Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (29 page)

The process of “massing intelligence” on an individual has proven to be a more valuable tool than harsh interrogation techniques when a detainee needs to be questioned. “We can go into an interrogation knowing more about a guy than he does—and this is a guy we didn’t even care about two hours before,” said one military officer. Pictures captured on his cell phone or ones that linked to his. Family names, even of his kids; family history. People with whom he had spoken and knowledge of where he had traveled. “This is the technique: ‘We know all,’” the officer said. “We wouldn’t just make the detainee think we already knew everything about him, but we actually do know everything about him. It gives us great leverage in forcing a detainee to give up others. There are no secrets left. It is futile to lie.” No detail is too small to be left off the counterterror database. “Knowing about a missing toe can help us ID a guy,” said one analyst. Forensic review of the kinds of copper wire or rubber washer favored by an explosives network is just as important. Bits of debris remaining after an explosion can be identified and tracked back to the original manufacturer. Not that a chemical company in Florida or a machine-parts plant in Michigan or a wire-bending shop in Italy would be aware that its multiuse parts ended up inside a bomb after purchases by many middlemen. But bomb makers are creatures of habit. They like the same parts. Working the purchase chain can often lead directly to the heart of the network.

Despite these advances in the brute-force power of supercomputer technology, human beings must remain in the decision loop, even though they also remain a weak link. The reason is straightforward: There is no software perceptive enough to look at a video image and separate a Taliban fighter carrying an AK-47 from an Afghan villager carrying a shovel. But the challenge to human analysts has been magnified as the military continues to accelerate its efforts to find, fix, and finish off Al Qaeda and its franchises.

Major General James O. Poss sits atop the Air Force effort as his service’s assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and from a Pentagon office decorated with models of the newest and coolest spy planes, he revels in the accelerating advancements in his technology even as he worries about the ability of human beings to keep up. He confessed that the Air Force has reached out to at least two unusual allies for advice on how to manage its intelligence overload: first, to the National Football League, to see how the organization categorizes and stores years of game film and video, and manages still to quickly access the files; and second, to YouTube, to explore better ways to gather, analyze, and store voluminous video files. “The bad news is, we don’t know how to manage all of the information yet,” Poss said.

The challenge is obvious at Langley Air Force Base, inside what looks like a redbrick schoolhouse where a warehouse-sized room with dim lighting is home to hundreds of flat-screen TVs that hang from industrial metal skeletons. Air-conditioning guarantees gooseflesh. The occupants are strikingly young. They consume a lot of caffeine and sugar. They speak their own language. The building is called Distributed Common Ground System-1, one of the Air Force’s most sensitive installations for processing, exploiting, and disseminating information from the global battlefield. And it is costly: The Air Force piece of this global intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission alone is priced at $5 billion. Using this network, and for the Air Force alone, each day brings the task of processing one thousand hours of full-motion video, one thousand still images, and hundreds of hours of “signals intelligence,” usually cell phone calls, in thirty-eight different languages. That flood of data has fundamentally changed how the military thinks about the fog of war. No longer is it too little information. Today, the problem is too much, and the challenge is seeking new ways to analyze it, prioritize it, and distribute it.

Deep concerns over how to manage all of this information have risen to the very top of the military. General James E. Cartwright, the former head of Strategic Command who became vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2007 and is an expert on new technology and warfare, worries about how the military will manage with its introduction of the next generation of sensors, which are vastly more capable than even those on the battlefield today. “Today, an analyst sits there and stares at ‘Death TV’ for hours on end trying to find a single target or see something move or see something do something that makes it a valid target,” Cartwright said. “It is just a waste of manpower. It is inefficient.”

And it’s only going to get worse, as the next generation of sensors can watch multiple targets over a larger area. This so-called Gorgon Stare technology could require two thousand analysts to fully process the data feeds from a single flying platform, compared to the nineteen analysts required per drone today, he said. “We just can’t do that,” Cartwright warned. “I now have run into a problem of generating analysts that I can’t solve.” That’s why, he said, the military is searching for new algorithms and new digital technology to help analyze, sort, and store at speeds impossible for a human to manage in this new world of battling shadowy terrorist and insurgent networks.

John Tyson, the DIA’s top Al Qaeda expert, has watched as the government’s force of professional counterterrorism analysts has grown from a group small enough to know each other’s phone numbers to a vast army linked by supercomputers processing hundreds of thousands of bits of data in nanoseconds. Al Qaeda and its associated terror networks may have been degraded, but they are adapting. “If you look at it from a network standpoint, perhaps they are less capable,” Tyson said. “However, I think it is more distributed now, but I think you have more people looking at the problem set. It is sort of a crapshoot. Put your bet down on red or black.”

8

THE RISE OF HOME-GROWN EXTREMISM

On the cold, soggy morning of December 1, 2010, Juan Zarate and Michael Leiter met in a conference room just a few blocks from the White House, where together they had managed one terrorism crisis after another. The two old friends and longtime colleagues in the Bush administration had taken different paths after President Obama was sworn in. Zarate had left government and was now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an influential Washington think tank, as well as a national security analyst for CBS News. The White House had asked Leiter to stay on as head of the National Counterterrorism Center, a nod to the former Navy pilot’s professionalism as well as to the new team’s desire to maintain continuity among the country’s top terror fighters during the transition.

Zarate had invited Leiter to CSIS to speak on the shifting terrorist threat facing the country and how Leiter’s center was responding to the new challenges. The two men traded compliments during the introductions. “He’s not Jack Bauer,” Zarate said of Leiter, referring to the star of the television drama
24
, “but he’s probably the closest thing we have in Washington in a suit to Jack Bauer.” “Minus the torture,” Leiter quipped to the audience of policy analysts, journalists, and government experts. He then joked that he was still trying to catch up on the flood of e-mails the indefatigable Zarate had sent to him at two a.m.—nearly three years earlier.

But the message Leiter delivered that morning was anything but light-hearted: The American homeland is not immune to the ideological poison of Al Qaeda and its affiliates and followers, as there are American citizens and permanent legal residents infected by the virus of violent religious extremism, often spread by the Internet.

The Obama administration is grappling with the fact that the nation is hurtling down a bloody and familiar road already traveled by Britain, Spain, Germany, and Israel. Despite a spate of recent thwarted bomb plots, Leiter warned, the country was facing an increasing threat from homegrown terrorists. “We have to be honest that some things will get through,” he said. “In this era of these more complicated threats and a more diverse threat and lower-scale attacks, to include individuals who have been radicalized here in the homeland, stopping all of the attacks has become that much harder.”

Leiter’s sobering comments were sandwiched between two cases that vividly illustrated his concern about the growing number of Americans who are choosing to self-radicalize and carry out terror attacks on their own.

Five days earlier, on November 26, the FBI arrested Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a nineteen-year-old Somali-born U.S. citizen who tried to detonate what he thought was a car bomb at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon, where some ten thousand people had gathered. While he was planning the bombing, Mohamud was spotted by the FBI and put under surveillance. He told undercover agents that in 2009 he published three articles on the Web site Jihad Recollections, which was edited by Samir Khan, a Saudi-born American, from his home in North Carolina. (Khan had since moved to Yemen, where he ran
Inspire
, an English-language magazine and Web site, on behalf of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.) Mohamud also told the agents that for four years he had been dreaming of carrying out a terrorist attack. “Since I was fifteen,” he said. “I thought about all these things before.”

A week after Leiter’s address in Washington, federal prosecutors charged a Baltimore construction worker with plotting to blow up a military recruiting station in Maryland. The FBI had been tipped off to his radical statements on Facebook, joined his plot, and gave him a phony car bomb that he tried to explode. The worker, Antonio Martínez, a twenty-one-year-old American citizen who had recently converted to Islam and changed his name to Muhammad Hussain, had declared on his Facebook page that he hated “Any who opposes Allah.” The indictment charged that Martínez was focused on killing American military personnel in the United States because they were killing Muslims overseas. In this case, as in the Mohamud case, the FBI used undercover agents to monitor the suspects for months, befriend them, and ultimately supply them with fake explosives. In both cases, federal agents said they offered the men several chances to back out, proposing nonviolent options to help the cause of Islam. But the men wanted to attack.

They were not alone. In September 2009, a nineteen-year-old Jordanian national was arrested after placing a fake bomb in a sixty-story Dallas skyscraper. The same month, a twenty-nine-year-old Muslim convert was charged with placing a bomb in the federal building in Springfield, Illinois. And in October 2010, a thirty-four-year-old naturalized American citizen born in Pakistan was arrested and charged with plotting to bomb the Washington Metro after meeting with undercover agents and discussing his plans and surveillance activities. All these plots were thwarted. (In October 2010, the Jordanian was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison. The other cases were all pending, as of the spring of 2011.) But Leiter’s message was clear: Eventually, one of these homegrown terrorists would succeed.

*   *   *

As the years passed after September 11 with no major attacks in the homeland, terrorism analysts cautiously embraced the notion that Muslims in the United States were less vulnerable to radicalization than Muslims in Europe or the Middle East. American Muslims were better assimilated culturally and economically, the experts said, and they were well positioned to climb the ladder of prosperity in this country. They were said to exhibit little of the alienation that often gripped their counterparts in Europe, much less an attraction to extremist violence. But that began to change noticeably, starting in 2009. In all, there have been more than forty plots involving American citizens or permanent residents in the ten years since the 9/11 attacks, and roughly half of these were launched in 2009 or 2010. The jihadist plots or attacks inside the United States have baffled terrorism experts because the would-be bombers have no evident links to one another and little in common beyond their apparent ideological motive.

Even more disturbing to counterterrorism officials are three cases with ties to Pakistan’s tribal region, where the American perpetrators received training in bomb making and terrorist tactics from Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives. These plots involved Najibullah Zazi, a former Manhattan coffee vendor who pleaded guilty to traveling to Pakistan for explosives training and plotting a deadly assault on New York City subway trains in September 2009; David C. Headley of Chicago, who pleaded guilty to aiding the 2008 terrorist assault on Mumbai and plotting attacks in Denmark; and Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani American who loaded his Nissan Pathfinder with fertilizer, propane, and gasoline in a failed attempt to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010. “The past thirteen months have been as intense, if not more intense, because of the variety of threats than any time since 2001,” Leiter told the CSIS audience.

Why was this happening now?

The New York Police Department, after more than two years of reviewing cases of homegrown terrorism in the United States and around the world, offered one of the earliest explanations in a wide-ranging report issued in August 2007 that described a four-phase process that transforms what it called “unremarkable” people into terrorists. In the first phase, or “preradicalization,” most homegrown terrorists are strikingly unexceptional; they have ordinary jobs, live ordinary lives and, for the most part, have had little if any criminal history. The second phase, “self-identification,” occurs when individuals are influenced by external or internal events, often through the Internet, and begin to explore the jihadist brand of Islam on their own. This phase could result from losing a job, experiencing a death in the family, or feeling anger about the treatment of Muslims in international conflicts, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq. The third phase, “indoctrination,” happens when an individual wholly accepts the extremist ideology and is willing to commit violence to achieve its goals. This stage is often facilitated by someone with spiritual influence, such as an imam or other respected figure with religious training or credentials, who sanctions the violent act as a religious duty. The final stage, “jihadization,” is reached when individuals or members of a small group accept their duty to commit violence in the name of Islam and begin preparing and executing a plot.