See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (33 page)

Another lingering question I wanted to answer before I gave up on my research: I’d always had my suspicions about what became known as the ‘second channel’ in the Iran-contra affair - the one that opened up after the go-between Ghorbanifar proved such a bust. Ali Hashemi-Bahramani, President Rafsanjani’s nephew, had been the primary person in the second channel, but a second Iranian had appeared with Bahramani near the end of the affair, at a meeting held on October 29, 1986, in Mainz, Germany, with Ollie North and George Cave. At the time, I couldn’t figure out who he was or why he had come; now I rifled through the Iran-contra files until I found what I was looking for. About halfway through the meeting, a mysterious Iranian who called himself Ayyub Mozzafari showed up. And what was his true name? I can’t reveal the evidence here, but the answer was beyond challenge: Feridoun Mehdi-Nezhad. In seeking the release of the hostages, the American government was doing business with Iran’s master terrorist. But almost as good, I found out that Mehdi-Nezhad is now in Iranian president Mohammad Khatami’s camp - the same Khatami official Washington looks at as the hope for better relations between the US and Iran.

There was one final thing I decided to look into: the relationship between Mughniyah and Osama bin Laden. If there was one, which two pieces of fragmentary evidence suggested, it would be America’s worst nightmare. We suspected strongly and immediately that bin Laden had a hand in the November 1995 bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan; his fingerprints were all over it. Shortly afterward we learned that Mughniyah’s deputy had provided a stolen Lebanese passport to one of the planners of the bombing. Six months later we found out that one of bin Laden’s most dangerous associates was calling one of Mughniyah’s offices in Beirut. Neither piece of evidence amounts to a smoking gun, but both should scare anyone who knows how terrorism works.

As for me, both items added to a growing rage that I was having more and more trouble containing. Whether it was Osama bin Laden, Yasir Arafat, Iranian terrorism, Saddam Hussein, or any of the other evils that so threaten the world, the Clinton administration seemed determined to sweep them all under the carpet. Ronald Reagan and George Bush before Clinton were not much better. The mantra at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seemed to be: Get through the term. Keep the bad news from the newspapers. Dump the naysayers. Gather money for the next election - gobs and gobs of it - and let some other administration down the line deal with it all. Worst of all, my CIA had decided to go along for the ride. Now that such horrendous neglect has come home to roost in such misery-provoking ways, I take no pleasure whatsoever in having been right.

As my research drew to an end in late November 1997, I began thinking seriously about resigning from the CIA. The FBI and our own inspector-general investigations had told me what I needed to know about the agency. Politics had seeped down to its lowest levels, into operations, where I worked. I’d always assumed the DO was immune. I was wrong.

I’d joined the CIA hoping to get at a slice of truth not available to everyone. I’d even succeeded, in a sense. In my last months there, I unraveled the Beirut embassy bombing, at least to my satisfaction: Iran ordered it, and a Fatah network carried it out. Along the way, I’d also gotten to see the underbelly of a collapsing superpower, and I’d spent my days and too many nights with a cast of characters that no novelist could create. For all its ups and downs, it had been a good run, and now it was time to go. I also knew I had used up my goodwill chits. The CIA I’d spent twenty-one years serving was changing a lot faster than I could adapt. Maybe I should have tried to move up into management and change it from the top, but that wasn’t me.

One Friday afternoon I walked up the seven nights of stairs to the office of the director of operations, Jack Downing, and handed my letter of resignation to his assistant. ‘This cowboy is hanging up his spurs,’ I said, my voice trembling slightly. Downing immediately asked to see me. He tried for twenty minutes to convince me that the CIA was going to go back to the way it was and there was a place for me. I could see, though, that he knew it wasn’t the truth. The agency had become an ocean liner; turning it would take decades, assuming the powers that be even wanted to alter its course.

‘I’m sorry to see you go,’ Downing finally said. ‘I promise you’ll get a medal for your remarkable career.’

True to his word, he arranged for me to be awarded the Career Intelligence Medal on March 11, 1998, officially signed by my old Georgetown classmate George Tenet. The medal turned out to be one secret the CIA was willing to keep. I didn’t learn about it until two years later, when some friends finally called and told me. Still, I love it, especially the part of the citation that reads: He repeatedly put himself in personal danger, working the hardest targets, in service to his country.

Maybe, after all, someone had noticed.

When the world as most of us knew it began to fall apart on the morning of September 11, 2001, I was at my home in Washington, D.C., not many blocks from the United States Capitol. If United Airlines Flight 93 had been allowed by its passengers to fly on to its intended destination, I would have heard it crash into the White House. If the target had been the Capitol, and it might have been, I would have felt the crash as well.

For me, the irony of the situation was hard to miss. After two decades in some of earth’s true hellholes, I had returned only recently to the heart of the most powerful nation on earth, protected by a military force such as the world has never known, watched over by domestic and foreign security services that number in the hundreds of thousands. And what had saved the city I was living in? Not the CIA. Not the FBI. Not the air force or navy or marines or army. But the raw courage and determination of a fistful of average Americans. As I said at the beginning of this book, the lapse made me furious to think about. All of us have a right to expect more from those in whom we vest such power.

But there’s one more thing I felt in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, as I watched the deaths unfold on TV and the horror mount both in New York and across the Potomac River in Virginia. If it weren’t for personal commitments, I would have gotten the hell out of Dodge, and in a big hurry. The people who planned this attack are good. Very good. I’d found out too much about their capabilities, from sophisticated chemical warheads to portable nuclear weapons. I also knew they wouldn’t be discouraged if Osama bin Laden were captured and paraded down the streets of Lower Manhattan in a cage or if Afghanistan were bombed back into the Stone Age.

Were the attacks of September 11 conceived in the fertile imagination of Osama bin Laden? I don’t know for certain, and I’m not sure anyone ever will. But I am absolutely sure that it’s in Osama bin Laden’s best interests for us to believe that is so. Terrorist campaigns aren’t directed just against the enemy. They are campaigns of recruitment as well, and by demonizing bin Laden, by holding him up as the mastermind of the attacks and as the archenemy, we have assured that the disillusioned, the angry, the desperate young men of the Muslim world will flock to his cause, whether he’s dead or alive to lead it. And yes, there are more men like that than we could ever count.

Did Osama bin Laden act alone, through his own Al Qaeda network, in launching the attacks? About that I’m far more certain and emphatic: No.

Even before I left the CIA in late 1997, we had learned that bin Laden had suggested to the Iranians that they drop their efforts to undermine central Asian governments and instead join him in a campaign against the United States. We knew, too, that in July 1996 bin Laden’s allies, the Egyptian Gama’at, had been in touch with Imad Mughniyah, whom my own research had shown to be behind the 1983 bombing of the American embassy in Beirut. Throw in bin Laden’s connections to the Egyptian fundamentalists, and what we have is the most formidable terrorist coalition in history.

We also have to keep in mind that the Islamic terrorists we’re up against are hampered by self-protective bureaucracies. They don’t care about institutions and egos. In the pursuit of their goals, they form ad hoc networks that dissolve as soon as the mission is accomplished, only to be reconstituted later in some new permutation or combination. And Osama bin Laden had all the right connections to put together perhaps the most dangerous ad hoc network ever. Once he set up shop in Afghanistan, opened his training camps there, and sent out word that he was ready to take violence across the ocean, it was only a matter of time until he and his colleagues struck. The questions were always how and how big, what and where, and when, not if.

In the aftermath of the attacks, I had my own little piece of the puzzle to add.

After resigning from the agency, I moved to Beirut and set up shop with another ex-CIA officer as a consultant. It was territory I knew and understood, far better than I understood official Washington. It was also where I had my best contacts, including some I wasn’t very keen on. At the height of the Internet-bubble stock market, for instance, one of Mughniyah’s former associates proposed forming a dot-corn company with me.

But, more interesting, among the clients we attracted (and I use the word advisedly) was a member of a Gulf royal family who was then living in Damascus, having tried unsuccessfully to overthrow his cousin, who was the emir. We would meet him irregularly at a desert location between our office and his home, and one night in December 1997, as we sat huddled by a fire to hold off the night cold, he told us this story:

When he’d been working as chief of police in his government, he had become aware that his government was harboring an Osama bin Laden cell. The two main members of the cell, he said, were Shawqi Islambuli, whose brother had assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981, and Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, whose area of expertise was airplane hijackings. The prince went on to tell us that when the FBI attempted to arrest Muhammad and Islambuli, his government had equipped them with alias passports and spirited them out of the country; both eventually settled in Prague.

Getting out of the spy business proved a lot harder than I thought it would be. As if I’d never left, I passed everything I had learned from the ex - police chief back to the CIA in early 1998. Not surprisingly, there was no follow-up. No response. No indication that my message even got to anyone who bothered to read it. It was just like the coup in Iraq.

It wasn’t until three years later, in the early summer of 2001, that an associate of my prince, a military officer still working for his government, informed me he was aware of a spectacular operation about to occur. He also claimed to possess the name of Osama bin Laden operatives in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. He provided us with a computer record of hundreds of secret bin Laden operatives in the Gulf. In August 2001, at the military officer’s request, I met with an aide to the Saudi defense minister, Prince Sultan bin Abd-al- Aziz. The aide refused to look at the list or to pass them on to Sultan. Apparently, Saudi Arabia was following the same see-no-evil operating manual the CIA uses.

It all comes down to the point that we have to start listening to people again, no matter how unpleasant the message is. The CIA doesn’t have a choice but to once again to go out and start talking to people - people who can go where it can’t, see what it can’t, and hear what it can’t. That’s the CIA I joined in 1976, not one enamored of satellite technology and scared of its own shadow, but one with the guts to walk into the wilderness and deal with what it finds there. That’s the CIA we need today. And until we have that CIA - one with thousands of human ears and eyes, out listening where the ones who will do us harm hatch their evil schemes - I don’t think any of us should feel safe again.

We are at war in America and throughout the Western world, at war with an enemy with no infrastructure to attack, with no planes to shoot out of the sky, with no boats to sink to the bottom of the sea and precious few tanks to blow up for the amusement of the viewers of CNN. The only way to defeat such an enemy is by intelligence, by knowing what they plan to do next, and by being ready for them when they arrive. And the only way to gather such intelligence is by having the political will to let those who know how to learn secrets perform their jobs, no matter how murky the swamp is. I wish I had the confidence that we were willing to walk down that path and stay on it.