Ghost Wars (81 page)

Black underlined this point to the bin Laden unit as its chief prepared to fly to Central Asia. The CIA would be interpreting this White House policy rule at its peril. It would be up to the agency’s colonel-level officers to decide, day in and day out, what kind of intelligence aid would “fundamentally alter” Massoud’s military position against the Taliban and what would not. If they did not get this right, they could wind up in a federal courtroom, Black warned.

Rich, the Algiers veteran and bin Laden unit chief, led the JAWBREAKER team to the Panjshir in October 1999. They flew secretly to Dushanbe, the pockmarked capital of the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, a desolate city recovering from postcommunist civil war. At an airfield where Massoud maintained a clandestine logistics base, they boarded an old Soviet-made Mi-17 transport helicopter and swooped toward Afghanistan’s jagged, snow-draped northern peaks.

Beyond the Anjuman Pass, two miles high, they descended into the narrow, cragged river valley that was Massoud’s fortress homeland. He had agreed to receive the CIA team at his principal residence, in a compound near where his family had lived for generations and where Massoud’s own legend as an anti-Soviet guerrilla leader had been born. They stayed for seven days. Most of the time they worked with Massoud’s intelligence officers on operations, equipment, and procedures for communication. The CIA set up secure lines between Massoud, his Dushanbe safehouses, and the Counterterrorist Center at Langley so that any fix on bin Laden’s whereabouts could be instantly transmitted to CIA headquarters and from there to the White House.
33

Rich and his team met with Massoud twice, once at the beginning of the visit and once at the end. The CIA officers admired Massoud greatly. They saw him as a Che Guevara figure, a great actor on history’s stage. Massoud was a poet, a military genius, a religious man, and a leader of enormous courage who defied death and accepted its inevitability, they thought. Among Third World guerrilla leaders the CIA officers had met, there were few so well rounded. Massoud prayed five times a day during their visit. In his house there were thousands of books: Persian poetry, histories of the Afghan war in multiple languages, biographies of other military and guerrilla leaders. In their meetings Massoud wove sophisticated, measured references to Afghan history and global politics into his arguments. He was quiet, forceful, reserved, and full of dignity, but also light in spirit. The CIA team had gone into the Panjshir as unabashed admirers of Massoud. Now their convictions deepened even as they recognized that the agency’s new partnership with the Northern Alliance would be awkward, limited, and perhaps unlikely to succeed.

The meetings with Massoud were formal and partially scripted. Each side spoke for about fifteen minutes, and then there was time for questions and answers.

“We have a common enemy,” the CIA team leader said. “Let’s work together.”
34

Massoud said he was willing, but he was explicit about his limitations. Bin Laden spent most of his time near Kandahar and in the eastern Afghan mountains, far from where Massoud’s forces operated. Occasionally bin Laden visited Jalalabad or Kabul, closer to Massoud’s lines. In these areas Massoud’s intelligence service had active agents, and perhaps they could develop more sources.

Because he had a few helicopters and many battle-tested commanders, the CIA team also hoped to eventually set up a snatch operation in which Massoud would order an airborne assault to take bin Laden alive. But for now the Counterterrorist Center had no legal authority from the White House to promote lethal operations with Massoud. The initial visit was to set up a system for collection and sharing of intelligence about bin Laden, and to establish connections with Massoud for future operations.

The agency men recognized that in their focus on bin Laden they were promoting a narrow “American solution” to an American problem in the midst of Afghanistan’s broader, complex war. Still, they hoped Massoud would calculate that if he went along with the CIA’s capture operation, it might lead eventually to a deeper political and military alliance with the United States.
35

Massoud told the CIA delegation that American policy toward bin Laden was myopic and doomed to fail. The Americans put all their effort against bin Laden himself and a handful of his senior aides, but they failed to see the larger context in which al Qaeda thrived. What about the Taliban? What about Pakistani intelligence? What about Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates?

Even if the CIA succeeded in capturing or killing bin Laden, Massoud argued to his CIA visitors, the United States would still have a huge problem in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda was now much bigger than bin Laden or al-Zawahiri alone. Protected by the Taliban, its hundreds and even thousands of international jihadists would carry on bin Laden’s war against both the United States and secular Central Asian governments.

“Even if we succeed in what you are asking for,” Massoud told the CIA delegation, as his aide and translator Abdullah recalled it, “that will not solve the bigger problem that is growing.”
36
This part of the conversation was tricky for the Americans. The CIA team leader and his colleagues privately agreed with Massoud’s criticisms of American policy. The CIA men saw little distinction between al Qaeda and the Taliban. They felt frustrated by the State Department diplomats who argued moderate Taliban leadership might eventually expel bin Laden bloodlessly.

The Americans told Massoud they agreed with his critique, but they had their orders. The policy of the United States government now focused on capturing bin Laden and his lieutenants for criminal trial. Yet this policy was not static. Already the CIA was lobbying for a new approach to Massoud in Washington—that was how they had won permission for this mission in the first place. If they worked together now, built up their cooperation on intelligence collection, the CIA—or at least the officers in the Counterterrorist Center—would continue to lobby for the United States to choose sides in the Afghan war and support Massoud. The CIA could not rewrite government policy, but it had influence, they explained. The more Massoud cooperated against bin Laden, the more credible the CIA’s arguments in Washington would become.

Massoud and his aides agreed they had nothing to lose. “First of all it was an effort against a common enemy,” recalled Abdullah. “Second, we had the hope that it would get the U.S. to know better about the situation in Afghanistan.” As the counterterrorism and intelligence work grew, the United States might finally intervene in the Afghan war more forcefully, “perhaps in the later stages,” Massoud calculated, as Abdullah recalled it.
37

Meanwhile, if Massoud’s men found themselves “in a position to kill Osama bin Laden, we wouldn’t have waited for approval from the United States,” Abdullah recalled. “We were not doing this just for the U.S. interests. We were doing it for our own interests.”
38

In the end Massoud’s men did not object to the discussions about legal limitations as much as they did to what they saw as the selfish, single-minded focus of American policy. “What was irritating was that in this whole tragedy, in this whole chaotic situation, at times that a nation was suffering,” recalled one of Massoud’s intelligence aides who worked closely with the CIA during this period, “they were talking about this very small piece of it: bin Laden. And if you were on our side, it would have been difficult for you to accept that this was the problem. For us it was an element of the problem but not the problem.”
39

The CIA team pledged to push Massoud’s arguments in Washington, but they sensed their own isolation in the American bureaucracy. They understood State’s objections. They knew that backing Massoud’s grinding war against the Taliban carried many risks and costs, not least the certainty of more Afghan civilian deaths. They had to make the case—unpopular and to many American officials still unproven—that the Taliban and al Qaeda posed such a grave risk to the United States that it required an extraordinary change.

26

“That Unit Disappeared”

THE JAWBREAKER TEAM choppered out to Dushanbe, leaving Afghanistan clandestinely across the Tajikistan border. Within a few weeks, several hundred miles to the south, four young middle-class Arab men who had sworn themselves to secrecy and jihad entered Afghanistan from Pakistan. The Taliban facilitated their travel and accommodation, first in Quetta and then in Kandahar.
1

Mohammed Atta, thirty-one, was a wiry, severe, taciturn Egyptian of medium height, the only son of a frustrated Cairo lawyer who had pushed his children hard. He had just earned a degree in urban planning from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, completing a 152-page thesis on development planning and historic preservation in ancient Aleppo, Syria. Ziad Jarrah was the only son of a Lebanese family that drove Mercedes cars, owned a Beirut apartment, and kept a vacation home in the country. He had emigrated to Germany to attend the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, where he studied aircraft construction. He initially caroused and smoked hashish, fell tumultuously in and out with his Turkish girlfriend, and then grew intensely religious and withdrawn. His girlfriend challenged his Islamic beliefs; at times he hit her in frustration. Marwan al-Shehhi had been raised amid the prosperity of the United Arab Emirates in the years of the OPEC oil boom. He served as a sergeant in the U.A.E. army. His parents, too, could afford a German university education for him. Of the four conspirators, only Ramzi Binalshibh, then twenty-five, could not rely on family money. Small, wiry, talkative, and charismatic, he excelled in school and won a scholarship to college in Bonn, but his widowed mother struggled at home in rural Yemen. The Binalshibhs came from Amad, a town in the mountains of Hadramaut province—the province from which, six decades earlier, Mohammed bin Laden struck out for Saudi Arabia to make his name and fortune.
2

The arrival of the four in Afghanistan suggested the complexity of al Qaeda just as American intelligence began to grasp more firmly its shape and membership. In their classified reports and assessments, analysts in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center described al Qaeda by 1999 as an extraordinarily diverse and dispersed enemy. The mid-1990s courtroom trials in the World Trade Center bombing and related cases, and evidence from the Africa bombing investigations, had revealed the organization as a paradox: tightly supervised at the top but very loosely spread at the bottom. By 1999 it had become common at the CIA to describe al Qaeda as a constellation or a series of concentric circles. Around the core bin Laden leadership group in Afghanistan—the main target of the CIA’s covert snatch operations—lay protective rings of militant regional allies. These included the Taliban, elements of Pakistani intelligence, Uzbek and Chechen exiles, extremist anti-Shia groups in Pakistan, and Kashmiri radicals. Beyond these lay softer circles of financial, recruiting, and political support: international charities, proselytizing groups, and radical Islamic mosques, education centers and political parties from Indonesia to Yemen, from Saudi Arabia to the Gaza strip, from Europe to the United States.
3

Al Qaeda operated as an organization in more than sixty countries, the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center calculated by late 1999. Its formal, sworn, hard-core membership might number in the hundreds.
4
Thousands more joined allied militias such as the Taliban or the Chechen rebel groups or Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines or the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. These volunteers could be recruited for covert terrorist missions elsewhere if they seemed qualified. New jihadists turned up each week at al Qaeda–linked mosques and recruitment centers worldwide. They were inspired by fire-breathing local imams, satellite television news, or Internet sites devoted to jihadist violence in Palestine, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Many of the Arab volunteers from countries such as Algeria or Yemen were poor, eager, and undereducated; they had more daring than ability and could barely afford the airfare to Pakistan. Yet some were middle class and college-educated. A few—like the four men who arrived secretly in Kandahar in the autumn of 1999: Atta, Jarrah, al-Shehhi, and Binalshibh—carried passports and visas that facilitated travel to Europe and the United States. These relatively elite volunteers moved like self-propelled shooting stars through al Qaeda’s global constellation. Their reasons to join were as diverse as their transnational biographies. In many ways they retraced the trails of radicalization followed in the early 1990s by Ramzi Yousef and Mir Amal Kasi. They were mainly intelligent, well-educated men from ambitious, prosperous families. They migrated to Europe, studied demanding technical subjects, and attempted—unsuccessfully—to establish themselves as modern professionals far from the family embrace and conservative Islamic culture they had known in their youths. As they joined a violent movement led by the alienated, itinerant son of a Saudi construction magnate and a disputatious, ostracized Egyptian doctor, they pledged their loyalty to men strikingly like themselves.

The Hamburg cell, as it came to be known, coalesced at a shabby mosque in the urban heart of Germany’s gray, industrial, northern port city. A coffee shop and a gymnasium for bodybuilders squeezed the Al Quds Mosque where Arab men in exile gathered for prayers, sermons, and conspiracy. Prostitutes, heroin dealers, and underemployed immigrants shared the streets. A 330-pound Syrian car mechanic who was a veteran of Afghanistan’s wars championed bin Laden’s message at the mosque. Mohammed Haydar Zammar was one of perhaps hundreds of such self-appointed soapbox preachers for al Qaeda scattered in city mosques and Islamic centers around the world. Zammar was well known to CIA and FBI counterterrorist officers based in Germany. The CIA repeatedly produced reports on Zammar and asked German police to challenge him. But German laws enacted after the Holocaust elaborately protected religious freedom, and German police did not see al Qaeda as a grave threat. The young men who came to pray with Zammar gradually embraced his ideas and his politics; Zammar, in turn, saw their potential as operatives.
5