The Way of the Knife (3 page)

Hundreds of clandestine officers and analysts were taken off the Asia and Russia desks and reassigned to the maze of hastily built cubicles jammed inside the CTC’s operations hub. The layout became so complex that people had difficulty finding their colleagues. Cardboard street signs were erected to help find cubicles located along “
Usama Bin Lane
” and “Zawahiri Way.” A sign was eventually posted above the center’s door—a constant, oppressive reminder that another terror attack could be days, or even minutes, away. The sign read,
TODAY IS SEPTEMBER 12, 2001
.

Directing the whirlwind in the war’s early months was J. Cofer Black, a flamboyant officer who had been obsessed with hunting Osama bin Laden ever since he ran the CIA’s station in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, when bin Laden was living in exile in the country. Black had cultivated an image inside the CIA as something of a cross between a mad scientist and General George Patton. On September 11, when some feared that the final hijacked airplane might be headed toward Langley, Black refused to allow CTC officers to evacuate CIA headquarters along with the rest of agency personnel.

In the months that followed, CIA director George Tenet rarely went to the White House without Black at his side, and a mythology developed about Black’s determination
to kill off as many al Qaeda operatives as possible
. During an Oval Office meeting two days after the attacks, Bush asked Black whether the CIA was up to handling its new assignment, which involved inserting paramilitary teams into Afghanistan to ally themselves with Afghan warlords and fight the Taliban. In ghoulish hyperbole, Black claimed that by the time the CIA was done with al Qaeda, bin Laden and his brethren would “
have flies walking across their eyeballs
.” That was the kind of talk Bush wanted to hear, and he took an immediate liking to the bombastic counterterrorism chief. But some of the president’s war cabinet cringed at the macho talk and began referring to Black as “
the flies-on-the-eyeballs guy
.”

Black’s exalted status with those who counted in the White House led to friction inside the CIA and constant battles with his boss, James Pavitt, whom he considered weak and unimaginative. Pavitt headed the Directorate of Operations, the branch of the agency responsible for all foreign espionage and covert action missions, and thought Black was a showboat and a cowboy. He believed that Black was far too eager to get the CIA involved in the kind of overseas exploits that had been a constant source of trouble for the agency, and in the years before the 9/11 attacks they had fought bitterly over whether the CIA should embrace the armed Predator to hunt and kill bin Laden in Afghanistan.

But the success of the CIA’s initial strategy in Afghanistan in late 2001 was a victory for Black and the Counterterrorist Center, and it seemed to prove to the CIA’s detractors that there were virtues to a small cadre of officers at the CIA running a campaign against a diffuse organization like al Qaeda. Teams of CIA paramilitary officers, later joined by Army Green Berets, had turned a ragged collection of Afghan militias into a conquering army. Riding on horses and in rusted Soviet-era armored vehicles, the Afghans had driven the Taliban from Kabul and Kandahar.

The strange new conflict had also upended how the United States waged war. The traditional wartime chain of command—passing from the White House to the secretary of defense to a four-star commander with a staff of hundreds to build and execute a war plan—had quietly been circumvented. The CIA director was now a military commander running a clandestine, global war with a skeleton staff and very little oversight. Tenet began pushing aggressively to bulk up the CIA’s paramilitary teams in Afghanistan, and he sold the White House on a program to capture terrorists, hide them in secret jails, and subject them to an Orwellian regimen of brutal interrogation methods. Only Bush, Cheney, and a small group at the White House were overseeing decisions about
who should be captured
, who should be killed, and who should be spared.

This was an abrupt change for Tenet, who in the years before the September 11 attacks had liked to tell his bosses at the White House that CIA officers should stay removed from the process of making policy. He evoked an almost monastic image of the spies at Langley producing intelligence assessments, while those “across the river,” at the White House and in Congress, made decisions based on these assessments. James Pavitt would later tell investigators from the 9/11 Commission that one lesson from the Iran–Contra scandal of the 1980s was that “
we don’t do policy from [Langley
] . . . and you don’t want us to.”

If that idea had already been something of a useful myth, certainly by late 2001 the CIA could no longer claim that it stood apart from messy decisions about war and peace. Bush demanded that Tenet come to the Oval Office each day for the president’s daily brief—it was the first time since the agency’s founding that the CIA director, rather than a lower-level analyst, provided the regular morning briefing at the White House. Like his CIA predecessors, Tenet was eager for the access to the president, and every morning he and Cofer Black arrived at the White House with the catalogue of terrorist plots and plotters to tell a rapt audience about the steps that the CIA was taking to protect the country. The daily audiences with the president made Tenet and the CIA indispensable to the White House, which had an insatiable appetite for information about any threats.

But such high-level attention was also beginning to have a distorting effect on the analysis that the CIA was producing—making it narrower, more tactical. Hundreds of CIA analysts were now working on terrorism, which was understandable in the aftermath of an attack that killed nearly three thousand Americans. But it became immediately obvious to the analysts that the path to career advancement at the CIA was to start working on terrorism, with the goal of producing something that might be read to the president early one morning inside the Oval Office. And what the White House was most interested in were leads about the whereabouts of specific al Qaeda operators, not broader subjects like the level of support al Qaeda had in the Muslim world or the impact that American military and intelligence operations might have on radicalizing a new generation of militants. The CIA focused its efforts accordingly.

Even the language of spycraft was gradually changing. CIA case officers and analysts had once used the term “targeting” as they made decisions about which foreign government official should be targeted for information or which foreign national could be turned into a CIA informant. Eventually, “targeting” came to mean something quite different for the analysts who moved into the Counterterrorist Center. It meant tracking down someone deemed a threat to the United States, and capturing or killing him.

The fights between Cofer Black and James Pavitt intensified, and by early 2002 Black had decided to leave the clandestine service and
take a job at the State Department
. His replacement was Jose Rodriguez, who had been one of the Counterterrorist Center’s top officers and the humble counterpoint to Black. Cofer Black had Middle East experience and was one of a handful of CIA officers with intimate knowledge about the terror network led by Osama bin Laden; Rodriguez had never served in the Muslim world and spoke no Arabic. But he was close to Pavitt, and some clandestine officers suspected that Rodriguez initially had been installed at the center so that Pavitt could keep tabs on Black. A native of Puerto Rico and the son of two teachers, Rodriguez had joined the intelligence agency in the midseventies after graduating from the University of Florida’s law school. His undercover career had been spent mostly inside the Latin America division, the home of the CIA’s adventures in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras during the 1980s. But at that time Rodriguez was still junior enough to avoid being enmeshed in the Iran–Contra investigations that would cripple the division for years. Rodriguez was well liked inside the clandestine service but had never distinguished himself as one of the best case officers in his CIA peer group. He served in a number of CIA stations in Latin America, including Bolivia and Mexico, and fostered an image as a maverick who liked to stick it to bureaucrats at Langley who he thought were micromanaging field operations. He was an avid horseback rider, and while he was station chief in Mexico City he named his favorite horse Business, instructing subordinates that if one of the bosses at Langley called to inquire about his whereabouts they should be told that Rodriguez was “
out on Business
.”

When he took over the Latin America division, in 1995, it was once again in turmoil. John Deutch, President Clinton’s second CIA director, had just fired a number of case officers for what the CIA euphemistically calls “close and continuing contacts with foreign nationals.” In other words, the men down in Latin America were having illicit affairs, and there were concerns that their promiscuity could make them vulnerable to blackmail. Rodriguez soon found trouble of his own. When a childhood friend was arrested in the Dominican Republic on a drug charge, Rodriguez intervened to stop Dominican police from beating his friend while in prison. It was a clear conflict of interest for the head of the CIA’s Latin America division to intervene with a foreign government on behalf of a friend, and the spy agency’s inspector general reprimanded Rodriguez for showing “a remarkable lack of judgment.”
He was removed from the job
.

But by 2001 his career had rebounded, and Rodriguez found himself among a number of Latin American hands—including his friend Enrique Prado—helping to run the CIA’s new war. He became a regular at the daily 5
P.M.
meetings around Tenet’s conference table, where senior CIA officials received daily battlefield updates about operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere. It was during one of those sessions that Rodriguez made an offhand suggestion that would lead to one of the most fateful decisions of the Bush administration.

The question before the group was what to do with all the Taliban fighters that American troops and CIA officers were picking up in Afghanistan. Where could they be held over the long term? The meeting turned into a brainstorming session, with various CIA officers suggesting countries that might be willing to accept the detainees. One officer suggested the Ushuaia prison, on Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego, a desolate facility at the bottom of the world. Another suggested the Corn Islands, two tiny specks in the Caribbean Sea off the Nicaraguan coast. But all of these suggestions were dismissed as unrealistic options. Finally, Rodriguez offered up an idea, almost in jest.

“Well, we could put them at Guantánamo Bay,” he said.

Everyone around the table laughed, thinking about how much it would anger Fidel Castro if the United States were to jail the prisoners of its new war on the American military base in Cuba. But the more they thought about the prospect, the more everyone thought Guantánamo actually made sense. It was an American facility, and the fate of the prison would not be jeopardized there as it could be in another country if the government changed leadership and decided to kick the United States’ prisoners out. And, the CIA officials figured, a prison at Guantánamo Bay would be outside the jurisdiction of American courts. A perfect location, it seemed.

Cuba became the CIA’s top recommendation for the new American prison, and soon enough the agency would build its own secret jail in one corner of the Guantánamo Bay prison complex. A maximum-security facility, it was dubbed Strawberry Fields by CIA officers because the
prisoners presumably would be there
, as the Beatles sang, “forever.”

—

ON A CHAOTIC BATTLEFIELD
seven thousand miles away from Washington, the first war of the twenty-first century was turning out to be a far messier affair than it had first appeared inside the warren of cubicles at the CIA or in tidy PowerPoint presentations delivered in wood-paneled offices on the top floors of the Pentagon. By early 2002, Afghanistan was neither a daily shooting war nor a hopeful peace but a twilight conflict beset by competition and mistrust between soldiers and spies. American missions were often based on shards of intelligence from unreliable sources, as when dozens of Navy SEALs and Marines spent eight days digging up graves at a cave complex at Zhawar Kili, in eastern Afghanistan, based on intelligence that Osama bin Laden might have been killed in a recent airstrike on the base. They were hoping to exhume bin Laden’s body and provide a reason to end the Afghan war after just three months.
They dug up a handful of bodies
but didn’t find what they were looking for.

Sometimes, poor communication between the CIA and the military had deadly results. On January 23, a team of Army Green Berets launched a raid in the dark of night on two compounds at Hazar Qadam, a hundred miles northeast of Kandahar. The compounds consisted of several buildings perched on the side of a hill. As an AC-130 gunship circled overhead,
two teams stormed the compounds simultaneously
.

Staccato bursts of AK-47 gunfire erupted from the buildings as the teams blew a hole in the outer walls. The Americans returned fire and began moving from room to room as some fought hand to hand with the suspected Taliban gunmen. By mission’s end, the Americans had killed more than forty people inside the compounds, and the AC-130 had reduced the structures to rubble.

But what the soldiers learned when they returned to their base was that, days earlier, the CIA had turned the men inside the two compounds away from the Taliban and convinced them to fight for the other side. Hanging in one of the buildings that night was the flag of the new government of Afghanistan, led by Hamid Karzai. The CIA had never told the special-operations task force that the dozens of Afghan men living in the compounds were now their allies.

The confusion in Afghanistan was partly the result of normal battlefield turmoil, but it also had its origins in the jockeying between the Pentagon and CIA for supremacy in the new American conflict. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had felt stung that CIA paramilitary teams had been first into Afghanistan. It wasn’t just a matter of logistics, though it was true that the platoons of Green Berets had been delayed by bad weather and problems getting access to bases around Afghanistan. It was that the invasion was, at its inception, conceived and led by the CIA with the U.S. military in a supporting role. The ability of the CIA to move more swiftly than the military with just a fraction of the Pentagon’s budget and manpower gnawed at Rumsfeld. He began overhauling the Pentagon’s bureaucracy to ensure it didn’t happen again.