Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (29 page)

The kids were out of college and starting families of their own by the time I got to NSA in 1999. When I arrived at CIA in 2006, we already had three grandchildren and family time was a little harder to come by because of their schedules and mine. We squeezed in a couple of beach weeks on the Outer Banks of North Carolina over Thanksgiving or Christmas, what our oldest grandchild called going to “the cold beach.”

We also managed to take three grandchildren (then ages ten, eight, and seven), without their parents, for a long Labor Day weekend to a wonderful beach house at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida in 2008. Lots of time in the surf, but work was never far away. On each of the three nights my security detail pounded on the door between 2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. for me to walk up the beach to my communications team and make a decision.

I got to talk about this blend of family, roots, and work at Duquesne University’s graduation ceremony in May 2007. I was honored that they had invited me. Apparently it wasn’t quite a unanimous decision. I was told that some faculty members had concerns.

I didn’t learn about that until
after
we had arrived in Pittsburgh. The last several drafts of the speech had smoothed off the rough edges on some hard issues. That afternoon, unwilling to miss an opportunity or concede a point, I put some of the splinters back in.

I never learned the exact character or extent of any objections, but several years later a Duquesne English professor went on record opposing the city of Pittsburgh’s recognition of me. At issue was an honorary street
sign, General Michael V. Hayden Boulevard, that had been put up in 2008 adjacent to Heinz Field and about six hundred feet from my boyhood home.

Mayor Luke Ravenstahl had ordered up the sign after spending an evening with my brother, Harry. Harry is sixteen years younger than me and would have been a great case officer: smart, sociable (he knows everybody), and skilled at eliciting both information and behavior. It probably didn’t hurt that the mayor was young (twenty-eight at the time) and a fellow Northsider and North Catholic graduate.

When Harry informed me of the mayor’s decision, my only response was to ask whether or not I could park there on game days.

Two years later the Duquesne professor saw the sign as he and his family were visiting the Carnegie Science Center across the street, and was offended. “General Hayden has done a great deal of service to the country, but I don’t think, given his role in the Bush administration’s policy of torture, the city should be honoring him with a public plaque,” he said.

He gathered a few dozen signatures petitioning the city for the sign’s removal, and the council put it on its public docket. He and several supporters made their case while my brother and a half dozen others made counterarguments. Harry pointed out a factual error: “The people here to protest the sign accused General Hayden of waterboarding detainees, so they really don’t know ANYTHING about General Hayden. The last act of waterboarding took place in 2003, and Mike became the director of the agency in 2006.” He went on to note that CIA actually took it off the table after I arrived. He then testily added something about there being no standing requirement to run national security decisions by the Duquesne University English department. (Nice touch, I thought.)

Team Hayden was buttressed by a dozen or so veterans and American Legion and VFW representatives who attended. They also had in hand a letter of support from my grade school football coach, ambassador to Ireland and Steelers owner Dan Rooney. The mayor’s office stood its ground on leaving the sign up. My contribution was to ask my brother to inquire if I could buy the sign if indeed it were to be removed.

Pittsburgh is a Democrat city, so the council members didn’t mind a little Bush bashing. My brother claims he lost circulation in one leg as a friend squeezed his thigh hard to prevent him from jumping up to protest. Finally, a friend on the other side of Harry leaped to his feet and screamed, “Bullshit!” after a particularly egregious accusation, an intervention that prompted a lot of supportive yelling from the veterans present.

In the end, the council was wise enough to recognize that a lot of the people who supported the sign actually vote in municipal elections and that the council really had no expertise when it came to judging American intelligence policy. The council was also clever enough to realize that since it had no hand in putting the sign up, it really shouldn’t have to decide whether it should come down. The issue pretty much just went away.

I suppose similar concerns prompted the alleged objections to my May 2007 graduation appearance. Although the school administration was anxious, there was nary a protest, gesture, or unkind word. Good thing. It was a combined commencement for Duquesne’s many schools—the first time they had done that in years—so graduates and families filled the university’s spacious Palumbo Center.

My message to the graduates was pretty straightforward. First, the kind of education they got at Duquesne would help them deal with a tough and turbulent world. They would be able to make connections that others might not see.

I told them about a trip to Israel and a flight on an Israeli military helicopter passing “over Bethlehem and then Jerusalem, with the Wailing Wall and the Al-Aqsa Mosque clearly in sight. A few minutes more flight time and I could see . . . the Sea of Galilee.”

Holy ground for three great monotheisms, but at that moment the “second intifada had been churning for nearly a year [and] Israelis and Palestinians were dying in the streets.” It took a broad (and historical) view to recognize that despite the chaos, “what connects us runs deeper than what divides us.”

Then I conceded that they weren’t walking off campus with all the
answers, and I assured them that I hadn’t either. None of my professors had ever put his arm around me after class and said, “Mike, here’s a good reading list that will come in handy when you’re doing National Security Strategy for Bush 41,” and my Western Civ class’s wonderful treatment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire didn’t describe what to do when Yugoslavia imploded and I was standing in Sarajevo in 1994 looking up at Serb artillery in the surrounding hills.

But, I continued, “I actually
was
prepared to deal with these situations, not in detail, because they were not predictable, but in general because I got as close to a classical education as is possible in modern America, and so have you.”

My other major point dealt with values. I told the graduates that in dealing with tough questions over the years, “something became obvious to me: the more senior I get, the older I get, the more basic, the more fundamental the problems and issues seem to be. And the more that happens, the less I rely on any kind of professional expertise that I’ve picked up along the way and the more I count on the basic values that I learned here in Pittsburgh, at my mom or dad’s knee, at North Catholic, at St. Peter’s grade school just across the river, and at Duquesne.”

I described “the challenging philosophy and theology courses [I had at Duquesne as] wonderful gifts . . . gifts that keep on giving. They give me an anchor in what is often a turbulent sea. They give me a compass when the way ahead is far from clear.
They give me a beam of light when I have to work in the shadows.
”

I concluded by reminding the graduates that “life will soon bring you increased responsibilities, and it is rare that you will have a legitimate choice to do nothing. [That was one of the splinters I put back in.] Responsibility usually demands action. My responsibility has to do with the defense of the republic, and my conscience, formed here at Duquesne University, compels me to act. [That was another.]”

I thanked the graduates and their families, turned, and walked to my seat onstage. As I bent down to put the binder, from which I had been
reading, on the floor next to my chair, the priest beside me whispered that I needed to go back to the podium. The graduates were applauding, and many of their parents were standing and clapping.

I walked back and waved a heartfelt thank-you to the hometown crowd.

W
e had a lot of friends among the intelligence services of the Middle East. In April 2007, the tough, tireless head of one of them came into my office at Langley. This man was without pretense, all business—but with a tough-love kind of human touch.

That day he was bringing big news. He carried with him photos of a nearly complete nuclear reactor in the eastern Syrian desert near a town called al-Kibar. We had picked up on the facility as it was being completed through satellite imagery, but its false walls and roofs made it difficult to identify. NGA (the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) had started to more regularly image it in 2006 and had labeled it “enigmatic.” That essentially meant that it looked important, but we couldn’t exactly tell what it was.

We had shared a decade’s worth of sporadic evidence of North Korean–Syrian nuclear cooperation with our liaison partner and had even pointed to the eastern desert and the cooling waters of the Euphrates River as likely candidates for a site. As resources were available we tasked our own satellite imagery to search the region for suspicious construction, but Syria was on the same overhead orbital path as Iraq and the needs of
the war there consumed a lot of that resource. In the end, we got the facility in our sights, but long after its appearance had been altered and its use obscured.

Our evidence had given us a kind of strategic warning that something was up. But now we had nearly a hundred handheld photos of the site while it was still under construction. You could see the false walls being erected over a shape eerily similar to North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor. To the side, under a tent, you could see reactor components. An interior shot showed rebar and concrete being used to create a floor into which uranium rods could be inserted. This was high-quality
tactical
warning.

Espionage protocol discouraged us from asking our friend how his service had acquired the images. The fact that our friend was sharing them with us at all was remarkable, given the absolute need for secrecy and the US government’s less than stellar record in keeping secrets. (I suspect our friend needed us to flesh out the North Korean connection.) Our best guess was that the photos had been downloaded from the computer of a sloppy Syrian scientist, but it didn’t really matter. It was pretty convincing stuff,
if
we could be confident that the pictures hadn’t been altered.

Once alone in my office, I tasked exactly that. Over time our experts reported that the photos were genuine and undoctored except for one where some writing on the side of a pickup truck had been pixelated out. Our folks were even able to take the handheld photos and our own overheads to create a three-dimensional model of the building, and each image fit perfectly. They were genuine photos of the same facility.

The morning after my colleague’s visit we briefed the president on what we had. Since my colleague had been part of a delegation to the White House the day before to talk to the vice president and Steve Hadley, this wasn’t going to be a total surprise. As we were getting settled in the Oval, I leaned toward Vice President Cheney, who had long been convinced of a Syrian nuclear program, and confessed, “You were right, Mr. Vice President.”

I laid out the photos and our own background. The last thing the president needed on his plate was this: an action that couldn’t stand, in a part of the world where any move could precipitate a war . . . with an ally who could and would act on its own.

Given the intelligence debacle on the Iraqi nuclear program, the president’s first demand was, not surprisingly, that we be sure, absolutely sure. He also demanded that this stay a secret to maximize his freedom of action.

Certainty and absolute secrecy. Individually these were tough tasks; together they approached being mutually exclusive. To get to certainty, you wanted to collect more information, to get some eyes on the ground. You would also want to bring in more experts to evaluate the information you already had. Expand the circle, as it were. But those kinds of steps increased the odds that the information would leak and the Syrians would be on to us. And as soon as that happened, we only half-jokingly concluded, Assad would announce that the site was housing a day-care center.

The facility itself was oddly hiding in plain sight. We could see no obvious security, but the site had been carefully selected in a wadi off a road that paralleled the Euphrates River, and a berm had been constructed to completely hide it from the highway. It was in the middle of nowhere, so much so that anyone detected snooping around on the ground would have had a cover story that ranged from very thin to nonexistent.

We cranked up national technical collection and dug into the archives to see if there were any clues there. The record of individuals affiliated with Korea’s nuclear program visiting Syria was pretty extensive. There was also sporadic evidence of mysterious shipments between the two countries. The new information gave meaning and importance to scattered data points we had on a North Korean and Syrian nuclear relationship that went back to at least 2001.

In early June we could see in imagery that the Syrians were gouging out a cooling-water intake along the banks of the river and were digging two trenches up the wadi for pipes to bring cold water to the facility and discharge hot water back to the river. The building still looked like a
Walmart warehouse from above, but there was
nothing
other than a nuclear reactor that would create enough heat to warrant that kind of cooling. And the fact that the Syrians opted for the low-profile underground pipes and cooling system rather than large cooling towers fit the clandestine nature of the facility.

But the president said we had to be sure, so we took other steps. First, we carefully briefed all of our data to an outside expert and asked his opinion. “It has to be a nuclear reactor,” he reported.

Then we gave the data to a red team, dedicated contrarians, and directed they come up with an alternative explanation. Build an alternative case as to why it’s not a nuclear reactor; why it’s not intended to produce plutonium for a weapon; why North Korea is not involved. They racked and stacked what we knew against other possibilities. “If it isn’t a nuclear reactor,” they concluded, “then it has to be a fake nuclear reactor.”

So it was a reactor. But that was just the start. We searched for the other things that Syria would need if it were to have its own viable nuclear weapons program. We knew of other suspicious facilities, but there were key components still missing. We could not, for example, identify work on an actual warhead. There was also no reprocessing facility we could locate, but not for want of trying.

Good intelligence was also going to be critical to deciding on a policy way ahead. The reactor at al-Kibar had to go, but not in a way that generated another Middle East conflict. The analytic staff at the agency knew the challenge and had developed a nice shorthand summary of the president’s policy objectives: No core. No war.

Intense policy discussions on a short menu of options followed. A purely diplomatic approach never got much traction. Naming and shaming wouldn’t be effective, nor would condemnatory language out of the UN (assuming we could get it). Assad could stonewall inspectors until the facility went hot and any démarche would tip our hand that we knew of the facility without being decisive. We could end up looking pathetic.

We took a hard look at special operations. A small team could enter,
approach the site, destroy critical equipment, and then depart. There was no obvious guard force, and the reactor was in isolated desert pretty far from towns or military facilities. Destroying the reactor this way would be low-key and somewhat anonymous and might not prompt Damascus to respond militarily. The issue was whether or not a small team could carry enough with it to effect sufficient destruction on steel, rebar, and concrete. An alternative branch of this planning called for destroying the pump house at the water intake in the Euphrates. That was more easily accomplished, but would slow the Syrians down more than stop them. It would also tip our hand. And for either scenario there was always the danger of detection.

Then there was an air strike. We knew the precise location of the facility and its specific makeup. Selecting aim points and weapons would be easy enough. Stealthy B-2s from the States could do the job, as could land-based air in the region or carrier-based air from the Mediterranean or the Gulf. Air defenses were respectable, but not prohibitive, and there was absolutely no evidence that they had been beefed up in the area. All good—and doable—but such a raid would reinforce a regional image of a United States facilely opting yet again for preemptive war.

The more we talked, the more we discussed what we called a hybrid option: publicize the existence of the facility and demand that Assad prove us wrong via inspections, all against a timeline and an ultimatum that left no doubt of eventual action. That showed restraint and respect for international institutions, but had the weakness of giving Assad time to prepare his defenses and, with seven thousand US citizens in Syria, time to take hostages too.

A lot of this depended on our assessment of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. We knew that he was never meant for this job. His older brother Bassel had been the heir apparent to Hafez, the ruthless but savvy father. Hafez had fought his way to power from humble beginnings in an Alawite village near Latakia to become president in 1971. He brought Syria stability by ruling with an iron hand for the next three decades.

Bassel followed in his father’s footsteps. He had a military background, headed up the Presidential Guard, and seems to have been highly regarded. He also had a love of fast cars that proved his undoing, as he died in 1994 racing at eighty miles an hour on a foggy night to the airport.

Bashar had never been close to his father or much associated with governance. He completed medical school in Syria and then did postgraduate work in ophthalmology in London. Now, with Bassel in the grave, his father began a crash course grooming Bashar for the presidency.

The dynamics of the Assad family often reminded me of Mario Puzo’s fictitious American mobster clan, the Corleones. Certainly the Assads and the closely affiliated Makhloufs, families linked by marriage, seemed to be partners in crime and ruthlessness as much as governance. And, like the Corleones, whose obvious heir Sonny was killed, the Assads unexpectedly lost their chosen, Bassel, as well. Don Corleone had the good fortune to have the far more talented Michael to fall back on. In many ways, Hafez had to settle for Fredo. One wonders if the elder Assad launched the al-Kibar project before his death in 2000 precisely because he recognized his son’s weaknesses.

Our view of Bashar was pretty dismal; we had tried to work with him to stem the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq, without much success. The Syrians seemed to be turning a blind eye to it while doing just enough to keep us at bay. Then again, a lot of the movement could be attributed to local corruption, lack of control, policy differences within the leadership, and flat-out government weakness. Not really a recipe for solid decision making now.

We had long described Bashar as a “serial miscalculator.” In the crisis we were about to create, we feared he would refuse any off-ramp we might offer him no matter how logical it was or how much we sweetened it. He wasn’t a confident or firm decision maker, and when pushed into a corner, he often became unpredictable. He feared humiliation, so he would likely want to look tough, and there wouldn’t be many in his inner circle
calling for calm. When he considered his own survival, he knew that he was most threatened when he looked weak. After his embarrassing withdrawal under pressure from Lebanon in 2005, another such display might be fatal for him—literally.

A lot of our analysts judged that he would not—could not—let the destruction of al-Kibar pass without responding. At a minimum they warned of “spontaneous” demonstrations that could threaten the embassy and individual Americans; calls to patriotism would likely elicit a positive response, as we speculated that many Syrians would feel pride at the attempt to go nuclear. Assad could also make life more difficult and dangerous for US troops in Iraq. He might even up the ante with the Israelis on the occupied Golan Heights, since he was mistakenly reading the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah conflict as exposing Israeli weakness.

The analysts added that the Iranians could see the destruction of al-Kibar as a test of their resolve as well, the first step in a theater-wide rollback of nuclear ambitions, and they would try to steel the spine of their Syrian client.

Our decisive policy meeting took place in June at the White House, but not in the West Wing. We met on the second floor of the residence in the Yellow Oval Room to keep the session off the president’s public schedule. All the members of the national security team were there: secretary of defense, secretary of state, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, national security advisor, director of National Intelligence, and more.

We settled into the overstuffed chairs and couches as White House waiters topped off our ice tea and exited. The president turned it over to Steve Hadley, who asked for the latest intelligence.

“Mr. President,” I began, “we’ve got four key findings for you. One, that’s a nuclear reactor. Two, it’s clear that the North Koreans and Syrians have been cooperating on nuclear questions for about a decade. Three, the North Koreans built this thing. And four, this is part of a nuclear weapons program.”

Before anyone could react, I cautioned them to wait. The national
estimate on the Iraqi nuclear program had been wrong, but beyond wrong it had also given a false sense of confidence. We had since learned to share not just what we believed, but also our doubts.

I resumed: “It’s a nuclear reactor. High confidence. Can’t be anything else. Take it to the bank.

“The Syrians and Koreans have been cooperating on nuclear developments for a long time. Lots of travel, back and forth. We know the people. High confidence.