick and dehydrated, working until they literally dropped, in some cases, down on their knees, digging with their fingers,” sorting bits of human flesh and bone.

Freeh became obsessed with the case. Thirteen Saudis were implicated, but Freeh surmised, through circumstantial evidence, that the government of Iran was behind the bombing. He thought the case against Iran could be made in court. He also thought that he could flatter and cajole Saudi princes into sharing criminal evidence and, ultimately, handing over the suspects. When his charm offensive failed, he lashed out—first at the royal family, then at the president. Freeh became convinced that Clinton lacked the political will and the moral force to avenge the Americans killed at Khobar. He thought the United States should retaliate against Iran for an act of war. He pushed the case with a passionate and personal devotion for five years. But he was almost alone in his judgments. He did not persuade the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, or the Justice Department to punish Iran’s mullahs or the Iranian military. Freeh was forced
to conclude that “
Khobar represented a national security threat far beyond the capability or authority of the FBI.”

While Freeh haggled with Saudi princes, the FBI opened a criminal case against the Saudi pariah Osama bin Laden in September 1996. He had been described in the CIA’s files up until then as a wealthy financier who bankrolled terrorism. But days before, bin Laden had issued his first declaration of war against the United States. In a message from Afghanistan, published by an Arabic-language newspaper in London, he had praised the Khobar bombing and warned America to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia.

“Nothing between us needs to be explained,” bin Laden wrote. “There is only killing.”

“W
HAT KIND OF WAR?
”

The FBI’s investigation into bin Laden was not a paper case. The Bureau had a witness.

An al-Qaeda defector, Jamal al-Fadl, a Sudanese who had stolen $110,000 from bin Laden’s coffers in Khartoum, had turned up at the U.S. Embassy in the neighboring nation of Eritrea, on the Horn of Africa, at the start of the summer. “
I have information about people, they want to do something against your government,” he told a State Department officer. “I told her I was in Afghanistan and I work with group and I know in fact those people, they try to make war against your country and they train very hard, they do their best to make war against your country.”

“What kind of war?” she asked al-Fadl.

“Maybe they try to do something inside United States and they try to fight the United States Army outside, and also they try make bomb against some embassy outside,” he replied. “I work with them more than nine years.”

Three CIA officers debriefed al-Fadl for three weeks. Then, in the newfound spirit of counterterrorism cooperation, the Agency turned him over to the FBI.

Daniel Coleman, a grizzled twenty-three-year FBI veteran attached to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York and the CIA’s counterterrorism center, flew to Germany with Patrick Fitzgerald, a young prosecutor in charge of national security cases at the federal courthouse in Manhattan. They talked to al-Fadl every day for two weeks. They brought him back to New York, and he remained in the Bureau’s around-the-clock custody for
the next two years. Coleman and his fellow agents came to like him. They nicknamed him Junior.

By January 1997, Junior had given the FBI a deep look at al-Qaeda’s origins, its structure, its ambitions, and its leaders. He told the FBI that bin Laden had been vowing to attack the United States for at least three years. America was a snake, bin Laden had said to his followers. Al-Qaeda had to cut off its head.

That same month, Dale Watson returned to FBI headquarters as chief, International Terrorism Section, National Security Division. On orders from the director, Watson spent an inordinate amount of time chasing shadows in the Khobar Towers case. But he was now more interested in the future than the past. He had learned a lot at the CIA. The Agency had thousands of people sitting and thinking. One of his core missions was to find a way for the FBI to think.

Clinton’s Presidential Decision Directive 39 had ordered the Bureau to analyze secret intelligence on terrorist threats, and to create strategies to disrupt and destroy them before they struck again. Freeh had promised to deploy a squadron of strategic analysts for that mission. Strategic analysis was the big picture, the power to know what your enemy is thinking. It was not about what happened five minutes ago, but what might happen five months from now; not a smart guess, but sifted and refined intelligence. Without it, taking action usually was a shot in the dark.

Watson looked around headquarters wondering: Where were all the analysts? They had been hired in 1995 and 1996, fifty or more of them, many with advanced degrees. But they had been shocked at the state of intelligence at the FBI. Where were the computers? Where were the data? Most of the new hires left within a year. They felt they had been treated like furniture, not federal investigators. By the turn of the century, the FBI had one analyst working on al-Qaeda.

Watson presided over the FBI’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit and a new Osama bin Laden Unit. He had seven agents, including Dan Coleman, working on the bin Laden case, under the assistant special agent in charge of counterterrorism in New York, John O’Neill. But at headquarters, “
no one was thinking about the counterterrorism program—what the threat was and what we were trying to do about it,” Watson said. “And when that light came on, I realized that, hey, we are a reactive bunch of people, and reactive will never get us to a prevention.” No one was thinking about where al-Qaeda’s next target might be—and “no one was really looking.”

But one FBI agent was talking about it in public, and that was O’Neill. He was a showboat and a self-promoter, but he studied al-Qaeda with a steely gaze. O’Neill believed, and he would tell anyone who listened, that the group had the capability to strike the United States at a time and place of its choice. “
The balance of power has shifted,” he warned in a speech in Chicago that spring. “No intelligent state will attack the United States in the foreseeable future because of our military superiority. So the only way these individuals can attack us and have some effect is through acts of terrorism.”