The 9/11 Wars (8 page)

A FAILURE OF INTELLIGENCE

Key to the speed at which the conspiracy theories spread was incredulity that Western security services could not have prevented the attacks. Much has now been written about this failure, one of the greatest of the many intelligence failures of recent decades. There is no space here to tell once again the long story of administrative squabbles, petty bureaucratic feuds and institutional failings that allowed the 9/11 hijackers to avoid the attention of American law-enforcement agencies despite the plethora of individual clues to their presence and plans that were uncovered through the spring and summer of 2001. In very simple terms, the 9/11 hijackers slipped through the gap between domestic security services looking for American citizens attacking in America and overseas security services, mainly the CIA, looking for foreign citizens attacking US interests overseas. Though it was understood that a third scenario – foreign citizens attacking in the US – was increasingly likely, the systems to deal with such an eventuality were not in place. The CIA picked up the trail of key individuals in the 9/11 plot in Malaysia but was unable to exploit the opportunity they were given to unravel the conspiracy. When the 9/11 teams did arrive in the US, a series of errors, avoidable delays and bad luck meant they evaded detection and capture. Finally no one had imagined terrorists ever using tactics like those that the hijackers were to adopt.

There is no space either to retell the story of the failure of various attempts to eliminate bin Laden in the late 1990s. What appears clear, however, is that, though American decision-makers undoubtedly recognized the threat bin Laden and his associates posed to US and other nations’ interests, certainly from 1998 onwards, they simply did not have the mental, legal, technical and cultural equipment to formulate and execute an effective policy to counter that threat.
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One reason for this was the lack of a legal framework to deal with an amorphous, dynamic and fragmented movement based more on personal relations and a shared worldview than on formal membership of an organization. So when in 2001 the perpetrators of the 1998 embassy bombings went on trial in New York, al-Qaeda was represented in the courtroom as a classic hierarchical terrorist group. Prosecutors and investigators were constrained both by their training and the legal tools at their disposal to fit this radically new phenomenon into a pre-existing schema, deploying laws designed to fight serious crime in order to obtain convictions. Equally, the nature of Islamic militant activism posed difficulties when it came to pre-emptive action to stop a plot. At what point and against whom, senior Clinton administration figures asked, could one intervene with military force before an attack took place? Was it justified to assassinate bin Laden when there was no direct evidence linking a conspiracy to him?
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One result of this ongoing debate was a lack of concrete purpose. ‘No one said kill him. The word used was “neutralized”, which covers a multitude of sins,’ remembered Jack Cloonan, who was a special agent for the FBI’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 2002.
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A further problem was finding a way of using military force against these irregular fighters in a distant country who, despite their unconventional structure and behaviour, nonetheless threatened attacks that could incur levels of physical destruction and casualties which had previously been the monopoly of states. American defence spending in 2000 was budgeted at $267 billion, with intelligence agencies receiving significant resources too, but this did not mean the right tools had been developed for such a technically difficult task.
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A project to mount missiles on the new unmanned surveillance drones being developed was being held up by squabbles between government departments and intelligence agencies over its funding. There were also problems with putting ‘boots on the ground’, i.e. combat troops into Afghanistan. The military, suited by habit, doctrine and equipment to fight single, strategically critical battles against conventional enemies, showed both an innate conservatism and an understandable reluctance to get involved with unorthodox plans often hatched by civilians whom they saw as dangerous amateurs.
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The missile strikes on Afghanistan and in the Sudan following the 1998 east African bombings had been an embarrassing failure, missing all major targets, killing a few recruits from Pakistani-based militant organizations who had camps in Afghanistan that were independent of those of al-Qaeda, incinerating a few tents and destroying what appeared to be a factory for making veterinary antibiotics at a total cost of more than $50 million.

Through 1999 and 2000 many alternative plans for ‘neutralizing’ bin Laden were discussed and rejected. Complicating the situation was an absence of actionable intelligence. This was inevitable given the lack of cultural resources suffered by Western intelligence services and the weaknesses in the relations with their counterparts in the Islamic world. The CIA and counterparts elsewhere in the West, with the possible exception of the French DGSE, had a very limited number of Arabists, and almost no one who spoke the languages of Afghanistan or Pakistan with any proficiency. MI6 did not have a single Pashto-speaker on its staff in 2001.
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The consequences of this lack of both a ground presence and detailed understanding were exacerbated by an increasing reliance on high technology and communications intercepts in place of so-called HUMINT, intelligence gathered by live human beings on the ground. Then there were the tight restrictions under which the CIA in particular worked. Often living in diplomatic compounds, sometimes not even speaking local languages, hedged round by security restrictions, intelligence operatives found even the most banal of relations with their local counterparts difficult. Developing the kind of range of contacts they needed for a genuine understanding of any given society, culture, country or community and the various forms of militancy and extremism it could produce was almost impossible. Many stations had been shut down in the early 1990s, and often the US agencies simply had no permanent physical presence. In Tajikistan, marginal in global terms perhaps but crucial for Afghanistan, the level of lawlessness and street violence was deemed ‘simply too great to allow CIA officers to visit there for more than a day or two at a time … once a month’.
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The CIA had few high-quality assets in Afghanistan, though they had developed a range of basic tribal contacts, and none within the senior ranks of the Taliban or circles close to bin Laden.

The degree of ignorance of local conditions was illustrated by a plan during the summer of 2001 to use Ahmed Shah Massood’s northern troops to attack or capture bin Laden, despite the fact that their target spent most of his time hundreds of miles from the dwindling pocket of territory Massood and his allies held. Massood’s men were predominantly Tajik and thus instantly recognizable outside parts of the north-east and Kabul. This posed an evident tactical problem. To show willing, Massood sent a detachment to fire some rockets into a training camp near Darunta when it was thought bin Laden might be in the vicinity.
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Predictably the strike had no effect. In the capital, a series of attempts were made to find out where bin Laden stayed and when he would be there. These too came to nothing.
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In the end it was al-Qaeda who, with lethal consequences, penetrated Massood’s security, killing the best asset America had in the country.

Another major obstacle was poor intelligence passed on by those who did have a better handle on what was going on than their Western counterparts. Despite relatively close relations with the Americans, information flowing from services in countries such as Jordan, Egypt and Algeria was designed primarily to convince the US government of the bona fides, stability and competence of the organization and government supplying it, not to give the recipient a fair and accurate assessment of distinctly sensitive issues such as international extremism or their own problems with domestic radical Muslim activism. Equally, key potential allies like the Pakistanis or the Saudi Arabians simply could not be trusted. Though it was in fact a variety of factors (including a last-minute decision by a driver) that had saved bin Laden from the missiles fired at eastern Afghanistan by Clinton in the wake of the 1998 east African bombings, US intelligence officials were convinced that their target had been tipped off by Pakistani security services.
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Following blasts targeting American troops in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, Riyadh’s security services had done as much to hinder American agencies’ investigations as to aid them. As for Yemeni authorities supposedly assisting Americans tracking those behind the attack on the USS
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in 2000 they were ‘worse than a joke’, according to US officials working on the file at the time.
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Indian intelligence fed a steady stream of highly politicized ‘findings’ to American counterparts throughout this period. These were largely focused on proving Osama bin Laden’s connection to, or even presence in, the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir.
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A variety of Middle Eastern intelligence services insisted that the Saudi was seriously ill from a kidney disease, a falsehood that was to surface regularly over the following years.
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Despite the obstacles, an understanding of what was happening in Afghanistan did gradually emerge. The CIA had set up a special unit to track bin Laden in 1996, which, after a difficult start, had begun to formulate a more accurate vision of the man and his operations.
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When it came to individual threats, formidable resources could be deployed. Following the 1998 east African attacks an extraordinary and very successful investigation led by the FBI saw the rapid detention of many of the key individuals involved. When it was feared that Islamic militants were planning a series of attacks on the eve of the new millennium, a vast worldwide operation of intelligence gathering, analysis and interdiction was launched. Hundreds of CIA officials worked round the clock through the last weeks of December 2000, checking every lead, trawling through vast banks of intercepted communications or reports received from overseas stations and foreign services. ‘It was extremely intense. There were rows of people sitting in jeans and sweatshirts all day and all night, all through the weekends,’ remembered Art Keller, a junior CIA official involved in the effort. ‘There was a genuine sense of urgency and threat.’
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But despite the growing body of knowledge about what was going on in Afghanistan, the true nature of the threat posed by al-Qaeda and Islamic militancy as it evolved in the last years of the twentieth century still seemed to escape many senior intelligence and counter-terrorist officials and, more importantly perhaps, their political masters. The shrill warnings from the CIA’s bin Laden unit – Alec Station – earned its staff a reputation as fanatics who suffered from a lack of perspective.
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Just a year or so before the September 11 attacks, researching the international militants in Pakistan was the job of the most junior member of the MI6 station in Islamabad.
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One key weakness was intelligence on exactly who was travelling to the camps in Afghanistan. In the years following the attacks counter-terrorist agencies would make massive efforts to fill this gap, working feverishly to understand the identity of those attracted in such numbers by the structures that al-Qaeda and a multitude of other groups had created there in the late 1990s. ‘In retrospect, there was one question we simply never really tried hard enough to answer,’ remembered one former MI6 officer. ‘Who were the volunteers?’
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THE VOLUNTEERS

Male, young, Muslim but otherwise very varied, those in the camps were the products of various broad trends affecting Islamic communities across a vast stretch of territory from Morocco to Malaysia, via Europe, the Balkans and central Asia.
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Though some were from developed Western countries, often second-generation immigrants or converts, most came from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Yemen and Algeria.
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There were, the Pakistani ambassador to Kabul at the time cabled home, also hundreds of central Asians, Bangladeshis and a hundred or so Uighurs.
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Three elements were immediately striking. The first was the age of the volunteers – eighteen to twenty-eight for the most part, which placed them firmly in the ‘youth bulge’ seen across the Islamic world in the late 1990s. They were the children of the economic boom in the Middle East fuelled by the oil price hikes that followed the 1973 Arab–Israeli war. Each stage of their relatively short lives had been marked by a new broad ideological development. Their first memories would have been of a time when the secular pan-Arab or nationalist ideas which had been dominant since the colonial powers left the region were being questioned in an unprecedented way following decades of economic mismanagement and graft. They had grown up during the 1980s, a decade which saw political Islamism come of age as a mass ideology in their countries of origin, particularly when left-wing ideologies were fatally undermined by the collapse of the Soviet Union. They were teenagers at precisely the time when political Islamism itself had began to lose momentum in the face of intransigent regimes and a failure to broaden its appeal beyond sections of the conservative urban middle and upper working class. And they reached adulthood at exactly the moment when the violent insurgencies of the early 1990s which had followed the failure of the Islamist project themselves began to run into difficulties as their indiscriminate brutality alienated potential supporters. In their short lives, therefore, the young men who ended up in the camps in Afghanistan between 1998 and 2001 had seen the failure of the nationalism of the first mid-twentieth-century postcolonial regimes, the socialism or pan-Arabism of their largely incompetent successors, the moderate Islamism of the opposition groups in many of their homelands and finally the violent extremism targeting local regimes. The new internationalist extremism of men like bin Laden was, at the very least, untried.
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