Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (15 page)

But if there had not been an intelligence failure at the CIA, there
had
been a major bureaucratic failure, though it became clear only in the years after 9/11. Members of the Agency had failed to “watch-list” two suspected al-Qaeda terrorists, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, whom the CIA had been tracking since they attended a terrorist summit meeting in Malaysia on January 5, 2000. The failure to watch-list the two al-Qaeda suspects with the Department of State meant that they were able to enter the United States under their real names with ease. Ten days after the
Malaysian terror summit, on January 15, 2000, Hazmi and Mihdhar flew into Los Angeles. The Agency also did not alert the FBI about the identities of the suspected terrorists, so that the Bureau could look for them once they were inside the United States. An investigation by the CIA inspector general—published in unclassified form in 2007—found that this was not the oversight of a couple of Agency employees, but that a large number of CIA officers and analysts had dropped the ball. “
Some fifty to sixty” Agency employees read cables about the two al-Qaeda suspects without taking any action. Some of those officers knew that one of the al-Qaeda suspects
had a visa for the United States, and by March 2001 some knew that the other suspect had flown to Los Angeles.

The soon-to-be hijackers would not have been difficult to find in California if their names had been known to law enforcement. Under their real names they rented an apartment, obtained driver’s licenses, opened bank accounts, purchased a car, and took flight lessons at a local school. Mihdhar even listed his name in the
local phone directory. It was only on August 24, 2001, as a result of questions raised by a CIA officer on assignment at the FBI, that the two
al-Qaeda suspects were watch-listed and their names communicated to the Bureau. Even then the FBI sent out only a “
routine” notice requesting an investigation of Mihdhar. A month later Hazmi and Mihdhar were two of the “muscle” hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77 that plunged into the Pentagon, killing 189 people.

The CIA inspector general’s report concluded that “
informing the FBI and good operational follow-through by CIA and FBI might have resulted in surveillance of both Mihdhar and Hazmi. Surveillance, in turn, would have had the potential to yield information on flight training, financing, and links to others who were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.” The names of the CIA officers who dropped the ball on the al-Qaeda hijackers remain classified, and no disciplinary action was taken against them; however, most worked at the Counterterrorist Center, and many continued to work on the hunt for bin Laden after 9/11. The knowledge that they could have done more to avert the loss of nearly three thousand lives animated them to work all the harder on finding the man responsible.

O
N THE MORNING OF
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Illinois state senator Barack Obama was driving to a legislative hearing in downtown Chicago when he heard on the radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. By the time he arrived at the meeting, a second plane had flown into the Twin Towers. “
We were told to evacuate,” Obama recalls. Out on the streets, people looked nervously up at the sky, fearing that the Sears Tower, Chicago’s landmark skyscraper, was also a possible target. Back at his office, Obama watched the images from New York: “a plane vanishing into glass and steel; men and women clinging to windowsills, then letting go; tall towers crumbling to dust.”

Six years later, Obama was a U.S. senator mounting what seemed a quixotic challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president. Clinton appeared to hold all the cards: name recognition, the Clinton money machine, the endorsement of many of the Democratic Party’s heavy hitters, top political consultants working on her team, and the hopes of many that she would be the first female president of the United States. But
Obama thought she
was vulnerable, particularly because of her support for the Iraq War, which was by now deeply unpopular, and which he had come out firmly against five years earlier. And Obama impressed a growing number of supporters with his intellect, his cool, and his ability to inspire young people, who flocked to his campaign. An Obama win, some hoped, would also help to heal the American Original Sin of slavery and subsequent racial discrimination.

As Obama’s long-shot campaign gathered steam, on July 17, 2007, an unclassified version of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the state of al-Qaeda was released to the media with a considerable splash. The estimate concluded that al-Qaeda “
has protected or regenerated key elements of its homeland attack capability, including: a safe haven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership.” This wasn’t exactly news. In the summer of 2005, al-Qaeda had directed the deadliest terrorist attack in British history, killing fifty-two commuters on the London transportation system. And the following summer, there had been a foiled attempt to blow up as many as seven American, Canadian, and British airliners with liquid explosives smuggled onto planes at London’s Heathrow airport. The public release of the key findings of the NIE was an official recognition that al-Qaeda had regrouped and was capable again of pulling off significant attacks in the West, and that the Bush administration’s policy of giving the Pakistani military dictator Pervez Musharraf a free pass to deal on his own terms with the militant groups based in Pakistan’s tribal regions was now over.

A couple of weeks after this NIE was released, Obama was scheduled to give a keynote speech on national security at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. He
met with his foreign policy advisors, Susan Rice and Denis McDonough, and speechwriter Ben Rhodes, at the modest two-room offices on Massachusetts Avenue
that served as the Obama campaign headquarters in Washington. Together they hashed out a speech that encapsulated the
Obama campaign’s foreign policy critiques of the Bush administration: that it had diverted too many resources to Iraq and had taken its eyes off al-Qaeda, and that it didn’t have a strategy for taking out al-Qaeda’s leaders in their bases in Pakistan’s tribal regions. Obama and his advisors kicked around exactly what language he would use in the speech. The decision was made to take a harsh line on Musharraf, whom they believed the Bush administration had coddled for too long.

There was a lot riding on the speech at the Wilson Center. The fact was, most of the D.C.-based punditocracy thought Senator Obama was a bit green, especially on national security issues and, in particular, by comparison to Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, who had already served two decades in the Senate and was a leading member of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee. Senator Clinton, too, was regarded as someone with credibility on national security issues. She also served on the Armed Services Committee and had traveled to dozens of nations when her husband was president, which had put her on a first-name basis with many world leaders.

The Wilson Center speech did not seem to allay doubts about Obama’s experience. Much of the attention that it garnered from the media and other presidential candidates focused on a section about al-Qaeda’s leaders in Pakistan, in which Obama declared, “
If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.… I will not hesitate to use military force to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to America.”

At a debate for Democratic presidential candidates in Chicago a week after the Wilson Center speech, Obama came under attack
from Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, who said Obama’s suggestion of a possible American unilateral strike into Pakistan was “irresponsible.” Senator Clinton piled on: “I think it is a very big mistake to telegraph that.” To large applause, Obama struck back at Dodd and Clinton, who had both voted to authorize the Iraq War, saying, “
I find it amusing that those who helped to authorize and engineer the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation are now criticizing me for making sure that we are on the right battlefield and not the wrong battlefield in the war against terrorism.”

Obama’s supposed weakness on national security was the subject of Hillary
Clinton’s most famous campaign ad, which debuted in late February 2008. Over pictures of children sleeping at night and the sound of a ringing phone, a man’s voice intoned portentously, “It’s three a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing. Something’s happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call. Whether it’s someone who already knows the world’s leaders, knows the military, someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world. It’s three a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” At the end of the ad the pictures of sleeping children dissolved to a shot of a composed Hillary Clinton wearing glasses and answering the phone. Obama was never mentioned, but he was clearly the person whom the Clinton campaign was targeting.

Criticism of Obama’s presumed bellicosity toward Pakistan was not limited to the Democrats. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney ridiculed Obama as a “
Dr. Strangelove” who is “going to bomb our allies.” John McCain also weighed in: “
Will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan?” When accepting his party’s nomination for president in Denver in late August 2008, Obama
took a swipe back at McCain, saying, “
John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the gates of Hell, but he won’t even follow him to the cave where he lives.”

After Obama was inaugurated as president he faced a choice. Many of the voters who had elected him had done so because he was the “antiwar candidate” who had spoken out early against the Iraq War. Once in office, Obama could have recast Bush’s “Global War on Terror” as a large-scale law enforcement campaign against jihadist terrorists, which many on the left of the Democratic Party believed was a more useful and accurate formulation. Obama did not choose that path. Instead, he publicly declared that the United States was at “war against al-Qaeda and its allies.” This framing had a number of advantages: it opened a way for groups such as the Taliban, which might one day choose to distance itself from al-Qaeda, to enjoy peaceful relations with the United States, and it named the enemy rather than continuing the Bush formulation of a vague and open-ended conflict against a tactic that had existed for millennia. For Obama, however, the conflict remained a
war
, and not some kind of global police action.

Perhaps his views on national security had to do with when he came of age. Obama was the first major American politician in decades whose views about national security weren’t deeply informed by what he did or didn’t do in Vietnam. Too young to have served in Vietnam as the senators John McCain and John Kerry did, he was also too young to have avoided service in Vietnam as Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush had. For Obama, Vietnam was a nonissue, and it is possible this fact contributed to his greater willingness to use military power in comparison to an older generation of Democrats. It took Clinton two years to intervene in Bosnia, which was on the verge of genocide, whereas it took Obama only a week or so to intervene in Libya in the spring of 2011, when dictator
Moammar Gadhafi was threatening large-scale massacres of his own population.

Obama embraced American “hard power” from the moment he assumed office. Only three days after his inauguration, at his first National Security Council meeting on January 23, 2009, the head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, Michael J. Sulick, proposed that the United States continue the aggressive campaign of drone strikes in the tribal regions of Pakistan.
Obama approved the campaign. That same day,
a pair of CIA drone strikes in North Waziristan and South Waziristan reportedly killed ten militants and some dozen bystanders.

On December 9, 2009, Obama went to Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize for his “
extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy.” Seemingly confounding the expectations of those who awarded him the prize, a little over a week earlier, troubled by the recent resurgence of the Taliban, he had substantially ramped up the Afghan War, authorizing a “
surge” of thirty thousand troops, thereby doubling the number of American soldiers in Afghanistan. During his brief time in office, his administration had also authorized an unprecedented
forty-five drone strikes aimed at Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda networks, killing about a half-dozen leaders of militant organizations—including two heads of Uzbek terrorist groups allied with al-Qaeda, and Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban—in addition to hundreds of lower-level militants and a smaller number of civilians (about 5 percent of the total), according to reliable press reports.

This policy of the targeted killing and execution without trial of hundreds of people was greeted mostly with silence by the human rights groups and those on the Left who had loudly condemned the Bush administration for its use of coercive interrogations and the lack of due process at Guantánamo.

Obama used the occasion of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Oslo to mount a nuanced defense of just wars, in particular the ground war and drone campaign he was waging against al-Qaeda and its allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The president acknowledged the great legacies of nonviolent approaches to social change bequeathed to the world by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., but he also made it perfectly clear that his opposition to the Iraq War didn’t mean that he embraced pacifism—not at all. Obama declared, “
I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man, and the limits of reason.”