The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS (11 page)

9/11 would also take the Agency in some ways back to its roots—back to the paramilitary days of the Office of Strategic Services, the country’s World War II intelligence service. Never before had the Agency had as much latitude to conduct paramilitary operations, and it used those authorities aggressively to protect the country. There would, of course, be a downside to the aggressive use of these authorities. CIA suffered political blowback against some of the operations and activities that were covered by these authorities, particularly our detention and enhanced interrogation program in the early years after 9/11.

Perhaps the biggest downside to our necessary focus on terrorism was the cost to the Agency’s ability to be a global intelligence service—to have the access around the world to be able to warn the president in advance of developments that could undermine US national security. There is no doubt in my mind that the resource shift and focus on terrorism were in part responsible for our failure to more clearly foresee some key global developments such as Russia’s renewed aggressive behavior with its neighbors.

These failures occurred because the additional personnel resources provided by multiple administrations and Congresses to fight the war against al Qa‘ida never fully covered everything we needed to do that—so we had to rob Peter to pay Paul. During the 1990s, the Agency workforce had shrunk by almost 25 percent—our contribution to the “peace dividend.” It was the leanest of times. And while the workforce grew significantly after 9/11, the number of employees at the Agency today is just slightly larger than it was in 1991—all trying to cover a world that in almost every respect is much more complex than it was in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. But there was no choice; the focus had to be on al Qa‘ida.

* * *

So how did our initial victory in Afghanistan—in only months—turn into the longest war in American history? It happened because at some point our goal shifted from ensuring that al Qa‘ida would not again be able to use Afghanistan as a launching pad for attacks against the homeland to something else. The mission changed to trying to permanently alter Afghan politics and society. It was an impossible task to turn Afghanistan’s tribal society and culture into a liberal democracy. It was an impossible task to convince the Taliban that it should operate inside the Afghan political system rather than outside of it. Perhaps we should have walked away from Afghanistan after forcing al Qa‘ida from the country, and we would have told all Afghans, including the Taliban, “If you let al Qa‘ida return, so will we.”

* * *

Being a presidential briefer is a killer job under the best of circumstances. The hours and the stress take their toll on bodies and marriages. The thought that Mary Beth and I had had early on, that
the job would be good for our family life, had been a poor piece of analysis. In late October we decided to escape to Charlottesville—a two-hour drive from D.C.—for a quick romantic overnight escape to celebrate our wedding anniversary. The thing is, my day had started at twelve thirty a.m. because I’d briefed that morning. Even with a nap during the drive down, I was exhausted. We stayed at a bed-and-breakfast and booked dinner for seven p.m.—early for most but definitely late for me. During dessert I fell asleep at the table. Mary Beth saved me from going face-first into my tarte tatin. As we were walking back to our cottage, I slipped down a flight of stairs, breaking off the railing in the process. Some of the other guests looked at me, clearly thinking, “He is really drunk.” I looked back, smiled, and said, “Not drunk. Just really tired.” I don’t think they believed me. So much for a romantic escape.

Because the job was so demanding, I had decided early on to do it for only a year. On January 4, 2002, it was time for me to move on. It was my last briefing. The president was in Crawford, and I brought with me my successor to show him the ropes and introduce him to the president. We arrived at the trailer where the president did his secure video teleconferences, a few minutes before the appointed hour. The president arrived and, before the teleconference went live, he asked me if there was any news in the briefing. I had no option other than to deliver the headline—that we had learned that Usama bin Ladin had escaped from Tora Bora, Afghanistan.

The US military had dropped more ordnance on the location than on any other area since World War II, and yet Bin Ladin had escaped. The forces that would have been necessary to box him in, to keep him from fleeing over the border into Pakistan, had simply not been there. Feeling the frustration of the moment, the president shot the messenger—me.

The president seldom raised his voice, but he did that day. He
was angry. He was madder than I have ever seen him. He asked, “How the hell did you lose him? How could he possibly have eluded you? What are your plans now?” I sat there thinking, “I did not have anything to do with this,” but I did not dare say a word.

You have never really been chewed out until you have had the bark stripped off of you by the most powerful man in the world. My poor successor sat there wide-eyed, no doubt wondering what he had just signed up for. When the videoconference went live and the smiling faces of Cheney, Rice, and Tenet appeared on-screen, the president wasted no time in asking, “What the hell is this? Michael just told me something about Bin Ladin getting away?”

I left the briefing without saying good-bye to the president. I thought I might never see him again, as my job as briefer was over. But I did not say anything given his understandable anger at what had just transpired in the mountains of Afghanistan. On the drive from Waco to Dallas to catch a flight back to Washington, my cell phone rang. It was the president’s personal aide, who asked for my home address. Within a few days, a handwritten note arrived from the president thanking me for my service as his briefer. It was clear to me that the president also felt bad about how our last briefing together had gone.

CHAPTER 5

An Imperfect Storm

R
oute Irish was the US military code name for the twelve-kilometer stretch of highway that connected the Baghdad International Airport with the secure area known as the “Green Zone.” The Green Zone contained the diplomatic facilities of the United States and our coalition partners, significant coalition military assets and headquarters, the Iraqi prime minister’s office, the country’s parliament, and several other Iraqi government buildings. By the time I first traveled on Route Irish in early 2005, this once-beautiful drive lined by large trees was a terrorist kill zone. Suicide bombers patrolled the highway looking for American or other coalition convoys to ambush.

Climbing into the back of a dusty and mud-covered black armored vehicle, I saw that the two CIA security officers in the front were armed to the teeth—knives, handguns, military assault rifles, and grenade launchers. The grenades were sitting in the open on a console between the driver’s seat and the front passenger seat. Having not seen one of the cylindrical grenades for launchers such as theirs before, I innocently asked, “What are those?” The answer was immediate, direct, and sharp: “Don’t touch those.” And the tone said, “Don’t ask any more questions.” Chagrined, I turned to look out the window and saw a bullet lodged in the inches-thick glass of the armored vehicle.

I, along with another senior Agency officer, was in Baghdad at the request of Director Porter Goss. Our job was to look into an incident in which Charles Duelfer—CIA’s lead man investigating Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program—and the military convoy in which he was riding had been attacked on Route Irish, resulting in the deaths of two Kansas National Guardsmen and severe injuries to a third. Before we pulled out from our parking spot, the lead security agent turned to me and said, “I just want to make something crystal clear. I will take you on one condition. If something happens along the way, you will follow my orders in full—no questions asked.” I swallowed hard and said, “Yes, sir.”

* * *

President Bush, after one post-9/11 briefing at the ranch in Crawford, in which we had discussed a preemptive Israeli air strike against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, told me, “Michael, my most important job is to protect the American people. I now understand why the Israelis act the way they do when it comes to terrorism.” To me, nothing better captured President Bush’s thinking about the war in Iraq than this statement. There is no doubt that the president’s focus on Iraq was born of 9/11. There is no doubt that, while it was a war of choice, President Bush took us there because he thought it necessary to protect the American people. But there is also no doubt that the Iraq War supported the al Qa‘ida narrative and helped spread the group’s ideology, a consequence not well understood before the war. So, both in genesis and in effect, the war in Iraq is very much a part of the terrorism story over the past fifteen years.

* * *

President Bush—from the vantage point of his first intelligence briefer—did not come to office with any particular ax to grind with Saddam Hussein. The conventional wisdom, of course, is that Team
Bush arrived in the White House with Iraq already in its gunsights. That might have been true for a small group of Bush appointees, but it is not what I observed from the president. Periodically Iraq would come to the forefront of his attention—for example, when Saddam’s forces would fire on US aircraft enforcing the no-fly zone, or when there would be signs that the international sanctions on Iraq were eroding a bit more. And there was certainly concern about whether the sanctions could be maintained over the long term and what Saddam would do when he was no longer in the box. Nonetheless, for the president, there was no early or inherent obsession with Iraq.

There was one occasion that might have conveyed a different sense, and I share it here only to set the record straight. During a session in the Oval Office in the spring of 2001, I mentioned to the president some improvement that had been made in the Iraqi air defense system and suggested to him that “if the United States were ever to engage Iraq militarily, this is something that US forces would have to deal with.” The president said to me, “It is not a question of
if
but only a question of
when
, Michael.” I know that some will read that comment to mean that Bush had already made his mind up about going to war with Iraq and was only looking for the provocation. But at the time—and to this day—I took him to mean only that in his estimation, at some uncertain time in the future Saddam would push us and he or some future president would have to respond.

* * *

Post 9/11, George Tenet and I continued our Saturday trips to Camp David but the routine was different—the briefings were less leisurely, more focused on terrorism and often took place in a conference room rather than the president’s office. On a monitor we could see the vice president, who would be piped in via video teleconference from a “secure location.” At one of these post-9/11 sessions, the president and vice president asked Tenet and me if Iraq had played
any role in the attacks. Tenet and I told the president and others that there was no intelligence to suggest that Iraq had had any role in the attack—and that if any nation had supported al Qa‘ida it was more likely to have been Iran, which had been responsible for the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 that killed nineteen US servicemen and wounded hundreds of others. But we quickly added that there was no evidence of an Iran–al Qa‘ida connection either.

At one point after 9/11, though, it seemed as if we might have discovered an al Qa‘ida–Iraq connection. The Czech intelligence service told us a source had told it that a 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta, had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer named Ahmad Samir al-Ani at the Iraqi embassy in Prague on April 9, 2001, at eleven a.m., just five months before the attack. The Czechs provided a fuzzy surveillance photo of the man they thought to be Atta.

I brought this into the Oval Office. In its initial analysis of the photo, CIA gave some credibility to the report. The US legal attaché (an FBI special agent attached to American embassies overseas) in Prague met with the Czech source, and the assessment of the “LegAtt” and the Czech officers present was that they were 70 percent confident the source was sincere and believed his own story regarding the meeting. The president asked a lot of questions, but unfortunately there was much more that we did not know than that we did know.

The possibility of an Iraqi connection—particularly a connection to the man we believed to have been the lead hijacker—was explosive. The story was leaked very quickly, with the Czech interior minister confirming it publicly. In early December, Vice President Cheney was the first US official to confirm the story, on
Meet the Press
. The vice president told Tim Russert, “It’s been pretty well confirmed that he [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia
[sic] last April.” The vice president went on to note that we did not know the purpose of the meeting and that we needed to investigate more.

The bottom line of the ensuing investigation was that the Czech story did not seem to be true, and I kept the president informed throughout the process. The FBI did an exhaustive review of Atta’s whereabouts during the time in question and, although we were not absolutely certain, every indication was that he had been in the United States. The Czechs did their own investigation and could not find any records of Atta’s having been in the country in April 2001. In addition, Czech investigators put al-Ani seventy miles from Prague when the alleged meeting occurred.

Despite our efforts to un-ring the bell on the Iraqi–al Qa‘ida Prague connection, a few in the administration—Vice President Cheney, in particular—repeatedly raised it in public comments. There was no similar obsession with the matter on the president’s part, however. Once we closed the books on the issue, he never asked about it again.

After spending almost an hour every morning with the president, for four months after 9/11, I came to understand his deep concern about Iraq. To me, the president’s thinking on Iraq was motivated by the soul-crushing impact of 9/11 and the legitimate fear that as bad as 9/11 had been, things could be much worse—if Saddam got it into his head to either use his weapons of mass destruction as a terrorist tool against the West, or provide those weapons to an international terrorist group. Although the intelligence community considered either of these developments unlikely, I believe the president considered both scenarios risks he could not ignore, particularly since the country had just suffered the single worst attack in our history. At the end of the day, it was the threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction being used against the United States that led the president to take us to war in Iraq.