Ghost Wars (115 page)

29. Pillar,
Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy,
pp. 103 and 107.

30. Tenet's quotations are from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, Appendix, p. 21. Slocombe memo and Clarke forecast from National Commission, staff statement no. 6, p. 3.

31. That Rana came along and an ISI officer translated is from an interview with a senior Saudi official.

32. Ibid.

33. The Omar quotations are from Prince Turki, ABC News
Nightline,
December 10, 2001.

34. Interview with a senior Saudi official. Speaking to the Associated Press on November 23, 2001, Turki quoted himself similarly: "I told him, 'You will regret it, and the Afghan people will pay a high price for that.' " See also National Commission, staff statement no. 5, pp. 9-10, which reports that Turki returned to Kandahar in June 1999 on a similar mission, "to no effect."

35. Interviews with U.S. officials.

CHAPTER 23: "WE ARE AT WAR"

1. In an early speech after becoming DCI, written to answer the question "Does America Need the CIA?," Tenet described the agency as the country's "insurance policy" against strategic surprise. Text of the speech from November 19, 1997, CIA Office of Public Affairs.

2. Interviews with Clinton administration officials. One recalled his reaction to the Africa bombings this way: "I'm at the White House, so I'm thinking two things: One is the venal thought that it is not good for the president to have embassies blowing up, so probably we want to limit that. And the other is that deterrence really depends on these kinds of things not happening, and that's really important for the exercise of U.S. power."

3. "A tendency . . . attention and resources" is from Paul R. Pillar,
Terrorism and U.S.
Foreign Policy,
pp. 115-16.

4. Interviews with U.S. officials. David Benjamin and Steven Simon highlighted the White House complaints about unedited intelligence in their book,
The Age of Sacred Terror.
The East Africa bombings, they wrote, "had a catalytic effect on CIA stations, foreign intelligence services, and it seemed, everyone who had ever peddled information" (p. 261). The CIA "gave Clinton substantial amounts of threat information that did not require presidential attention" (p. 265).

5. "No double standards" is from interviews with U.S. officials. Benjamin and Simon estimate that "scores" of embassies were closed for at least brief periods during the last months of 1998 and the first months of 1999.

6. Summaries of classified aviation threat reports in the fall of 1998 are from Eleanor Hill, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement, September 18, 2002.

7. Ibid., and interviews with U.S. officials. See also the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, Appendix, p. 23.

8. Joint Inquiry Staff Statement, September 18, 2002.

9. That the submarine order was closely held, that Tarnak coordinates were preloaded, what Clinton made clear to his senior aides, and that exercises reduced decision-to-target time to about four hours are all from interviews with U.S. officials involved. Delenda Plan and Steinberg quotation from National Commission, staff statement no. 6, pp. 3-4, and no. 8, p. 4.

10. The account that follows is based mainly on interviews with multiple participants. Staff investigators from the National Commission have helpfully corrected two errors in the account of this episode in the first edition of
Ghost Wars:
It occurred in December 1998, not September; and decision-makers feared hitting a mosque, not a hospital. See staff statement no. 6, p. 7.

11. Clinton's outlook and Clarke's advice from interviews with multiple senior Clinton administration officials involved in the discussions.

12. The Berger quotation is from testimony before the Joint Inquiry Committee, September 19, 2002.

13. That Berger's standard was "significant" or "substantial" probability of success is from interviews with Clinton administration officials.

14. The account in this section of the MONs signed by Clinton is from interviews with multiple officials familiar with the documents. Barton Gellman published the first account of the memos in
The Washington Post,
December 19, 2001. The account here differs from his in a few details. According to officials interviewed by the author, Clinton signed at least four MONs related to bin Laden. The first predated the Africa embassy bombings and authorized the use of force to detain or arrest bin Laden's international couriers, according to these officials. The second was drafted immediately after the embassy bombings and authorized snatch operations against bin Laden and certain of his lieutenants. The third was signed later that autumn and involved bin Laden's aircraft, as described in this chapter. A fourth was signed in late 1999 or early 2000 and involved the CIA's liaison with Massoud, as described in Chapter 25 and following. In addition to authorizing snatch operations by Massoud, Clinton specifically authorized the CIA's tribal team in southern Afghanistan, a Pakistani commando team, and an Uzbek commando team to carry out snatch operations using lethal force against bin Laden and his lieutenants. Whether the authorizations for each of these different strike forces required a separate MON or were handled by some other form of legal documentation is not clear to the author. All the documents re- main highly classified. "As smart as bin Laden . . . equally ruthless" is from Clinton's speech to the Democratic Leadership Council at New York University, December 6, 2002.

15. Baker is the coauthor of a legal book on these issues,
Regulating Covert Action
.

16. Interviews with U.S. officials.

17. Ibid.

18. Interviews with U.S. officials involved. "We wanted . . . be possible" is from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, p. 283.

19. The Hitz quotation is from an oped article he published in
The Washington Post,
September 15, 1998. Goss called the Directorate of Operations "gun-shy," according to the Associated Press, September 15, 1998.

20. Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, confirmed the existence and conclusions of these opinions in testimony before the Joint Inquiry Committee on September 19, 2002. "We received rulings in the Department of Justice," Berger said, "not to prohibit our ability-prohibit our efforts to try to kill bin Laden, because [the assassination ban] did not apply to situations in which you're acting in self-defense or you're acting against command and control targets against an enemy, which he certainly was."

21. The summary of the debate over law enforcement approaches to bin Laden is from interviews with multiple Clinton administration officials. Albright and Cohen quotations are from their written testimony to the National Commission, March 23, 2004.

22. Ibid. See note 14. Pentagon order from National Commission, staff statement no. 6, p. 5.

23. "Written word . . . kettle of fish and much easier" is from an interview with a U.S. official involved. In testimony before the Joint Inquiry Committee investigating the September 11 attacks, Cofer Black, who led the Counterterrorist Center after 1999, said in a statement, "Operational flexibility: This is a highly classified area. All I want to say is that there was a 'before' 9/11 and 'after' 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off." Divided planning in Pentagon from National Commission, staff statement no. 6, p. 5. Clinton's changing language from final report, pp. 126-133.

24. "Unless you find him . . . get the job done" is from an interview with a Clinton administration official involved.

25. "It was no question" is from Berger's testimony before the Joint Inquiry Committee, September 19, 2002. "Any confusion" is from National Commission staff statement no. 7, p. 9.

26. Douglas Frantz,
The New York Times,
December 8, 2001.

27. Michael Griffin,
Reaping the Whirlwind,
p. 207.

28. Ibid., p. 208. The letter was solicited by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's subcommittee on South Asian affairs.

29. Interviews with multiple State Department officials from this period. Inderfurth summed up the department's policy in an interview: "The United States had been very involved, as had others, during the period of '79 through '89, choosing sides. What was needed now was not to choose sides but to get all parties to talk, and if we had chosen sides, our ability to press all sides to actually sit down would have been impaired. A lot of people that had dealt with Afghanistan over the years said, look, the Northern Alliance and those involved are virtually no better than those they're opposing." Inderfurth said he personally had the view that Massoud's alliance could not possibly be as bad as the Taliban, and among his colleagues "there would be people who would concede the point." The consensus within the State Department was, according to Inderfurth, "Look, we've gone down that road before. We do not want to become an active participant in the civil conflict; we want to try to bring them together."

30. Statement by Karl F. Inderfurth, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, October 8, 1998.

31. Quotations in this paragraph are from Clinton's speech at Georgetown University, November 7, 2001. "Painful and powerful . . . community" is from Clinton's speech to the British Labour Party conference at Blackpool, England, October 3, 2002. Arguably, both the Irish Republican Army and the Zionist movement that emerged after World War II achieved important political goals through terrorist violence-as did the Palestine Liberation Organization.

32. "Fanatics . . . value of life" is from Clinton's Blackpool speech, October 3, 2002.

33. "Take Mr. bin Laden" is from
USA
Today,
November 12, 2001. "Reduce the risks . . . in the future" is from Clinton's Blackpool speech, October 3, 2002.

34. Pillar,
Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy
.
"A challenge . . . solved," p. vii. "A war that cannot be won . . . to some degree controlled," pp. 217-18. The account in this section of the debates between Pillar on the one hand and Clarke's aides Simon and Benjamin on the other is drawn in part from multiple officials in several departments. Skepticism is due when participants seek to characterize their positions about a catastrophe like September 11 in the light of hindsight. In this case, however, it is possible to document the views of Pillar, Simon, and Benjamin without such colorizing. After he left the CIA's Counterterrorist Center in 1999, Pillar spent a year at the Brookings Institution where he synthesized his views and experiences into a book that was written and published just before the events of September 11. In the same period, after they left the White House, Simon and Benjamin collaborated on an article in the security journal
Survival
about terrorism and al Qaeda. In documenting their competing views here, I have relied solely on language composed by the participants before they had the benefit of knowing about September 11.

35. Pillar,
Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy,
p. 120.

36. Ibid. "Often sensational public," p. 4. "Skewed priorities and misdirected resources," p. 203.

37. Paul R. Pillar, "Intelligence and the Campaign Against International Terrorism," in
The Campaign Against International Terrorism,
Georgetown University Press, forthcoming at the time of this writing. This article, unlike his work while at Brookings, was written after the September 11 attacks.

38. All of the quotations in this paragraph are from Pillar,
Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy,
p. 56.

39. Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin, "America and the New Terrorism,"
Survival,
Spring 2000, pp. 59-75.

40. Ibid.

41. That Tenet called the White House regularly to highlight specific bin Laden threat reports is from interviews with several Clinton administration officials.

42. Tenet's memo was cited and quoted by Eleanor Hill, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement, September 18, 2002. In congressional testimony that same day, Hill said Tenet's declaration of war inside the CIA was not widely known outside of Langley. "It was the DCI's decision," she said. "It was circulated to some people, but not broadly within the community." Awareness of the gravity of the bin Laden threat, she said, was greater among senior officials than among agents operating in the field. This was especially true at the FBI.

43. That bin Laden became a "Tier 0" priority is from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, p. 40. "In hindsight . . . there sooner," p. 42. "We never . . . Directorate of Intelligence," p. 41. "Never got to first base," p. 46.

CHAPTER 24: "LET'S JUST BLOW THE THING UP"

1. Interviews with senior Pakistani government officials.

2. Ziauddin's meetings with Sharif 's father in Lahore and his reputation as a political general are from interviews with both senior Pakistani and U.S. officials.

3. The CIA's plan to use ISI to set up bin Laden for ambush or capture is from interviews with U.S. officials. There are varying accounts of how American newspaper reporting caused bin Laden to stop using his satellite telephone in the autumn of 1998. The White House counterterrorism aides Benjamin and Simon cite a
Washington Times
story that reported bin Laden "keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones" as the triggering event. But there were other stories from the same period, including one in
The Washington Post
that quoted former CIA officials and other analysts talking about bin Laden's use of telecommunications.

4. Interviews with U.S. officials.

5. Ibid.

6. "That those ISI individuals . . . didn't know what they were doing" is from an interview with a Clinton administration official. "The policy of the government . . . the overall policy of the government" is from an interview with a second U.S. official. "An incredibly unholy alliance . . . nuclear war in Kashmir" is from an interview with a third senior Clinton administration official.

7. Interviews with U.S. and Pakistani officials.