88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (55 page)

Capturing bin Laden, I knew, would be still more problematic. He remained popular in much of Pakistan. If the Americans were to quietly kill or capture him in some remote area, so much the better. But for Pakistan to kill or, worse yet, capture him and turn him over to the Americans, the domestic political consequences would be very unpleasant. Better to ignore the problem, and hope it would go away. ISI
had shown considerable capability in capturing al-Qa’ida cadres in the settled areas. Kayani’s steadfast silence signaled he thought it better to continue focusing efforts there.

As if to underscore the point, as we sat across from one another at breakfast the following morning, an aide entered the room to whisper urgently into the ISI chief’s ear. His mouth curled into a tight smile. Abu Faraj al-Libi, the latest operations chief of al-Qa’ida, had been captured a few hours before, in a late-night raid on a graveyard in Mansehra, where he had been lured by Pakistani agents. I thanked and congratulated Kayani on the success.

A few hours later, I was looking down from a Pak Army helicopter at the high plateau surrounding Wana, the capital of South Waziristan. I couldn’t believe the contrast from three years before. The Pak Army was deployed in full force, with tents, vehicles, and howitzers everywhere. When I sat down with the local Pakistani political agent, he provided a lucid briefing, complete with PowerPoint slides, on the government’s overall plan. The agency would be pacified, he said, through a coordinated program of military force, economic development, and political reform. The military part we could readily see; he assured me that development projects were also in train, and that elections would soon be held for local councils. It was an impressive exposition. “This guy really gets it,” I thought.

But if so, he was probably alone. What he was describing demanded a stark departure from the Frontier Crimes Regulation, the 1901 law governing the Tribal Areas since British times and scarcely amended since. The old regulation had never been rescinded. If the Pak government had a comprehensive plan to pacify the Tribal Areas along the lines this fellow had suggested, Kayani certainly hadn’t mentioned it. In any case, it was obvious that if Pakistan were going to tame the Tribal Areas and end the terrorist safehaven, a lot of American assistance would be required, and not just for intelligence and weaponry.

Before finally heading over to Afghanistan, I sat down with the head of the Agency for International Development office in Islamabad. Economic development assistance in the Tribal Areas, I said, was at least as important as anything else we were doing in the War on Terror.
AID and the State Department were spending hundreds of millions per year in Pakistan. How much was going to the Tribal Areas? The answer: very little. AID had a few boutique projects along the western border, but nearly all development assistance was going elsewhere in the country. We were letting the Japanese, who had a very modest budget, take the lead in the Tribal Areas. I was appalled.

The U.S. government had been saying for years that we were leading a global “War on Terror,” bringing all aspects of national power to bear. That was the rhetoric. What I could see now in Pakistan was the reality.

In Kabul, my colleagues were seized with yet another threat. Pakistani militants, based mostly in North Waziristan and outraged at what they saw as the long-term occupation of Afghanistan by a U.S.-led NATO army, were launching increasingly brazen attacks against American and Afghan troops across the Durand Line. The Pakistanis were doing little or nothing to stop them. There were stories about how heavily armed fighters were crossing the border within sight of Pak military checkposts, firing rockets, and then retreating. To my colleagues and to the U.S. military, this looked like complicity. I doubted the Pakistanis were actively aiding and abetting the militants, but was not at all surprised at the lack of Pakistani reaction. We might feel that Pakistan had a solemn responsibility to keep its territory from being used as a base from which to attack an ally. But I knew that to the Pakistanis, these cross-border attacks would look like someone else’s problem. The Pakistanis had troubles enough in the Tribal Areas. They weren’t about to invite more.

On the final day of my trip, as I stood looking up at the Afghan flag above Hamid Karzai’s palace, I could yet take satisfaction in what we had accomplished on both sides of the Pak-Afghan border. But I was beginning to think that perhaps those successes, too easily achieved, could come undone.

T
HE GREATEST CHALLENGES I
faced as director of CTC did not come from terrorists. You might have thought, given the importance of what we were doing for the security of the nation, and the fact that we had thwarted thus far all attempts to reprise 9/11, CTC would have friends everywhere. But you’d be wrong. In 2005 we were under attack from all sides, and our most formidable enemies included other elements of the executive branch, the Congress, and the press. If good fortune had given some people license to become complacent, I had no such luxury. Al-Qa’ida had not hit us again, but it was not for want of trying. Other nations had not been so lucky: Bali, Indonesia, was struck by a devastating attack in October 2002, and Madrid in March 2004, to name a couple. London would be hit in July 2005, and Bali again later that year. My job was to make sure that CTC’s ability to protect us was maintained and enhanced. But as I surveyed the landscape on my return to Washington in May 2005, beginning at the seventh floor of my own headquarters and extending out across the Potomac to the capital city beyond, I could hardly find a single friend in a position to help me. This was the start of the loneliest but perhaps the most strangely exhilarating six months of my life.

Shortly before I took over CTC, Congress had passed legislation creating the National Counterterrorism Center. The reasons were obvious. After the report of the 9/11 Commission, documenting (among many other things) intelligence failures that had contributed to the disaster, Congress had to be seen to act in some way. The measures already taken to correct systemic problems involved improved information sharing and work practices, and were not readily visible to the
public. Congress couldn’t take credit for them. But creating a new government bureaucracy is highly visible.

At the same time, the framers of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which created NCTC, were very well aware of the critical operational work CIA was doing around the world, and didn’t want to interfere with it. They certainly didn’t want to be blamed for the next terrorist attack. So they did something seemingly safe: They took the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), a new organization created since 9/11 to improve information sharing between the domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence communities, and gave it a new name and a new, important-sounding mandate. The National Counterterrorism Center would henceforth have “primary responsibility” for intelligence analysis, though CIA and the other intelligence agencies could continue to do it as well. NCTC could expressly
not
do counterterrorism operations overseas. That risked creating havoc. But by creating another government entity to “connect the dots” that CIA and others had failed to connect in the past—well, Congress must have thought, what was the harm in that? The law of unintended consequences took over from there.

The vast majority of the federal government’s best terrorism analysts were in the Directorate of Intelligence’s Office of Terrorism Analysis, which was the analytic wing of CTC. The acting head of NCTC was John Brennan, a good friend of over twenty years’ standing, highly ambitious and a talented bureaucratic infighter. Years later, he would hold the senior counterterrorism job in the Obama White House, and then become director of CIA. Trying to bring federal intelligence and law enforcement to cooperate more closely with states and localities was important, but it was difficult, thankless work. Now Brennan seized the opportunity to take over preparation of high-profile terrorism analysis for the president and senior policymakers. Using the newly passed legislation as a stick, he successfully pressured the CIA leadership into giving up significant numbers of CTC’s terrorism analysts, whom he organized, along with others from elsewhere in the intelligence community, into a structure mirroring that in CTC. We were taking the same analysts whom Congress saw as having failed,
putting them in a different place, and pretending this would solve the problem.

It was an aggressively bad idea. Before long, analysts who had formerly been colleagues were in rival organizations, competing viciously for the right to take the lead on analytic pieces for the President’s Daily Brief. It was a huge duplication of effort at a time when there simply weren’t enough seasoned analysts to go around. It served the analysts themselves very badly. NCTC was in no position to effectively recruit, train, or develop career analysts in the way that CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence could. For CTC, whose strength had long been in using the same analysts to support operations and to write finished intelligence, the loss of these people both weakened our analytic depth and threatened to hurt our operations. Worse, there was no end in sight. NCTC was constantly pressing for yet more of our analysts. My organization was being picked apart.

Less than a week into my tenure, I sat down with Brennan to make him an offer. Rather than progressively raiding CTC of its analysts to create a rival organization, I asked, why not just take all of it? All the key agencies—CIA, the FBI, and the Defense Intelligence Agency—had large, dedicated counterterrorism organizations. Why not create a
real
national counterterrorism center by bringing these units together? They would remain functional parts of their parent organizations, from whom they would continue to derive their legal authorities and to receive administrative and “back-office” support, but would be “matrixed” together into a coherent organization in which sharing of analysts and other resources would be facilitated, and cross-government activities far better coordinated. This was what CTC had done successfully on a smaller scale in bringing together elements of completely independent directorates within CIA. Now we could do the same thing, but on a much grander scale, this time under Brennan’s direction. Rather than fighting for a place at the counterterrorism table with a nascent, immature organization, Brennan could instead have me and the chiefs of all the principal federal counterterrorism organizations sitting around his conference room every morning, answerable to him.

John was momentarily intrigued, but just as quickly seemed to
sense a trap. From his questions, I could see he doubted whether he would be able to control people who still belonged simultaneously to independent agencies. For him, this might be like invading China: You would be enveloped and overwhelmed by those whom you had nominally conquered. A veil fell over his eyes; he had no interest.

Undeterred, I continued to promote the idea elsewhere. The head of CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence indicated he would go along, but only if and when we were about to lose all our terrorism analysts. Other agencies were either opposed or apathetic; in any case, they saw no urgency. They weren’t under attack by NCTC. Fran Townsend, the president’s senior advisor on both counterterrorism and homeland security and a canny political operator, could see I was fighting an uphill battle. She expressed interest and encouraged me to continue—on my own.

When Brennan was passed over in his quest to be named the permanent director of NCTC, I made another pitch to his successor, retired Admiral Scott Redd. He responded very frankly. A long career in government had taught him that if you didn’t have direct command of the troops you were leading, you had nothing. The immutable laws of bureaucratic survival had won out, again, over effective government. The debilitating rivalry between CTC and NCTC continued. It would fester for years to come.

As our terrorist adversaries around the globe fell victim to our close cooperation with other intelligence and security services, and retreated increasingly into ungoverned spaces beyond the effective reach of allied governments, use of Predator drones was becoming increasingly important. I am not at liberty to discuss much of this, but let us say that the U.S. government in this period was not putting a premium on the use of drones—by any government entity—in the global counterterrorism fight. In 2005, with Iraq going up in flames, every available Predator coming off the assembly line was being sent there. This seemed unwise to me, but with Tenet gone, there was no one at CIA of his stature with the respect or force of personality to make a case for even a modest reallocation of DoD resources elsewhere. I argued for it everywhere I could, in the executive branch and even with congressional committees. I found sympathy for my views, but nothing more.

Yet of all the challenges CTC faced during that fateful year of 2005, the controversies surrounding detainees, interrogations, and secret prisons were by far the greatest. When I first arrived, the CIA terrorist interrogation program had been in existence for nearly three years. It had begun just after our capture of Abu Zubayda in Pakistan in 2002, and evolved greatly since then.

Interrogation is not a core function, nor is it a traditional skill of the CIA. Yes, the organization did have a small number of experienced interrogators, most of whom were also polygraph operators. Barry McManus, who dealt with Dr. Bashir, the Pak nuclear scientist, was one of these. But there were only a few of them, and their skills and experience varied widely. Case officers, who reflect the traditional methods of the Clandestine Service, depend upon the willing collaboration of their sources; they are trained in manipulation, not intimidation or coercion. But it is a core aspect of CIA culture that it responds to the needs of the moment. Given direction from the president, it quickly becomes whatever its masters need it to be.

I was not involved in the interrogation of Abu Zubayda, or in the subsequent construction of a formal program to detain and interrogate the senior al-Qa’ida members whose capture would follow. Once Abu Zubayda was dispatched aboard a CIA plane, I and my station were back at work to capture more like him. But I could readily understand why CIA needed a controlled, disciplined interrogation program. The alternative was something like what I had in Pakistan.