Ghost Wars (44 page)

Iran and Libya also seemed possible suspects in the World Trade Center case. The Counterterrorist Center staffed a permanent branch targeting Hezbollah. It had files of evidence about Tehran’s sponsorship of terrorist strikes by Hezbollah’s Shiite cadres, who saw themselves at war with Israel. The CIA’s analysts viewed Iran as the world’s most active sponsor of terrorism. “It was
the
priority,” Lake recalled. Sudan, where an Islamist government had recently taken power in a coup, also seemed a possibility. Working with early, fragmentary evidence from informers and from the World Trade Center crime scene that seemed to connect the plot to Sudan’s government, the Federal Bureau of Investigation initially called its investigation “Sudafed,” meaning “Sudan Federal.”
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This scattered list of suspects reflected the fractured character of terrorism worldwide. There had been fifteen officially designated terrorist incidents on United States soil between 1990 and 1992. Many involved attacks by Puerto Rican nationalists; one involved an Iranian Marxist group; others were carried out by American extremists. Globally the most active terrorist groups included Maoists in Peru and Tamil separatists in Sri Lanka. The pattern seemed to be that there was no pattern.

The CIA’s Counterterrorist Center had evolved into a different organization from the one Duane Clarridge and Bill Casey had envisioned amid the hostage crises of 1986. In the years following the Iran-Contra scandal, with CIA operators facing trial for perjury and other crimes, it was much harder to win support in Washington for clandestine or preemptive strikes against terrorists. The Counterterrorist Center remained close to the CIA’s clandestine service, and it continued to run risky espionage operations to collect intelligence, but there was little appetite at the CIA or the White House for covert paramilitary operations, either in the Bush administration or the early Clinton administration. More and more the Counterterrorist Center moved from operations to analysis. It was also under heavy budgetary pressure. As they investigated the World Trade Center bombing and the Kasi murders, the center’s managers attended a succession of budget reduction meetings. There were no layoffs, but the center’s resources shrank steadily. When an analyst or operator quit or retired, he or she often could not be replaced because of budget constraints.
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No more than one hundred people worked at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center during this period. They were divided into about a dozen branches. They still focused heavily on secular terrorist groups such as Abu Nidal. One branch tracked Islamic extremism in the mainstream Sunni Muslim world, but until 1993 it concentrated primarily on the violent Islamic radicals who challenged Algeria’s socialist government.
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Washington’s broader counterterrorist bureaucracy in 1993 was dispersed, plagued by interagency rivalries, and fraying under budgetary pressure. The State Department’s counterterrorism office, on paper a focal point for policy, was in a state of near chaos, wracked by infighting, leadership turnover, and budget cuts. The National Security Council had yet to issue any formal directive about which government agency should take the lead in a case like the World Trade Center bombing or how different agencies should work together. Early draft proposals about those issues sat at the White House unresolved for nearly two years.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation, meanwhile, led by Louis Freeh, pushed to expand its role in criminal cases with international connections, including terrorism cases. Freeh wanted to place FBI agents in U.S. embassies worldwide. Some CIA officers resisted the FBI’s global expansion, seeing it as an incursion into the agency’s turf. Even those at Langley who believed the CIA could profit by partnering with the FBI were uncertain how the new system was supposed to work in detail.

One basic unresolved question was whether to tackle terrorism as a national security problem—as a kind of war—or as a law enforcement problem, with police and prosecutors in the lead. In some cases terrorists looked like enemy soldiers. At other times they were easy to dismiss as common criminals. Their sometimes spectacular media-conscious attacks might generate widespread fear and draw intense scrutiny, but the actual impact of terrorism on American society was minimal. Americans were still much more likely to die from bee stings than from terrorist strikes during the early 1990s. In that respect it made more sense to treat terrorism as a law enforcement problem. Prosecuting and jailing a terrorist as an ordinary murderer effectively dismissed his claims to political legitimacy. This seemed to many American national security thinkers a more rational reply to terrorists than waging a paramilitary war or treating some half-educated Marxist thug with the dignity accorded to enemy soldiers.

By the time the Clinton administration settled into office, this legalistic approach to terrorism was well established within the American bureaucracy. In 1995 when Clinton at last made a decision about his antiterrorism policy, he formally designated the FBI as the lead agency in terrorism cases where Americans were victims. Clinton’s relationship with Louis Freeh and the FBI was perhaps even worse than his relationship with Woolsey and the CIA. Clinton seemed to regard Freeh as a self-righteous Boy Scout drone, and the White House political team resented the FBI’s role in what they saw as trivial, politically motivated investigations. Still, Clinton was a Yale Law School graduate, a former law professor, and a deep believer in the principles of the American legal system. As a matter of policy Clinton sought to cloak American power with the legitimacy of international law wherever possible. Emphasizing police work and courtroom prosecutions against terrorists seemed both a practical and principled approach.

The CIA did not typically work inside the American legal system. The agency was chartered by an American law—the National Security Act of 1947—and its employees were subject to prosecution in the United States if they defied orders, carried out unauthorized operations, or lied under oath. But the CIA’s espionage and paramilitary operations overseas were conducted in secret and were not subject to review by American courts. CIA operators routinely burglarized foreign embassies to obtain intelligence. They paid warlords and murderers for inside information about American adversaries. The intelligence they collected often could not withstand scrutiny in an American courtroom. Nor did Congress
want
the CIA to participate in prosecuting criminals inside the United States. The CIA was created to prevent another Pearl Harbor. But in the aftermath of a catastrophic war against Nazism, Congress also sought to protect the American people from the rise of anything like Hitler’s Gestapo, a secret force that combined spying and police methods. The CIA was therefore prohibited from spying on Americans or using intelligence it collected abroad to support directly criminal prosecutions in the American court system.
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Prosecutors and police, including the FBI, were also discouraged from sharing with the CIA leads or evidence they collected in domestic criminal cases. In many cases if an FBI agent or federal prosecutor passed along to the CIA files or witness statements obtained during a terrorism investigation before a grand jury—no matter how important that evidence might be to American national security—he or she could go to jail.

The FBI’s hermetic culture had become infamous by the early 1990s: FBI agents would not tell local police what they were doing, were deeply reluctant to work on interagency teams, and would withhold crucial evidence even from other FBI agents. There were FBI agents stationed inside the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center to aid information exchange, and in some respects the FBI’s relations with the CIA were better than its relations with many other government agencies. Even so, after the World Trade Center bombing, as the FBI began to communicate with the CIA about Islamist terrorism cases, its agents carefully followed the laws banning disclosure of grand jury evidence.
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All of this inhibited the CIA’s reaction to the World Trade Center attack. Since 1989 the FBI had been running paid informants inside circles of Islamic radicals in New York and New Jersey. In 1990, FBI agents carted away forty-seven boxes of documents and training manuals from the home of El Sayyid Nosair, Rabbi Meir Kahane’s assassin. The FBI did not translate the material from Arabic into English for two years, and even then it did not share with the CIA crucial evidence about the terrorists’ international network. The documents provided rich details about Afghan training camps and the growth of al Qaeda along the Afghan border and throughout the Middle East. Osama bin Laden’s name surfaced in this initial FBI investigation because a relative of Nosair traveled to Saudi Arabia and received money from bin Laden to pay for Nosair’s defense lawyers. The CIA was not told.
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The CIA’s analysts only learned about the full richness of the FBI’s files several years after the World Trade Center bombing. National Security Council files from 1993 record at least one meeting between Woolsey and Lake at which bin Laden was discussed as a terrorist financier worthy of attention, but he was not a focus of the World Trade Center investigation. A CIA paper circulated on April 2, 1993, described bin Laden as an “independent actor [who] sometimes works with other individuals or governments” to promote “militant Islamic causes.” The agency also continued to report on the Afghan training camps where bin Laden sometimes appeared. An issue of the classified National Intelligence Daily reported on April 20 that hundreds of Islamist militants had passed through the camps during the previous twelve months. In September, Langley cabled CIA stations worldwide to assess the vulnerabilities of bin Laden’s network and in November the agency identified a series of bin Laden–related targets for further intelligence collection. Still, there was no clear picture during 1993 of what role bin Laden played, if any, in violent operations.
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Like the CIA’s analysts, FBI agents were slow to see the jihadists emerging as an independent transnational force. They were slow to allocate resources to study and combat Sunni Islamic radicalism in general. They saw Shiite Iran as the primary fountainhead of religiously motivated terrorism. “Did we screw up, in retrospect?” asked Clinton’s national security adviser, Tony Lake, years later, speaking of this broad array of problems. “Of course.” Poorly understood and lightly challenged, the Afghanistan-spawned Islamist cells began to spread.
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14

“Maintain a

Prudent Distance”

PAUL PILLAR ARRIVED AS CHIEF of analysis at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center six weeks after the World Trade Center bombing. He was a tall, lanky man with a nervous blink and the careful, articulate voice of a university professor. A U.S. army officer in Vietnam, he had degrees from Dartmouth and Oxford, and a doctorate from Princeton. Fast-tracked in management and intelligence analysis after he joined the CIA, he served as executive assistant to CIA director William Webster, a position often set aside at Langley for rising stars. Pillar reflected the high-minded traditions of the CIA’s analytical wing, the Directorate of Intelligence. He was not an Arabist, but he had studied political Islam and the Middle East. He was a manager and an intellectual, an author of books and academic journal articles. From within the Counterterrorist Center he would emerge during the next six years as one of the CIA’s most influential terrorism analysts.
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Initially, Pillar was as stumped as the FBI was by the World Trade Center case. The first group of suspects arrested in the New York area were a diverse, bumbling crew. It was easier to imagine them as pawns of some hidden foreign government plot than as an independent terrorist cell. Gradually, as the FBI’s evidence accumulated, a new theory of the case began to emerge. Informants quickly identified the blind Egyptian preacher Sheikh Rahman as a source of inspiration for the World Trade Center attack and several thwarted bombings of New York landmarks. The CIA’s analysts began to look more closely at cross-border Islamist radicalism emanating from Egypt and its neighbors.

An Islamic political revival had swept through the Arab countries of North Africa during the previous four years. A violent offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Islamic Group, had opened an assassination and bombing campaign against the secular government of Hosni Mubarak. The Islamic Group’s cadres hailed from the impoverished, long-radicalized Upper Nile region, and their campaign revived a decades-old tradition of Islamist violence in Egypt. But the group also seemed to be newly stimulated by returning veterans from the Afghan jihad. The same was true in Algeria. There the Muslim Brotherhood–linked Islamic Salvation Front captured the political imagination of Algeria’s poor and, increasingly, its angry middle classes, who saw their secular, socialist leaders as corrupt and politically exhausted. After the government aborted a 1991 election because it appeared the Islamists would win, young militants, some of them veterans of the Afghan jihad, went underground and formed a new violent resistance called the Armed Islamic Group. They opened a terror campaign against the government. Hundreds of Algerian civilians died each month in bombings, massacres, and assassinations carried out by both sides.
2

Pillar and other CIA analysts, along with station chiefs in Cairo, Algiers, and Tunis, studied and debated these insurgencies intently in the months after the World Trade Center attack. They asked: What was the connection between these violent, national Islamist groups and terrorists who might threaten the United States or its allies? What policy should the United States adopt toward the Egyptian and Algerian Islamists? Should it regard all Islamic fundamentalists as dangerous, or should Washington reach out to the peaceful wings of the Muslim Brotherhood, while attempting to isolate and repress its violent offshoots? Should the United States encourage democratic elections even in countries such as Algeria or Egypt where the Islamists might win? How could Washington be sure that Islamists would continue with a democratic system after they won power?