Ghost Wars (55 page)

He was. Many of the CIA’s career officers revolted against Deutch’s change message. They saw his management reform campaign as just the latest wave in a series of attacks against the agency’s core mission and culture. To them President Clinton seemed indifferent about the CIA’s health. The agency’s budget continued to shrink. In mid-1995 there were only a dozen new case officers being trained at the Farm as career spies. The Directorate of Operations now had fewer than eight hundred case officers worldwide, about a 25 percent decline from the peak years of the Cold War. Stations had closed not only in Afghanistan but across the Third World. There was a strong sense in the Directorate of Operations that the CIA was getting rolled in the budget process by the Pentagon and the FBI. After the Ames case, internal investigations into other possible spies operating at Langley placed dozens of case officers under suspicion, contributing to an atmosphere of distrust and uncertainty. When Deutch’s new managers arrived, they emphasized gender and racial diversity as a prime CIA hiring goal, a mission that angered and dismayed the many white males among the agency’s veterans. New management techniques promoted open criticism of supervisors, discussions about the CIA’s purpose, focus groups, more interaction with the media—“California hot tub stuff,” as one unhappy veteran called it. To achieve personnel reductions without firing anyone, CIA managers had to look for experienced officers who were vested enough in their pensions to be able to retire early without hardship. They sought out such veterans and encouraged them to leave. The retirements became wrenching and disruptive.
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On the day he accepted early departure, longtime Soviet analyst Fritz Ermarth filled out paperwork with his retirement counselor, an old acquaintance he had known since the days of CIA directors Stansfield Turner and William Casey. Ermarth posed the kind of question that he used to ask about the Soviet bureaucracies he analyzed: “Look, you process four hundred to five hundred people a year through this little cubicle, right? What’s your portrait of the place?”

The counselor’s eyes filled with tears. “I’ve never seen it so bad,” she said, as Ermarth recalled it. He asked what she meant.

“Everybody says it’s hard to put your finger on it,” she replied, “but it’s the growth in the importance of stuff that shouldn’t matter relative to stuff that should.”
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THE CIA'S COUNTERTERRORIST CENTERE began to emerge as a modest exception to the agency’s downward trend. For the first two years of the Clinton presidency, budgeting and policy making about terrorism had been dispersed and confused. The shock of the Oklahoma City bombing in the spring of 1995 created a new sense of urgency at the National Security Council, however. The bombers turned out to be a domestic cell of antigovernment militia. But their audacious strike coincided with a shocking chemical weapons attack by a Japanese-based cult in Tokyo.White House terrorism analysts believed the Japanese case showed that the United States was vulnerable to terrorists using weapons of mass destruction. Spurred by Clinton, the National Security Council organized its first terrorism policy review during the early months of 1995.

In June, Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive-39, classified Secret, titled “U.S. Policy on Counterterrorism.” The document echoed the presidential directive that President Reagan had signed during the last great wave of anti-American terrorism during the mid-1980s. It was also the first official recognition by any American president of the danger posed to the United States by terrorists who acquired nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.
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The CIA was instructed to undertake “an aggressive program of foreign intelligence collection, analysis, counterintelligence, and covert action.” If necessary, CIA operations would seek to return terrorist suspects “by force ... without the cooperation of the host government” so that the accused could face justice in American courts.

“The acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by a terrorist group, through theft or manufacture, is unacceptable,” the directive continued. “There is no higher priority than preventing the acquisition of this capability or removing this capability from terrorist groups potentially opposed to the U.S.”
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On paper, at least, American policy was now more forceful and clearly stated than it had been in years. The document also centralized authority on counterterrorism policy at the White House for the first time. The challenge now was to put the words into practice.

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IN JANUARY 1996 the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center opened a new office to track Osama bin Laden. The agency had never before dedicated a unit of this kind to a single terrorist. Formally known as the “bin Laden Issue Station” and code-named “Alec,” the group leased space in a suburban Virginia office park just a few miles from CIA headquarters. Employing about twelve staff members, it was designated a “virtual station.” This meant that within the CIA’s budgeting and cable routing systems, the unit would have the administrative status, privileges, and autonomy enjoyed by more traditional stations abroad. The idea was born from discussions in the Counterterrorist Center’s senior management group. Bin Laden was still seen by CIA analysts primarily as a money man, but he was an emerging symbol of the new mobility of international terrorism. National Security Adviser Tony Lake, who approved the bin Laden unit at the CIA, recalled that he realized the Saudi had become an important terrorist when classified memos started referring to him by the acronym “UBL” (which referred to a spelling of bin Laden’s transliterated first name as Usama). In Washington having an acronym was the ultimate sign of importance, Lake recalled sardonically. Because he operated across borders, bin Laden presented challenges to the CIA’s old system of country-based intelligence collection. The CIA’s managers wanted to experiment with a new kind of unit, a prototype that might be used against other transnational targets. They would fuse intelligence disciplines into one office—operations, analysis, signals intercepts, overhead photography, and so on. The National Security Agency had tapped into bin Laden’s satellite telephone and kept track of his international conversations. These intercepts could be used by the new station to track his payments and connections in multiple countries.
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They chose bin Laden because by early 1996 there was a rising recognition of his importance, both at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and at the White House. The unit’s first project was to develop a strategic picture of bin Laden’s activity. Some of the new focus on bin Laden came from Richard Clarke, a forceful career civil servant who in the summer of 1995 had been appointed Clinton’s counterterrorism director, working from the National Security Council under the authorities spelled out in PDD-39. In addition, classified evidence about bin Laden was piling up, circulating in cables throughout the intelligence community. The reporting from the CIA’s Khartoum station was by now voluminous. Bin Laden’s name surfaced continually in reports from Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Israel, and elsewhere. As one regular reader of these cables recalled, it seemed as if every other cable about terrorism from North Africa contained the phrase “Osama bin Laden, financier of terrorists.” The CIA now viewed bin Laden as “one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world,” as a rare public statement put it. There was some new money available for the CIA’s counterterrorism budget by fiscal 1996. Tony Lake chaired an interagency meeting that approved spending it on the CIA’s virtual bin Laden station. Richard Clarke said later that he asked the CIA and the Pentagon to develop plans for “operating against” al Qaeda in Sudan, instead of merely collecting intelligence, but that neither department “was able successfully to develop a plan.” Operators inside the virtual station began drafting plans to capture bin Laden early on, but none of these ideas was approved or carried forward by superiors or the White House. The agency’s plan offered a way to try something new: “Let’s yank on this bin Laden chain and see what happens,” as one participant recalled.
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But before they could get a grip on him, bin Laden slipped beyond their reach into Afghanistan.

THE CIA STATION in the U.S. embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, had been conditioned during Cofer Black’s 1993–95 tour to threats of violence from bin Laden’s followers. After the aborted plot to assassinate or kidnap Black, an informant who walked into the embassy volunteered details about supposed plots to kill Tony Lake in Washington. (A State Department official relayed to Lake an assurance from Sudan’s foreign minister: “He says that he’s not trying to kill you.” Lake answered, “It’s the darndest thing, but I’m not trying to kill him, either.”) CIA officers and embassy diplomats regularly faced hostile surveillance by Sudanese and foreign Arab radicals on the streets of Khartoum. Two CIA contractors reported being threatened on a Khartoum street, although the seriousness of this incident was debated within the agency. Even when one of the station’s walk-in sources proved to be a liar, there remained a thick file of threats against the U.S. embassy and its personnel. The chancery building faced a crowded street in central Khartoum, vulnerable to car bombs, but Sudan’s government did not respond to requests for new protection measures. By the fall of 1995 the embassy’s Emergency Action Committee—which included the CIA station chief, the State Department’s security officer, and senior diplomats—had drafted a cable to Washington recommending that the Khartoum embassy be closed to protect American employees. Under this plan the CIA station housed in the embassy would also close, ending the agency’s up-close perch for intelligence collection against bin Laden.
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The newly arrived U.S. ambassador to Sudan, Timothy Carney, a feisty career diplomat, thought this was a terrible idea. Carney believed his colleagues overstated the dangers. Cofer Black agreed with him, but Black had transferred from Khartoum to another assignment in the summer of 1995, and his successor at the Khartoum station expressed a more cautious attitude. Carney questioned the integrity of some of the intelligence sources on which the Emergency Action Committee based its threat analysis. Moreover, he thought that closing the embassy would send exactly the wrong signal to Sudan. The United States sought to end Sudan’s support for terrorists, among other goals. Carney believed this could only be achieved through direct engagement with the Khartoum government. If the United States shut its embassy and pulled out, it would leave Sudan all the more isolated and desperate. The United States could reduce the threat of Islamic radicalism if it learned to interact with Islamists in more sophisticated ways, distinguishing between peaceful movements of religious revival and those bent on violence. Instead it was clinging to alliances in the Middle East with corrupt, failing secular regimes such as Egypt’s, which encouraged Washington to lump all Islamic political groups into one “terrorist” camp. With this myopia, Carney believed, the United States was inadvertently pushing governments such as Sudan’s toward more radical postures.
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When Carney set up shop in Khartoum in November, he found a draft Emergency Action Committee cable recommending the embassy’s closure. He was appalled at the tone of the cable and its conclusion. But he had been a diplomat in the Vietnam era and had vowed that he would never suppress a cable from an embassy where he served even if he disagreed with it. The lesson of Vietnam was that the American government worked best when decision makers had all the arguments, even the ones they did not want to hear, Carney believed. He let the cable recommending closure go through to Washington.
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Based on its arguments, CIA director John Deutch told the White House formally that he believed the Khartoum embassy should be shut. Clinton’s national security cabinet met two or three times to discuss the issue. Past attempts to negotiate with Sudan had yielded no improvements in its record of coddling terrorists and waging a brutal civil war against Christian rebels in the south, the cabinet group concluded. If closing the embassy isolated Khartoum’s government, perhaps that would be the right signal after all, some of the participants in the meetings said. For his part Deutch focused on the security question: The risks of staying in Khartoum outweighed the benefits, he said.
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Carney flew to Washington and argued passionately to Secretary of State Warren Christopher that closing the embassy would be a catastrophic error. “An embassy’s a tool,” he said. “You need to keep the tool in place.” But Deutch persisted in his judgment that the Khartoum station was just too dangerous to operate. Late in January 1996, Christopher acceded to Deutch’s request. Carney flew back to Khartoum and told Sudan’s foreign minister that the United States was pulling out because of terrorist threats to American personnel.
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The Sudanese were outraged. The Khartoum government had lately moved to curtail the influence of Islamic radicals in the country. The American decision would say to the world that Sudan was unsafe for investment and travel, that it was an outlaw government.

Carney said there was nothing he could do; the decision had been made. On February 6, 1996, he attended a farewell dinner at the Khartoum home of Sudanese vice president Ali Osman Taha. That night he and Taha fell into their first serious conversation about Sudan’s support for terrorists. Carney said that if the Sudanese ever expected Washington to reconsider its decision, they had to show they were serious. Osama Bin Laden was one of Sudan’s biggest sources of grief in Washington, Carney said. Sudan should expel him and provide information to the United States about his finances and his support for North African terrorists.
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With Carney’s assistance Sudan arranged one month later to send a secret envoy, General Elfatih Erwa, to Washington for more talks. Erwa met with Carney and two CIA officers from the Africa Division in the Hyatt Hotel in Rosslyn, Virginia. On March 8, 1996, meeting alone with Erwa, the CIA officers handed him a list of demands that had been developed and endorsed by a working group at the White House. The CIA, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and the State Department had all helped formulate this list. The two-page proposal was titled “Measures Sudan Can Take to Improve Relations with the United States.” The second item on the list asked for intelligence about bin Laden’s Khartoum followers: “Provide us with names, dates of arrival, departure and destination and passport data on mujaheddin that Usama Bin Laden has brought into Sudan.” The memo also demanded details about the owners of specific cars and trucks that had been surveilling CIA personnel in Khartoum.
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