Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (37 page)

Relations between Jordan and Israel weren’t so bad, though, that GID couldn’t hand me off to Mossad at the famous Allenby Bridge over the Jordan River during one of my trips. (I opted for that in lieu of the sixty-six-mile C-17 ride from Amman to Tel Aviv.)

There were other services who turned to us for help. In July 2007, twenty-three very young, very sincere, and very foolish Korean Christian missionaries were kidnapped in Afghanistan. Korea is the most Christian country in Asia, exceptionally devout, and these young Presbyterians had allowed their zeal to outstrip their judgment.

The head of the Korean service was charged with getting them freed, so he flew immediately—
not to Kabul, but to CIA headquarters
—to ask for our assistance. He needed help on the ground in Afghanistan and knew where to find it. I think I surprised him when I offered him a full-time US officer to accompany him. The young man had deep Afghan experience, but the real trump was played when the chief asked through his interpreter if our officer knew any Korean. Without waiting for the translation, the Korean American case officer responded in the affirmative and in Korean, bringing the first smile of the day to the chief’s face.

Sometimes liaison was a pure joy. In July 2008 the Colombian armed forces staged a dramatic rescue of fifteen hostages, including three American contractors who had been held since their observation plane went down five years earlier.

I had visited Bogotá on one of my liaison trips. A long, hard war against the FARC, an insurgency fueled by drug trafficking, was turning the government’s way. Colombia’s tough president, Alvaro Uribe, had
made a big difference since assuming office in 2002, but this was also the product of constant, long-term, unheralded, hard-slogging intelligence work. The kind of stuff that never made the papers or evening news.

When I read of the Colombians’ proposed rescue plan, I thought I was reviewing a grade-B movie script. Two helicopters masquerading as NGO aircraft. A fictitious transfer of the prisoners to senior FARC leadership. Colombian military playing the role of FARC guards. I just shook my head. “Oh, yeah. This’ll work. Sure.”

But it did! The three rescued Americans, whose location was our highest intelligence priority in Colombia for years, were so taken in that one of them resisted the transfer and refused to go. Only after one of the “guards” leaned into him and whispered into his ear, “Trust me, trust me,” did he agree to cooperate.

The rescued Americans visited the agency shortly after their release. Even more touching was the insistence of the Colombian rescue team that they visit Langley as well. I sat with them in my conference room as they informally reviewed the whole operation for me. We took a lot of photos, and they gave me some memorabilia that I still have in my home office. The gratitude ran strong both ways.

One of our most unusual (and productive) liaison relationships wasn’t with a foreign entity at all—it was with the New York City police department. These ties later became controversial, but all along we viewed New York as a special case, an international as well as an American metropolis. Over a third of the city’s residents were born abroad. And New York was certainly at the top of al-Qaeda’s target list. Mayor Bloomberg and his tough police commissioner, Ray Kelly, seemed to agree with us.

Cooperation began informally with a CIA counterterrorism analyst in the city passing threat data to the NYPD. It really took off when Kelly hired Dave Cohen, former head of CIA operations and deputy head of analysis who had also worked in New York, to set up his intelligence division. Cohen built a familiar structure: a directorate for operations (collection) and a directorate for analysis.

Domestic intelligence collection has always been countercultural in America. CIA doesn’t do it; it’s beyond the agency’s charter. Law enforcement is reluctant to do anything without a criminal predicate. No crime, no investigation. Without new attorney general guidelines (which were not forthcoming until December 2008), the FBI would be forever constrained. Besides, NYPD was better qualified for this. They knew their domain cold; they could map threats by zip code.

We decided to embed an analyst within Cohen’s organization. Just like with our other partners, he could help put locally derived information into a global context. He could also engage with the NYPD on the daily threat matrix, which was an almost no-threshold catalogue of dangers. Together with NYPD he studied the local threats to New York and rated them. After all, false positives to industries like fiscal services would lead to the wasteful expenditure of millions of dollars. The threat had to be real.

A lot of this was more or less in place before I arrived, and I saw no reason to change it. I agreed to formal headquarters approval of the ad hoc arrangements in 2007. The bureau wasn’t happy, and I’m sure that we were squeezing more than a paragraph or two of our memorandum of understanding (MOU) with them, but as one of my seniors put it, “This is the right thing to do and, besides, there is no such thing as MOU jail.”

We actually gave NYPD a training slot in our field tradecraft course at the Farm. The idea was to help them develop the tools they needed (since they did have liaison relationships overseas), give them some situational awareness for the counterterrorism business, and sensitize them to counterintelligence threats.

When I was in New York I always tried to drop in on Commissioner Kelly. We struck up a friendship on my first visit as he was proudly showing me the massive desk of one of his predecessors, Theodore Roosevelt. Kelly and I were of like mind on many issues (like the
New York Times
). To this day I wear NYPD cuff links on occasion; I trust he wears the CIA links that I gave him.

In 2012 two industrious AP reporters won the Pulitzer Prize for
Investigative Reporting for a series of stories on the NYPD’s overall counterterrorism effort and CIA’s role in it. The stories intentionally raised all sorts of civil liberties concerns, but although the agency admitted that its effort could have benefited from closer supervision, CIA seemed to reflect the national and city consensus when it responded, “The CIA stepped up cooperation with law enforcement on counterterrorism after 9/11. It’s hard to imagine that anyone is suggesting this was inappropriate or unexpected.”

And we never suggested that this was a generalized model. New York is unique—unique in demographics, unique in size, unique in threat. The NYPD had its main job, fighting crime, under control, and its sheer size (35,000 uniformed officers, about three times the size of the next largest force, Chicago) gave it sufficient scale. NYPD also had strong, veteran leadership in Kelly and unflinching political support from Mayor Bloomberg.

By Dave Cohen’s count, New York City was the target of seventeen terrorist plots between 2002 and the 2011–2013 kerfuffle generated by the AP reporting. Al-Qaeda was 0 for 17. A lot of things contributed to that. One of them was this program. All in all, NYPD was one of the best liaison relationships we had.

It’s probably not surprising that China wasn’t in the same league when it came to intelligence relationships, though it was important enough that I traveled there to meet with a counterpart. In this case it was the head of what we called 3-PLA, the chief of the Third Department of the Chinese general staff, the office responsible for signals intelligence. My host could not have been more gracious, the banquets were spectacular, and we really did have items of common concern—Russian intentions and technical developments, for example.

We also met some political figures in the Great Hall of the People adjacent to the infamous Tiananmen Square. The Great Hall is divided into rooms named after Chinese provinces. Pointedly, we met in the Taiwan room and in the Tibet room, provinces over which Chinese sovereignty is contested. The Chinese never miss an opportunity to make a point.

Although my counterpart was gracious, I couldn’t say the same thing about our security guards. In one instance a balky Chinese driver would not get out of the way of our small convoy as we were speeding toward a meeting. When we finally passed him, I could see in the mirror that police in one of the trail vehicles had stopped, pulled him over, and were starting to beat him as they dragged him from the car. During a later tour of the Forbidden City, a phalanx of large, dark-suited escorts shoved Chinese tourists out of the way to clear a path for us. We feigned fatigue and asked to leave as quickly as possible.

It caused me to wonder how the Chinese thought we would react to all that. Did they know so little about us that they thought we wouldn’t mind? Or maybe they did know us, and didn’t care. Or maybe they were trying to send another message. If they were, I didn’t get it.

With all this liaison activity, it’s surprising that neither Steve nor I went to Moscow during our time together. Old habits die hard, I guess. We had little trust in the Russians and in the one area where we should have had common interests: terrorism. Moscow often conflated violent extremism with legitimate dissent.

The Russian resident, the senior intelligence officer at their Washington embassy, came to the agency once for lunch and discussions. It was pleasant enough, but my chief of staff had the security folks sweep the dining room and my office for bugs after the Russian left.

Our bad. Russia stormed back onto the international scene with a vengeance under Putin. Meeting with them would not have stopped any of that, but it would have given us useful insight into how the Russian Federation was thinking and created equally useful contacts in the Russian services, which we knew were feeding Putin’s paranoia about America’s and the West’s intentions. Liaison sometimes means more than just working an intelligence exchange.

George Tenet had proved that. He had been the go-to guy in a complex relationship with the Palestinians and Yasser Arafat. My deputy, Steve Kappes, when he was director of operations, had negotiated a big
chunk of Libya’s WMD disarmament with Moussa Koussa, the head of Gaddafi’s service.

I later got my chance with the Pakistanis (chapter 18).

 • • • 

R
EVOLUTION IN
E
GYPT.
Hostages along the Andean Ridge and in the Hindu Kush. Russian armor in the Caucasus. The United States has the only intelligence service in the world that is, and is expected to be, global in its field of view. CIA has always tried to live up to that role, but after 9/11 it was a particularly difficult task. As I later told Leon Panetta, we were also America’s combatant command when it came to al-Qaeda.

Years after I left government, I reviewed my Thursday morning briefing scripts for the president and was struck by how much they focused on terrorism, and within terrorism how much they were about South Asia—Pakistan and Afghanistan. And during the last six months of the administration, I was struck that we covered the hunt for HVT-1 (High-Value-Target-1, i.e., bin Laden) and HVT-2 (Zawahiri) in practically every session. We were certainly focused.
*

The CT obsession was on my mind when Dave Petraeus came to visit us at our home as he was preparing for his CIA confirmation hearing in 2011. He and his wife, Holly, peppered Jeanine and me with a variety of questions about life at the agency over coffee cake and juice in our kitchen.

As Dave and Holly were leaving, I pulled him aside for one last observation.

“Dave,” I said, “CIA has never looked more like OSS than it does right now.” The reference was to the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II direct action unit under William “Wild Bill” Donovan.

“But it’s not OSS,” I continued. “It’s the nation’s global espionage
service. And you’re going to have to work every day—like I had to and I’m sure Leon had to—to impose that reality on yourself and on the agency.”

And make sure you do it without making the country any less safe against terrorism, I silently thought. Tough order.

A
re you sure sure they’re there?”
the one who will make the decision asks.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’re sure it’s them?”

“We’ve got good HUMINT. We’ve been tracking with streaming video. SIGINT’s checking in now and confirming it’s them. They’re there.”

“How long have you had capture of the target and who else is around?”

“A couple of hours. The family is in the main building. The guys we want are in the big guesthouse here.”

“They’re not very far apart.”

“No, sir. But far enough. And there’s another outbuilding here. Small. In the past we’ve seen AQ people use it when they stop here. We’re here a lot. So are they. It’s a really dirty compound.”

“Anyone in that little building now?”

“Don’t know. Probably not. We haven’t seen anyone since the Pred got capture of the target.”

“What’s the PK
[probability of kill]
on the
big guesthouse look like with a GBU
[that would be a GBU-12, a laser-guided five-hundred-pound bomb]
?”

“These guys are sure dead. We think the family’s OK.”

“You think they’re OK?”

“They should be. We’ve done the bug splat, but you can never be sure. Structural weakness. They walk out of the house or something.”

“What’s it look like with a couple of Hellfires
[a much smaller weapon with a twenty-pound warhead]
?”

“We’d bring them in this way. All the energy away from the family quarters. The family quarters are fine. If we hit the right room in the guesthouse, we’ll get all the bad guys. But these internal walls can be thick. If we don’t hit the right room or if one of them is up taking a piss . . .”

There’s a long pause in the room.

Finally, the one responsible for the decision speaks.
“Use the Hellfires the way you said.”

An officer leaves the room en route to the ops center with the message.

There is another long pause.

“Tell me again about these guys.”

“Sir, big AQ operators
[he recounts names and history]
. We’ve been trying to track them forever. They’re really careful. They’ve been hard to find. They’re involved in homeland plotting. They’re the first team. They sure as hell have a track record.”

There is another pause. A long one.

“Use the GBU.”

Another, more senior operator jumps from the table and sprints after the first one
.

“And that small building they sometimes use as a dorm . . .”

“Yes, sir.”

“After the GBU hits, if military-age males come out . . .”

“Yes, sir?”

“Kill them.”

Less than an hour later the decision maker is briefed once again.

“Sir, the two targets are dead. There was no damage to the family
quarters, but they’ve all left the compound. Pretty upset. They left quick. No effort to see if there were any survivors in the guesthouse. No one came out of the small building. We didn’t hit it.”

“Good.”

Targeted killing has become a core part of the American way of war, and to do that legally and effectively requires the kind of exquisite intelligence reflected here. It also requires some very difficult operational and political decisions.

CIA plays a part in that, and the agency has acknowledged that it has an intelligence interest and an operational role in the US government’s use of drones. Many details on the extent of that interest and that role remain classified, of course, but I can say that during my time at CIA I was exposed to various aspects of this effort and that I witnessed the kind of decision making described here. Although I won’t discuss details, I can also say that—given my nearly forty years as an air force officer and other senior positions I held in the intelligence community—I was in a unique position to understand, appreciate, and advocate for this effort. I am as much an airman as an intelligence officer, after all.

 • • • 

W
ITHIN TWO WEEKS
of arriving at Langley I got a handwritten note from Stan McChrystal, commander of JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command. CIA and American special operations claim a common bloodline back to World War II’s Office of Strategic Services and its founder, Wild Bill Donovan. A statue of Donovan stares down at the entrance to CIA’s Original Headquarters Building.
*

Coalition forces had just killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the ruthless head of al-Qaeda in Iraq. McChrystal understood better than most the importance of intelligence in the hunt for AMZ. His note was simple. “Mike, Thanks to all of your people. Stan.” “Taking terrorists off the battlefield” was the euphemism the United States used when it killed or captured an al-Qaeda member. Either technique worked, but we obviously preferred capture so we could mine the potential intelligence value of a detainee. That was getting increasingly difficult, though, even in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the American military controlled the environment, and beyond those locations it was getting downright rare.

We were ready to recommend more frequent direct action. We knew that the threat had increased to intolerable levels, both to US forces in South Asia and to the homeland. We were watching terrorist trainees leap off motorbikes, steady themselves, and then begin firing against simulated targets.

We were also confident that the quality of intelligence was good enough to sustain a campaign of very precise attacks. We weren’t claiming perfection. In late 2006 intelligence had enabled a strike on a suspected terrorist, a one-legged chieftain in the Haqqani network. It turned out that the man killed was affiliated with Haqqani, but he wasn’t the senior leader we believed he was. With all the land mines over the past decades, there were a lot of one-legged terrorists in South Asia.

I demanded a full explanation for the misidentification. There was no dodging or excuses. People were thoroughly, maybe even excessively, contrite. He was a bad man, but he wasn’t the target.

I reflected a short time, then told them to study what went wrong and make corrections, but to keep their focus looking through the windshield. “I’ll take care of the rearview mirror.” Later that day I sent word that “if you find another target to nominate this afternoon, I’m still interested.” It was a vote of confidence. I later learned that it was a very big deal for the targeting crew.

I knew we could do this. By early 2008 I was convinced that the IC could routinely provide exquisite intelligence to enable precision
targeting. Our task was to convince the rest of the government that we could and that they should take advantage of it.

We had one other thing going for us that we knew would not last forever. As director of CIA, I got to talk to
this
president every week without any filters. Who knew what it would be like in a year?

I briefed President Bush every Thursday morning on sensitive collection and covert action, and I began to use these sessions to point out the growing al-Qaeda footprint and brazenness in Pakistan’s so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA. My chief analyst on this was a lanky Notre Dame graduate who lived and breathed this work. He educated me almost daily, and I tried to pass this on to the president. The main point was that as bad as this might be for Afghanistan and our forces there, this was fundamentally becoming a threat to the
homeland
.

I never uttered the following sentence to the president, the vice president, or to Steve Hadley through the first half of 2008, but if we had boiled down all of our briefings to just a few words, the essence would have been:
“Knowing what we know now, there will be no explaining our inaction after the next attack.”

I pretty much hit the same theme in the summer of 2008 when I briefed the threat, the intelligence, and potential responses to a large gathering of agency, State, and DOD officials in Dubai. In the federal bureaucracy, that’s called “socializing an idea.” They seemed to get it.

The US government slowly started to put its toe in the water against al-Qaeda in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. A charismatic al-Qaeda operations chief was killed early in 2008. The strike was clean and the target so important that even regional reaction was muted.

Later in the year another AQ senior, active in planning attacks in the West, was killed along with several lieutenants in a similar strike with similar precision and with a similarly restrained response.

In between, a terrorist-affiliated compound was hit as a group gathered. Same result. Same response.

In midsummer, Hellfire missiles ripped through the body of yet another senior AQ operative (who had been active in their WMD program
and who had a $5 million price on his head in the US Rewards for Justice program) and a group of his assistants as they were sleeping in a courtyard to beat the oppressive summer heat.

The United States had finally begun a sustained and robust campaign of targeted killings in South Asia from unmanned aerial vehicles.

Progress had been good, but we knew that we had to proceed carefully. Steve Hadley reminded everyone that mistakes, especially early mistakes, would be devastating. He added that all of this had to be at a digestible pace for domestic and especially for foreign audiences.

And it became clear very quickly that some things would
not
be digestible. In early September, American forces made a shallow penetration into Waziristan in pursuit of militants. Although the raid was successful, it had not gone cleanly, and there were claims of civilian casualties. Islamabad responded very forcefully, lodging a formal protest, with Parliament passing a resolution condemning the action, while Ambassador Patterson was called to the Foreign Ministry for a dressing-down. It was reported that the usually dispassionate director general of military operations, Ahmed Shuja Pasha,
*
completely “lost it” when discussing the raid. The Pakistanis also closed the crucial Torkham highway for a day, an unsubtle reminder that the United States and NATO depended on Pakistani forbearance to use this critical supply route to Afghanistan.

In a perverse (but welcome) way, the raid may have made targeted UAV strikes along the border more acceptable from the Pakistani point of view. Pakistani tolerance also seemed to increase later in September when a suicide truck bomber killed over fifty people in an attack on the Marriott hotel in Islamabad. Some there even went so far as to say that the war on terrorism now had to be Pakistan’s war too.

Based on publicly available sources, there were nearly three dozen attacks like the one on the senior WMD operative in the last seven months of the Bush administration, almost three times the total of the previous
four years combined. Those same sources report that eighteen named senior and mid-level Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders were killed.

The intelligence on which these strikes were conducted was exquisite, based on human intelligence, technical collection, and the near-continuous unblinking stare of the Predator itself. The strikes were particularly telling on al-Qaeda’s operational leaders, who had to move and communicate. They couldn’t afford to hunker down like bin Laden and Zawahiri, whose main contribution to the movement was pretty much just staying alive.

Not that we weren’t interested in the top leaders. We worked hard to locate them; I still remember the briefing I got in late 2007 or early 2008 from our bin Laden cell saying they had a promising lead on a courier they believed might lead them to bin Laden. We didn’t lack for executive emphasis either, as President Bush began most of my Thursday morning briefings for the last six months of his administration with the simple question “Well?” followed by reminding me how many days he had left in office.

My only defense was to show him the chart that we had drawn up of the important operational leaders we were chasing and point out the increasing number of
X
s drawn over their faces.

There were other attacks, dubbed “signature strikes” by the press, that were designed to disrupt known al-Qaeda locations and activities even when specific identities were unknown. Some have criticized these as indiscriminate. They were not.

In fact, intelligence for signature strikes was quite robust, since it
always
had multiple threads and deep history. How else to make a judgment about this compound, at this time, with these visible clues? The data was near encyclopedic.

Many such strikes actually killed high-value targets whose presence may have been suspected but was not certain. And we made no excuses about killing lower-ranking terrorists. The United States viewed these attacks as legitimate acts of war against an opposing armed enemy force,
and in warfare it is regrettably necessary to kill foot soldiers too. The signature strikes had the effect of shrinking the enemy’s bench and the AQ leadership’s sense of safe haven. They also had the indirect effect of protecting intelligence sources and methods, since, from the ground, the strikes may have looked more random than they actually were.

It wasn’t long before intelligence reporting began to confirm our success. There was genuine mental anguish in the vulnerable al-Qaeda leadership. The attacks were seen as brutal and unrelenting and there was no obvious solution to them. There was literally no place to hide.

Years later, in 2015, an American court case against an al-Qaeda member prompted the government to release eight documents from the trove of bin Laden letters captured in Abbottabad in 2011. Bin Laden’s correspondence with his chief lieutenants in 2010 is remarkable in its candor and in its confirmation that we got the intelligence right both before (the targeting) and after (the intended effects) the strikes began.

The letters also confirm that we got the threat to the West and to the homeland right. They are filled with references to foreigners supporting al-Qaeda or undergoing training and preparation. The list includes citizens or residents of Uzbekistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Germany, Bulgaria, Britain, Australia, Canada, the Maldives, Kurdistan, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Algeria, Iran, and the United States.