Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (6 page)

The strategy of targeting Al Qaeda’s senior leaders paid early dividends. In March 2002, the key Al Qaeda planner, Abu Zubaydah, was one of the first terrorists captured by Pakistani authorities and turned over to the CIA for interrogation. In September, Pakistani police raided an apartment in Karachi and captured Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a senior Al Qaeda member, in a gun battle. On November 4, a Hellfire missile fired from a CIA Predator drone in the Yemeni desert killed Qaed Senyan al-Harthi, also known as Abu Ali, one of the planners of the
Cole
bombing two years earlier. The Yemen strike was the first time an armed Predator drone had been used to attack suspected terrorists outside of Afghanistan. It also signaled a more aggressive phase in the campaign against terrorism, with the United States relying less on the cooperation of other nations to arrest and detain suspected terrorists when they were discovered overseas. But the most important Al Qaeda leader on the Two + Seven list to be seized was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, generally recognized as the third-ranking official in Al Qaeda and one of the principal planners of the East Africa embassy attacks, the
Cole
bombing, and 9/11 itself. Pakistani forces seized him during a raid on a house in Rawalpindi on March 1, 2003.

As time went on, the seven terrorists initially linked with bin Laden and al-Zawahri on the Two + Seven chart were killed or captured, and new names turned up on President Bush’s scorecard. The initial strategy was chipping away at the enemy’s leadership, but an approach broader than kill-or-capture was clearly needed.

Another problem remained unresolved: Who would lead that effort? The president, of course, was ultimately in charge of what he called the “war on terror.” But day-to-day, who would take the lead and have the responsibility and authority? “Who was in charge of the war on terror from 9/11 to now?” Myers would later reflect. “I’d say there was probably nobody in charge.” The military was still locked in a kill-or-capture mentality, but elsewhere in the government new thinking on combating terrorists was emerging.

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In the months after 9/11, the FBI was undergoing a seismic shift in combating terrorism at home and abroad. From the days of J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men, FBI agents had risen through the ranks by arresting bank robbers, kidnappers, and white-collar criminals. But the bureau was transforming fitfully after the 9/11 attacks and now ranked fighting terrorism as its number-one priority. It doubled the number of agents assigned to counterterrorism duties to roughly five thousand and created new squads across the country that focused more on deterring and disrupting terrorism than on solving crimes.

The FBI was no stranger to domestic terrorism. The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, by Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people. And the first World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993, by Ramzi Yousef, the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, killed six people and injured more than a thousand others. But counterterrorism remained a highly specialized backwater at the bureau. On September 11, fewer than one hundred agents had the know-how, field experience, and background running national programs to coordinate a multidistrict, multiagency, international operation like the investigation after 9/11.

A major lesson from the first World Trade Center bombing was to keep the terrorists off balance and disrupt their plots before they could carry out the next big one. In the initial weeks and months after 9/11, with government experts concerned about a second wave of terrorist strikes, there was a full-court press to anticipate and interdict any follow-up attacks.

As top FBI counterterrorism officials saw it, if they did not detect a plot unfolding and identify the potential plotters, they needed “to shake the trees hard and make sure that anybody that looks like or smells like or breathes like a terrorist is not given the opportunity to execute on an operation that we don’t see.” That strategy came at a cost. By 2003, some counterterrorism experts within the FBI began challenging whether disruption alone was the best strategy to combat terrorists. “What we began to realize pretty rapidly was that there was a lot at stake when you disrupt somebody and you really don’t have a clear picture of what their involvement is or what the network is,” said Arthur M. Cummings II, a top FBI counterterrorism official.

Cummings, a stocky former Navy SEAL, worried that while arresting a suspected or known terrorist would remove that particular threat, it might also leave authorities blind to a larger terrorist network and its ongoing operations. “When we have somebody who is a terrorist come to American borders, the question always should be asked: Are we losing more than we’re gaining in this disruption strategy?” he said. “Do we have a view into the genuine nature of the enemy and what they plan to do and what their network is and what facilitation capacities they have within the United States? Does that exist? Do we have that knowledge?”

In 1995, when American and Pakistani authorities arrested Ramzi Yousef in Islamabad, the federal agents who brought him back to the United States for trial questioned him for six hours on the flight. Most of the questions focused on Yousef’s culpability and building a body of evidence that would hold up in court. “He was proud of what he did, he gave us a ton of evidence, all of which was Mirandized and all of which we could use in court,” Cummings said. “What we didn’t understand about Ramzi Yousef was that basically he could have told us what the future of Al Qaeda was going to be, what the leadership of Al Qaeda was going to be, what their aims were, where their aims were going to focus, what was the future of this organization.” Before 9/11, the FBI focused on the individual and building a case against him. “If you take that paradigm and you completely turn it around, and you take a saw and buzz around his head and peer in, that is your new objective,” Cummings said. “I don’t care about the man. Ramzi Yousef is of no interest to me except that he is a means to my understanding of the broader network.”

By late 2002 and 2003, FBI counterterrorism officials were pressing state, local, and federal law enforcement authorities to answer a series of questions before making any arrests. For Cummings and a growing cadre of counterterrorism specialists in the bureau, teasing out the contours of a potential terrorist network became more important than making an immediate arrest. “Do you know everything there is to know about this individual and his network and his area of influence? And if you don’t, and if he is not an imminent threat, why are you taking him off the street and why are you effectively going blind?” Cummings said. “And that blindness is going to hurt us in the long run.”

With some resistance from old-guard agents, the new paradigm began to take hold and have a pivotal impact on the daily morning intelligence briefings convened by FBI director Mueller and on special briefings with Attorney General John Ashcroft. Cummings and other champions of the strategy called it risk management. Once the FBI, through electronic surveillance, informants, or information from foreign partners, realized that a known or suspected terrorist was operating in the United States, the question became: How long do you track him in order to identify his contacts and map his “pattern of life,” all the while risking that the suspect might slip his surveillance, before arresting him and possibly closing whatever window authorities had into an emerging plot? “Before, it would be that our focus was only on developing evidence, facts that were admissible in a courtroom,” Mueller said. “Yes, you have to identify those that may end up in a courtroom but beyond that you have to paint a full picture of what is going on.”

Local authorities were also engaged in taking steps to interdict terrorist attacks. New York City beefed up its intelligence and counterterrorism capability after 9/11. In March 2003 the New York Police Department (NYPD) dealt with a plot to severely damage the Brooklyn Bridge involving Iyman Faris, a thirty-four-year-old naturalized American citizen from Kashmir living in Columbus, Ohio. Faris had been under federal surveillance, and when the police were informed of the potential threat, they increased marine and land security coverage around the bridge. Faris concluded that the plot was unlikely to succeed—apparently because of increased security—and aborted it. He was arrested shortly after that. “We made a very visible presence there, and that may have contributed to it,” said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the NYPD. “Deterrence is part and parcel of our entire effort.”

In New York City today, as many as one hundred police officers in squad cars from every precinct converge twice daily at randomly selected times and selected sites, like Times Square or the financial district, to rehearse their response to a terrorist attack. Police officials say the operations are a crucial tactic to keep extremists guessing as to when and where a large police presence may materialize at any hour. Borrowing a page from the playbook of authorities in London, the police in New York are working on a plan to track every vehicle that enters Manhattan to intensify the city’s vigilance against a potential terror attack. Data on each vehicle—its time-stamped image, license plate imprint, and information on whether it is releasing radio waves or even radiation—would be sent to a command center in Lower Manhattan, where it would be indexed and stored for at least a month as part of a broad security plan that emphasizes protecting the city’s financial district.

Federal agencies were also realigning their focus on counterterrorism, expanding beyond the military’s kill-capture focus to hone new measures to deter terrorist activity. At the Treasury Department, Juan Zarate was piecing together the remaining law enforcement components after the Secret Service and the Customs Service were incorporated into the new Department of Homeland Security in 2002. Zarate laid out an ambitious plan to make Treasury a pivotal player in the government’s post-9/11 counterterrorism arena, leading the global effort to track down Saddam Hussein’s assets; working with important Middle East allies such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates to crack down on terrorists’ use of financial networks in those countries; and with David Aufhauser, Treasury’s general counsel, creating the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence in 2004, with the first intelligence shop inside any finance ministry in the world.

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By the middle of 2002, the focus of political leaders in Washington and military commanders in the field was shifting dramatically toward Iraq. Scarce military resources like reconnaissance and surveillance planes, Predator drones, and Special Operations forces were being readied for the invasion to come.

For many policy makers, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz, the various threats often had tantalizing though vague connections to Iraq, a threat they saw as larger than the one posed by Al Qaeda. By late November, Jeff Schloesser had been assigned to write a classified internal assessment, entitled “Leveraging Iraq,” that sought to forecast how toppling Saddam Hussein’s government would influence the behavior of state sponsors of terrorism, notably Iran, Syria, Libya, and Sudan. When Schloesser questioned the timing of a potential military campaign against Iraq, Myers snapped at him, “Get with the team.”

Schloesser’s frustration, however, was understandable. The Two + Seven chart that Bush kept in his desk kept acquiring new names and mug shots in addition to those of the maddeningly elusive top two leaders. There seemed to be an endless supply of replacements to plot new attacks. Schloesser’s concern was prescient. Seven months later, on May 16, 2003, a series of suicide bombings ripped through Casablanca, Morocco, killing forty-four people. On March 11, 2004, bombs exploded on four trains at three stations in Madrid, killing 192 people and wounding about 1,800.

Efforts to rouse a “whole-of-government” approach were gaining little traction, despite the growing evidence that the administration needed to devise a more creative strategy to enlist popular support in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader Middle East to dry up the seemingly endless stream of young recruits and money flowing to the terrorist networks. While the president spoke of “a nation at war,” it was really a military at war, along with its partners in the intelligence community. Efforts to combat Al Qaeda’s ideology and narrative that the West was at war with Islam—the so-called war of ideas—got short shrift in the meetings of Bush’s top national security aides.

After a White House meeting on December 13, 2002, Myers returned to the Pentagon in a foul mood. Bush had made it clear to him and to his other top national security officials that the way to victory was killing and capturing the enemy. “He doesn’t have much patience for the battle of ideas,” Myers told his aides after the meeting. Bush’s edict to his top military and civilian advisers came just a week after Donald Rumsfeld had written a memo to the president, warning him that the United States was losing the pivotal ideological war of ideas against Al Qaeda. It would be several more years before Bush changed his thinking, losing critical time and focus on what ultimately became one of the U.S. government’s main efforts to combat terrorists.

By the summer of 2003, just a few short months after the giddy early days of battlefield success in Iraq and Bush’s declaration of “Mission Accomplished,” any aura of victory was beginning to fade as a shadowy insurgency in Iraq stepped up its attacks on American forces. At first, Rumsfeld denied that the American forces were facing any kind of guerrilla force in Iraq. But on July 16, John Abizaid, now a four-star general who had just taken over the Central Command from Tommy Franks, acknowledged for the first time that American troops were, indeed, in a “classical guerrilla-type” war against the remnants of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. These fighters had organized cells at a regional level and demonstrated the ability to attack American personnel with homemade bombs and tactical maneuvers. Abizaid warned that the Baathist attacks were growing in organization and sophistication, and he also cited a resurgence of Ansar al-Islam, a fundamentalist group the State Department said was tied to Al Qaeda, and the appearance of both Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda look-alike fighters on the battlefield.