Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (39 page)

“George, Bob, get together and sort this out”: Author interview with a former senior administration official, 2010.

“Just nuts”: Author interview with a former Defense Department official, 2010.

“When we would go up and do an early conceptual brief”: Author interview with Major General Jeffrey Schloesser, USA (Ret.), Arlington, Va., March 10, 2010.

“We thought we could take our counterterrorist forces”: Author interview with General John Abizaid, USA (Ret.), at the United States Military Academy, West Point, N.Y., January 12, 2010.

The plan called for hunting: Author interview with a former senior military officer, Summer 2010.

“You learn very quickly that most insurgencies are not brought to heel”: Author interview with General Richard Myers at National Defense University, Fort McNair, Washington, D.C., Summer 2009.

“Two + Seven was pretty crude”: Ibid.

“If you get these guys simultaneously or in quick order”: Author interview with John Tyson, Washington, D.C., September 17, 2010.

“In the end, it was asking for pre-approval”: Author interview with Major General Jeffrey Schloesser, USA (Ret.), Arlington, Va., March 10, 2010.

“Who was in charge of the war on terror from 9/11 to now?”: Author interview with General Richard Myers at National Defense University, Fort McNair, Washington, D.C., Summer 2009.

“to shake the trees hard”: Author interview with a senior FBI counterterrorism official, Washington, D.C., 2010.

“What we began to realize pretty rapidly”: Author interview with Arthur M. Cummings II, Washington, D.C., April 9, 2010.

“Before, it would be that”: Author interview with Robert S. Mueller III, Washington, D.C., March 11, 2011.

“We made a very visible presence there”: Author interview with Paul J. Browne, New York Police Department, Summer 2009.

“He doesn’t have much patience for the battle of ideas”: Author interview with a senior military official, Arlington, Va., Spring 2010.

“Despite remarkable victories, the fight against terrorism is far from over”: General John Abizaid, USA, Testimony Before the Senate Armed Services Committee, September 25, 2003.

“Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day”: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, October 16, 2003.

2. THE NEW DETERRENCE

“really neck down the number of words”: Author interview with Barry Pavel, Arlington, Va., September 28, 2010.

“I said, ‘Mr. President, you never have a meeting on the war on terrorism,’”: Author interview with Douglas Feith, Washington, D.C., June 30, 2009.

“It came from my head”: Author interview with Barry Pavel, Arlington, Va., September 28, 2010.

“People at the time thought that terrorists weren’t deterrable”: Author interview with Matthew Kroenig, Washington, D.C., Summer 2009.

“Isn’t anyone … thinking about deterring terrorists?”: Ibid.

“I just remember it intellectually being a very good piece of work”: Author interview with Douglas Feith, Washington, D.C., June 30, 2009.

“a perverse form of religious hope”: Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, Speech at American Israel Public Affairs Committee, April 21, 2002.

“If you can remove a certainty of success”: Author interview with General James Cartwright, Arlington, Va., February 21, 2011.

“Don’t define deterrence so narrowly”: Author interview with Matthew Kroenig, Washington, D.C., Summer 2009.

“A new deterrence calculus combines the need to deter terrorists”: White House, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, 2006.

“We will selectively be able to enhance our deterrence”: Ryan Henry, Arlington, Va., February 3, 2006.

“We decided that wouldn’t change him one bit”: Author interview with Major General Jeffrey Schloesser, USA (Ret.), Arlington, Va., March 10, 2010.

a brief statement by President Bush: President George W. Bush, Statement on North Korea Nuclear Test, White House, Washington, D.C., October 9, 2006.

“Today we also make clear that the United States”: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C., October 28, 2008.

“The artful presentation of Al Qaeda”: Author e-mail interview with Richard Barrett, February 22, 2011.

“What we’ve developed since 9/11 is a better understanding”: Author interview with Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, McLean, Va., January 15, 2008.

“It hit very close to home for me”: Quoted in Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “For Antiterror Chief, a Rough Week Ahead as Hearings Begin,”
New York Times
, January 17, 2010.

“Someone asked me what I thought about going to work”: Michael Leiter, comments to Intelligence and National Security Alliance, Washington, D.C., February 24, 2010.

3. THE EXPLOITATION OF INTELLIGENCE

“The epitome of the word ‘cavalry’?”: Author interview with Lieutenant Garry Owen Flanders, USA, 2010.

“They did an initial triage”: Author interview with a Department of Defense intelligence officer, Washington, D.C., May 2010.

“These guys wanted results”: Quoted in Eric Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall, “Task Force 626: Inside Camp Nana,”
New York Times
, March 19, 2006.

“That was a situation where we were building the airplane”: Author interview with John Tyson, Washington, D.C., 2010.

“Literally you were talking to the guys who were going to be knocking down doors”: Author interview with John Tyson, Arlington, Va., 2010.

“It gave us their whole game plan for Baghdad”: Author interview with a defense intelligence officer, Tampa, Fla., 2010.

“Once that stuff started coming back”: Author interview with Major General John Campbell, USA, Afghanistan, 2010.

“What we found in those documents”: Author interview with General Raymond Odierno, USA, Arlington, Va., 2010.

“If you don’t lock your door, you can’t complain about burglars”: Author interview with a former Marine Corps officer, Washington, D.C., 2010.

“We were getting our asses kicked by suicide bombers”: Author interview with a senior military officer, 2010.

“It was the kind of thing done a thousand times before”: Author interview with a senior military operations officer, Tampa, Fla., April 29, 2010.

“These Al Qaeda were as—what’s the right word?—as anal”: Author interview with a senior U.S. counterterrorism official, Washington, D.C., 2010.

“They videotape everything, like Pamela and Tommy Lee”: Author interview with a military intelligence analyst, Tampa, Fla., December 2009.

“From Vietnam to 9/11”: Author interview with a Special Operations community veteran, 2010.

“If you can learn something about whatever is on those hard drives”: Author interview with Major General Mark O. Schissler, Arlington, Va., January 11, 2008.

It was first disclosed in the
New York Times
: Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, “Pentagon Says a Covert Force Hunts Hussein,”
New York Times
, November 7, 2003.

“Every operation is a fight for intelligence”: Author interview with General Stanley A. McChrystal, USA, Arlington, Va., June 10, 2009.

“I remember when we first started taking this stuff”: Author interview with a Department of Defense intelligence analyst, Washington, D.C., May 19, 2010.

“more atomized—the individual guy who is bombing you every day”: Author interview with Michael Vickers, Arlington, Va., March 16, 2010.

“from the bow and arrow to the rifle”: Author interview with Lieutenant General Gary North, USAF, Persian Gulf region, July 2008.

“The fighters’ overall youth suggests”: Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman,
Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq: A First Look at the Sinjar Records
(West Point, N.Y.: Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy, no date), p. 16.

“The Sinjar records reinforce anecdotal accounts”: Ibid., p. 27.

“For example in Libya”: Author interview with a U.S. counterterrorism expert involved in the Sinjar process, 2010.

“Whoever finds the intel, owns the intel”: Author interview with a senior military operations officer, Tampa, Fla., April 2010.

“McChrystal said this is not something that should stay in the intelligence world”: Author interview with a senior U.S. defense official, Arlington, Va., 2010.

“To do it, it involved dragging the shooters kicking and screaming”: Author interview with a military intelligence analyst, Tampa, Fla., April 2010.

“I can’t walk into a country and say, ‘Stop foreign fighters’”: Author interview with a senior national security official, 2010.

“This guy named Dailey would come in from the State Department”: Author interview with a senior U.S. national security official involved in Dailey effort, undated.

“They can’t cross-check names on databases or anything”: Author interview with a senior national security official, 2010.

“Before Sinjar, we sort of ‘soccer-Mom’ed’ it”: Author interview with a former Marine Corps officer, Washington, D.C., May 11, 2010.

“You can see you have to work with other countries”: Speech by General David H. Petraeus to Association of the U.S. Army, Washington, D.C., October 7, 2008.

4. THE PROBLEM OF PAKISTAN

“This is the epicenter of terrorism in the world”: Author interview with a senior U.S. military officer, Arlington, Va., Summer 2010.

“We kept building and building the case of the safe havens”: Author interview with General Michael Hayden, USAF (Ret.), former director of Central Intelligence and National Security Agency, Arlington, Va., April 8, 2010.

“It wasn’t just increase the Predator campaign”: Author interview with a senior Bush administration official, Washington, D.C., April 2010.

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller … said in an unusual public statement: See Alan Cowell, “Blair Says Homegrown Terrorism Is Generation-Long Struggle,”
New York Times
, November 11, 2006.

“I saw my role as coordinator, organizer, and gadfly to the interagency process”: Author interview with Juan Zarate, Washington, D.C., August 17, 2010.

“If we weren’t concerned about what was happening”: Thom Shanker, “In Pakistan, U.S. Defense Secretary Seeks Support to Counter Taliban,”
New York Times
, February 13, 2007.

“There was just a lot of chatter”: Author interview with former National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2010.

“Al Qaeda was bringing more and more people”: Author interview with General Michael Hayden, former director of Central Intelligence and National Security Agency, Arlington, Va., April 8, 2010.

“Pakistan was Job One from the beginning”: Author interview with Michael Vickers, Arlington, Va., August 26, 2010.

“When you are looking for indications”: Author interview with Frances Fragos Townsend, Washington, D.C., January 8, 2010.

On July 10, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in an interview: “Chertoff’s Gut,”
Chicago Tribune
, July 12, 2007.

“It is the same intuition people use in medicine”: Author interview with Michael Chertoff, Washington, D.C., October 28, 2009.

“It hasn’t worked for Pakistan”: Mark Mazzetti and David Sanger, “Bush Aides See Failure in Fight with al Qaeda in Pakistan,”
New York Times
, July 18, 2007.

“In 2007, we’re in a period where we were especially worried”: Author interview with Michael Leiter, McLean, Va., November 4, 2010.

“What it enabled you to do was say”: Author interview with Michael Chertoff, Washington, D.C., October 28, 2009.

“We were running and gunning”: Author interview with Frances Fragos Townsend, Washington, D.C., January 8, 2010.