The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS (25 page)

There was joy in the streets of Cairo and great angst in the corridors of power elsewhere in the Middle East. The blowback was huge. I felt it myself on a trip to the region shortly thereafter, when I visited Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Our friends in the region asked how we could so quickly abandon a longtime ally like Mubarak. The unspoken but ever-present question was how quickly we would abandon them if similar circumstances arose. The truth is that we had no other options in the case of Egypt. There was no way
we could have saved Mubarak—even if it had made the most sense for US policy, which it did not.

As interesting as the developments throughout the Middle East in early 2011 might be, I would not be including them in this book were it not for the unintended impact they had on the war against terrorism. As positive as the development of greater democratic rule might be over the long term, one of the biggest winners in the Arab Spring—at least in the short-to-medium term—was al Qa‘ida.

In Egypt, Mubarak was replaced by Mohamed Morsi, a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood who quickly started granting himself extraordinary powers. Morsi turned out to be a horrible leader, making bad decisions on both political and economic matters. Whatever the benefits of having a popularly elected leader, they were more than offset by poor governance. This was all to the dismay of many—both inside Egypt and out—who had hoped he would lead efforts to reenergize the Egyptian economy and transition the country to democracy. One of the ways this poor governance played out was that, while the mechanisms for combating terrorism in Egypt remained largely intact, there was no political will to use them. The military, intelligence, and law enforcement communities in Egypt essentially stopped fighting al Qa‘ida because they felt they had no political support to continue to do their job. In a remarkably short time, al Qa‘ida, which had been defeated in Egypt for almost two decades, made a comeback, establishing new footholds in the Sinai and other parts of Egypt. From these locations al Qa‘ida could now strike Israel, energy pipelines important to Israel and Jordan, and tourist sites popular with westerners within Egypt. The Sinai went from being a prime location for scuba divers and beach goers to a war zone.

Morsi’s government was essentially doing nothing. Eventually the White House sent counterterrorism czar John Brennan to tell Morsi that al Qa‘ida was on a rapid road to recovery in Egypt and
that its overarching goal was to kill Morsi and overthrow his government. While Brennan got Morsi’s attention—Egyptian CT operations against al Qa‘ida partially resumed—the Egyptian military several months later decided that it had had enough and replaced Morsi after little more than a year in office.

But the damage had been done. Al Qa‘ida had gained enormous ground in the largest and most important Arab country in the region. We are still paying for the Egyptians’ lack of focus today, with al Qa‘ida fully entrenched in the Sinai, where it regularly conducts attacks against Egyptian military and police units, and in Egypt’s most important cities, where it still poses a threat. The Arab Spring, that flowering of self-determination and public expression, had turned into a catalyst for the worst kind of violence and oppression. From a counterterrorism perspective, the Arab Spring had turned to winter.

* * *

We experienced a different kind of setback in another major country in the region, Libya, where the problem was not a lack of willingness to deal with al Qa‘ida but rather a lack of capability to do so.

On the surface Libya would not seem to be of much interest to the intelligence community. The country, while large in size, is primarily desert. In terms of population, Libya is not even in the top one hundred among the nations on the planet. But mere numbers can be deceiving. Throughout my thirty-three years at the Agency, Libya demanded a disproportionately large share of our attention. Most of that focus can be attributed to just one of the country’s six million people: Muammar Qadhafi. Qadhafi made himself an international pariah with the course he chose for his nation—the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, and the practice of terrorism as a tool of statecraft, including the bombing of Pan Am 103 flying over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988,
an act of terrorism that killed 259 people on board and eleven on the ground. Qadhafi was also behind the 1986 bombing of a Berlin discotheque frequented by US servicemen, which killed two.

Then, in early 2003, just as the United States and its allies were beginning the invasion of Iraq, representatives of the Libyan government reached out to our British counterparts suggesting that Qadhafi might be willing to discuss voluntarily ridding his country of its weapons of mass destruction. CIA and British intelligence officials met secretly with Qadhafi and his senior leadership, eventually brokering a deal designed to remove Libyan weapons of mass destruction without firing a shot.

Once that deal was negotiated, the United States and its allies engaged in an awkward resumption of relations with Libya—ties that had been strained since Qadhafi seized control of the country in 1969. By 2006 the United States had reestablished diplomatic relations and sent an ambassador to Tripoli for the first time in twenty-seven years.

While we had no illusions about the harsh, authoritarian nature of the regime led by the “Brother Leader,” as Qadhafi liked to be called, in the aftermath of 9/11 we were more than prepared to work with his regime if it would help in our efforts to prevent attacks and defeat al Qa‘ida and similar organizations. And help it did. For very different reasons, the most important being that al Qa‘ida wanted to overthrow secular Arab regimes, Qadhafi hated and feared al Qa‘ida as much as we did. Since a number of top leaders of Bin Ladin’s organization were Libyans, his assistance proved quite useful.

The world of intelligence is packed with strange bedfellows—and few stranger than the Libyans. But due to this “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” mind-set, we found ourselves working with them. I made a trip to Libya in late 2010, just weeks before their revolution began. As deputy director of CIA, I was visiting to ensure that the Libyans continued to work with us against al Qa‘ida.

My principal point of contact in Libya—and my host for the visit—was Abdullah Senussi, Qadhafi’s domestic intelligence chief. Senussi was known for being ruthless. He had been implicated in bombing airplanes, massacring prisoners, and possibly trying to assassinate foreign leaders. I did not know what to expect when I walked into his office, but what I found was a strangely personable interlocutor.

While it was clear to me that Senussi was a tough guy (he was also Qadhafi’s brother-in-law), I was able to see another side of him. I found Senussi to be smart, straightforward, and funny. We had an intense meeting in his office, where protocol—that is, his boss—demanded that he lecture me on his view that the United States was moving too slowly to restore full diplomatic relations with Libya. Once we got over that box-checking, we settled into a detailed discussion on al Qa‘ida and what we could do together against the group. It was almost as if Senussi flipped a light switch to go from the first topic to the second.

Near the end of the meeting, we found common ground in talking about our families. We told each other about our children, and it was clear to me that the light of his life was his daughter, Anoud, who was in her late teens. He was enormously proud of her—and I could relate on a human level by telling him about my own kids, who were not far from her age. By the end of the meeting, I had to remind myself of the horrible deeds Senussi had undertaken for the sake of the “Leader.”

My next stop was a three-hour lunch with the head of Libya’s external spy agency, Abuzed Omar Dorda. Set next to a Roman ruin, the restaurant was one of Tripoli’s finest. We had a large table in the middle of the restaurant, with Dorda sitting across from me. Security agents—mine and his—filled the tables around us. Dorda smoked nonstop before, during, and after lunch. It was like a scene from
The Sopranos
.

During the meal I learned that lecturing was part of the personality of senior Libyan officials. The intelligence chief used most of the lunch to tell me that everyone in the world was a Muslim but not everyone knew it yet. He said, “Michael, you are a Muslim. You have just not yet acceded to Allah’s will.” But he pleasantly suggested that I would someday. When I mentioned that this was not what I’d learned in eight years of Catholic school, he proceeded to tell me about the great significance of Jesus in Islam. To me his lecture was not just rhetoric. Dorda actually believed deeply what he was telling me, and I found his sincerity and his interest in my personal relationship with God endearing.

Intelligence cooperation between any two countries is based largely on personal relationships and trust. And from that perspective, my visit to Libya paid off. Within a day Senussi and I had developed a relationship. On a very basic level, there was trust established between us. I departed Libya with the relationship between our two services stronger and with the knowledge that I could at minimum pick up the phone and call him if I needed. This was important because Libya had a very effective intelligence service.

Very soon I had to do just that. Early in 2011, protests and clashes with security forces broke out across wide swaths of Libya. The bloodiest clashes occurred in the country’s second-largest city, Benghazi. In late February a decision was made at the State Department that the US embassy in Tripoli should be temporarily closed and its employees—as well as any other American citizens who wanted out—evacuated. The only way to get all of them out quickly was to charter a ferry to Malta. The State Department set up the ferry—as well as a follow-on air flight to take out the last few Americans—but there was still concern about the safety of Americans as they moved from the embassy to the Port of Tripoli, where the ferry was docked.

White House officials, aware that I had established a relationship
with Senussi, asked me to reach out to him and seek his assistance in ensuring that the State Department employees were allowed to safely withdraw. I called Senussi on February 24 and asked him to provide security for our diplomats as they moved to the dock. He promised me that he would ensure their safety, and he was as good as his word. Nearly two hundred Americans managed to depart without incident.

Whenever I talked to Senussi during this period he would go out of his way to try to convince me that the people rising up against Qadhafi were not freedom seekers but wholly owned agents of al Qa‘ida. There was no doubt that mixed among the various rebel factions were some extremists loyal to Bin Ladin’s ideology, but the vast majority had no agenda other than to rid their country of the oppression imposed over four decades by their “Brother Leader.”

It was the policy of the US government at the time to be supportive of the goals of the rebels, and we gave them considerable assistance—short of lethal arms. Eventually military support was provided to the resistance through NATO and other allies.

A second opportunity to employ my back channel to Senussi came in March 2011 when four
New York Times
employees were captured by Qadhafi’s forces outside the town of Ajdabiya. The group included a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, a videographer, and two still photographers (one of whom was a woman). We later learned that they had been badly beaten by their captors and were convinced they would likely not survive captivity.

As is often the case with media operating in a war zone, low-level soldiers holding the journalists thought they might be spies. Again the White House asked me to help, and I picked up the phone and called Senussi. After another lecture about how the rebels were really al Qa‘ida operatives and how we should be working with the Libyan government against them, I was able to turn the conversation to the reporters. I told Senussi that the four were exactly what
they said they were—reporters, not spies—and that they should be released. Two days after my call, they were let go. I am not sure that the leadership of the
Times
was ever told of the role CIA played in making the release possible.

Senussi’s cooperation was not the result of our personal relationship. That got me in the door. No, the cooperation resulted from Senussi’s belief that if he assisted me on these tactical matters, it would make it easier for him to convince me that Libya was indeed under assault from al Qa‘ida and we would see the error in our ways. His was a strategic play.

My third encounter with Senussi was designed to be a wake-up call. It was May, and the NATO and Arab coalition had been active for a number of weeks under the banner of protecting the Libyan people from their own government. No senior official in Washington had yet publicly demanded Qadhafi’s departure. The White House thought that needed to change and asked me to speak with Senussi again—this time to make it clear that there was only one solution to the ongoing violence: Qadhafi had to go. Once I passed on the message, Senussi said over and over again, “This is a very important message. This is a very big deal.”

My final encounter with Senussi was the most dramatic. The conflict had been dragging on for months and there had been considerable bloodshed on both sides. It was apparent that the Qadhafi regime’s days were numbered and that its end would be violent and perhaps protracted. In an effort to speed up the inevitable collapse of the dictator’s rule, my fellow participants in the Deputies Committee asked me if I could convince Senussi to do the right thing, to join the future of Libya, not remain in its past. The thinking was that if someone of Senussi’s stature in the regime changed sides it could lead others to do the same, perhaps resulting in a rapid collapse of the regime and the saving of thousands of Libyan lives.

The last thing I wanted to do was discuss this with him over the phone, however. There was a high probability that a call such as mine would be intercepted and my suggestion alone might be sufficient to get Senussi killed. So I reached out to him and offered a personal meeting in either Egypt or Tunisia. He agreed, and we set the Tunisian island of Jerba as the meeting place. But just two days later, he sent word that the meeting had to take place at a border crossing on the Libyan-Tunisian border. I thought perhaps the Leader did not want Senussi venturing too far from home. So I said OK and dispatched a security team to Tunisia to quietly assess the proposed meeting location. The team reported back that in order to reach the proposed meeting site it had had to pass through more than a hundred thousand Libyan refugees who had swarmed across the border to avoid the fighting. Still I insisted that the planning for the trip continue.