Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (16 page)

The second important public signal came a week later, on July 17, when the White House released a grim new intelligence assessment that openly acknowledged that the strategy of fighting Al Qaeda in Pakistan had failed. The intelligence report, the most formal assessment since the 9/11 attacks about the terrorist threat facing the United States, concluded that the United States was losing ground on a number of fronts in the fight against Al Qaeda. Indeed, the report concluded, the terrorist organization had significantly strengthened over the past two years. In identifying the main reasons for Al Qaeda’s resurgence, intelligence officials and White House aides cited Musharraf’s hands-off, peace-deal approach toward the tribal areas. “It hasn’t worked for Pakistan,” Townsend told reporters at the White House. “It hasn’t worked for the United States.”

In response to these developments, the federal government quietly went on heightened alert, and the National Security Council created a secret interagency task force to coordinate its response. The White House initially planned to have the FBI lead the task force, but Scott Redd and Michael E. Leiter, the two top officials of the National Counterterrorism Center, argued that their agency was uniquely suited to handle the challenge. Leiter appealed directly to Townsend, emphasizing that the center was prepared to show how far the government had come in addressing the failings on September 11 of sharing information and coordinating activities among federal agencies. Townsend agreed, and the NCTC was given the responsibility of leading the effort. It would also be a test run for some “new deterrence” principles.

It came as no surprise to those who knew Michael Leiter that his persuasion prevailed. Supremely self-confident and politically savvy, Leiter had managed complicated bureaucratic operations before. When the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created in the wake of the 9/11 Commission Report in 2004, Leiter served as a deputy chief of staff coordinating the new agency’s operations with the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, and other agencies and departments. Now the challenge for Leiter was to harness the government’s newly revamped counterterrorism structure to address the amorphous but potentially deadly threat. “In 2007, we’re in a period where we were especially worried about Al Qaeda operatives ready for deployment to Europe or the United States,” Leiter said. “That was our fear.”

In response to this new challenge, Leiter oversaw a crash review of American vulnerabilities, heightening U.S. defenses, coordinating with European and Middle Eastern allies, and increasing clandestine intelligence operations along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. In previous terrorism scares, experts from the Pentagon, the State Department, the FBI, and the intelligence agencies would meet to discuss the intelligence, return to their agencies to draft recommendations for possible actions, and then reconvene at the next interagency meeting to review the new set of options. This so-called stovepiping arrangement never fully integrated the government’s resources and expertise. In addressing the 2007 summer threat emanating from Pakistan, a cadre of counterterrorism experts from across the government met repeatedly, tapping into the same information and drawing up potential action plans that complemented and coordinated with each other. It was a lesson drawn directly from the failures of 9/11. “What changed was that senior officials from every department and agency, overseas and domestic, were coming together with a common intelligence operating picture, saying, ‘This is exactly what we’re seeing, and this is what we’re going to do about it,’” Leiter said. But Leiter and his colleagues still needed something tangible that would help everyone involved in the process, including the president in his daily briefings, quickly understand the threat, the responses available to government, and the cost, in terms of treasure, manpower, and economic impact of each option.

So was born the Horse Blanket.

It wasn’t really a blanket at all. Rather, it was a large, multilayered briefing paper that unfolded, like a child’s toy, to reveal a graduating series of contingencies that each federal agency could take in response to a potential or actual terrorist attack. It was a graphic device that distilled thousands of hours of analytical work and PowerPoint slides to a fold-up chart that policy makers could pull from their briefcases to handily compare and contrast options. The options were depicted on the document in green, yellow, or red, depending on how much it would cost (installing more screeners in airports), how much it would disrupt daily American lives (closing down portions of the border), or how it might impact foreign policy (increasing drone strikes).

“What it enabled you to do was say, ‘If we have reason to believe we are facing an elevated threat picture, here is the menu of options we can look at on an interagency basis,’” Chertoff recalled. “Depending on the intelligence you could say, ‘Well, we really ought to dial this up at the border or we ought to dial this up, we ought to do more internal investigation.’ For example, this is purely hypothetical, but if we have an indication of an imminent nuclear weapon coming into the country, you would then say, ‘Okay, that’s just about as bad as it gets, we’ll shut the border.’ That’d be a red because you can’t sustain shutting the border for a long time because it’s a huge burden on us and it’s a huge burden on the rest of the world. We never came near that, but I am trying to give you a feel for the burden of various levels of protection.”

With no public fanfare, the CIA and other intelligence agencies intensified their spying and analysis along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and coordinated even more closely with foreign intelligence services, culminating in the increased drone strikes a year later, in the summer of 2008. The FBI intensified its analyses of the threat to the United States itself. Homeland Security tightened border defenses, including some innovative reshuffling of Transportation Security Administration personnel at airports. Teams of bomb-sniffing dogs were more visibly deployed at train stations. “We were running and gunning,” Townsend recalled. “We had an ability to surge the system in a very focused way and do it on a worldwide scale.” As more information came in, officials could ramp efforts up or down accordingly, reflecting how the tools of the “new deterrence” could be employed and modulated according to the threat. Most of the steps taken and techniques employed remain classified because officials want to be able to use some variation of them in the future. “It was a full slate of things domestically and abroad,” Zarate recalled. “You’re trying to create a security blanket that tries to suss out what may be out there.”

The threat eased after about a month, and Leiter’s task force stood down. But the fears seemed justified when authorities in Germany and Denmark announced in early September that they had broken up two terrorist plots, each with connections to Pakistan’s tribal areas. In Germany, the authorities said they had stopped a major terrorist attack against American and German targets in the country, possibly including the Ramstein Air Base, a crucial transportation hub for the American military, and Frankfurt International Airport. Nearly three years later, a German court would sentence four Islamic militants to serve up to twelve years in prison for planning to create what a judge called a “monstrous blood bath.” The group was known in Germany as “the Sauerland cell” after the region in North Rhine–Westphalia where three of the four men were arrested in possession of twenty-six military detonators and twelve drums of hydrogen peroxide, the main chemical in the explosives that had been used in the London transit bombings of July 2005. The court determined that three of the men were members of an Al Qaeda–linked terrorist group, the Islamic Jihad Union, which was a splinter organization of a Tajik terrorist group. The United States had helped the German authorities track the location of two of the suspects by eavesdropping on their cell phone conversations as they moved out of training camps in Pakistan.

A day before the German plot was disrupted, Danish authorities conducted predawn raids in nearly a dozen locations. American authorities helped Danish security officials locate the suspects through electronic intercepts from Pakistan, just as they did in the arrests in Germany. American intelligence officials said that one of the men in the Danish case had received instruction in explosives, surveillance, and other techniques at a terrorist training camp in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan within the preceding twelve months. Just as American officials had feared, the extremists were seeping back into their European homes from the Al Qaeda training camps in Pakistan. It was only a matter of time, they believed, before these militants would make the hop across the Atlantic to American soil.

*   *   *

It was the most tantalizing of all tips, the Holy Grail of clues among the millions of pieces of information that intelligence analysts sifted through in the years after the 9/11 attack: the location of Osama bin Laden.

In the late summer of 2007, as tensions in Washington heated up over the reports of possible terrorist plots emanating from Pakistan, Afghan intelligence officers eavesdropping on Taliban conversations picked up strong indications that Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters were planning the largest gathering in Afghanistan since early in the war. The intelligence was so compelling that President Hamid Karzai summoned top American officers to his palace in Kabul to plead for a major American operation to crush the fighters. It wasn’t just the Afghans who were worried. Independently, the secretive U.S. Special Operations teams assigned to hunt high-level Al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Afghanistan had also detected reports of the militant massing. “This looked to be bigger than Anaconda,” said one senior American intelligence officer, referring to Operation Anaconda in March 2002, the final set-piece battle of the invasion of Afghanistan. Seven Americans died in that offensive in the Shahikot Valley.

This time, the intelligence indicated that more than one hundred Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters and commanders planned to enter Afghanistan through the Tora Bora mountains along the Pakistan border. The rugged, rocky region is honeycombed with caves, some of which had been used by the mujahideen in their standoff against the Soviet Army in the 1980s. The terrain was easy to defend and hard to attack and had been the site of bin Laden’s last stand before he escaped into Pakistan in the winter of 2001–2002. What seized attention in Washington in 2007 were faint if tantalizing hints that bin Laden himself was going to join the new gathering. Even President Bush was briefed on the reports. “It was a big deal. We thought we had ‘Number One’ on this side of the border,” said a senior American military officer involved in the operation. “It was the best intelligence we’d had on him in a long time.”

Top military and intelligence officers who read the reports said the camps in Tora Bora were being used not merely as a staging area for attacks across Afghanistan, but, more worrisome, there were indications that the site was a planning and training area for a high-visibility, mass-casualty attack somewhere outside Afghanistan, in western Europe or perhaps even the United States. That larger threat is what led some to interpret the intelligence as indicating bin Laden himself might be in attendance to motivate suicide bombers and bless a mission that would attempt to replicate something big, perhaps even on the scale of another 9/11-style strike. “The threat stream was viable,” said one senior officer. “The area was a hub for high-value leaders, mid-level commanders and foot soldiers. It was a command-and-control center. They went there as a launching pad to fight inside Afghanistan but also to plan and train for a spectacular attack outside the theater of combat.”

Nobody disagreed that Tora Bora was a significant center of terrorists and militants. But there were deep divisions among the analysts over whether bin Laden would show up. “If UBL had been there, it would have been just luck,” scoffed one military commander.

Those who read the intelligence tidbits as pointing to bin Laden’s presence said it was one of the few areas of Afghanistan in which the Al Qaeda mastermind might feel safe moving and would have been the most recent confirmed presence of bin Laden. Other intelligence analysts rejected any suggestions that bin Laden would be foolish enough to move from hiding in Pakistan into a remote corner of Afghanistan, where the United States military could employ all its forces. As the analysts argued over the intelligence, the Special Operations planners were taking no chances. If this militancy council did happen and bin Laden was there, he would not escape again, they vowed.

Planners began building the largest combined air and Special Operations mission since the Vietnam War. The centerpiece of the operation, called Valiant Pursuit, would be carried out by as many as five B-2 bombers, the bat-wing stealth warplane initially designed to carry nuclear warheads into the Soviet Union. For this mission, each plane was to be loaded with about eighty satellite-guided conventional bombs. Dozens of attack planes would also be in place, ready to strike targets in the Tora Bora mountains. On the ground, the military would employ a new, long-range artillery system called HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System). Helicopter gunships and Special Operations troops would stand ready to go in to kill or capture any insurgents who escaped the initial aerial bombardment. “It was going to be a piling on,” said one senior American officer who was briefed on the mission, which is still highly classified.

The size of the operation, coupled with the ambiguity of the intelligence, alarmed some senior U.S. commanders, including Admiral William Fallon, the head of Central Command. “Fallon’s view was you’re swatting a fly with a sixteen-pound hammer,” said the senior American officer. Other concerns surfaced. The B-2s would be utilizing a British air base in Diego Garcia, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean, and would likely need to fly through Pakistani air space to carry out the mission. While the B-2s’ bombs were satellite guided, there was a risk that one could fall into Pakistani territory by mistake. “There was a lot of concern about how much ordnance we were going to put on target,” said another senior American officer.