Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (44 page)

Chapter 2. Fighting Islamists with a Blinding Cold War Hangover, 1996–2001

1.
Armstrong Williams, “Missing the Mark…Amid Self-Delusion,”
Washington Times,
October 19, 2000, A-19.

2.
Each administration I worked for also demonstrated exactly the same mind-permanently-made-up attitude toward Saudi Arabia. Although intelligence is collected on Saudi Arabia, senior IC and administration officials tend to shrug off any negative intelligence about the Saudis, whether it regards Riyadh’s assistance to anti-U.S. Islamists around the world, involvement in corruption or other criminal activities, or other nefarious matters. In addition, both Israel and Saudi Arabia can head off any effort to get negative intelligence to senior policymakers because each country’s ambassador in Washington has easy and immediate access to the White House.

3.
Two instances of such protectiveness toward Moscow, although minor in the overall scheme of things, show how deeply ingrained this tendency was in the parts of the Intelligence Community that were focused on the USSR. The Afghan-Soviet war was a matter of intense interest to both houses of Congress, and so CIA officers were regularly called on to brief the members and staff of the two intelligence committees. On such an occasion one of the CIA’s Soviet experts was asked by a congressman why the CIA had not told the committee about a recent massacre of Afghan civilians by the Red Army. The officer responded that the murders were relatively small in number and we did not want to make too much out of a “minor atrocity.” The congressman was livid over the term “minor atrocity” and warned the officer to stop protecting the Soviets.
     On another occasion preparations for a congressional briefing were marked by an argument over trees. At the time the commander of a Soviet unit in northeastern Afghanistan was ordered to move a large portion of his command south along a road that was heavily forested on each side right up to the edge of the road. Before moving, therefore, the commander wisely sent his engineers to cut down a wide swath of trees on each side of the road to lessen the ability of the mujahedin to ambush the column from point-blank range. The briefing team’s Soviet experts objected to describing the commander’s action because they believed the “politicians” in Congress would use the information to defame the Soviets as destroyers of the Afghan environment. As ludicrous as this argument was, senior CIA managers agreed, and the information was deleted from the briefing.
     This, as I said, was low-level nonsense, but it increases the admiration one must have for President Reagan’s tenacity in overcoming the much greater protectiveness toward the USSR displayed by senior Intelligence Community managers who had spent their careers as Soviet hands. It also, I think, explains much of the 1980s venom that was directed toward DCI William J. Casey and Deputy Director for Intelligence Robert Gates as they worked with Mr. Reagan to break the Bolsheviks and their apologists in the U.S. government.

4.
Charles S. Maier,
Among Empires: America’s Ascendancy and Its Predecessors
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 152.

5.
The subject of terrorist groups acquiring WMD was always met with deep skepticism at the CIA and in the Intelligence Community generally. This primarily is due the nation-state orientation of intelligence officers and managers and their view that only nation-states had the money, expertise, and safety capabilities necessary to handle WMD materials safely. This was fair enough during the Cold War, but the rise of transnational threats thereafter changed things drastically. In al-Qaeda’s case, for example, the CIA had solid information by late 1996 that bin Laden had several years previously formed a unit to build, steal, or purchase WMD—preferably a nuclear device—and staffed it with hard scientists, technicians, and engineers. He had told the unit that money was no object, and of course personal health and safety were not issues for those willing and even eager to die as martyrs. This information was contained in a fifteen-to-twenty-paragraph intelligence report, which detailed what we had learned in excruciating detail. CIA senior managers, however, still did not believe that al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group was serious about getting and using WMD and so edited the report down to two short paragraphs. The full report was not released until a year later, after repeated appeals from the officers who had collected the information.

6.
In all the post-9/11 investigations, analysis, and media commentary, no one seems to have posed the question that is most important in regard to how good the intelligence had to be before Washington could act to destroy an entity—al-Qaeda—that we believed was determined to detonate a mass-destruction weapon in the United States. Senior Clinton NSC officers Richard Clarke, Daniel Benjamin, Steven Simon, and unnamed senior CIA officers have said that (a) by 2000 the CIA had been reporting “for years” that al-Qaeda was seeking nuclear and chemical weapons; (b) President Clinton was fixated on the WMD issue since at least 1995; (c) the White House believed that al-Qaeda had been trying to acquire WMD “[b]y early 1994, if not earlier”; and (d) the Cabinet was advised by the CIA in early 1998 that “[s]ooner or later bin Laden will attack U.S. interests, perhaps using WMD.” Note that all the reporting about al-Qaeda’s WMD intentions was available before the ten chances to capture or kill were presented to President Clinton between May 1998 and May 1999. It is inexplicable, at least to me, how all the investigations, pundits, and journalists have let Clinton officials have it both ways; that is, the al-Qaeda WMD threat was clear, but the intelligence was never good enough to try to destroy al-Qaeda. Question: How definitive must the intelligence be before the U.S. government acts to prevent a nuclear explosion in a U.S. city? See Clarke,
Against All Enemies
, 162–63, 177; Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon,
The Age of Sacred Terror
(New York: Random House, 2002), 128–29; and Kean et al.,
9/11 Commission Report,
112.

7.
Many of the opportunities to capture or kill bin Laden are listed in
9/11 Commission Report
, 108–43. To the best of my memory, the chances were as follows:

• May 1998: Capture opportunity at bin Laden’s compound south of Khandahar City
  
• September 1998: Capture opportunity north of Khandahar City
  
• December 1998: Military attack opportunity, governor’s palace, Khandahar City
  
• February 1999: Military attack opportunity, governor’s residence, Heart City
  
• March-April 1999: Multiple military attack opportunities, hunting camp, near Khandahar
  
• May 1999: Military attack opportunities on five consecutive nights, Khandahar City
  

8.
For a stunningly misleading account of the number of occasions bin Laden’s location was fixed by the CIA’s clandestine service, and equally deceptive comments on the quality of the information available to President Clinton on opportunities that arose to eliminate bin Laden, see Clarke,
Against All Enemies,
196–204.
In the binder of documents I prepared for working with post-9/11 panels, there are memoranda from the seniormost officers of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, as well as cables from the CIA’s senior officer in Pakistan, that document that DCI Tenet was repeatedly told by his top advisers that the intelligence was not going to get better. In addition, DCI Tenet repeatedly told those of us involved in the ten opportunities to eliminate bin Laden that he had on each occasion informed Messrs. Clarke, Berger, and Clinton of this fact.

9.
The best assessment of Moscow’s side of a proxy war is the study prepared by the Soviet General Staff on Afghanistan. See Lester A. Grau and Michael A. Gress, eds. and trans.,
The Soviet Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002), xiii.

10.
See Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin,
The Bear Trap: Afghanistan’s Untold Story
(Lahore, Pakistan: Jang Publishers Press, 1992), 189–206.

11.
From my perspective, the Afghans are the exception to this general conclusion about Cold War proxies. Afghans are a truly peculiar people—stubborn, courageous, and extraordinarily patient and independent. With or without U.S., Saudi, or Pakistani assistance the Afghan mujahedin would have continued to fight the Soviets with whatever arms they could gather until they were either victorious or wiped out.

12.
Michael Abramowitz and Griff White, “Insurgent Activity Spurs Cheney Trip to Afghanistan,”
Washington Post
, February 27, 2007, A-1; David E. Sanger, “Cheney Warns Pakistanis to Act Against Terror,”
New York Times
, February 27, 2007, A-9; and Machiavelli,
Prince,
40–41.

13.
John McCain and Robert Dole, “Save Darfur Now,”
Washington Post
, September 10, 2006, B-07. The conservative side of the U.S. political spectrum is likewise abundant with these private-sector champions of U.S. intervention. From the democracy-and-freedom peddlers at Freedom House, the American Enterprise Institute, and the National Endowment for Democracy, to the overseas Christian-conversion campaigns conducted under the guise of the evangelical humanitarian organizations led by Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham, the political right is just as obsessed with embroiling the United States in costly interventions abroad that serve their specific interests but not America’s national ones. Indeed, some of the evangelicals—in the same ways as the Israel-firsters—seem eager to involve their countrymen in other peoples’ religious wars.

14.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, “The Dark and Bloody Crossroads,”
National Interest
, no. 32 (Summer 1993), 56.

15.
It seems likely that economic interests also played a role in the Clinton administration’s reluctance to upset the Taliban by trying to kill or capture bin Laden. As noted, the Clinton White House pushed hard in support of UNOCAL’s effort to get Taliban permission to build a natural-gas pipeline through Afghanistan in the 1990s. In addition, President Clinton refused to kill Osama bin Laden in the spring of 1999 when he was visiting the hunting camp of a prince from the United Arab Emirates in the desert near Khandahar. Why? The prince’s father was about to buy U.S.-made F-16 fighter planes valued at $8 billion. For the natural-gas deal see Kean et al.,
9/11 Commission Report,
111, and “The Great Game, Oil and Afghanistan: An Interview with Ahmed Rashid,”
Multinational Monitor
22, no. 11 (November 2001). For the hunting camp chance, see Clarke,
Against All Enemies,
200; Kean et al.,
9/11 Commission Report,
137–39; Benjamin and Simon,
Age of Sacred Terror,
281; and Tenet,
Center of the Storm
, 123. Together these three works provide a nifty cover-up of the reason Washington failed to attack bin Laden and the hunting camp of the UAE princes. In his book Clarke said the camp “looked a lot more like a luxury mobile home than a terrorist hideout. We feared that the target was not al-Qaeda, but a falcon hunting camp from a friendly state.” The
9/11 Report
says Clarke told the commissioners that “the intelligence [about the camp] was dubious.” Benjamin and Simon claim the attack was called off when the White House learned that “the camp belonged not to bin Laden but to a group of wealthy Emiratis who had flown to Afghanistan for a hunting trip.” The Clinton-protecting Tenet simply and completely untruthfully adds, “Before a decision could be made [by the president] as to whether to launch a strike, we got word that bin Laden had moved on.”
     Each account sounds plausible, and each is untrue. The CIA knew and told the White House and the NSC from the moment of the camp’s establishment that it belonged to the UAE princes and was complete with luxurious tents, dozens of four-by-four vehicles, and a plane parked near the facility. Likewise, it was common knowledge in Khandahar that the UAE princes were hiring locals as laborers and cooks. The camp itself served as a magnet that repeatedly drew bin Laden there to meet, dine, and pray with the princes; we knew this from human assets and technical means. The bottom line for this story is that the Clinton White House and NSC knew(a) from the first that the camp belonged to the UAE princes; (b) that bin Laden was going to the camp to visit the princes; and (c) that a variety of intelligence sources were telling us when he was in the camp on a timely basis. Why did President Clinton fail to attack? Because making money was more important than protecting Americans. Per Clinton NSC senior directors Benjamin and Simon: “At the moment the Tomahawks [cruise missiles] were being readied, the United States was in the final stages of negotiations to sell eighty Block 60 F-16s [to the Emiratis], America’s most sophisticated export fighter jets.”
     The tools covered by the term “technical means” include all methods of intelligence collection that are not dependent on firsthand human observation. While not commenting on the bin Laden operation specifically, the reader can imagine how very useful is the work of CIA-based imagery analysts in helping to corroborate reporting from human assets. This is particularly true when the assets are reporting on physical features—buildings, hills, road intersections, culverts, vehicles, bridges, etc.—in the immediate vicinity of an individual(s) being sought. The ability to validate reporting and thereby build confidence in asset reporting that cannot be confirmed by “U.S. eyes” via the at-times-astounding work of imagery analysts was one of the most important tools that were brought to bear in CIA efforts against bin Laden. For more information about the technical means used with CIA assets in Afghanistan than I could ever have gotten approved by CIA’s Publication Review Board, see the information DCI Tenet apparently allowed to be disclosed for publication in Bob Woodward,
Bush at War
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 6–7.