The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS (2 page)

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What follows is the story of CIA’s fight against al Qa‘ida told from the perspective of someone who always seemed to find himself in the middle of history-making events and who has always been nonpartisan—seeking and reporting the truth no matter what policy-makers wanted to hear—serving six different presidents, three Republicans and three Democrats. There are, of course, many things related to this story that I cannot recount because they are and should remain secret. What I can promise is that I will offer an intimate, insider’s look at how we at CIA have faced the biggest threat to our nation since the darkest days of the Cold War.

CHAPTER 1

Opening Salvos

O
n Friday, August 7, 1998, Molly Hardy was a CIA officer operating under cover in Nairobi, Kenya. Molly was from Georgia, and she had single-handedly raised a daughter as she traveled the world over a lengthy career. Molly was a finance officer, and a good one. Her job was handing out and keeping track of the money that CIA uses to pay its sources for the information that keeps America safe. She dealt largely in cash—in many different currencies and many different denominations. In August 1998 she was fifty-one and a grandmother, and she was looking forward to returning home to see her granddaughter.

For a number of weeks over the summer of 1998, intelligence sources had been picking up chatter among terrorists about a looming attack, about coming “good news.” But the talk was nonspecific about target, location, and timing. All of those missing details would become clear on the morning of August 7.

At ten thirty a.m. Molly, among many others at the embassy in Nairobi, heard gunfire and a small explosion from a grenade. It was the breach of the embassy security barrier by al Qa‘ida suicide bombers. The noise attracted employees to the windows—including Molly. Molly, sensing what was about to happen, warned others to
stay away from the windows and to “get down.” As she did, a massive truck bomb exploded—destroying a large part of the embassy as well as much of an adjacent building. Over two hundred people were killed—including twelve Americans. More than four thousand were injured. Molly’s last words were heroic ones, saving the lives of many of her embassy colleagues. Molly was among CIA’s first casualties at the hands of Bin Ladin.

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In Washington, eight thousand miles from Nairobi and Dar es Salaam—where there was a near-simultaneous attack against our embassy in Tanzania—it was the middle of the night. My wife, Mary Beth, and I, along with our three children, were fast asleep in our small three-bedroom house in Arlington, Virginia. It was the type of house a mid-level intelligence officer could afford. Our two older children, Sarah and Luke, had their own bedrooms, but Peter, our baby, was sleeping in a crib in the master bedroom. At the time I was the executive assistant to the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, and one of the requirements of my job was that I have a special STU-III secure telephone at home so I could discuss classified information at any time. Because our house was cramped, the secure phone was on the floor of the master bedroom, under Peter’s crib, and that night, as usual, it was also buried under a pile of laundry.

The ringing jolted me awake. I scrambled to find the phone and answer it before it woke Mary Beth or Peter. I failed on both counts, and Peter loudly expressed his displeasure. I had taken my share of calls in the middle of the night, but this one was not typical. The senior duty officer from the CIA Operations Center, the Agency’s most senior officer after hours, told me that a DOD (Department of Defense) satellite system had detected two enormous explosions
in East Africa. He added that other reports, most important from the State Department Operations Center, had confirmed large explosions at the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and that these were quite clearly terrorist attacks. I told the officer to wake Director Tenet and tell him everything—one of only two times I woke him during my two years as his executive assistant (the other being when CIA-provided information led NATO to accidently bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade). I quickly showered, jumped in my car, and headed to work.

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At this point in my career, I was an eighteen-year veteran of CIA, an organization that has three primary missions: collecting secrets clandestinely, conducting all-source analysis for the president and his senior advisors, and undertaking actions covertly to further US foreign policy objectives. No one who had known me as a young man would have even predicted that CIA would hire me. I did not get serious about education until I was a senior in high school. I lived at home during college, never traveled overseas, and did not speak a foreign language.

I majored in economics, and my aspiration was to go to graduate school, earn a PhD, and teach. But one of my professors had a different idea. “You ought to send a résumé to the CIA,” he said, stressing that the Agency hired economists and that it might be a good fit for me. My professor knew that economics is one of a handful of academic disciplines that teaches critical thinking—the number one skill needed to be a successful intelligence analyst.

To be honest, I had little understanding of CIA or what an economist would do there, and even less interest in joining its ranks. But on a lark I sent off an application and was surprised a few months later to be invited for a visit. I had never been to Washington, D.C.,
and after four austere years living at home while going to college, I figured it would be a treat to see the sights. I set off for our nation’s capital with no intent of accepting a job offer from CIA.

What I found when I arrived, however, was a group of amazingly talented people who were enormously dedicated to an important mission. I found an Agency that was helping the nation address a world of challenges, including an ongoing hostage crisis in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It needed young men and women to help unravel some enormously complex issues. It was enticing, but I told my recruiter that I really had my heart set on graduate school. “No problem,” he said. “Come here. Do a good job. We’ll eventually send you to grad school on our dime” (a promise on which the Agency would make good). I accepted an entry-level job paying fifteen thousand dollars a year and began my career as an intelligence analyst.

As an analyst I was fortunate to be involved in some important work early on. For example, I led a small team that statistically demonstrated—using a combination of information provided by intelligence sources and the Philippine government’s publicly released election results—that President Ferdinand Marcos had stolen the presidential election in 1986 from Corazón Aquino. Marcos had used a new technique—the systematic disenfranchisement of millions of voters in areas expected to vote in large numbers for Aquino. Our analysis showed that Marcos’s 54–46 victory would have been a victory for Aquino by a wide margin in a fair election. CIA’s findings played a role in the Reagan administration’s decision to distance itself from Marcos after the election, which helped lead to his fall from power only weeks later in the peaceful “People Power Revolution.” It was exhilarating to be a young analyst and to see my work have such impact. I was hooked. And then, in the early 1990s, I was involved in a larger team effort that
uncovered the nascent North Korean nuclear weapons program, which remains a serious threat to this day. Our work included supporting the initial US diplomatic negotiations with the North Koreans on the issue—analysts providing real-time assistance to the US negotiating team.

Most of my time, however, was spent on East Asian economic issues—significant matters but not the stuff of spy novels. In 1996, however, an unexpected part-time assignment changed the course of my career. At the time, CIA Director John Deutch and his deputy, George Tenet, were fielding complaints from the secretary of the treasury, Robert Rubin, and his deputy, Larry Summers, about the intelligence community’s collection of information on economic matters. (This followed the French declaring persona non grata a senior Agency official in Paris for allegedly stealing information on French trade policy.) Rubin and Summers believed that much of the effort the intelligence community was expending to obtain economic data on other countries, as well as other nations’ plans for economic policy, was unnecessary and could become counterproductive to our diplomatic relationships with those countries. Tenet, whom I had met briefly on several occasions, asked me to lead an interagency team to examine the question.

The bottom line of my study was that Rubin and Summers were right. Much of what the intelligence community was collecting on economic issues was available through public means, or what is internally referred to as “open-source” information. Even though the study went against the status quo, it was well received, particularly by Tenet, who told me that he liked the rigor of the report and the clarity with which the results were conveyed. Not surprisingly, Rubin and Summers liked the answer as well, with Rubin writing a letter to Deutch complimenting the study.

Just eighteen months later, Director Deutch stepped down as
DCI and was succeeded by Tenet. On December 11, 1997, I was at Arlington Hospital in Virginia waiting for Mary Beth to deliver our third child, Peter. A phone rang—not in the waiting room and not at the nurses’ station but in the delivery room. Mary Beth, in the initial stages of labor, did not look pleased. Neither did the attending nurse who answered, then handed me the phone, saying with some sarcasm, “It’s for you.” On the other end of the line was a friend, Greg Tarbell, who at the time was the daily intelligence briefer for Director Tenet and who would later become my chief of staff when I served as deputy director and acting director. Being resourceful, Tarbell had tracked down the phone number in the delivery room.

Tarbell said with some excitement, “I know you are busy, but I thought you’d want to know—Tenet told me this morning that he remembered the good work you did on that economic intelligence study and that he is considering asking you to be his new EA.” Being tapped to serve as the director’s executive assistant would be a significant career opportunity, but with my mind understandably elsewhere, I ended the call by simply saying, “That’s interesting.” Mary Beth asked, “Who was that?” I gave her the standard answer that an Agency officer provides to a questioning spouse, “Oh, it was nothing,” and I went back to my primary job of delivering ice chips on demand.

A few days after Peter’s birth, I was back at work. Tenet called me to his office to offer me the job. As I crossed the threshold of his long, rectangular office, he handed me a cigar from his private stash to offer congratulations on Peter’s arrival. Excited, I accepted the position on the spot.

Exciting
, however, is not the word I would use to describe the first few weeks on the job.
Overwhelming
was more like it. I had never had a job anything like it before. It was 24/7 and totally consuming. I was the director’s only executive assistant at the time; now
there are two or three, depending on the director. I was reluctant to get up from my desk to walk down to the cafeteria for lunch, or even to visit the men’s room, for fear that the stack of new e-mails in my inbox would double during even a brief absence. On top of this, I had, at first, no earthly clue what people were talking about. Tenet and his senior subordinates from across the agency often spoke or wrote in the kind of shorthand that only people who have worked an issue for a long time can understand. And there were so many cryptonyms (code words) to learn that my head was swimming. Furthermore, the breadth and scope of the issues coming at me were unlike anything I could have imagined.

After I had been on the job for a few weeks, Tenet said as I handed him a report, “Are you OK?” I fibbed and told him everything was fine. But as time went on I caught up to the pace of the work and also learned the lingo. I kept my head well above water, and I settled into one of the best jobs of my life.

One of the things that made the job special was the chance to work with Tenet, the most down-to-earth, approachable senior government official I have ever met. The son of Greek immigrants, who learned hard work busing tables in his father’s diner in Queens, Tenet has an everyman quality about him that makes him impossible to dislike. He is brilliant in an unthreatening way, and kings and cafeteria workers thought he was their best friend. And they were right. Ranging from slightly to very rumpled in appearance, Tenet set an informal mood in the office, where he would frequently burst out in Motown hits like Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” do spot-on imitations of foreign leaders (he did an incredible Yasser Arafat), or dribble a basketball in the hallways of the Agency. Tenet never took himself too seriously, a vital trait in a place where the work, which he attacked vigorously, was often a matter of life and death (literally).

I loved working for him. There were four main parts to the
job—any one of which might have kept me fully occupied. First I was to review every piece of information coming into the director’s office—whether in a letter, memo, e-mail, cable, phone call, or personal visit—and make a snap decision on whether Tenet needed to know it or not and, if so, whether he needed to know it immediately or it could wait for that evening’s nightly “Read Book.” Information was flooding in every minute from many different sources. If I passed too much of it to the boss, he would be overwhelmed and unable to focus on the most critical matters. If I kept some critical bit of intelligence from the director, something could go badly wrong.

The second duty was to review and organize decisions that he needed to make—in the form of official brown folders from various parts of the organization asking the director for a formal judgment on a wide range of issues, informal questions to which someone needed an answer, and letters drafted by others for the director to sign and send. If I decided something was routine—if I was confident that I knew how Tenet thought about the issue—I could have a machine (called an autopen) sign it. I would then put a copy of what had gone out in the director’s name in his overnight reading materials. This autopen was to become the source of my first mistake as EA.