Intel Wars (21 page)

As the Taliban juggernaut rolled southward, concern spread in Washington about the safety of
Pakistan's arsenal of seventy to ninety nuclear weapons
. In the minds of some U.S. intelligence officials, a nightmare scenario was beginning to take shape in which Pakistan's nuclear arsenal could fall into the hands of the Taliban unless the military situation in the north of the country was somehow reversed.

One senior American official recalled that in late April 2009, the CIA station in Islamabad reported to Washington that there were no discernible signs that the Pakistani military was taking any steps to beef up security at its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile storage facilities. One of the station's agents inside the Pakistani military reported that there had been no appreciable change in the security measures at the Pakistani Air Force's major nuclear weapons storage sites at Masroor Air Base on the outskirts of the city of Karachi, or at Mushaf Air Base outside the city of Sargodha, 170 kilometers northwest of the city of Lahore. Likewise, there were no signs that the Pakistani Army had increased the alert status of its force of nuclear-armed M-11 ballistic missiles, which were stored in reinforced bunkers at the huge Kirana Hills weapons depot south of Sargodha.

These intelligence reports from Pakistan raised alarm bells in Washington. In early May 2009, CIA director Leon Panetta ordered the CIA station chief in Islamabad to step up surveillance of all Pakistani nuclear weapons storage depots, as well as pump his sources inside the Pakistani military for any information about what they were doing to ensure that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal did not fall into the hands of the Pakistani Taliban or other Muslim extremist groups inside Pakistan. At the same time, U.S. Air Force and Navy planners began contingency planning for air and cruise missile strikes against the Pakistani nuclear weapons storage depots in case these sites were taken over by Muslim extremist groups.

Just as the Taliban juggernaut appeared to be on the verge of rolling unopposed into Islamabad, it suddenly stopped in late May. Realizing how dire the situation was, Pakistani Army Chief of Staff Kayani had ordered an entire army corps sent posthaste from its garrisons along the Indian border to Swat. An attack by 22,000 Pakistani Army troops backed by hundreds of tanks sent the lightly armed Taliban fighters reeling back toward their mountain redoubts. By the end of June the Swat Valley had been retaken largely without a fight, with the Taliban's top commander, Maulana Fazlullah, opting to return to the mountains in order to fight again another day.

The fighting in the FATA during the summer and fall of 2009 between the Pakistani military and the Taliban was remarkable from an intelligence perspective, for a number of reasons. In June 2009, the Pakistani military for the first time allowed U.S. Air Force drones based in Afghanistan to cross the border and fly photo reconnaissance missions over the Pakistani Taliban strongholds in the FATA and the North-West Frontier Province; and the CIA was authorized for the first time to use Predator and Reaper unmanned drones to attack Pakistani Taliban targets not just in the FATA but also in the area to the east around the city of Peshawar.

With the secret and entirely deniable blessing of the Pakistani government and military, the CIA immediately ratcheted up the number of drone attacks in the FATA, conducting fifty-three missile strikes in the FATA in 2009 as compared with only thirty-six the previous year. CIA officials were jubilant when one of their drones on August 5, 2009, killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, in his house in the village of Zanghara in South Waziristan. But the CIA's jubilation was short-lived.

Not everyone in the U.S. government was as satisfied with the results of the drone strikes as the CIA. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told President Obama that the CIA's unmanned drone strikes were
not
the war-winners that many CIA officials said they were. According to Clinton, no matter how many al Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban commanders and fighters the drones killed, the militants would, as they have done for the past decade, just replace the losses within days. In State's view, the only way that al Qaeda would ever be defeated was if the Pakistani military could somehow be coerced or induced into going into the FATA and cleansing the place with, as one of the secretary of state's advisers put it, “fire and sword.”

CIA officials thought that the State Department was being overly cautious, with one agency official saying that “State was just doing what they always do—covering their ass.” According to the CIA officials, intercepted cell phone calls confirmed that the drone strikes were taking a terrible toll on al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban.

There was a serious downside to the missile strikes, however. For their part, Pakistani military officials believed that the drone attacks had proved to be an invaluable recruiting tool for the Pakistani Taliban, with a surreptitiously taken videotape made by Pakistani military intelligence showing hundreds of enraged Waziri tribesmen volunteering to join the Taliban after several particularly bloody CIA drone attacks in North Waziristan in December 2009. According to Wing Commander Irfan Ahmad, a U.S.-educated Pakistani Air Force officer who has been intimately involved in the fight against the Taliban in northern Pakistan since 2004,
“It appears that the drone attacks have increased [the] militants' motivation for terrorist activity.”

On December 30, 2009, a Jordanian doctor named Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, who had been recruited by the Jordanian intelligence service while in prison to spy on al Qaeda in Pakistan, detonated a vest containing high explosives inside the heavily guarded CIA compound at Forward Operating Base Chapman outside the city of Khost in southeastern Afghanistan, killing seven CIA officers or contractors and a Jordanian intelligence officer who was Balawi's case officer. The most prominent casualty was the CIA base chief, Jennifer Lynne Matthews, a forty-five-year-old divorced mother of three from Fredericksburg, Maryland, who had served twenty years in the CIA, most of them as an analyst in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center at Langley, Virginia. The Pakistani Taliban immediately took credit for the attack, stating that the Khost attack was in retaliation for the CIA's killing of Baitullah Mehsud in August.

The CIA's retaliation for the Khost suicide bombing proved to be embarrassing. On January 14, 2010, spokesmen for the U.S. and Pakistani governments gleefully announced that a missile fired from a CIA drone had destroyed a compound at Pasalkot in North Waziristan, killing Hakimullah Mehsud, who had succeeded Baitullah Mehsud as head of the Pakistani Taliban. The Taliban's spokesman vehemently denied that Mehsud had been killed, but officials in Washington and Islamabad dismissed his claim as nothing but empty rhetoric. It turns out it wasn't. Four months later, on May 3, the Taliban proved everyone wrong when they released to selected reporters in Islamabad a videotape showing that Hakimullah Mehsud was indeed very much alive and well.

By December 2009, the U.S. intelligence community believed that Pakistan had been saved, but only just barely. Over 11,500 civilians, soldiers, policemen, and terrorists had been killed in 2009, bringing the death toll to more than 25,000 dead since figures started being compiled by the Pakistani government in 2003.

In Washington, the victory over the Taliban was more bitter than sweet. As soon as the Pakistani Taliban militants had been beaten back from the gates of Islamabad, the Pakistani military immediately reneged on its promise to Washington to break its ties with Mullah Omar's Taliban forces and the other terrorist groups in Pakistan.

According to interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, this was because the Pakistani military and ISI had concluded that the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan was going to pull out of the country before the Taliban could be defeated, leaving in Kabul a government hostile to Pakistan and backed by its arch-enemy, India. According to a cable from the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, “
Fear that the ISAF mission in Afghanistan will end without the establishment of a non-Taliban
, [Pashtun]-led government friendly to Pakistan adds to the Pakistani establishment's determination not to cut its ties irrevocably to the Afghan Taliban.”

An angry Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sent a harshly worded cable to all American embassies in the Persian Gulf in December 2009 that essentially charged Pakistan with continuing to aid and abet terrorist groups within its borders. According to the cable, “
Although Pakistani senior officials have publicly disavowed support for these [terrorist] groups
, some officials from the Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) continue to maintain ties with a wide array of extremist organizations.”

Even more difficult to swallow were the end-of-year intelligence assessments, which showed that the Pakistani Taliban had not been defeated in 2009. The Pakistani military had mounted nearly a half-dozen halfhearted offensives against the al Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban fighters in the FATA during the summer and fall of 2009, which while achieving some modest gains failed in their goal to clear the region of militants. When the operations were over, the Pakistani forces returned to their garrisons for the winter and surrendered all of the gains they had made back to the Taliban.
But what really angered American diplomats and intelligence officials was that the Pakistani army had refused
to go after any of the Taliban factions based in the FATA who were on its payroll, such as the ISI's longtime Taliban client, the Haqqani Network.

In the opinion of the U.S. intelligence community's experts on Pakistan, such as the national intelligence officer for South Asia, Neil H. Joeck, the biggest loser of 2009 was the government of Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari, whose authority in December 2009 was in free fall in the face of mounting internal opposition to his pro-Washington policies from the Pakistani political elite and the military.

Clandestine intelligence reporting in 2009 and early 2010 revealed that President Zardari had on a number of occasions pressed army chief of staff General Kayani to intensify his military's efforts against the Taliban in northern Pakistan, only to be rebuffed each time because Kayani still refused to budge from his firmly held belief, which was shared by the entire Pakistani general staff and the ISI, that India remained the principal external threat to Pakistan's national security, not the Taliban.

In a confrontational November 20, 2009, meeting in Islamabad, CIA director Leon Panetta told ISI director General Ahmad Shuja Pasha that his agency had to do more to combat the presence of Taliban and al Qaeda militants in the FATA, and live up to its promise to cease its covert support of all three of the Afghan Taliban factions that continued to operate from their sanctuaries in northern Pakistan. Panetta also told General Pasha that his agency's overt harassment of CIA operatives based in Pakistan had to stop; otherwise, the CIA chief said, “there would be repercussions.”

But the Pakistani military and the ISI felt that they were being deliberately manipulated by Washington. Shortly before Christmas 2009, a senior Pakistani military official told a CIA officer in Islamabad that he thought that Washington was deliberately “hyping” the threat from al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban in order to get what it wanted from Islamabad. Despite the terrible events of the past year, the general still honestly believed that India was the top threat to Pakistan's national security, not the Pakistani Taliban or al Qaeda. “I could not believe what I was hearing,” the CIA official said. “How could this guy be so blind after everything that had just happened?”

As we shall see in chapter 7, this exchange proved to be an ominous portent of things to come.

CHAPTER 5

We Have to Kill Them All

Scenes from the Global War on Terrorism

 

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “EASTER, 1916”

British prime minister Winston Churchill is reputed to have said more than sixty years ago, “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” Churchill was, of course, referring to the unconventional and often brutal tactics that the badly outnumbered British forces felt compelled to use against the Germans during the darkest days of World War II.

The metaphor may be more than sixty years old, but it remains apt today when describing the decade-long secret war that the U.S. intelligence community and its allies around the world have waged against not only al Qaeda in Pakistan but the dozens of other foreign terrorist groups of every size, shape, and color around the world.

In the days after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration made a resolution, which was codified in a top secret directive—National Security Presidential Directive 9, “Combating Terrorism”—that as a matter of the greatest urgency it was necessary to destroy al Qaeda and all of its allies by any means necessary because of the clear and present danger they posed to U.S. national security and, according to a declassified Joint Chiefs of Staff document, “
our way of life as a free and open society
.”

This document was written in stark terms that reduced a very complex global problem down to a simple “us versus them” paradigm in which the overarching doctrine was “we must kill them before they kill us.” It was remarkably similar in tenor and tone to a classified directive written almost thirty years earlier in the aftermath of the September 1972 massacre of eleven Israeli athletes and a German policeman at the Munich Olympic Games, wherein the Israeli cabinet ordered the Mossad to wipe out the Palestinian Black September terrorist group because of the danger that it posed to the Israeli state.

Over the past decade, the U.S. intelligence community has waged a secret battle beyond America's borders against a host of foreign terrorist organizations, conducted almost entirely out of view of the American public. The fight has been both remorseless and pitiless, with no quarter asked for or given on either side.

Since entering office in 2009, the Obama administration has continued the policy initiated during the Bush administration of killing al Qaeda leaders and fighters whenever and wherever they are found. The widely held sentiment inside the U.S. intelligence community remains that the only sure way to ensure that there will be no more 9/11s is, as one current senior administration official starkly put it in a 2009 interview, “We have to kill them all, every last one of them.”

The U.S. intelligence community's fight against al Qaeda and the hundreds of other foreign terrorist groups around the world is run from the National Counterterrorism Center
, which is located in Building LX-1 next to the director of national intelligence's office at Liberty Crossing in northern Virginia.

The chief of the NCTC from June 2008 until his retirement in July 2011, Michael E. Leiter, had an unusual pedigree for the nation's top terrorist hunter. He spent six years flying navy electronic warfare aircraft off the decks of aircraft carriers before graduating from Harvard Law School in 2000 magna cum laude, where he was also the editor of the
Harvard Law Review
. After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Leiter spent the next three years (2002–5) as a federal prosecutor in Alexandria, Virginia, before getting his first exposure to the intelligence world when he was chosen to be deputy general counsel of the Robb-Silberman Commission, which examined why the U.S. intelligence community failed so miserably in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. That led to a one-year stint as deputy chief of staff for the first director of national intelligence, Ambassador John D. Negroponte, before moving over to take command of NCTC in 2007. When the Obama administration came into office in 2009, Leiter was asked to stay on at his post because of the respect that he had garnered within the intelligence community.

Leiter may have had the respect of his peers in the intelligence community, but the organization he commanded was viewed by many as troubled. The NCTC was yet another example of the poor compromises that often come out of the U.S. intelligence community's convoluted decision-making process. Its predecessor, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), had been created on May 11, 2003, to be the U.S. intelligence community's one-stop-shopping source for all intelligence information, both raw and evaluated, about domestic and foreign terrorist groups and their activities. The only way such a clearinghouse was going to work cohesively was if it brought together under one single roof the more than one dozen counterterrorism units that then existed within the U.S. intelligence community. But when it came time to consolidate, all sixteen American agencies refused to give up the counterterrorism units that they had lavished so much time and money on since 9/11.

When TTIC was renamed the National Counterterrorism Center in 2005 and placed under the command of the newly created director of national intelligence, it had very few assets to call its own and was almost completely dependent on the charity of the rest of the intelligence community for whatever personnel and resources it got. So today, six years after its creation, NCTC is still trying to evolve and develop its own institutional identity as well as its independence from the rest of the intelligence community.

At the present time, the NCTC staff is rather small by American intelligence community standards, consisting of five hundred full-time military and civilian personnel, only about two hundred of whom are actually NCTC employees. The rest are seconded to NCTC for one- or two-year rotations from sixteen U.S. government agencies, including the CIA, NSA, DIA, and FBI, who continue to operate their own larger and better-funded counterterrorism units.

Because NCTC has no sources of its own, it is completely dependent for its supply of raw data on the U.S. intelligence, military, law enforcement, and homeland security communities. The amount of information pouring into NCTC's operations center every day is mind-boggling—8,000 to 10,000 intelligence reports, each of which has to be read by NCTC's analysts; plus the names of 10,000 individuals, every one of whom has to be cross-checked through NCTC's database of known or suspected terrorists (Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE) to determine if the person has any ties to al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. According to data supplied by the NCTC, as of January 2009 the TIDE database contained the names of more than 564,000 individuals, of whom 5 percent were American citizens. The implications of this figure are staggering. According to NCTC there were in 2009 more than 28,000 American citizens known or suspected to be terrorists, or to have had some association with terrorists!

The problem is that TIDE, according to two intelligence analysts who have served recent tours of duty at NCTC, is far from a perfect system. When TIDE was created in 2004, it was not supposed to be the “Mother of all Counterterrorism Databases” that it is today. The system kept growing and growing as thousands of names were added to it every day. NCTC analysts who have used TIDE say that it is sometimes cranky and unresponsive, and not the easiest system to use. Fixing this relatively simple problem has become increasingly more difficult because the size of the database continues to expand without corresponding software upgrades to handle the greater data load and the ever-increasing number of analysts using the system.

Rather than design a new and more comprehensive database comparable to Google, NCTC's software contractors kept adding on more features and memory on top of the old system, which rather than improve the situation just made the system worse. The system has become so complicated and cumbersome that it isn't unusual for it to come back with a “no records found” response to requests for information on even the most banal subject.

One former NCTC analyst recounted how she typed into the TIDE search engine the name of a well-known African terrorist leader, only to be told that there were no reports in the database matching her description. To put it mildly, the analyst was more than a little angry since she was the lead analyst on this particular terrorist group, and she had personally entered into the system three reports on the subject the week before, which the system for some reason failed to pick up.

Dozens of complaints have been filed in recent years by NCTC analysts about the problems they have experienced trying to use TIDE. A larger and more capable database that was supposed to replace TIDE has been on the drawing board for years, but for unknown reasons the new system has never moved past the design stage. According to a former NCTC terrorism analyst, “We told [NCTC] management that unless a new system was brought online in the near future one of two things was going to happen: TIDE was going to crash or the system would lose a critical piece of information needed to prevent another 9/11.” NCTC's management chose not to act on the complaints, however, with the analyst recalling that “we were still waiting for a reply to our complaint when I left a year later.”

Senior officials at the NCTC can rightfully point to some major successes in the war on terror since 9/11. The killing of Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011, tops everyone's list of major accomplishments, but the NCTC's analysts are still waiting to see if his death will lead to the collapse of what is left of al Qaeda in Pakistan. In the meantime, there have been other successes against al Qaeda. Not only has there been a marked decrease in the number of terrorist attacks around the world, but al Qaeda has been unable to mount a successful terrorist attack inside the U.S. for the past decade. Whether this is because of the efforts of the intelligence community or the weakened state of al Qaeda is a matter of fierce debate within the intelligence community today.

There have been occasional attempts, but these plots have all failed miserably, largely because of a combination of technical problems and the ineptitude of the individuals chosen to mount the attacks. Take for example the case of the mentally unstable British-born al Qaeda operative named Richard Reid, who on December 22, 2001, attempted to detonate high explosives packed into his shoes over the Atlantic while on a United Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. The bomb failed to detonate, and Reid was overpowered by the plane's passengers and crew. He is now serving a life sentence in federal prison.

Over the past decade the U.S. intelligence community and its foreign partners have largely succeeded in either destroying or neutralizing the majority of al Qaeda's terrorist networks outside of the organization's stronghold in northern Pakistan. The European intelligence and security services, with some assistance from the U.S. intelligence community, have largely succeeded in stripping bare most of al Qaeda's operational and logistical support networks in Western Europe. European counterterrorism officials believe that today there are only a handful of al Qaeda operatives remaining in Western Europe. Even so, while their numbers are greatly diminished, the remaining al Qaeda operatives in Europe remain potentially lethal.

The Middle East may be the secret success story of the U.S. counterterrorism effort since the Obama administration entered office in 2009. Iran and Syria, the two Middle Eastern countries who are the leading state sponsors of terrorism, have been largely quiescent over the past three years in terms of actively supporting terrorist attacks in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. Both countries continue to provide sanctuary and financial support to a number of Middle East terrorist groups, but these groups have largely written terrorism out of their playbooks in their efforts to become legitimate political forces in their home countries.

For example, there have been almost no major terrorist attacks on Israel since the Obama administration entered office because the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas is now fully occupied trying to govern the Gaza Strip. There have also been no significant terrorist attacks inside Lebanon over the past three years because the Iranian- and Syrian-backed militant group Hezbollah has largely abandoned terrorism in favor of becoming a legitimate political party in Lebanon. Today, Hezbollah is the single most powerful political force in Lebanese politics, holding eleven of the thirty cabinet posts in the Lebanese government until withdrawing from the Lebanese government in early 2011. It still holds a substantial bloc of delegates in the Lebanese parliament. And thanks to substantial financial subsidies from Iran (estimated at $300 million per annum), it largely governs those parts of southern Lebanon where the country's Shiite population resides independent of the Lebanese government. Behind the scenes, intelligence sources confirm that over the past several years the CIA has succeeded in recruiting a number of agents inside both Hamas and Hezbollah, giving the U.S. intelligence community for the first time relatively reliable information concerning the capabilities and intentions of both these highly secretive organizations.

Iraq is also viewed as a major counterterrorism success within the U.S. intelligence community. Since the Obama administration took power, officials have remained cautiously optimistic about the future of the country. Despite suffering devastating losses during General David Petraeus's “Baghdad Surge” offensive in the summer and fall of 2007, al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) continues to soldier on, periodically mounting bloody car and suicide bombings in Baghdad and Mosul, which have killed hundreds of Iraqi civilians. But the terrorist networks in Iraq continue to suffer crippling losses, including many of their top leaders over the past three years. The departure of the last U.S. Army combat brigade from Iraq on August 19, 2010, and the shift of former Iraqi Shiite militants like Moqtada al-Sadr, leader of the so-called Mahdi Army militia, toward becoming legitimate political leaders in Iraqi politics have contributed to a further lessening of tensions in the country.