Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (4 page)

To protect the president after the attacks in New York and Washington, Air Force One zigzagged west on a secret route from Florida to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to refuel. On the tarmac, Bush was unnerved by what he saw outside his window: rows of B-52 nuclear bombers were on the runway in scramble mode, and air crews were running around in battle-dress uniforms. The airmen were not gearing up in response to the terrorist attacks, it turned out, but were part of a previously scheduled annual drill by the U.S. Strategic Command, simulating a nuclear attack against the homeland. Barksdale did not possess the technology to connect the president by secure videoconference with his top advisers in Washington, so Air Force One was quickly airborne again, this time bound for Offutt Air Force Base outside of Omaha, Nebraska, the headquarters of the Strategic Command, or “Stratcom.” Deliberately located in the middle of the country during the Cold War—at that time out of reach of Soviet long-range missiles and bombers—Stratcom and its subterranean war room were built to transmit a president’s orders to launch a nuclear strike.

Stratcom had been engaged for more than a week in a high-level exercise called Global Guardian, which posited that a rogue nation called Slumonia would attack the United States with nuclear weapons. The State Department insists that countries cast as adversaries in war games not be identified, but Slumonia was a small nuclear power in northeast Asia—obviously, North Korea. With the cancellation of constant high alerts at the end of the Cold War, American bomber crews did not have extensive experience in loading nuclear weapons, so this exercise was a way to keep their skills up to date. That is why on the morning of 9/11 air crews were pulling nuclear bombs and missiles out of their heavily guarded storage sites and loading them aboard B-52s and B-2s in Louisiana and Missouri—precisely the scene that startled Bush at Barksdale. The nuclear weapons were real, but their triggers were not armed.

By the time Bush landed at Offutt, Admiral Richard W. Mies, Stratcom’s commanding officer, had cancelled the training exercise and ordered the nuclear warheads returned to secure storage bunkers and the bombers dispersed, lest either pose a target of opportunity for an unforeseen follow-on terrorist attack. “We are not under pretend attack,” Mies told his assembled staff. “We are really being attacked.”

Even as Stratcom was rehearsing for old-school threats, the military’s elite counterterrorism force, the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was preparing to conduct an exercise against the growing threat of a nuclear, chemical, or biological terrorist attack against the United States or against American interests. On September 11, about 1,800 Special Operations forces and a handful of other secret government operators were preparing to launch a sixteen-day exercise in six European and Mediterranean countries and on a ship at sea. The goal of the classified drill was to find and thwart terrorists who had captured an unconventional weapon and threatened to use it against the United States. The exercise, overseen by the U.S. European Command and code-named Ellipse Charlie, was called off that day during its final planning stages, and the commandos rushed back to their real-world bases.

The European Command and the Special Operations forces had identified the right kind of threat. Because they were trained in hostage-rescue operations and counterterrorism missions, it also made sense that the Special Operations troops were rehearsing a complicated mock attack from a foe like Al Qaeda. But the American commandos and the rest of the U.S. government were still several steps behind Al Qaeda in piecing together the critical intelligence and threat information that could have helped prevent the attacks. Now the race was on to learn everything possible about Al Qaeda before it could strike the homeland again.

*   *   *

On Monday, October 15, Jeff Schloesser steered his dark green BMW onto Interstate 95 and started the thirty-minute trip from his home in Springfield, Virginia, to the Pentagon. At 5:30 a.m., the crushing Washington morning commute had not yet turned the eight-lane freeway into a parking lot, and Schloesser made good time on this crisp morning, the first day of his new job and a world away from the Middle East.

In the five weeks since 9/11, Schloesser had returned from his fifteen-month assignment in Kuwait, expecting to go to Washington to punch the next ticket in his climb up the Army’s leadership ladder: a stint working European policy issues on the military’s Joint Staff. Schloesser had served in Kosovo in the late 1990s, giving him some exposure to the bedeviling intricacies of Balkan politics. But Schloesser’s boss, Lieutenant General John Abizaid, had other ideas for him. Abizaid directed political-military affairs for the Joint Staff and was one of the Army’s most intelligent officers. A Lebanese American with small-town roots in northern California—and the only Arabic speaker to advance to four-star rank in the Army (he would get his fourth star in 2003)—Abizaid had served in Jordan and had spent a year as a member of a UN observer force in southern Lebanon. In between those assignments, Abizaid had commanded a 120-man Ranger company that parachuted into Grenada as part of the 1983 invasion. At one point in the operation, Abizaid ordered a soldier to hot-wire a bulldozer at the airfield and charge at Cuban troops with blade raised, giving cover to himself and his men (an incident that was immortalized in the 1986 Clint Eastwood film
Heartbreak Ridge
). Schloesser reported to Abizaid’s office early that morning, not knowing exactly what was in store for him. “Forget Europe,” Abizaid said. “You’re going to stand up a brand-new office here, the Strategic Planning Cell for the War on Terror.”

In wartime, the responsibility for planning and waging specific campaigns falls to the regional military commander assigned to oversee that slice of the globe. In this case, responsibility for Afghanistan fell to the U.S. Central Command, based in Tampa, Florida, and led by General Tommy R. Franks. The broader strategic military planning that cuts across different regional commands is the domain of the Joint Staff. On September 11, the Joint Staff had no office or staff specifically assigned to thinking about fighting terrorists around the world. Jeff Schloesser and his new team would be filling a crucial void.

At the end of the week, Abizaid convened his crisis-action team and singled out his newest chief terrorist hunter. “Have we killed any Al Qaeda yet?” Abizaid demanded, staring at Schloesser. Schloesser, still trying to find his way around the labyrinthine halls of the Pentagon, wrote that night in one of the small, green notebooks that he kept for every assignment since he was a young captain: “Not sure, too much focus on the Taliban in Afghanistan and not enough on our global fight against Al Qaeda.” Schloesser was not alone in grappling with America’s newest Public Enemy Number One.

*   *   *

Within the U.S. government on September 11, 2001, there were peaks and valleys in terms of understanding Al Qaeda, but mostly valleys. The Clinton administration had reacted with increasing alarm after Al Qaeda’s attacks in 1998 against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as well as the strike on the
Cole
two years later. But President Clinton never ordered more than cruise missile strikes against Al Qaeda targets. When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, few of his advisers had any detailed understanding of how Al Qaeda was organized, how it was equipped, and how it could train its operatives to carry out the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. As one senior White House official who closely monitored terrorist intelligence reports recalled, “There were people up and down the hallways who couldn’t spell Al Qaeda. Literally they didn’t know a thing. I remember being asked, ‘Is it all one word or two?’”

The new administration’s greater national security concerns centered on building antimissile defenses against a rogue state like North Korea or countering the growing military influence of China throughout Asia. After September 11, there was a mad scramble to catch up. Within the inner circles of the Bush administration, officials vented frustration at the lack of clear understanding about the nature of this new enemy. At the same time, intense debates involving senior policy makers and intelligence officials centered on how precisely to define the enemy beyond Al Qaeda. “Pretend it’s a box,” explained one participating intelligence official, recounting a primer he gave to senior White House aides. “Who is inside the box and who is outside the box with this enemy? Is it Hezbollah? Is it Hamas? There is a lot of debate about how big this box is and what you put in it.”

In the months after the 9/11 attacks, government officials arrived at a tentative consensus about transnational threats with global reach. Al Qaeda and its associated groups became the main target. But intelligence officials and policy makers struggled with how to define the nature of the enemy, where it resided, and its nexus to state actors, including Iran, Sudan, and Iraq. It was a question that grew increasingly politically charged beginning in early 2002, as senior Bush administration officials sought to draw links between Al Qaeda and the government of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.

In the initial weeks after the attack, the more than fifty organizations that make up the U.S. government’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies scrambled to try to answer these questions. But often they found they spoke past each other, had different priorities, and played diverging and uncoordinated roles in combating the new threat.

At the National Security Agency, the supersecret eavesdropping agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, a call went out from its director, Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, to open the spigots and provide as much information as possible to the FBI, which was responsible for tracking terrorists inside the United States. Little of the NSA’s technical wizardry had been aimed at Al Qaeda before 9/11. As FBI agents chased tips culled from telephone, e-mail, and other communications intercepts, many of them complained that the NSA’s information was nothing but a series of dry holes that wasted critical manpower and resources. The NSA fired back that the FBI had misused and misunderstood the valuable clues they had been provided. It didn’t help that the FBI lagged woefully behind in updating its outmoded computer systems. “We in no way thought we were giving them leads,” Hayden said. “We thought we were giving them raw data that they would put into a larger database. It took us a period of time to go, ‘Oh, hell, that’s not working. Tighten it up here,’ because they just didn’t have the ability to absorb what was coming down.”

But the nation was on edge, fearing another wave of attacks. In this heightened threat environment, the CIA began dumping its in-box of raw intelligence reports of plots, sightings, and potential attacks on Bush’s desk every morning as part of his top-secret Presidential Daily Briefing. The data came in a neatly printed spreadsheet called the Threat Matrix, the top two or three dozen of the most disturbing pieces of intelligence and suspected plots that American and allied spy agencies had dug up in the previous twenty-four hours. “In those early days, believe me, we saw them all—nuclear, biological, chemical [NBC],” said a former senior staff member of the National Security Council. “There were compelling reports of NBC being developed, smuggled in, and planned for use in the U.S. None of them panned out, but it all affected the psyche of policymakers after 9/11.”

As the FBI and NSA crossed signals early on, the FBI and the CIA also operated at cross-purposes, sometimes unwittingly. In order to avoid being shunted aside in advising the president on threats to the nation, the FBI soon came up with its own version of a threat matrix for the president. At one point in early 2002, both agencies were tracking what American analysts said were growing preparations for a major “wedding” somewhere in the Midwest. In terrorist parlance, the word
wedding
is often code for a major attack. Dribs and drabs on this “wedding” planning made their way to the president from both agencies, independent of each other, of course. Finally, over the Easter holiday, during a video-teleconference with top aides in Washington from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Bush halted the briefing, exasperated by the discrepancies in the rival agencies’ reporting about the suspected threat. “George, Bob, get together and sort this out,” he told his CIA director, George J. Tenet, and FBI director, Robert S. Mueller III.

Bush’s instincts were right. When the analysts finally untangled their clues, it turned out that the ominous “wedding” really was just that: the matrimony of a young man and a young woman from two prominent Pakistani American families. There was no threat. There was no plot. Until the president personally intervened, however, the FBI and CIA had jealously guarded their sources and assessments without collaborating to resolve what turned out to be a time-consuming dead end.

*   *   *

Within three months of the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban had been routed and had fled Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden had escaped the bombing of Tora Bora and slipped across the border into Pakistan. Mindful of the lessons of the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, the Americans maintained a light footprint there: small groups of CIA paramilitary officers supported by Special Operations forces that worked closely with the indigenous Northern Alliance troops. At the Pentagon and at the CIA, analysts and operatives watched as militants spilled out of Afghanistan and scurried for refuge elsewhere, plotting to fight another day. Yet the outlines of what constituted Al Qaeda and its affiliates were still vague. A fear of when and where the next attack might take place continued to grip official Washington. With little information or understanding of how extremist networks like Al Qaeda work, some proposed responses by various agencies were driven by overreaction or worse.

Some planners proposed that if Al Qaeda appeared ready to attack America again, the United States should publicly threaten to bomb the city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, the holiest site in all of Islam, in retaliation. “Just nuts!” one sensible Pentagon aide wrote to himself when he heard the proposal. This plan, while far-fetched, copied traditional Cold War deterrence in laying out punishment in advance to deter an attack. While this proposal was quickly rejected, more refined and realistic versions would come along in its place.