Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (3 page)

Soon after the strike on the Pentagon, Zarate and a handful of senior Treasury officials rushed from their offices to the Secret Service headquarters six blocks away, where they watched the day’s events unfold from the service’s command center. Within months, Zarate would become the point man for the Treasury—and for much of the U.S. government—tracking the movement of money through the murky channels of terrorist financing, dissecting the sophisticated and shadowy networks of donors, illicit activities, and other sources that filled terrorist and insurgent coffers. From Justice to Treasury and ultimately to the upper echelons of the White House’s National Security Council, Zarate would over the next decade employ his keen intellect, near-photographic memory, and deft ability to bring together disparate players in the government’s bruising internal bureaucratic battles over how to carry out the Bush administration’s global war on terror.

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On the morning of September 11, Michael G. Vickers was immersed in the details of plans to help transform the Pentagon by creating lighter, faster, and more lethal forces to deal with emerging threats. Vickers directed strategic studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, one of the leading independent defense research organizations in Washington. Restructuring the armed forces was one of the Pentagon’s top priorities in the early days of the Bush administration. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was in the midst of setting strategy and budgets under a process called the Quadrennial Defense Review, which was mandated by statute. The Pentagon’s new leadership was assessing which weapons systems it ought to buy, how much money ought to be requested, and whether the number of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines should be changed.

But in the midafternoon, one of Rumsfeld’s top aides frantically called Vickers, telling him that the secretary urgently needed him for a different assignment, one that drew on his storied terror-fighting career from his Cold War days. Soft-spoken and wearing thick glasses, Vickers was the Pentagon’s own version of Clark Kent, an unassuming figure whose spare but unusually impressive official Pentagon biography only hinted at the extraordinary life he had lived in the 1970s and 1980s: “His operational experience spans covert action and espionage, unconventional warfare, counterterrorism (including hostage rescue operations), counterinsurgency, and foreign internal defense.” Mild manner notwithstanding, Vickers was one of the nation’s most experienced counterterrorism operatives and planners.

In 1973, when he was twenty years old, Vickers had enlisted directly into the Green Berets, taking advantage of a rarely offered program that admitted qualified civilians straight out of college or private life into the Special Forces. In Germany, with the 10th Special Forces Group, he learned how to operate behind Soviet lines to link up with partisan forces. The Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies had positioned a vastly greater number of tanks and armored troop carriers along the Fulda Gap in central Germany, across from American and NATO forces. If it came to war, one of his unit’s most sensitive missions would be to infiltrate behind Soviet lines, each four-man team armed with a backpack-size nuclear bomb. Vickers and his comrades were to plant these miniature nuclear warheads near massed Warsaw Pact forces and along their lines of attack to blunt their overmatched numbers. But, given the sensitivity of the nuclear technology, the orders were not to drop and run but to maintain “positive control” over the nukes until the detonate directives were broadcast via coded message. Vickers and his men had spoken with the weapons designers and knew the detonation sequence. There was much gallows humor about whether they would have time to get away.

Fortunately, Vickers never had to carry out these orders. Instead, he took advance training and became a Special Forces officer and shifted to Central America, where he combated Salvadoran rebels and helped resolve an airline hijacking and another hostage situation involving Honduran government ministers. Vickers loved the dangerous, fast-paced missions, and when advancement in the Army hierarchy threatened to limit his opportunities to conduct field operations, he packed his rucksack and transferred to the CIA in 1983. By now Vickers spoke Spanish, Czech, and some Russian and was qualified to plan and lead the most sensitive covert operations. In his first year at the agency he was quickly dispatched to the Caribbean island of Grenada to fight alongside Army airborne forces sent to help restore a pro-Western government that had been overthrown by Cuban-backed insurgents.

No sooner had Vickers finished in Grenada when the agency sent him to Beirut in the aftermath of the suicide truck bombings there in October 1983 that killed 241 American service members and 58 French paratroopers. It was Vickers’s first brush with Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed, anti-American terrorist organization. But his most heralded mission was yet to come. In late 1984, he was tapped to be the principal strategist for the largest covert action program in the CIA’s history: the paramilitary operation to funnel guns, antiaircraft missiles, and money to the Afghan mujahideen that in time would drive the Soviet Army out of Afghanistan. Vickers was featured in the book
Charlie Wilson’s War
and was introduced to film audiences in the Hollywood version as the whiz kid playing chess against three opponents at once in a park across from the White House. But that was artistic license: Vickers does not play chess, at least not the kind on a board with sixty-four black and white squares. From the late summer of 1984 to the spring of 1986, Vickers worked with the Afghan resistance and came to know dozens of Afghan commanders, many of whom on 9/11 were allied with the Taliban or fighting against it.

Few if any American officials understood Afghanistan’s history, rugged terrain, and complicated set of warring personalities on 9/11 better than Michael Vickers. And, now more than a decade after his greatest professional triumph, Vickers was being summoned back to help combat a threat in Afghanistan, this time as a civilian adviser to the secretary of defense—a role that would open a second major chapter in his counterterrorism career. But he was still a little out of date in his knowledge, having left the CIA in the spring of 1986 to attend Wharton Business School and having spent the 1990s in academia, the private sector, and the think-tank community. “My view of terrorism was shaped by my experiences in the ’80s, which were hijackings, largely Palestinian terrorism,” Vickers said. “On 9/12, I had a lot of catching up to do in a hurry.”

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The day began at 3:30 a.m. for the thirty-year-old Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst who, just a few years out of a prestigious midwestern graduate school, had already earned a spot within a tiny, elite cadre of Al Qaeda specialists in the U.S. government. September 11 had started auspiciously for the analyst, who will be identified in this book as John Tyson because of the highly sensitive nature of his intelligence work. He was in early that day to brief his boss, Rear Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, the Joint Staff’s top uniformed intelligence officer, on a complicated stream of information about a terrorist threat that Tyson and some other analysts were tracking. The Joint Staff is made up of 1,300 uniformed officers, enlisted troops, and civilians who work grueling hours in the Pentagon to support the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military’s top officer and senior military adviser to the president and secretary of defense.

Shortly after 5:30 a.m., as the briefing wrapped up, the admiral summoned him for a private word. The National Security Council’s top counterterrorism official, Richard A. Clarke, had asked for Tyson to join his staff at the White House. Tyson was pleased. During graduate school, he had studied briefly in Egypt and had researched terrorism under the tutelage of a retired police detective who had migrated into academia and specialized in international criminal justice. Tyson joined the DIA in 1997 as the agency’s first analyst dedicated solely to assessing the threat posed by a little-known Saudi radical “with a lot of money and a big mouth”—a man named Osama bin Laden. He became a member of a small, eclectic group of bin Laden experts whose ranks included a gruff National Security Agency code breaker; a churchgoing, cat-loving CIA terrorism specialist; and a mother of six who in her day job at the State Department drew on lessons from child rearing to help master the understanding of an emerging terrorist organization called Al Qaeda. Tyson, with his earnest enthusiasm, close-cropped military haircut, and athletic build, was the rookie of the group. Now, he would be working at the White House, the pinnacle of decision making in the government. But the events of that morning would cancel those plans; Tyson was too valuable for the DIA to spare.

At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 plowed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and Tyson’s world turned upside down. He and other American intelligence analysts had worked through Al Qaeda’s attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. They had worked through the bombing of the USS
Cole
in 2000. “The
Cole
attack, where they tried to kill our guys—you take that pretty personal, because we are the Department of Defense,” Tyson said. Now 9/11. “They tried to kill me here in this building—you take that personal a little bit, too,” he added. “There’s something in the pit of your stomach because we’d been waiting for something like this.”

Trained for this kind of emergency, one group of DIA analysts immediately began assessing what had happened; another group started going back through classified intelligence reports searching for previously undetected clues about how the attack was planned and conducted; and yet another group reached out to colleagues at the CIA and other intelligence agencies to swap information. That’s what Tyson was doing when the Pentagon was hit at 9:37 a.m. “Biggest office building in the world. It is all made of concrete. And to feel it shift, almost like it went up and then back down again, was pretty jolting,” Tyson said. After the attack, Tyson drove across the Potomac to the DIA’s main headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington. A few hours later, he was summoned back to the Pentagon. Armed military personnel had to come from a Pentagon command center to vouch for him at the heavily guarded entrance and to escort him back into the building, where he worked and slept that night. “The next year was basically a blur,” he recalls.

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These four individuals—Schloesser, Zarate, Vickers, and Tyson—are largely unknown to the general public, toiling one or more levels below the most senior officials in the Bush and Obama administrations. But they represent a cadre of counterterrorism specialists from a variety of backgrounds in the military, law enforcement, intelligence services, and other government agencies who found themselves playing key roles after the 9/11 attacks. Over the past decade, they and others like them have struggled to devise—and sometimes improvise—policies and strategies to fight a persistent and ever-changing, but not always very effective, terrorist foe. Often these were the people who had a first glimmer of a more expansive approach to combating the terrorists and their guiding ideology but were frustrated until some piece of insight broke through and took hold. Their personal experiences over the past ten years offer a glimpse into the evolution of America’s fight against Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups.

With skill and luck, the United States was able to avert another large-scale, high-casualty attack in the first years after 9/11. Yet the fact remains that even with improved defenses and increasingly effective tactical success, in the faraway safe havens of Pakistan and Yemen a determined and creative terrorist plot is certain to succeed sooner or later. America cannot be good enough and lucky forever. Had a young Nigerian man been more adept in detonating an explosive sewn into his underwear on Christmas Day 2009, an American commercial jetliner would likely have crashed in Detroit, killing hundreds of people. Had a Pakistani American honed his bomb-making skills just a bit better, his SUV packed with explosives would have detonated in Times Square in May 2010. Had that plot, hatched in Pakistan’s tribal areas, succeeded, it likely would have forced the Obama administration to attack targets in Pakistan in ways that would have had exceedingly negative and enduring ripple effects on American policy in the Muslim world.

In many ways, the best the United States can now do is to push that day of reckoning farther down the road, reduce the possible damage inflicted by a strike, and build a national resilience akin to what the British and the Israelis have developed over time and through grim experience: to recover quickly and confidently from the terrorist attack that is sure to come. But to make this happen, the American public needs to know more about what those in our counterterrorism structure know—and what they fear.

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The memory remains strong throughout the U.S. government of how ill-prepared it was on 9/11 to cope with the threats of modern terrorism. The commander in chief, President George W. Bush, was aboard his vaunted flying command post, Air Force One, for most of the day, but its Cold War command-and-control capability made it virtually useless for the requirements of this twenty-first-century threat.

Air Force One was built to protect the president and broadcast launch codes in the event of a nuclear war, not to operate as an airborne information hub and media center. Getting live television and Internet aboard the aircraft had never been a priority and was not possible on September 11. Bush, who had begun the day in Florida and was fuming that he could not return immediately to Washington, was infuriated that he could not receive a live feed from Fox News, CNN, or any other cable television network. The president, his aides, and reporters on board were left squinting at soundless, fuzzy images skimmed from weak ground signals of local television channels below as the presidential plane passed overhead. Despite the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in the country’s military arsenal and spy networks, Bush was largely blind to the vivid images of destruction and disarray that were seen by millions of Americans live on television.