Ghost Wars (68 page)

During these talks the tribal agents would say, in effect, as Schroen recalled it, “Well, we’re going to do our best. We’re going to be selective about who we’ll shoot.” But by the time the cables describing these assurances and conversations circulated at Langley, where the plan awaited approval from senior managers, there were some at CIA headquarters who began to attack the proposed Tarnak raid as reckless. Schroen urged his superiors to “step back and keep our fingers crossed” and hope the tribals “prove as good (and as lucky) as they think they will be.” But the deputy chief of the CIA’s clandestine service, James Pavitt, worried aloud about casualties and financial costs. A classified memo to approve the raid reached the White House in May. The CIA ran a final rehearsal late that month and awaited a decision.
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BIN LADEN CONTINUED to call public attention to himself. When India unexpectedly tested a nuclear weapon that May, bin Laden called on “the Muslim nation and Pakistan” to “prepare for the jihad,” which should “include a nuclear force.” In an interview with ABC News, broadcast to the network’s sizable national audience, bin Laden declared that his coalition’s “battle against the Americans is far greater than our battle was against the Russians. We anticipate a black future for America. Instead of remaining the United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.” Americans would withdraw from Saudi Arabia “when the bodies of American soldiers and civilians are sent in the wooden boxes and coffins,” he declared.
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As these threats echoed, Richard Clarke pulled meetings together at the White House to consider options. The CIA Counterterrorist Center was represented at these sessions, but the CIA officer present was cautious about discussing the center’s tribal assets. Very few people in or out of the agency knew of the draft plan to snatch bin Laden at Tarnak Farm.

There was a natural tension between Richard Clarke’s counterterrorism shop at the White House and the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. Clarke personified presidential authority and control over CIA prerogatives. He could influence budgets and help write legal guidance. There was a suspicion at the CIA that Clarke wanted direct control over agency operations. For their part, Clarke and his team saw Langley as self-protectively secretive and sometimes defensive about their plans. The White House team suspected that the CIA used its classification rules not only to protect its agents but also to deflect outside scrutiny of its covert operations. In one sense Clarke and the CIA’s counterterrorist officers were allies: They all strongly believed by the spring of 1998 that bin Laden was a serious threat and that action was warranted to bring him into custody. In other respects, however, they mistrusted each other’s motives and worried about who would be blamed if something went wrong in a risky operation. The CIA, in particular, had been conditioned by history to recoil from gung-ho “allies” at the National Security Council. Too often in the past, as in the case of Oliver North, CIA managers felt the agency had been goaded into risky or illegal operations by politically motivated White House cowboys, only to be left twisting after the operations went bad. White House officials came and went in the rhythm of electoral seasons; the CIA had permanent institutional interests to protect.

Clarke and his counterterrorism group were interested in a snatch operation against bin Laden that could succeed. But they were skeptical about the Tarnak raid. Their sense was that the agents were old anti-Soviet mujahedin who had long since passed their peak fighting years and that they were probably milking the CIA for money while minimizing the risks they took on the ground. Some in the White House felt that the agents seemed unlikely to mount a serious attack on Tarnak. Worse, if they did go through with it, they would probably not be able to distinguish between a seven-year-old girl on a tricycle and a man who looked like Osama bin Laden holding an assault rifle. Women and children would die, and bin Laden would probably escape. Such a massacre would undermine U.S. national interests in the Muslim world and elsewhere.
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The CIA’s leadership reviewed the proposed raid in late May. The discussion surfaced doubts among senior officers in the Directorate of Operations about the raid’s chances for success. In the end, as Tenet described it to colleagues years later, all of the CIA’s relevant chain of command—Jack Downing, then chief of the D.O., his deputy Jim Pavitt, Counterterrorist Center Chief O’Connell, and his deputy Paul Pillar—told Tenet the Tarnak raid was a bad idea. There was also no enthusiasm for it at the White House. Recalled one senior Clinton administration official involved: “From our perspective, and from George’s, it was a stupid plan. It was an open plain. . . . I couldn’t believe this was their great plan—it was a frontal assault.” Richard Clarke, by this official’s account, did little to disguise his disdain. He asked his White House colleagues and the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center team sarcastically, “Am I missing something? Aren’t these people going to be mowed down on their way to the wall?”

Tenet never formally presented the Tarnak Farm raid plan for President Clinton’s approval. Tenet’s antennae about political risk had been well calibrated during his years as a congressional and White House staffer. He was unlikely to endorse any operation that posed high risks of civilian casualties. He also was in the midst of a new, secret diplomatic initiative against bin Laden involving Saudi Arabia; a failed attack on Tarnak might end that effort.

The decision was cabled to Islamabad: There would be no raid. Mike Scheuer, the chief of the bin Laden unit, wrote to colleagues that he had been told that Clinton’s cabinet feared “collateral damage” and accusations of assassination. Decision-makers feared that “the purpose and nature of the operation would be subject to unavoidable misinterpretation . . . in the event that bin Laden, despite our best intentions and efforts, did not survive.”
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The tribal team’s plans should be set aside, perhaps to be revived later. Meanwhile the agents were encouraged to continue to look for opportunities to catch bin Laden away from Tarnak, traveling only with his bodyguard.

Some of the field-level CIA officers involved in the Tarnak planning reacted bitterly to the decision. They had put a great deal of effort into their work. They believed the raid could succeed. If bin Laden was not stopped now, the challenge he presented would only deepen.

As it happened, this was only the beginning of their frustration.

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“The Kingdom’s Interests”

PRINCE TURKI AL-FAISAL, the Saudi intelligence chief, saw the threat posed by Osama bin Laden through a lens colored by Saudi Arabian politics. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri preached against the kingdom in its own language: They denounced the royal family’s claim to be the true and legitimate guardians of Sunni Islam’s two most important holy places, Mecca and Medina. They appealed to the Koran as inspiration for violent revolt against the ruling al-Sauds. Bin Laden continued to use his wealth and the global channels of digital technology to link up with other Saudi Islamist dissidents inside the kingdom and in exile. For years the Saudis had tried to hold bin Laden at a distance, hoping to isolate and outlast him. “There are no permanent enemies here in Saudi Arabia,” a leading prince once remarked, describing the kingdom’s swirling webs of family-rooted alliances and enmities.
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With his shrill cries for jihad against the royal family, however, bin Laden was starting to make himself an exception.

By the late spring of 1998, Turki and other senior princes, including the kingdom’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah, had become alarmed. Saudi security forces arrested militant bin Laden followers who had smuggled surface-to-air missiles into the kingdom. In March the Saudis secured the defection of bin Laden’s Afghanistan-based treasurer, Mohammed bin Moisalih. He revealed the names of prominent Saudis who had been secretly sending funds to bin Laden. All the while bin Laden kept holding press conferences and television interviews to denounce the Saudi royals in menacing, unyielding terms. The interviews were beamed by satellite across the Arab world and to the ubiquitous reception dishes sprouting on Saudi rooftops. Aware of this turmoil, Clinton sent Tenet secretly to Riyadh to urge Saudi cooperation. Abdullah authorized Turki to undertake a secret visit to Kandahar. As Turki later described it, he was instructed to meet with Mullah Omar and discuss options for putting bin Laden out of action.
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The mission was constrained by the complexities of Saudi royal power. Then seventy-four, Crown Prince Abdullah had emerged as a newly confident force. His flaccid older brother, King Fahd, remained incapacitated by a stroke suffered several years earlier. With the passage of time royal power had gradually consolidated around Abdullah. A goateed, bulky man with attentive black eyes and Asiatic cheeks, Abdullah had won praise within the kingdom for his straight talk, his hard-headed Saudi nationalism, his ease with ordinary Saudi soldiers and citizens, and his relatively austere lifestyle. He did not summer in Cannes casinos, indulge undisciplined sexual appetites, or recklessly pilot stunt planes, and in the context of the Saudi royal family, this made him a ramrod figure. In Saudi tradition he continued to marry younger wives and father children as he aged. By 1998 he lived in a series of manicured palace complexes that resembled midsized American colleges, with pathways and driveways weaving through watered lawns and stately rows of desert arbor. He kept an idiosyncratic schedule, sleeping in two four-hour shifts, once between 9 P.M. and 1 A.M., and then again between 8 A.M. and noon. In the wee hours he swam in his royal pool and busied himself with paperwork. Each Saturday he flew to Jedda with several of his brothers, boarded his yacht, motored into the Red Sea for a few hours, ate lunch, and retired for a nap, rocking on the waves. Each Wednesday he went via bus to a desert farm where he bred Arabian horses. He was hardworking and serious about his political responsibilities, but he was austere only in the ways that a multibillionaire with enormous palaces, yachts, and horse farms can be austere.
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Abdullah was skeptical about the eagerness of some Saudi princes to curry favor at any price with the United States. The crown prince understood that Saudi Arabia was not strong enough militarily to abandon its protective alliance with Washington, but he wanted to establish more independence in the relationship. He thought Saudi Arabia should pursue a balanced foreign policy that included outreach to ambivalent American friends in Europe, especially France. He wanted a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran even though the United States was opposed. He wanted to help the United States achieve a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians but rejected American support for the Israeli government. Abdullah pursued what he saw as an independent brand of Saudi nationalism, and while he was not hostile to American interests, he was not as accommodating as some previous Saudi monarchs had been. Fear of communism no longer united Riyadh and Washington. Abdullah felt he could recast the alliance without undermining its basic solidity.
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Abdullah’s ascension changed and complicated Prince Turki’s position within the royal family. In Saudi political culture, which venerated seniority and family, Turki remained a relatively junior figure. Educated at Georgetown and Oxford, he was one of the royal cabinet’s most obviously pro-American princes, not necessarily an asset in the Abdullah era. Turki’s vast personal riches and the wealth accumulated by his aides, such as the Badeeb brothers, bothered some of his rivals in the royal family. They felt the Saudi intelligence department had become a financial black hole. In keeping with Abdullah’s calls for increased professionalism in Saudi government, Turki’s rivals clamored for accountability at the General Intelligence Department.

On the bin Laden question, Turki had to compete for influence with his uncle, the more senior Saudi interior minister Prince Naif, who was the Saudi equivalent of the attorney general and the FBI director combined. Naif and his powerful sons jealously guarded Saudi sovereignty against American interference. They often seemed to hold explicitly anti-American attitudes. They refused repeatedly to respond to requests for investigative assistance from the FBI, the White House counterterrorism office, and the CIA. They interpreted Saudi laws so as to minimize American access to their police files and interrogations. Naif made exceptions and occasionally cooperated with the FBI, but his general policy of stonewalling the Americans put Turki in an awkward position. Turki was the CIA’s primary liaison to the Saudi government, and he tried to maintain open channels to Langley. He worked closely with George Tenet on the Middle East peace process and tried to establish a secret, joint working group to share intelligence about the threat posed by bin Laden. But Naif often scuttled his efforts at openness. On terrorism, at least, Turki was unable to deliver much for the CIA. On a desert camping trip, the prince suffered carbon monoxide poisoning after a heater failed inside his tent, and for a while his colleagues at Langley wondered if he had been permanently impaired. As Turki faded, physically and politically, the CIA watched its links to Saudi Arabia fray—a bond that had been an important part of the agency’s worldwide clandestine operations for two decades.
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ON A MID-JUNE DAY IN 1998, Prince Turki’s jet banked above Kandahar airport. He looked out the airplane window and spotted Tarnak Farm. He had been briefed about bin Laden’s use of the compound and had been told to watch out for it as he landed. He could see it now on the barren plain—no better than a squatter’s encampment by the standards of Saudi Arabia. Its primitive facilities were centuries removed from the luxuries Turki enjoyed in Jedda, Riyadh, Paris, and beyond. Turki often reflected on the tensions inherent in Saudi Arabia’s oil-fed drive for modernization. The combustible interactions of wealth and Islamic faith, Bedouin tradition and global culture, had opened deep fault lines in the Saudi kingdom. Osama bin Laden had fallen through the cracks, and here he was, in a mud-walled compound on the outskirts of Kandahar, preaching revolution.