Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (14 page)

In each capital, the official recalled, “We gave them a briefing that showed where they were culpable, handed it to them—we had a customized ‘hunter’ briefing,” of PowerPoint slides and graphic printouts created by the staff of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in Washington. “It’s good honest data. It was very evident that this stuff couldn’t have been dreamt up, at least not by a bunch of gringos.”

Some of the countries were offended. Some were so taken aback by the accuracy of the intelligence that they rounded up suspected recruits and facilitators of the terrorist transit network even before the Dailey delegation left town. “Now, a lot of these countries wanted to help not just for the effort in Iraq, but these guys come back to their country, and they’re troublemakers,” the official recalled. “Algeria had the same troublemakers from the mujahideen from Afghanistan, so a lot of these countries had already seen it historically so it wasn’t hard to be convincing. But that was the thrust of our discussion. It was, ‘You may have problems with the U.S. in other areas, but here’s a spot where we’re giving you information to help these folks decide to be helpful, so please take good heed there.’ And they did.”

American officials said that in scores of cases, the host government took the Sinjar data and sent its own security officials to speak with the family, community leaders, and local mullahs. “They would say, ‘How could something like this happen?’” recalled one official who participated in the initiative. “There was a kind of finger pointing by the government to the family members. And then they’d say, ‘Please contact us if he raises his head, let him know we’re looking for him if he comes home, let us try to get inside his head to find out why he’s doing this so we can try to fix problems like that for the future.’ Most of these countries became pretty mature on their own internal security.”

Sessions in Libya and Egypt were contentious. While the session in Saudi Arabia was calmer, it was in its own way just as complex. Since their country was the largest source of foreign fighters and suicide bombers flowing through Syria into Iraq, Saudi officials were eager to get the intelligence. But this had not always been the case. Saudi charities funded Al Qaeda, and weapons carried by terrorist fighters around the region originated there as well. Only after Al Qaeda turned on the Saudi leadership several years after the attacks of 9/11—breaking an unofficial cease-fire by launching attacks on local infrastructure and persons, including members of the royal family—did the Saudis embrace programs to combat their internal terrorist challenges with a vengeance. During a 4:00 a.m. meeting over tea, one American official recalled, the Dailey delegation’s hosts at the Saudi Interior Ministry described a delicate balancing act of cracking down on Islamic extremism while honoring Muslim religion and culture and sacred sites in ways that would not inflame radicalism.

In Algeria, the conversation took place over a lengthy dinner with internal security officials and senior representatives from the intelligence agencies. In Yemen, the hosts were the military and intelligence services. The problem there, however, was that the Yemeni government had not quite made it into the digital information era, so the list of more than one hundred names and addresses of potential jihadists and their recruiters and enablers had to be tabulated and sorted by hand. “They can’t cross-check names on databases or anything,” said one official who worked the Sinjar report for Yemen. “It was a bit of a challenge for them. They were conscientious. They were there for it all, but it took them a little bit longer, a little more work.”

The Sinjar effort is being studied today at military academies and in closed-door, off-site intelligence seminars as a model of success in how to strike back at terrorists measured in two significant ways. From his suspected hideout in the tribal areas of Pakistan, Ayman al-Zawahri took to the terrorist communications channels to blast the Sinjar documents and the West Point Combating Terrorism Center report as American military lies. Obviously he reads the center’s Web site.

The American military in Iraq learned from the Sinjar files and significantly changed its deployments along the Iraq-Syria border based on what was learned from the files captured in the raid. “Before Sinjar, we sort of ‘soccer-Mom’ed’ it with forces spread evenly all along the border,” said a Marine officer who subsequently invested his forces more wisely by putting the intelligence into practice. “We realized there were huge swaths that were just not important, because the foreign fighters were using these smuggling ratlines. So we focused our forces more efficiently.” General Petraeus said the overall Sinjar effort did more to halt the terror networks that flowed foreign fighters and suicide bombers into Iraq than any other operation.

“You can see you have to work with other countries,” he said. “The State Department counterterrorist ambassador, of all people, Lieutenant General (retired) Dell Dailey, former head of JSOC—talk about getting one of those right—went out to all the different countries from which foreign fighters had come into Iraq, talked to them, tried to get them to reduce the opportunities for military-age males to fly to Damascus, Syria, on a one-way ticket. And it worked.”

After the Sinjar raid and the exploitation of the intelligence that animated the regional diplomatic effort, the flow of foreign fighters and would-be suicide bombers into Iraq dropped from a high of 120 a month to between 10 and 20 a month, according to statistics compiled by the military’s Central Command. The Sinjar mission and the intelligence exploitation effort provided the platform for a crippling strike against the network funneling young jihadists from across the Middle East for the grimly effective mission of becoming suicide bombers in Iraq. Even more, it proved that there is no solely military solution to the threat of terrorism and that every instrument of national power must be brought into play. When commanders, diplomats, and intelligence officers are asked to describe a success in the struggle against violent extremism since the attacks of 9/11, they cite Sinjar as a template for melding intelligence collection and analysis, Special Operations attacks, and global diplomacy to mitigate one of the most serious terrorism problems of the war in Iraq, which was the flow of foreign fighters and would-be suicide bombers from North Africa, the Persian Gulf, across the Middle East, and then through Syria into the war zone.

4

THE PROBLEM OF PAKISTAN

On a searing summer day in July 2008, President Bush’s senior foreign policy and national security advisers filed into the Yellow Oval Room on the second floor of the White House for a top-secret briefing. The subject was Al Qaeda’s metastasizing presence in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas along the mountainous border with Afghanistan. The briefers were General Michael V. Hayden, the former head of the NSA who was now the CIA director, and his deputy, Stephen R. Kappes, just back from an exasperating visit with President Pervez Musharraf and other top civilian and military officials in Islamabad.

Bush settled into an overstuffed chair in front of a carved wooden table. Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Rice, Defense Secretary Gates, National Security Adviser Hadley, and Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took their seats along with the others. It was an unusual setting for such a momentous meeting. Bush typically held his war councils in the Oval Office or in the underground and windowless Situation Room. But this chandeliered room in the White House residence, with a view across the Truman Balcony of the South Lawn and the Ellipse, had a place in history: It was where, on December 7, 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor—and where he vowed to strike back.

The high-level meeting represented the culmination of nearly two years of growing alarm within the administration about a resurgent Al Qaeda; its ally, the Pakistani Taliban; and an increasingly intertwined network of Islamic extremist groups working in a criminal-like syndicate in Pakistan’s rugged borderlands. It also brought to a head months of frustration with an essential but often infuriating ally. After facing a with-us-or-against-us ultimatum from Bush immediately after the September 11 attacks, Pakistan had worked closely with American agents to capture such top Al Qaeda operators as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11. The United States had given more than $10 billion in military aid to Pakistan since 2001, about half of which had gone to reimburse the counterinsurgency efforts by the Pakistani Army. However, Pakistan was also an ally whose main spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, gave support and safe haven to militant groups in the tribal areas who killed American troops in Afghanistan and supported Al Qaeda, groups that also provided Pakistan with a strategic proxy force against its neighbor and longtime rival, India.

This paradox in the relationship underscores how America’s “new deterrence” strategy requires an often exasperating reliance on difficult or undependable partners, like Pakistan, that need to be stroked, scolded, and supported—sometimes all at once. A parade of high-level American officials, including most of those gathered in the room that day, had flown to Islamabad over the past several months to coax, cajole, or confront Pakistani politicians, generals, and spies to take more aggressive action against the militants. The trips yielded little. Now, the threat emanating from Pakistan’s tribal areas wasn’t simply aimed against American and allied troops in neighboring Afghanistan; it had become a growing menace directed against the U.S. homeland. “This is the epicenter of terrorism in the world,” said one senior military officer.

Pakistan’s government had negotiated a series of peace agreements with the militants, cease-fires to pull Pakistani troops out of the tribal areas in exchange for a halt to attacks on army garrisons and other government targets. But those agreements had failed to keep the peace, and they had given Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban time and space to rest, rearm, and recruit. Specifically, the CIA warned, Al Qaeda was now recruiting and training Westerners in the deadly art of explosives and bomb making, and was sending them home to Europe and North America with orders to unleash attacks of their own.

“We kept building and building the case of the safe havens,” Hayden would later recall. “They were coming at us. They were a threat to the homeland.” Musharraf, distracted by political problems of his own, held back his military and security forces and deflected the American offers of help and threats to do more. But even as tensions were rising, a debate within the administration had delayed this midsummer reckoning in the White House residence. For months, the CIA and the Pentagon had wanted to launch commando raids into Pakistan and dramatically increase missile strikes from Predator drones against targets in the tribal areas to keep the militants off balance. But the State Department warned that any unilateral action could stoke the anti-American fires already blazing in Pakistan, further destabilize the weakened Musharraf government, and perhaps even open the door for Islamic radicals to seize control of the country and its nuclear arsenal. The State Department position had prevailed, and for months the Americans worked with and through the Pakistani government, with few lasting results. “We were 0 for ’07,” Hayden said, using a baseball hitter’s analogy to explain the lack of success against Al Qaeda and its confederates in the tribal areas.

But with fresh intelligence assessments that warned of a growing threat to the United States itself now in hand, there was an unspoken understanding among the officials gathered in the Yellow Oval Room, Hayden said, that “after the next attack, knowing what we know now, there’s no explaining it if we don’t do something.” Hayden and Kappes briefed the latest intelligence—by now chillingly familiar to the group—and then presented a detailed plan to address the threat. The plan called for ramping up the number of armed CIA Predator and Reaper drones flying over the tribal areas at any given time. It dropped the requirement that the agency seek “concurrence” from Pakistan’s government, instead authorizing unilateral Predator strikes with notification to the Pakistanis as an attack was happening or shortly thereafter. This would shorten to about forty-five minutes the time between when a target was spotted and when a Predator could launch a Hellfire missile. It would also reduce the chance that the ISI might tip off the target.

Equally important, the plan called for increasing an already burgeoning number of CIA case officers on the ground, vastly expanding the scope and depth of the American spy network inside the tribal areas. A year earlier, in the summer of 2007, threats swirled about Pakistan-based terrorist plots against Europe, and the CIA had sharply increased the quality and quantity of intelligence collected along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Hayden’s plan would accelerate that trend. Finally, Special Operations forces would be authorized to plan cross-border raids from Afghanistan into Pakistan to attack militant targets, demonstrating to Al Qaeda and to the Pakistani military that Bush really meant business.

In short, one participant said, the thrust of the plan was to increase all means to put pressure on Al Qaeda during George W. Bush’s last six months in office. The goal was to kill Osama bin Laden before the president’s term ended or at the very least leave Al Qaeda in a much weakened state for his successor. Senator Barack Obama’s campaign pledge to ratchet up the pressure on Al Qaeda—a bit of political one-upmanship—wasn’t lost on Bush or his national security team. “It wasn’t just increase the Predator campaign,” said one senior official in the meeting. “It was to do whatever was necessary to go after the network.” After a limited debate, Bush approved each measure. It was a decision that effectively made the CIA director America’s combatant commander in the hottest covert war in the global campaign against terror.

Later that night, more than seven thousand miles away, a Predator drone prowling over South Waziristan fired a Hellfire missile killing six men, including Abu Khabab al-Masri, one of Al Qaeda’s most skilled chemical and biological weapons experts, and one of the top Al Qaeda operatives on the CIA’s hit list. With less than six months left in the Bush presidency, the gloves were coming off.