Ghost Wars (63 page)

His views about the global threats America faced in the summer of 1997 stood squarely in the center of CIA and Clinton administration analysis. He saw five “critical challenges” to the United States. These were the “transformation of Russia and China”; the threat of rogue states such as North Korea, Iran, and Iraq; the “transnational issues” such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, drugs, and organized crime; regional crises; and failing states in places such as Africa and the former Yugoslavia. There was nothing remotely controversial about Tenet’s list; it covered such a wide range of potential foreign policy problems as to be almost immune from criticism. To the extent it made choices, it was a list of hard targets, and it focused on the potential for strategic surprise. It was also the list of a synthesizer, a collator of other people’s analyses, including, crucially, the president’s. Clinton had provided the intelligence community with a list of priorities in a classified 1995 presidential decision directive. First on the list was intelligence support to the Pentagon during military operations. Second was “political, economic and military intelligence about countries hostile to the United States.” Third was “intelligence about specific trans-national threats to our security, such as weapons proliferation, terrorism, drug trafficking, organized crime, illicit trade practices and environmental issues of great gravity.” It was a long, sprawling mandate.
20

Tenet was sharpest when he reflected on the CIA’s core mission of strategic warning against surprise attack. “It’s easy to become complacent,” he said. With the Soviet Union gone and American economic and military strength unchallenged, “the world is different, but it is not safe.”
21
The CIA’s job was to tell presidents about dangerous surprises, it was that simple. This led Tenet quickly to the threat of terrorism, missiles, and weapons of mass destruction. Through discussions at the White House he absorbed and then recapitulated Clinton’s own emerging obsessions with terrorism and especially biological weapons.

At Tenet’s confirmation hearing, Senator Bob Kerrey asked the nominee if he thought the threat of terrorism “may be overstated.” The question reflected a broader skepticism on Capitol Hill and in the press that summer. The CIA and the FBI, according to an oft-repeated argument, were hyping terrorism to win budget increases. But Tenet told Kerrey that the terrorist threat was real and that it was growing. “The sophistication of the groups capable of launching terrorism against U.S. interests now is worldwide. They have a capability to move money and people and explosives, and the level of activity continues to be enormously worrisome to U.S. intelligence. They’re fanatical. They have every reason to continue doing what they’re doing. . . . The activity worldwide at this moment in time is unprecedented and the threat to U.S. interests is enormously high.”
22

It was the terrorists, far more than the governments of Russia or China, or even Iraq or Iran, who would most likely deliver a devastating shock to the United States. “What are the forces at play that we must contend with?” Tenet asked the CIA staff early on. He answered his own question: “First, the threat environment is growing more diverse, complex, and dangerous—biological agents, terrorism, information warfare. It’s easier and easier for smaller and smaller groups to do serious damage, with less visibility and warning. The potential for surprise has increased enormously.”
23

BY THE AUTUMN OF 1997 persistent lobbying against the Taliban by the Feminist Majority had influenced the two most important women in the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton. When Albright visited a refugee camp in Peshawar that November, she departed from her prepared script and denounced the Taliban’s policies toward women as “despicable.” It was the first time a Clinton Cabinet member had made such a forceful statement about Taliban human rights violations. A few weeks later Hillary Clinton used a major speech about human rights at the United Nations to single out the Taliban. “Even now the Taliban in Afghanistan are blocking girls from attending schools,” Clinton said. The Taliban were harassing those “who would speak out against this injustice.” It was the first time that either of the Clintons had seriously criticized the Taliban in public.
24

The impetus had come from old friends of Albright and Hillary Clinton in the feminist policy networks of the Democratic Party. These were accomplished, professional women of the baby boomer generation now stepping into powerful positions that women had not held in Washington before, at least not in these numbers. They kept in touch with one another and worked each other’s issues. The Taliban had now slipped onto the agenda of this fax machine network. Sitting cross-legged in their barren ministries thousands of miles away in Kandahar, the Taliban’s leaders had no idea where this turn in American attitudes had come from. They made little effort to find out.When pressed on the issue of education for girls by the occasional visiting American delegation, they said, “This is God’s law,” recalled the State Department’s Leonard Scensny. “This is the way it’s supposed to be. Leave us alone.”
25

Despite the loss of their embassy in Washington, Massoud’s closest aides pressed their worldwide lobbying campaign to rally support for their war against the Taliban. In Washington that fall, Abdullah, now officially deputy foreign minister in Massoud’s rump government, told State Department officials that bin Laden was financing the Taliban. He tried to persuade the handful of Afghan experts he met at Foggy Bottom that the Taliban should be seen as part of a regional network of Islamist radicalism funded by bin Laden and other wealthy Persian Gulf sheikhs.

In comments such as Albright’s, Abdullah could see “signs of some change” in American attitudes, but at the working level of the State Department, all he heard about was the need for Massoud to negotiate with the Taliban. There seemed little belief that the Taliban posed a serious threat. Most of all, “what was lacking there was a policy,” Abdullah recalled. The path of least resistance at the State Department was “to accept the presence of the Taliban as a reality” in Afghanistan and try to negotiate solutions “through Pakistan,” as Abdullah recalled it. On the American side, “We wanted to see if there was a way to bring about a peaceful settlement of the continuing civil war,” remembered Karl F. “Rick” Inderfurth, then assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs. The State Department’s analysts believed late in 1997 that “the Taliban had to be dealt with, it couldn’t be wished away.”
26

UNOCAL CONTINUED TO FLOOD Foggy Bottom and the National Security Council with the same advice: The Taliban were a reality, and they could also be part of a new Afghan solution. Marty Miller searched energetically during 1997 for a way to convert the Taliban’s triumph in Kabul into a final pipeline deal. He met regularly with Sheila Heslin at the White House. He announced that the Taliban might earn as much as $100 million annually from transit fees if they would only allow the pipeline to be built.

Miller had decided early in 1997 that Unocal needed better contacts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He began to rely more on Robert Oakley, the former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and a member of the Unocal advisory board. Oakley’s wife, Phyllis, was at this time the chief of the State Department’s intelligence wing, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. She had access to virtually all of the U.S. government’s most sensitive intelligence reporting.
27

Robert Oakley advised Miller to reach the Taliban by working through Pakistan’s government. He also suggested that Unocal hire Thomas Gouttierre, an Afghan specialist at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, to develop a job training program in Kandahar that would teach Pashtuns the technical skills needed to build a pipeline. Gouttierre had worked on U.S.-funded humanitarian aid inside Afghanistan during the late years of the anti-Soviet jihad when Oakley was ambassador in Islamabad. Now Unocal agreed to pay $900,000 via the University of Nebraska to set up a Unocal training facility on a fifty-six-acre site in Kandahar, not far from bin Laden’s compounds. Gouttierre traveled in and out of Afghanistan and met with Taliban leaders. Oakley lobbied Nawaz Sharif’s government in Islamabad on the oil company’s behalf. In December 1997, Gouttierre worked with Miller to arrange for another Taliban delegation to visit the United States, this time led by Mullah Wakil Ahmed, Omar’s chief aide.
28

By now it was reasonable for the Taliban to believe that Unocal was effectively an arm of the United States government. The Taliban had more intimate, more focused, and more attentive contact with Unocal executives and their paid consultants than with any American officials. The Unocal executives did not just talk about oil pipelines, they talked about a path to negotiated peace in Afghanistan.

Miller’s team provided escorts and transportation for the Taliban that December and helped arrange a meeting for three Taliban ministers at the State Department. Assistant Secretary of State Inderfurth expressed his strongest concerns to the visitors about the condition of Afghan women. He also admonished the Taliban about their tolerance of drug trafficking. He talked about demining, the peace process, and other subjects, never even raising the topics of terrorism or bin Laden. Only after Inderfurth left for another meeting did the subject come up. One of the Taliban ministers explained that his movement had inherited the bin Laden problem, as he was already in Afghanistan “as a guest of the previous regime.” The Taliban, this minister said, had stopped allowing bin Laden “to give public interviews and had frustrated Iranian and Iraqi attempts to get in contact with him,” according to a Confidential State Department account of the meeting prepared at the time. As for the Unocal pipeline, one of Inderfurth’s deputies told the delegation that it was “unlikely to be financed unless there was peace in Afghanistan.”
29

Miller also rented a meeting room for the Taliban delegation at the Watergate Hotel. The itinerary included a visit to NASA headquarters and Mount Rushmore. The idea was to stir the Taliban with images of American ambition and tradition, to build a connection with Mullah Omar’s closest aides that went beyond money and jobs. Marty Miller had been aggravated by Albright’s public denunciations of Taliban human rights violations. He needed to convince the Taliban that they could do business with the United States.

Pakistan’s government, nervous about where these independent contacts between the Taliban and the United States might lead, sent an ISI officer with the Taliban delegation to keep watch on them.
30

Marty Miller arranged for Zalmay Khalilzad, the leading Republican expert on Afghanistan, to meet with the Taliban at the luxury Four Seasons Hotel in Houston. Over dinner Khalilzad opened a debate with the Taliban’s information minister, Amir Khan Mutaqqi, over the Taliban’s treatment of women. They argued over exactly what the Koran said about this issue.

Marty Miller invited the Taliban for dinner at his suburban home overlooking a golf course. He was nervous that some of the decorations in his house might offend the Taliban. Before they arrived for dinner, he invited one of Unocal’s consultants, an Afghan named Dr. Izimi, to walk through the house looking for potential causes of offense. He had pictures on the walls and all sorts of knickknacks, and he worried that “what is innocuous to us might be offensive to them.” Izimi found some statues near Miller’s swimming pool that had been bought in Indonesia. The statues were originally grave markers made for indigenous tribes, and they depicted nude people. The statues made it very obvious “who the guy and who the gal are,” as Miller put it.

Izimi gave them a good look and said, “Hmm, I don’t think these are going to cut it.”

“Do you want me to take them down?” Miller asked.

“No, I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” Izimi said. “Why don’t we just put a
burqa
on them?”

They went into Miller’s kitchen and found some trash bags, returned to the pool, and tied the bags over the statues.

Miller’s wife was involved in a group that raised funds for court-appointed advocates for children. This year the Miller house was part of a fundraising tour of seven or eight suburban houses fixed up with Christmas decorations. As a result, Miller had seven Christmas trees in his house, each elaborately decorated with tinsel, gleaming balls, and blinking lights, plus many other Christmas decorations in every room.

The Taliban “were just stunned to see all these Christmas trees,” Miller recalled. They kept asking Miller what the Christmas tree meant in the larger story of Jesus and the Christmas holiday. Miller actually had no idea how the Christmas tree had become a symbol of Jesus’s birthday, but he talked about it as best he could.
31

The Taliban leaders asked Miller if they could have their photographs taken standing in front of a Christmas tree. One or two members of the visiting delegation declined to participate, adhering even in Houston to the Taliban’s ban on representative images of the human form. But Mullah Wakil and the rest of the long-bearded Taliban leaders stood before one of the blinking Christmas trees, scrunched shoulder to shoulder and grinning.

GEORGE TENET WAS AWARE of Osama bin Laden. He supported the small bin Laden tracking unit in the Counterterrorist Center. But by the end of 1997, neither the new CIA director nor the agency placed bin Laden very high on their priority lists. The agency’s view of bin Laden remained similar to Prince Turki’s: He was a blowhard, a dangerous and wealthy egomaniac, and a financier of other radicals, but he was also isolated in Afghanistan.

Tenet was “most concerned,” he told a Senate panel, about the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons around the world, “because of the direct threat this poses to the lives of Americans.” Statistically, the threat of terrorism remained steady, although the number of attacks against American targets was rising slightly. But in comparison to the potential devastation of a nuclear-armed missile launched against an American city, the threat posed by independent terrorists such as bin Laden appeared modest. As Tenet scanned the horizon in search of potential Pearl Harbors, he saw unstable countries such as Russia and China that already had the capacity to launch such a surprise attack, and he saw governments such as Iran, North Korea, and Iraq that might have the motivation to do so if they could acquire the means. Stacked up against these challenges, bin Laden looked to many officers and analysts at the CIA like a dangerous criminal but not an existential threat.
32