Find, Fix, Finish (6 page)
Authors: Aki Peritz,Eric Rosenbach
In May 1998, three months before the African embassy bombings, the FBI would again attempt to force institutional change, announcing a strategic five-year plan that made national security and counterterrorism its top priorities. The plan stipulated that the Bureau shift resources to bolster its preventative counterterrorism capability, including intelligence collection, analysis, dissemination, and nationwide information sharing. To meet these goals, the FBI created new investigative services, counterterrorism, and counterintelligence divisions in 1999, oblivious to the findings of internal reports that 66 percent of analysts were not qualified to perform their job. The Department of Justice’s inspector general would later find that although the Bureau’s counterterrorism
budget
tripled during the mid-1990s, counterterrorism
spending
had remained relatively flat during the late 1990s, and by 2001 only 6 percent of the Bureau’s personnel worked in counterterrorism.
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Unsurprisingly, by 2003, many facets of the reorganization had not been implemented and of those that had, several had fallen short of the mark.
budget
tripled during the mid-1990s, counterterrorism
spending
had remained relatively flat during the late 1990s, and by 2001 only 6 percent of the Bureau’s personnel worked in counterterrorism.
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Unsurprisingly, by 2003, many facets of the reorganization had not been implemented and of those that had, several had fallen short of the mark.
The FBI had other institutional and bureaucratic demons to conquer. In 2000, the Bureau began its ill-fated Trilogy project, an attempt to update its information management and sharing systems, which had been designed and installed in 1995 using technology from the 1980s. These shockingly deficient systems were critical to the ability of FBI agents to collect the necessary information to identify and communicate threats within US borders. Before 2001, FBI agents had little ability to effectively search or store information or intelligence contained in its files within and across field offices, severely hampering its ability to identify and track potential challenges.
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Director Freeh infamously avoided using computers as much as possible. As such, after the 9/11 attacks, the FBI had to send photos of hijackers by mail as they were unable to email them.
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After the project started, however, the Bureau discovered that its computers were in even worse repair than originally anticipated, and, by 2003, the project was declared a “large disaster” by the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee: “FBI software and hardware contracts for Trilogy have essentially become gold-plated. The cost is soaring. The schedule is out of control.”
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By 2005, the Bureau gave up and scrapped the project.
TAKING THE CONVENTIONAL ROAD AT THE PENTAGON63
Director Freeh infamously avoided using computers as much as possible. As such, after the 9/11 attacks, the FBI had to send photos of hijackers by mail as they were unable to email them.
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After the project started, however, the Bureau discovered that its computers were in even worse repair than originally anticipated, and, by 2003, the project was declared a “large disaster” by the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee: “FBI software and hardware contracts for Trilogy have essentially become gold-plated. The cost is soaring. The schedule is out of control.”
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By 2005, the Bureau gave up and scrapped the project.
As early as 1996, the US armed forces were asked to craft a plan to eliminate bin Laden. In response, the Joint Chiefs presented the NSC with a plan to strike a number of buildings in Sudan where bin Laden was supposedly living at the time. While still outlining the plan, however, the military briefer conducting the presentation reported that the Pentagon recommended against it. In response, national security adviser Anthony Lake allegedly told the briefer, “I can see why. This isn’t stealth. There is nothing quiet or covert about this. It’s going to war with Sudan.” The briefer allegedly replied, “That’s what we do, sir. If you want covert, there’s the CIA.”
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For the military, the bureaucratic lanes in the road were clear. “The Pentagon wanted to fight and win the nation’s wars, as Colin Powell used to say,” said Michael Sheehan, a former counterterrorism coordinator at the State Department. “But those were wars against the armies of other nations—not against diffuse transnational terrorist threats. So terrorism was seen as a distraction that was CIA’s job, even though terrorists were attacking military targets and personnel. The Pentagon way to treat terrorism against Pentagon assets abroad was to cast it as a force protection issue.”
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The military waged war and war had traditionally been fought with state actors—not with nebulous terrorist organizations. During the late 1990s, the military would accordingly focus on the war in Kosovo and the Desert Fox bombing campaign against Iraq, “traditional” conflicts using conventional capabilities against troops and weapons systems.
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The military waged war and war had traditionally been fought with state actors—not with nebulous terrorist organizations. During the late 1990s, the military would accordingly focus on the war in Kosovo and the Desert Fox bombing campaign against Iraq, “traditional” conflicts using conventional capabilities against troops and weapons systems.
Many officials argued that the use of military might to target terrorist cells presented a serious problem of scale. Former defense secretary William Cohen and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Hugh Shelton told the 9/11 Commission that cruise missiles were too expensive to be used against the “jungle gym” terrorist training camps built from “rope ladders” in Afghanistan.
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This does not mean, of course, that the military did not have to grapple with terrorism. Its forces had sustained a number of terrorist attacks during the 1980s and 1990s, including devastating attacks on barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983 that killed hundreds of US and French servicemen. On June 25, 1996, assailants attacked the Khobar Towers housing complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen Americans. Although Iran was suspected of having a part in the bombing, the military took no retributive action it would characterize as “counterterrorism.” Instead, the military focused on defensive measures, force protection, and consequence management.
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Indeed, the military would take steps to improve force protection after the Khobar Towers attack and the later bombing of the USS
Cole,
but some officials believed that these attacks were an unfortunate consequence of being the last superpower standing. One “very senior [Special Operations Forces] officer who had served on the Joint Staff in the 1990s” allegedly said that he had often been told that terrorist strikes were “a small price to pay for being a superpower.”
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Cole,
but some officials believed that these attacks were an unfortunate consequence of being the last superpower standing. One “very senior [Special Operations Forces] officer who had served on the Joint Staff in the 1990s” allegedly said that he had often been told that terrorist strikes were “a small price to pay for being a superpower.”
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The inevitability of terrorist attacks and the Pentagon’s conception of the pursuit of terrorists as inappropriate would mean that political concerns often overrode a need for retribution. For example, after the Khobar Towers attacks, US officials took no action against Iran for its complicity in the attack. Ten years after the bombing, Louis Freeh would write in a
Wall Street Journal
opinion piece, “Mr. Clinton and his national security advisor, Sandy Berger, had no interest in confronting the fact that Iran had blown up the towers.” They did not want to take on Iran and risk being forced into military intervention.
Wall Street Journal
opinion piece, “Mr. Clinton and his national security advisor, Sandy Berger, had no interest in confronting the fact that Iran had blown up the towers.” They did not want to take on Iran and risk being forced into military intervention.
Other sources agree that more traditional political and diplomatic concerns triumphed in this case. According to the conservative
Weekly Standard
, when an aide presented a plan for a series of retaliatory military strikes to a high-level meeting in the Pentagon, one senior policymaker allegedly responded: “Are you out of your mind? You’re telling me that our Middle East policy is not important and that it’s more important to go clean out terrorists? Don’t you understand what’s going on in terms of our Middle East policy? You’re talking about going after terrorists backed by Iran? You just don’t understand.”
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Weekly Standard
, when an aide presented a plan for a series of retaliatory military strikes to a high-level meeting in the Pentagon, one senior policymaker allegedly responded: “Are you out of your mind? You’re telling me that our Middle East policy is not important and that it’s more important to go clean out terrorists? Don’t you understand what’s going on in terms of our Middle East policy? You’re talking about going after terrorists backed by Iran? You just don’t understand.”
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That particular plan included a significant reliance on Special Operations Forces (SOF), the capability the Pentagon would have deployed had it attempted a kill or capture operation. Highly trained and elite, Special Operations units, under the command of the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), included 45,000 active and reserve personnel, 2 percent of US military personnel overall, by 2001.
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SOCOM was created in the aftermath of the disastrous operation in Iran commonly referred to as Desert One, when military personnel attempted to rescue fifty-two hostages trapped in the American embassy. The ad hoc operation ended in tragedy when eight US servicemembers died in a midair collision. The military hoped that the new SOCOM would enable more effective cooperation between the branches of the US services to avoid such disasters in the future. They weren’t entirely successful, as subsequent US operations in the early 1990s in Somalia would prove. In front of the 9/11 Commission, military authorities would repeatedly reference the two operations in their explanations as to why the military sought to avoid smaller, unsupported military operations in the 1990s.
The military preferred to respond to terrorism conventionally, retaliating against the state sponsors of terrorism as opposed to the substate actors, a strategy that—unlike special ops—appeared to work. In 1986, a bomb planted in a German disco killed two US servicemen and injured fifty others. Within days, the Reagan administration had linked the bombing to Muammar Qadhafi’s Libyan state and, in retaliation, launched air strikes against the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi. Although later intelligence would indicate that Qadhafi’s interest in terrorism continued after the attack, the strikes were declared successful at the time.
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Experience from the early Clinton administration reinforced the apparent efficacy of a conventional response. In April 1993, days before George H. W. Bush was to visit Kuwait, the country’s intelligence officials discovered a car bomb allegedly intended to assassinate the former president. In the months following, the FBI linked the plot to the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS), and President Clinton ordered a cruise missile strike on IIS headquarters. US intelligence discovered little direct Iraqi involvement in international terrorism from that point on.
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For the military the lessons of the 1990s were clear: conventional action works, and covert action doesn’t.
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For the military the lessons of the 1990s were clear: conventional action works, and covert action doesn’t.
Even as the executive branch began to recognize that the threat of nonstate organizations required the conceptualization of new military options, the Pentagon continued to recommend against the deployment of special operations personnel. Some military leaders doubted the ability of special operations teams to successfully conduct counterterrorism operations. More often, however, senior military brass intent on keeping the military’s role limited to traditional war-fighting activities relied on a false belief in Washington that the military had no authority to conduct covert operations.
Because the FBI had defined counterterrorism for many years as a law enforcement issue, some Defense Department officials claimed that the military could not intervene. “If you declare terrorism a criminal activity, you take from Defense any statutory authority to be the leader in responding,” said one official. “Lawyers at the Defense Department . . . argued that we have no statutory authority because this is essentially a criminal matter.”
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The basis of this belief rests in an interpretation of law: whereas military operations are authorized in Title 10 of the US Code, covert action is covered in Title 50, which deals with the IC. As a result, many military leaders, policymakers, and national security lawyers have concluded that the CIA had sole responsibility for covert action. Moreover, the military required special authorization from the president or Congress to use force outside of specified combat zones and, with the exception of the missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan, prior to 9/11, this authorization was not forthcoming.
Even at the time, however, this interpretation rested on poor analysis, as Title 50 states that the written finding used to support each covert action “shall specify each department, agency, or entity of the United States Government authorized to fund or otherwise participate in any significant way in such action”—it does not specify that only the CIA can carry out covert actions.
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But according to one member of the NSC’s counterterrorism group, the military would not budge from this understanding; even when presented with a legal opinion to the contrary, the NSC member said, “They would say, ‘Well, we’re not going to do it anyway. It’s a matter of policy that we don’t.’”
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Some argued that the military only made the legal argument to provide justification to decline sending SOF to combat terrorism. “The Joint Staff was very happy for the administration to take a law-enforcement view,” said one Pentagon official. “They didn’t want to put special ops troops on the ground.”
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But according to one member of the NSC’s counterterrorism group, the military would not budge from this understanding; even when presented with a legal opinion to the contrary, the NSC member said, “They would say, ‘Well, we’re not going to do it anyway. It’s a matter of policy that we don’t.’”
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Some argued that the military only made the legal argument to provide justification to decline sending SOF to combat terrorism. “The Joint Staff was very happy for the administration to take a law-enforcement view,” said one Pentagon official. “They didn’t want to put special ops troops on the ground.”
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Even though the military had conceived of SOF as small, stealthy, and independent units, after the Mogadishu imbroglio, the military demanded better force protection for special ops, including air support. But there were few bases that could provide the necessary logistical support for operations against terrorist hotspots such as Afghanistan and few allies that would allow US forces to cross their airspace.
Although the lack of infrastructure would hinder SOF deployment, many at the Pentagon would argue that poor intelligence collection posed an even bigger challenge. SOF employed an “intelligence drives operations” approach
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—the information generated the operational possibilities and not the other way around. Since the CIA was not producing the appropriate type of intelligence, the Pentagon’s objections created the intellectual architecture that made it all but impossible to deploy special operations forces to track down terrorists who had attacked Americans.
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—the information generated the operational possibilities and not the other way around. Since the CIA was not producing the appropriate type of intelligence, the Pentagon’s objections created the intellectual architecture that made it all but impossible to deploy special operations forces to track down terrorists who had attacked Americans.
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Officials on both sides of the political fence would present the military as a force of obstruction in its stalwart support of cruise missiles as the only option. At least one Pentagon official agreed, claiming that “the Joint Staff was the biggest foot-dragger on all of this counterterrorism business.”
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The 9/11 Commission report concluded, “At no point before 9/11 was the Department of Defense fully engaged in the mission of countering al-Qaeda, though this was perhaps the most dangerous foreign enemy then threatening the United States.”
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The 9/11 Commission report concluded, “At no point before 9/11 was the Department of Defense fully engaged in the mission of countering al-Qaeda, though this was perhaps the most dangerous foreign enemy then threatening the United States.”
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THE EFFORTS
of every agency within the US government to develop and deploy a robust counterterrorism strategy prior to 2001 was ultimately stymied by a host of creative, bureaucratic, and political hurdles. Institutional inertia and culture, lack of political and public will, legal concerns, limited resources, and an ill-aligned infrastructure would combine to create an environment in which the executive was denied options to counter the new threat. Nothing seemed likely to change the state of affairs short of a severe shock to the political system—one that occurred on a bright blue Tuesday morning in September 2001.
of every agency within the US government to develop and deploy a robust counterterrorism strategy prior to 2001 was ultimately stymied by a host of creative, bureaucratic, and political hurdles. Institutional inertia and culture, lack of political and public will, legal concerns, limited resources, and an ill-aligned infrastructure would combine to create an environment in which the executive was denied options to counter the new threat. Nothing seemed likely to change the state of affairs short of a severe shock to the political system—one that occurred on a bright blue Tuesday morning in September 2001.
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