Intel Wars (17 page)

The British general was right, of course. President Obama had put General McChrystal in an untenable situation when he announced on December 1, 2009, at West Point that he had ordered that an additional 30,000 troops be sent to Afghanistan on top of the 68,000 troops already there, but that the first of these troops were to be withdrawn by July 2011. Even if they did not say so publicly, everyone at the NATO summit meeting knew that McChrystal had been saddled with an impossible task. In essence, the president had given the general only a year and a half to turn the battlefield situation around before he had to begin drawing down the size of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. In the time allotted and with the forces at his disposal, McChrystal could not militarily defeat the Taliban, given the amount of territory that the guerrillas then controlled. The best McChrystal could reasonably be expected to do was to degrade the strength of the Taliban's guerrilla forces and try to secure the major cities and towns of Afghanistan. And now, McChrystal was admitting to NATO's top commanders that he might not be able to accomplish even this very limited goal.

But a few weeks later, General McChrystal was gone. On June 21, 2010, news broke that
Rolling Stone
magazine was about to publish an article containing disparaging remarks made by General McChrystal and his senior staff about President Obama and other members of the administration. Two days later, McChrystal flew back to Washington to be relieved of his command by President Obama and sent unceremoniously into retirement.

CHAPTER 4

The Root of All Evil

The Pakistani Problem

If you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.

—SUN TZU

Anybody who has watched any of the Sunday morning political talk shows on the major television networks since 9/11 has probably heard at one time or another some senior U.S. government official intone with great seriousness and gravity something along the lines of “Pakistan is a valued partner in the fight against terrorism.”

In the aftermath of 9/11, these words actually had some resonance and meaning. When the Taliban regime in Afghanistan collapsed in December 2001, Mullah Omar and all of the Taliban's leadership and hardcore fighters escaped across the border into Pakistan. A few weeks later, Osama bin Laden and several hundred of his al Qaeda fighters also fled across the border into Pakistan after the Battle of Tora Bora. In an instant, Pakistan became a frontline state in the war on terrorism, where for a time U.S. and Pakistani intelligence operatives worked together to try to find and destroy what was left of the militants hiding in the desolate northern part of the country.

Ten years later, many of the U.S. government officials who agreed to be interviewed for this book believe that the phrase “Pakistan is a valued partner in the fight against terrorism” is now empty, cynical rhetoric. Anger and frustration with the Pakistani government in Washington is now so overt that Ambassador Richard Holbrooke described Pakistan in a 2010 interview as “the root of all evil.”

American officials now firmly believe that the Pakistani government has, as a matter of national policy, given aid and comfort to our enemies, costing the lives of American soldiers fighting next door in Afghanistan. This widely held view was enunciated in a secret cable sent by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to U.S. embassies in the Persian Gulf in December 2009, which stated unequivocally that “
Pakistan's intermittent support to terrorist groups and militant organizations threatens to undermine
regional security and endanger U.S. national security objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Even within the U.S. intelligence community, which still depends to some degree on Pakistani cooperation in its continuing efforts to ferret out al Qaeda, the majority view among senior officials is surprisingly negative, with a former DNI official taking the view, “How can any country that hides our enemies and obstructs our efforts to find them be an ally?”

Interviews with a dozen American and Pakistani intelligence officials have revealed that since 9/11, the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community have had what can only be described as a tempestuous, love-hate relationship with Pakistan's powerful intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, which virtually everyone refers to by its initials, ISI.

It is not an exaggeration to say that many of the CIA's greatest intelligence successes and failures since 9/11 stem directly from its inordinately convoluted relationship with the ISI. Even in the best of times, the U.S.-Pakistani intelligence relationship has been dogged by mutual suspicion and even open animosity, fueled to a certain degree by the strong undercurrent of anti-Americanism that pervades the ranks of the Pakistani military and intelligence services. This should come as no surprise, since the U.S. government and its policies in the Muslim world are extremely unpopular in Pakistan, with recent State Department polling data showing that 68 percent of all Pakistanis have a decidedly unfavorable view of the United States.

This has meant that every CIA chief of station in Pakistan since 9/11 has worked hard to improve their personal relationships with the director of ISI and his senior staff. The CIA chief of station spends much of his time during the workweek commuting back and forth between the fortresslike U.S. embassy in Islamabad's diplomatic enclave (one former CIA staff officer sarcastically referred to the heavily protected area as the “ghetto of the damned”) to ISI's headquarters, located just four miles away at the intersection of Khayaban-e-Suhrawardy Road and Service Road East.

In keeping with its penchant for secrecy, everything about the ISI is hidden from public view. The ISI's 40-acre headquarters complex is surrounded by a ten-foot-high wall and guarded twenty-four hours a day by a contingent of elite Pakistani Army troops who not only shoo away unwanted visitors but have orders to shoot anyone foolish enough to try to enter the compound without authorization. Beyond the main gate is a circular driveway, which leads to a white multistory office building where most of ISI's senior officials have their offices. Most of ISI's staff work in a series of drab multistory office buildings that extend back several hundred yards from the ISI headquarters building.

But according to a Western European intelligence source, most of the ISI's really sensitive intelligence-gathering and covert action activities, including all activities relating to Afghanistan, are run from two military bases eight miles to the south called the Hamza Camp and the Ojri Camp, both of which are hidden away behind high walls and guard towers in the city of Rawalpindi. “We've been trying to find out what goes on in those camps for years,” a former CIA case officer revealed in a 2010 interview, “but without much success. Everything they [the ISI] did not want us to see or hear about they hid in 'Pindi.”

The chief of ISI on 9/11, Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed, had been the bête noire of the U.S. intelligence community for years because of his overtly pro-Taliban views. At the request of the U.S. government, after 9/11 Ahmed went to Afghanistan and met with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in Kandahar to try to stave off the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. But evidence suggests that Ahmed instead urged the Taliban to fight. After his return from Afghanistan, CIA officials privately told Pakistani president Pervez Musharaf in no uncertain terms that they did not trust Ahmed, and that the general had to go as part of the price tag for Pakistan joining the U.S.-led war on terror. It came as no surprise to intelligence insiders when General Ahmed was abruptly and unceremoniously forced to take early retirement on October 7, 2001, only three weeks before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began.

His replacement, Lt. General Ehsan ul Haq, ran the ISI for three years from October 2001 until he was promoted to the position of chief of staff of the Pakistani armed forces in October 2004. General ul Haq was handpicked for the post not because he was an intelligence professional but rather because he was a close personal friend and confidant of President Musharaf.

During General ul Huq's tenure, the top task for the CIA and ISI was to hunt down and capture or kill the remnants of al Qaeda that had fled into the wilds of northern Pakistan after the Battle of Tora Bora in December 2001. According to a half-dozen retired and current-serving CIA officials, the ISI aggressively collaborated with the CIA in going after the remnants of al Qaeda. Almost all of the senior al Qaeda officials captured since 9/11 and now biding their time behind bars at the military-run Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba were captured in Pakistan during General ul Haq's tenure in office, including Abu Zubaydah (captured March 28, 2002), Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan (July 11, 2002), Ramzi Bin al-Shibh (September 11, 2002), Abu Umar and Abu Hamza (January 9, 2003), and the biggest capture of them all, al Qaeda's operations chief, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, on March 1, 2003. “We would not have gotten any of these guys without the help of ISI,” a former senior CIA official said in an interview.

As a reward for this assistance, the CIA has secretly funneled hundreds of millions of dollars every year since 2002 to the ISI, with senior American intelligence officials confirming media reports that until 2009 the agency was directly subsidizing about one third of ISI's annual budget, which did not include the tens of millions of dollars of training, equipment, and logistical support that the agency also provided to Pakistan.
According to author Bob Woodward
, in 2008 the annual CIA subsidy to the ISI amounted to a staggering $2 billion.

But for all the successes, there were some glaring failures. Until al Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, was finally found and killed by U.S. Navy SEAL commandos in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 1, 2011, American and Pakistani intelligence officials interviewed for this book agreed that the failure to find him was the single most important failure in the war on terror.

Since bin Laden and his adherents had fled to Pakistan after the Battle of Tora Bora almost a decade earlier in December 2001, the belief within the U.S. intelligence community had been that bin Laden and his Egyptian-born deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, continued to run al Qaeda from their hiding places somewhere in
the lawless 10,000-square-mile area of northern Pakistan bordering Afghanistan called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA
, which is roughly the size of the state of Massachusetts.

But senior Pentagon officials, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, believed that bin Laden had been killed at Tora Bora, and steadfastly refused to admit that the terrorist leader was still alive until the Arab news organization Al Jazeera began broadcasting bin Laden's videotaped pronouncements in late 2002. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were angered by U.S. intelligence community assessments that bin Laden was still alive because there were no indications appearing in intercepted al Qaeda communications traffic that he was dead. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz believed that al Qaeda was keeping the fact that bin Laden was dead a secret by keeping the news of the terrorist leader's demise out of their electronic communications that NSA was intercepting. A clearly angry Wolfowitz wrote in a classified July 2002 internal memo that “
I fear we are so mesmerized [by signals intelligence] that we find it impossible
to adequately account for the fact that the terrorists know that we do this. We are a bit like a drunk looking for our keys under the lamppost because that is the only place where there is light.”

Fortunately, the intelligence community ignored Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and kept looking for the elusive al Qaeda leader. After the Battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, the U.S. intelligence community's top priority remained finding bin Laden and his top deputies, with the Bush administration believing that if we managed to neutralize the top leadership of al Qaeda, then the whole organization would collapse from within. So Washington ordered the CIA station in Islamabad and its subordinate bases in Pakistan to do “whatever is needed to bring bin Laden to justice.” In the years that followed, the Islamabad station expended vast amounts of time, money, personnel, and equipment on the effort, but bin Laden and Zawahiri somehow eluded the massive dragnet for a decade despite having $25 million bounties on their heads. An army intelligence briefing described the problem as
“looking for a silver needle in a stack of 6 million needles.”

During the early stages of the search, from 2002 through 2004, there were occasional fragmentary references to bin Laden in CIA clandestine agent reports and in intercepted al Qaeda communications traffic emanating from northern Pakistan. But none of the leads panned out. The last hard information about bin Laden was in 2004, when the National Security Agency intercepted a reference to “the Sheikh,” referring to bin Laden, in an intercepted al Qaeda transmission emanating from North Waziristan in the lawless tribal areas of northern Pakistan. But since then, the trail had gone stone cold.

According to a senior Pakistani intelligence official, in desperation, the CIA surreptitiously tapped the phones of the Islamabad bureau of the Arab news organization Al Jazeera in the hope that the intercepted calls might lead them to the clandestine couriers who periodically gave the network CDs containing the latest videotaped pronouncements by Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri. But these taps never produced any viable intelligence other than to confirm in the minds of the CIA officers who listened to the recordings that many of the network's reporters had a clear anti-American bias.

The inability of the CIA to find bin Laden and Zawahiri was not the end of the problems, either. U.S. intelligence officials have confirmed that, try as they might, the CIA and its foreign partners have had little sustained success penetrating al Qaeda over the past decade. Getting inside al Qaeda proved to be nigh on impossible, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitting in a 2001 classified memo that “
some terrorist groups use family and communal relationships
that make them extraordinarily difficult to penetrate.” As reported by the Associated Press on November 5, 2010, the CIA and the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, managed to recruit a small number of former al Qaeda and Taliban detainees held at Guantánamo and sent them back to Pakistan to spy on their former masters under the direction of the ISI. However, al Qaeda and Taliban counterintelligence operatives quickly identified them as spies, possibly with the help of pro-Taliban ISI officers in Islamabad. They were immediately arrested, tortured, and, once every ounce of information had been extracted from them, publicly executed.

One American intelligence official interviewed for this book admitted that the extreme paranoia of al Qaeda's top leaders about the presence of spies in their midst made it next to impossible to insert agents into the organization. According to a former head of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, Michael J. Sulick, these terrorist groups
“screen their recruits probably better than the U.S. government does.”

The loss rate among the few agents that were recruited was extraordinarily high. For example, on Sunday, November 8, 2010, a Pakistani Taliban drumhead court in the al Qaeda and Taliban stronghold of Miram Shah in North Waziristan found three local tribesmen guilty of spying for the United States after a trial that lasted less than an hour. Taliban gunmen immediately blindfolded the three men, tied their hands behind their backs, and led them to a nearby gas station, where they were shot to death in front of a crowd of several hundred men who had gathered for the occasion. The identities of the three men were never made public.