500 Days (59 page)

“Today we have begun a big project,” Samudra boasted. “Today we have declared war on America.”

Eight months before, the leadership of Jemaah Islamiyah had met in Thailand with Riduan Isamuddin—an al-Qaeda heavy hitter better known as Hambali—to toss around ideas for the next terrorist strike. A plan to bomb embassies and other targets in Singapore had been thwarted by that country’s Internal Security Department, and Hambali had pushed the Southeast Asian terrorists to focus instead on “soft targets”—bars, cafés, or nightclubs frequented by Westerners. Using a series of code words, he suggested five countries where an operation
could be launched, including “Terminal”—the name for Indonesia. Whatever nation was chosen, Hambali emphasized, the primary goal was to kill a lot of “white meat,” his code for Americans.

Hambali was now pushing for the attack to take place on the first anniversary of 9/11, but Samudra refused. They weren’t prepared. They still needed to purchase bomb-making equipment and choose the attack site.

“We will have to wait before establishing a target and a plan,” Samudra told the others in the car. “We need time to seek the target, the means, and, most importantly, the funds.”

The money from the jewelry store robbery was the first step, and Hambali was supposed to provide another $30,000. Despite the delay, Samudra was confident that he and his compatriots would soon inflict renewed fear on America and its allies.

•  •  •  

Zubaydah begged his CIA interrogators to stop as they strapped him down onto the gurney and rotated it fifteen degrees downward. The black cloth was held over his mouth and an officer poured water on his face. Zubaydah’s head filled with liquid.

Nearby, a group of agency officials from Washington watched as Zubaydah tried fruitlessly to struggle. He urinated on himself again, no longer able to control his bladder anytime he was terrified.

The interrogators didn’t want to do this. They had reported to CIA headquarters that Zubaydah had been broken and was now fully cooperative. Senior officials didn’t believe it—he seemed to know bits and pieces, organizational structures of al-Qaeda, a few names, but no details of planned attacks. His name had turned up in so many interceptions of al-Qaeda conversations that they were still convinced Zubaydah was the third-highest-ranking member of the terrorist group, below only bin Laden and Zawahiri.

The information coming out of the interrogations was far different. He was no al-Qaeda mastermind—in fact, there was something
off
about him, almost as if he was mentally ill. He had said repeatedly that he was
not
an al-Qaeda fighter or even a member. He was, instead, a facilitator whose duties were to act as a logistics chief, no more than a terrorist travel agent. His name appeared in so many intercepted conversations—and was linked to so many different attacks—because the al-Qaeda members involved in the terrorist operations were contacting him to help arrange their trips, he maintained.

If true, none of this made Zubaydah a useless catch—far from it. He was a
cog inside the al-Qaeda wheel, and his revelations expanded the American government’s knowledge of the terrorist group’s activities. But his information was often sketchy, and he provided few detailed insights about impending attacks.

To reassure themselves that he was holding nothing back, the CIA officials wanted to observe Zubaydah’s behavior during a harsh interrogation. Afterward, their bosses agreed—Zubaydah was cooperating. He had been waterboarded again for nothing.

•  •  •  

The black, double-folded cable slashed at Abdullah Almalki’s feet, his Syrian interrogators cracking it like a whip. It was August 24, and Almalki—the Canadian citizen who had been seized during a trip to Damascus to visit his sick grandmother—was approaching his fourth month in captivity.

Throughout that time, he had been tortured relentlessly. They had beaten him with the cable for seven hours straight, counting off a thousand lashes. They had stuffed him into a tire while pounding him, hung him off the ground by his arms, slapped him, kicked him. He occasionally was able to peek from under his blindfold and saw that his tormentors were formulating their questions from documents they were studying.

Eventually, he came to believe that the Canadian government was aiding the Syrians. At one point he was asked questions about his business that could have come only from paperwork seized in his office during a search by Canadian law enforcement. Another time, he was asked questions about material found in his parents’ house; police officials took that, too. The Canadians would later deny having shared any of the information with the Syrians. They had, however, provided it to the Americans.

The belief that his country had abandoned him—and, indeed, was participating in his torture—nearly overwhelmed Almalki with grief. Most galling of all was the sheer pointlessness of his ordeal. If he lied, he was tortured. If he told the truth, he was tortured. If he said nothing, he was tortured. There was no way to make the brutality stop.

The blackest moment, though, came when he realized that children were in this horrible place. Almalki was in an interrogation room when he saw a boy, about eight years old, taking his younger sister to the bathroom. He learned that up to twenty mothers and ten children were being held. The mothers were tortured; he could hear them when they were returned to their crying children, broken, bloodied, and moaning in pain.

•  •  •  

In a seventh-floor office at CIA headquarters, Cofer Black sat at his desk, angrily writing on a yellow legal pad. He was sick of politicians yammering about how the agency’s counterterrorism unit had fallen down on the job before 9/11. This testimony he was preparing would be his first chance to publicly slam the critics that he saw as reckless and uninformed.

Black had stepped down as head of the Counterterrorist Center in May and since then had been working out of an office in the suite of the CIA’s general counsel, John Rizzo. He filled his days reviewing documents and putting thoughts to paper as he readied himself to appear before Congress’s Joint Select Committee on Intelligence, which was investigating the 9/11 attacks.

Members of the committee had offered him the chance to speak at the hearing from behind a screen to protect him against potential retribution from terrorists. He refused—he wasn’t going to hide. His people who had been on the front lines for years in the war against the jihadists—those men and women who had dedicated so much of their lives to protecting the country—were being smeared as responsible for the deaths of three thousand of their fellow citizens. Black wanted to stand in public, telling the truth about the selfless commitment of these anonymous heroes who had struggled valiantly with too little money, too little support, and too much work. The White House knew it; Congress knew it; the entire national security apparatus knew it. The CIA’s inspector general had even issued a report, just weeks before 9/11, saying what a good job the unit was doing, particularly given its meager resources.

But even
with
all of those hurdles, his people had detected the rumblings of the coming attack. He had personally briefed Rice about the warning signs of an imminent terrorist strike. Then the White House did . . . nothing. And now senior members of the administration were—just as Black had always expected—blaming the CIA for not warning them enough, or not pinpointing the time and place of the attacks.

It took 9/11 to sweep aside all of the impediments. The counterterrorism unit received all the money and people it needed. After months of administration hemming and hawing over using the armed Predator, the bird was cleared for takeoff. Restrictions against sharing intelligence with the FBI were tossed out. There was no longer hand-wringing from the White House about conducting proactive operations against terrorists.

Black was never one to use mealymouthed words to get a point across. So he needed some hard-edged phrase to convey to Congress how restrained his CIA unit had been before 9/11, and how everything had changed afterward.

Some sort of graphic analogy. Something like “unchained the junkyard dog.” But not quite. America wasn’t a junkyard and the counterterrorism personnel weren’t dogs. It was the wrong metaphor.

He gave it more thought, and the perfect phrase popped into his mind. He scribbled it down on his legal pad.

“After 9/11,” he wrote, “the gloves came off.”

•  •  •  

On the evening of August 27 in Karachi, an al-Qaeda operative removed the lid on a Nera WorldPhone and connected to an Intelsat communications satellite stationed over the Indian Ocean. The terrorist—one of the planners of the 9/11 attack—entered a phone number into the desktop system and reached an associate who was also tied to the terrorist group.

The first man spoke in code, his words beamed into orbit. Before the flow of digital data could be relayed back down to earth, it was intercepted by another satellite operated on behalf of the NSA by the American government’s National Reconnaissance Office.

Technical experts picked through the conversation and began to suspect that the unidentified caller was involved in transporting al-Qaeda members out of Pakistan, where many of them had fled after the war in Afghanistan began. The analysts ran voice comparisons with other recordings and hit the mother lode. They matched the voice with one on the yet-to-be-broadcast Al Jazeera interview with bin al-Shibh and Sheikh Mohammed, a recording that had been turned over to the CIA by the emir of Qatar.

The man on the phone was bin al-Shibh. American intelligence now knew the city where one of the planners of 9/11 was hiding. The Pakistanis had proved themselves trustworthy in the capture of Abu Zubaydah and perhaps could help with this search. The CIA passed the information to the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, asking for help. The hunt would last fifteen days.

•  •  •  

Cheney was angry. The Iraq debate had been playing out around the world—in newspaper articles, think-tank reports, speeches by geopolitical Einsteins—but the administration had barely made a peep to explain its position. It was imperative, the vice president told Bush, to let the public know where they stood, and why. And he would like to make the case himself. Bush agreed, but didn’t ask Cheney for details of what he planned to say.

•  •  •  

The stage at the Nashville convention for the Veterans of Foreign Wars was splashed in red and blue from the curtains to the lighting to the dais. After an effusive introduction, Cheney stood and approached the podium, taking a place in front of a giant, red oval emblazoned with the group’s logo.

“As members of the VFW,” he began, “you are united by common experiences and shared commitments.”

For the next few minutes, Cheney wandered down familiar paths—praising the integrity of veterans, their history of leadership on great issues of the day, their closeness with the administration. Predictably, he spoke, too, about homeland security, 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, and the pursuit of bin Laden.

Then, a shift. “Containment is not possible when dictators obtain weapons of mass destruction and are prepared to share them with terrorists who intend to inflict catastrophic casualties on the United States,” he said. “The case of Saddam Hussein, a sworn enemy of our country, requires a candid appraisal of the facts.”

Since the rout of Iraqi forces in the Gulf War, Saddam had agreed to abide by U.N. resolutions calling for him to cease the development of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. But he broke his promises.

“We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons,” Cheney said. “Among other sources, we have gotten this from first-hand testimony of defectors.”

Attempts by the international community to keep Saddam in check had failed, Cheney said, because he devised an elaborate program to hide his arms-building efforts.

“One must keep in mind the history of the U.N. inspection teams in Iraq,” he said. “Even as they were conducting the most intrusive system of arms control in history, the inspectors missed a great deal.”

That track record provided strong reason to question any suggestion that bringing the weapons inspectors back would end the threat posed by Iraq. “On the contrary,” Cheney said, “there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow ‘back in his box.’ ”

And while the world relaxed to the soothing assurances from U.N. inspectors, Saddam would just keep plotting.

“There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Cheney said. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

Americans could not wish away this mortal threat, he said. Their elected leaders instead had to consider all available options. Those who believed that
opposing Saddam would damage the broader war on terror were wrong. Instead, Cheney said, regime change in Iraq would inspire freedom-loving people to topple dictatorships in other lands. Extremists would have to rethink their strategy of jihad. The people in Iraq would celebrate the overthrow of their tyrants, just as Afghanis in Kabul had welcomed their American liberators.

“With our help,” Cheney said, “a liberated Iraq can be a great nation once again.”

After a few closing remarks, Cheney stepped away from the podium. The crowd erupted in applause.

•  •  •  

At the White House, horror.

Cheney had issued what amounted to the moral equivalent of a declaration of war. He had gone far beyond any policy yet decided by Bush. He had stuck a finger in the eye of the U.N., dismissing weapons inspection as not only foolhardy, but dangerous. And his backhanded slap at the international community had been delivered at a time when Blair was phoning several times a week, urging Bush to give the U.N. one last try. To the president’s consternation, Cheney had just put America’s partnership with Britain into jeopardy, at a time when Blair’s support for the administration’s policy was crucial.

And no one in the White House had known ahead of time that Cheney was going to publicly utter such inflammatory pronouncements.