500 Days (35 page)

THE DISMAL SHADE

A group of Afghani musicians played in darkness near a C-130 turboprop at Bagram Airfield. Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie, stepped off the aircraft and walked briskly down a red carpet toward a fit, bearded man wearing a long cape and karakul hat. Blair smiled as he shook hands with the man, Hamid Karzai, the newly installed chairman of the Afghan Transitional Administration.

Karzai was a Pashtun leader who had been forced into exile after emerging as a fierce opponent of the Taliban. The American air campaign in October gave Karzai a chance to return to his homeland and take up arms against Taliban rule. Days after the bombing began, he and three colleagues rode motorcycles to the Pakistani border and crossed into Afghanistan. They traveled to Kandahar, where Karzai spent a few weeks taking the pulse of residents, trying to judge if they had tired of the Taliban’s stranglehold on their lives. Quietly, the Afghanis poured out their feelings of bitterness and fear of the regime; the population, Karzai decided, was ready for political change.

To take charge of that mission, Karzai needed supplies, and lots of them. Using his ever-present iridium satellite phone, he contacted American embassies in Rome and Islamabad dozens of times, seeking materials and weaponry so that he and his growing militia could join the campaign against the Taliban. Aid flooded in, and the Americans quickly recognized him as a charismatic and knowledgeable leader who was able to rally people to his side. When the Taliban collapsed, prominent Afghanis gathered in Bonn to form the Transitional Administration. With American support, they named Karzai as chairman of the governing committee.

When Blair arrived in Bagram on January 7, 2002, he was the first Western head of state to visit Afghanistan’s new leader. Out of deference to the danger of this gathering, the arrival ceremony was brief; a group of soldiers from British Special Forces quickly whisked the official party to a line of armored, four-wheel-drive vehicles.

As the caravan made its way slowly over endless tank traps, Karzai spoke confidently about the future of Afghanistan—perhaps a bit too confidently, Blair thought. Finally, the group reached a Russian barracks where Blair was scheduled to sit down with eight other ministers.

They gathered in a large meeting area inside the building. A collection of tables and chairs had been positioned around the room. A drab spread of sweets had been laid out and would remain uneaten.

Karzai opened the discussions but seemed to have little control over his government’s bickering factions. Even as he attempted to express graceful thanks to Blair, other ministers interrupted, openly aggressive and belligerent.

One of the first to speak was a rotund man who bore a striking resemblance to Orson Welles. For several minutes, he thundered about the challenges facing Afghanistan with its crippling poverty and war-weary citizenry.

“We need help,” he said in a derisive tone, suggesting that he doubted Britain would deliver.

“We understand the difficulties faced by your country,” Blair said. “And I want to assure you that Britain will stay with you for the long term.”

Even with all of its problems, Karzai said, his country’s future was brighter. “Afghanistan is well rid of the terrible leadership that came before,” he said. “The Taliban almost destroyed this country, but its people are now prepared to do what is necessary to rebuild.”

The hopeful words did nothing to quiet the tone of distrust and anger in the room; Karzai felt embarrassed about how his compatriots were treating the prime minister. Later, as the meeting drew to a close, he spoke again, trying to rekindle an air of optimism and gratitude.

He faced Blair. “We are all so glad that such a distinguished person as yourself has come to see us, taken the risk,” Karzai said with a smile. “You have demonstrated such goodwill. When the Afghan people hear that you visited us, they will be proud and thrilled.”

The gathering broke up with a few remaining grumbles. On one side of the room, a Special Forces member leaned toward Alastair Campbell, a senior Blair aide.

“Welcome to bandit country,” the soldier whispered.

•  •  •  

The classified threat matrix was delivered by hand and electronically to senior administration officials and to national security outposts around the world. And almost daily, at least one item on this list of potential dangers terrified official Washington.

Since the days after 9/11, the White House had demanded that all information about potential threats be transmitted around the government through the matrix; then intelligence or law enforcement officials were assigned to investigate each item. The data came with almost no filtering; it was, instead, raw intelligence, the kind not usually provided to policy makers. Such information was too easy to misinterpret—the unschooled in the art of spy craft would likely give great weight to insignificant or unreliable reports.

Now every bit of material—from the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense Human Intelligence Operations—was dumped into the matrix. Intelligence was no longer served by the glass, but shot from the fire hose.

Over time, those reviewing the daily list of potential threats found that the experience could be overwhelming—and then numbing. And far too many listed items were absurd on their face.

An official from a CIA office in the Middle East reported that al-Qaeda was preparing to launch a kamikaze-style air assault on an American naval base at a South Pacific island; the navy never had a base on that island, nor had any ship from the Pacific fleet ever docked there. Still, the threat—to a base that didn’t exist—was added to the matrix. Another cable came in from a military investigations unit that bin Laden had been spotted shopping at a post exchange on an American base in East Asia. One investigator joked to a friend that perhaps the United States could locate the al-Qaeda leader by tracing the Visa card he used at the PX. The news about bin Laden’s shopping trip appeared in the matrix.

Then there was a phenomenon called “circular reporting.” After 9/11, hundreds of millions of dollars were pumped into intelligence and law enforcement agencies, which in turn used portions of the money to hire analysts. Within a few months, there were hundreds of new people available all around government to examine and interpret the same bits of detail. A report flowed in from a CIA analyst and was disproved. Days later, the same information—tweaked differently by another analyst—reappeared in the matrix. If investigators could not confirm that the supposed threat was a repeat, they had no choice but to chase down the worthless allegations again.

In one instance, an alcoholic was stopped by local law enforcement in Cleveland; he blurted out that there was a plot to destroy an American Airlines flight leaving from Chicago O’Hare International Airport. The man’s statement bubbled up the line and landed in the matrix. The threat was investigated and dismissed as drunken ravings. Days later, another agency reported a plot to attack an American Airlines plane in Chicago, and a new investigation led back to the same alcoholic. The story reappeared on the threat list at least two more times.

But the matrix could not be ignored, because alongside the junk were terrifying nuggets of credible intelligence. There was detailed and corroborated intelligence about terrorist plans to murder hundreds of schoolchildren, to rapidly execute scores of citizens in ways designed to leave Americans feeling unsafe even in their homes, to use truck bombs and other explosives to destroy buildings or infrastructure, and others.

Information from foreign intelligence services was equally frightening. One European agency reported that radiation meters had detected potentially lethal material coming across a border; subsequent information suggested that it had been smuggled from one country to the next by a terrorist group. But the suspects—along with their unknown shipment—had disappeared into the second country. Multiple reports came in from overseas that al-Qaeda was engaged in an aggressive effort in Malaysia to develop anthrax weapons, raising strong concerns in Washington given the recent terrorist attacks using the bacteria.

These domestic and international reports weighed heavily on Bush—it was a daily dose of horror, depictions of the depraved cruelty that the human mind could conceive. No matter how unlikely some of the scenarios might be, they seemed less improbable than the idea of crashing hijacked planes into buildings would have been before 9/11.

Bush and Cheney told their staffs that they would not stand by agonizing about these heinous plots to murder untold thousands. The administration was going to be aggressive, forward-leaning, pushing as far to the line as possible. Their job was to ensure the safety and security of the American people, and they would do whatever it took to meet that duty.

•  •  •  

A group of American diplomats and generals strutted into the Sarajevo office of Alija Behmen, the prime minister of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

A secretary greeted the visitors—Christopher Hoh, the deputy United States ambassador, and three others from the embassy; General John Sylvester, the American commander for the NATO-led Stabilization Force, known as SFOR,
which was tasked to serve as a peacekeeper in the war-ravaged country; and General David Petraeus, assistant chief of staff with SFOR. Seconds later, Behmen emerged from his office, an expression of cautious cordiality on his face.

“Please, come in,” he said, inviting the group to a meeting room.

The prime minister felt apprehensive as everyone found their seats. He had heard that the Americans were about to pressure him to do something bordering on illegality—maybe even crossing that border. Three months earlier, they had demanded that Behmen order the arrests of six Algerians; they were, the Americans said, cooking up a plot to bomb the United States embassy in Sarajevo. While the Americans gave no information supporting the allegation, they repeatedly assured Behmen that it existed.

Over the past three months, Federation authorities had gathered all of the evidence they could find. They searched the men’s homes and offices, downloaded and analyzed data on their computer, took the machines apart and examined the pieces, checked phone records, interviewed witnesses, and sought information from agencies such as INTERPOL, the FBI, and NATO security forces. They turned up—nothing. Federation officials begged the Bush administration to give them access to the proof that the United States found so convincing, to no avail. The men must stay locked up, the Americans insisted, but neither the police nor the courts could be told why.

There
was
a piece of paper found in one search that listed a phone number and a name similar to that of a senior al-Qaeda operative. But there were problems with the document, and members of the Federation police whispered among themselves that it might have been manufactured by the Americans to ensure these men were taken off the street.

Any defendant in the country could be held without charge for only ninety days, and that time was almost up for the Algerians. With the men’s release looming, the embassy called Behmen and asked for this urgent meeting.