The Finish (13 page)

By 1999, ALEC Station employed twenty-seven people, many of them women. They ran an unorthodox CIA office, very informal. People dressed casually. Because it maintained informants and contacts worldwide, the office was open twenty-four hours a day. Everyone worked long hours so few formalities of office life took hold. Scheuer would nap every afternoon in his office. As their sense of the threat posed by al Qaeda grew, so did their sense of mission. Some in the office, like Scheuer, passed up offers for promotions in order to stay with the work. Marriages broke up. The place had a cultish feel. Because Scheuer presided over so many dedicated women officers, some started calling his group “the Manson family.”

They couldn’t get bin Laden arrested in the Sudan, so they came up with a plan to harass him. He had a number of large projects under way there—road building, agricultural programs, and businesses. He was also actively underwriting terror attacks throughout the region. So ALEC Station proposed sabotaging his construction equipment. They wanted to spike engines with slurry that would force them to seize up. When the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was briefed on the plan, one member objected: “If you do that, won’t you be putting some Sudanese farmer out of work?” The project was scrapped.

Not long afterward, when the attempted assassination of the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was linked to al Qaeda
,
the Sudan was pressured by states in the region to expel bin Laden. He relocated to Afghanistan, where he declared his war on the United States. This move pleased ALEC Station, because the NSA could now listen in on phone conversations in Afghanistan; there was also an enormous archive of overhead imagery left over from the
mujahidin
–Soviet wars, and the CIA had many friendly contacts in that country. In 1997, Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, invited bin Laden to live in Kandahar, at an experimental agricultural station called Tarnak Farms, south of the city. This was an area where the agency had an especially rich network of spies, a group it called “Tripoints.”

For once they could watch bin Laden closely and listen to him and his people. Lacking the authority to kill him, Scheuer’s group laid plans to kidnap him—that would have been in May or June of 1998, several months before the embassy bombings in East Africa. They intended to hold him in a remote mountainous area for interrogation and then fly him to an Arab state for imprisonment (unless the United States decided to prosecute him directly). They fleshed out a raid in detail, a snatch-and-grab mission inside Afghanistan employing a special ops team delivered by helicopter. But when the plan was run up the chain it was vetoed as too risky. American forces might get killed, and because bin Laden lived with his wives and children, some of the children might be harmed. Scheuer recalled being mystified by the decision. He asked, “How much more of a threat do you need before you finally do something?”

When Director George Tenet paid a visit to ALEC Station not long afterward, one of the women on Scheuer’s staff confronted him angrily: “You and the White House are going to get thousands of Americans killed.”

Tenet told them that he understood their anger, but that it would subside. By now the group’s growing sense of urgency, coupled with its cultish image and high number of female staffers, had begun to work against it. They were seen as overly emotional and alarmist. Tenet’s response reflected this subtle prejudice and rankled ALEC Station still further.

“You will all think clearer in a couple of days,” he said.

In August, after the embassy bombings, Scheuer recalls being asked if the plan to kidnap bin Laden could still be pursued. The answer was no. Bin Laden knew that the chances of America taking action would grow after those attacks. He had gone into hiding. They had missed the chance.

By now, the United States was willing to use lethal force on bin Laden. President Clinton authorized two cruise missile strikes soon after the embassy bombings, one targeting Al-Shifa, a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum thought to be developing chemical weapons, and the other targeting a bin Laden camp near Khowst. The missiles hit on August 20, fired from ships in the Arabian Sea. The CIA would estimate that twenty to thirty people were killed—but not bin Laden, who had reportedly left the Khowst camp a few hours earlier.

After that, the project for ALEC Station became pinpointing bin Laden long enough in advance to be targeted. They presented the White House with eight such opportunities, Scheuer recalled, and each time the strike was called off, primarily over concerns about collateral damage. The CIA man had always been prickly and eccentric. He was so much more willing to accept collateral casualties than his superiors—was so convinced that the threat posed by bin Laden warranted drastic, immediate action—that he had begun to be regarded with suspicion. He seemed obsessed.

In 1998, on the Sunday before Christmas, ALEC Station learned that bin Laden was staying in the Haji Habash house, part of the governor’s palace in Kandahar. The CIA had a local spy who knew which wing of the building bin Laden was in, and even which room, because he had escorted him there. It was first-rate, firsthand intelligence, and a target that could easily be reached by Tomahawk missiles launched from ships in the Arabian Sea.

“Hit him tonight—we may not get another chance,” advised Gary Schroen, ALEC Station’s field officer.

Scheuer took it directly to the White House, along with Director Tenet and John Gordon, the deputy director. It was snowing. The three men drove from Langley into D.C. together, but inside the White House only Tenet was allowed into the meeting, which the Clinton administration’s principals joined by teleconference. Scheuer and Gordon waited outside for hours. The missile strike was not authorized. According to The 9/11 Commission Report, there was concern that as many as three hundred people might be killed or injured, and that there was thought to be too great a chance of bin Laden moving at the last minute, as he had before. There was also a mosque nearby that might have been damaged. The CIA men drove back up the George Washington Parkway, disappointed yet again. Scheuer was particularly upset by the administration’s worry about damaging a mosque.

The next day, with the opportunity gone, Scheuer wrote to his field officer, Schroen, that he had not been able to sleep. “I’m sure we’ll regret not acting last night.”

“We should have done it last night,” Schroen wrote back. “We may well come to regret the decision not to go ahead.”

Scheuer’s frustration got the better of him. In 1999 he drafted a memo to the heads of the CIA, complaining about the risks being run to collect timely information, the hours of hard work that went into each targeting opportunity, and the unwillingness of the government to take action.

“[It seemed wrong to] me, to some extent, the idea of continually sending your officers into harm’s way to gather information that is credible and usable and to find the government not willing to use it to defend American people for reasons that [exist only in] their own minds,” he explained years later in an interview for this book. “You know, how racist is it to think that 1.4 billion Muslims are going to rise up and attack the United States because some shrapnel hits a stone mosque in Kandahar? You have to have zero respect for the humanity or the common sense of the Muslim world to expect something like that to happen. And yet, that’s the excuse these brilliant Harvard-trained people come up with.”

He was relieved of responsibility for ALEC Station. As he recalled later, he was told, “We want you to tell your people that you are burned out and don’t worry, we’re going to give you a medal and a monetary award.”

Scheuer said he told them, “Stick it in your ass.”

Everything changed after 9/11, of course. Then the questions all became, Why hadn’t the United States acted against bin Laden more aggressively when it could? “Obsessives” like Scheuer and his “cult” at ALEC Station looked prophetic, not overly emotional. The United States had missed its chance to get bin Laden before his biggest plan bore fruit.

After the invasion of Afghanistan there were battlefield leads that pointed American forces toward a rugged redoubt in Tora Bora, which translates to “Black Cave.” It was in the far easternmost part of the country, near the border with Pakistan, and was reputed to have a byzantine maze of caves, natural and man-made. It was also reputed to be bin Laden’s hideout. When American forces and Afghan militiamen took it in 2001, over a five-day siege, they found lots of small caves and some bunkers, but nothing like the fortress they had imagined. It turned out to be another place the Sheik had recently left.

The best reports said he had fled over the White Mountains into Pakistan, probably before the assault even began. After that . . . nothing.

No, not nothing.

Start with thousands of small bits of information. Names, lots and lots of names. Sightings. Rumors. Interrogation transcripts. Phone numbers. Phone calls. Dates. Addresses. Geographic coordinates. Aerial photographs. Ground surveillance photos. Videos. Faces. Iris images. Gaits. Maps. Fingerprints. Old diaries. E-mails. Web sites. Social media. Text messages. Tweets. Old-fashioned letters. Blogs. News reports. Broadcasts. Bills. Payment schedules. Traffic tickets. Rent payments. Credit card numbers. Charges. Bank account numbers. Deposits. Withdrawals. Transfers. License numbers. Passport numbers. Police reports. Arrests. Travel itineraries. Everything and anything that can be transformed into data. When you’re looking for one person in a world of seven billion, and when that one person does not wish to be found, you cast a wide net.

After 9/11, and after bin Laden escaped Tora Bora, it is safe to say that the United States government was fully engaged in hunting him down. Engaged to a degree that makes the uphill battles of little ALEC Station seem like a basement hobby. The Obama administration might invoke “limited bandwidth” and competing priorities to explain why these efforts fell short, but the truth is that every agency and branch of the vast U.S. military-industrial complex was now fully invested. What did that mean? It meant that finding and eliminating bin Laden was not just a preoccupation of a small group working in a storefront near Langley. It was a central goal. No one would be left waiting in the hall at the White House ever again for permission to strike. But finding bin Laden had also become exponentially more difficult. Tools and networks and units had to be developed to find, fix, and finish al Qaeda and other terror networks like it. What would evolve—this thing they called F3EAD—is worth examining in more detail.

You begin with scraps. Anything that can be transformed into data, those names and numbers and other types of information partially enumerated above. All of that and more, intel from every pipeline: detainee interrogations, HUMINT (human intelligence), SIGINT (signals intelligence), GEOINT (geospatial intelligence), and even something called MASINT (measurement and signature intelligence, which converted into searchable data highly technical things like radar or chemical or sound). Each bit is a potentially useful dot in a vast matrix. Collection flowed from a blizzard of agencies, large and small—CIA, FBI, NSA, NGA, and many more. The SEAL and Delta Force warriors ransacked the hideouts they raided for everything that might contain a lead—they called it “pocket litter.” Who knew which stray fact might lead to bin Laden? Or if any of them ever would? At times the CIA had dozens of analysts working on bin Laden full time, but the sheer number and variety of leads was daunting. There was always a good chance, perhaps a better than even chance, that the Sheik would live out his days in hiding and die peacefully in bed, surrounded by his wives and his many children and the devoted members of his intimate circle, perhaps after leveling one last broadside at the “Head of International Unbelief”—thumbing his nose as he entered paradise. For those who believed in such things, evading the grasp of American justice would lend credence to his claim of divine guidance.

In the end, finding bin Laden would illustrate the most banal of truths about intelligence work. More than genius or courage, it is about effort and patience and will. It is also, of course, about money and time—but when we are talking about a goal assigned top priority by not one but two presidents of the United States, and where time and resources are, in effect, bottomless, it boils down, ultimately, to a steady application of will. President Bush famously kept a chart of wanted terrorists in a desk drawer and would personally X out those who were captured or killed. Bin Laden was always “Number One.” At his regular daily briefings, Bush would routinely ask, “How’re we doing?” and everyone knew what he was talking about. It was the same with Obama. After that impromptu meeting in his office with his new intelligence chiefs in 2009, he would bring it up at nearly every security briefing.

“Are we any closer?”

“What have we learned?”

An intelligence network like America’s is not one but multiple bureaucracies, each with its own specialty—listening, observing, photographing, sensing, probing, analyzing. The strength of such an overlapping structure is that things get looked at more than once, and from every conceivable angle. And the strength of bureaucracy—everyone knows about the weaknesses of bureaucracy but rarely do we consider its strength—is in its limitless capacity for work. Steady, unceasing work, like the trickle of the river that ever so slowly carves a gorge. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, here was an effort that would consume large chunks of the careers of analysts—analysts replaced at intervals with fresher eyes and ears and minds who would eagerly set off down stale trails with new vigor.