Operation Dark Heart (25 page)

In early January, I brought charts produced by LIWA from Fort Belvoir to Able Danger’s operations in Tampa. I remember opening them up and laying them down on the table in the conference room located next to Schoomaker’s command suite.

“This is what they got for us,” I told Scott Phillpott, the operations officer of Able Danger. “They say they can do more of this.”

We both looked at the charts, blown away.

They were two-dimensional representations of the large open-source database containing between three and four terabytes of information on known and suspected al Qaeda operatives, enablers, and affiliates. The charts had hundreds of photos (from passports, visas, and other sources) and names (sometimes multiple for one individual). Some photos were grouped on the chart by terrorist affiliation, others by suspected geographic location.

One group was the “Brooklyn cell,” as we came to call it: associates of Omar Abdul Rahman, the “blind Sheik,” who was serving a life sentence for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

An al Qaeda cell in the United States.

Scott stared at the chart, transfixed. “This is it,” he said. “This is exactly what we need.”

We both leaned over it, examining photos of some of the most dangerous people in the world as they stared up at us.

Scott pointed to one in the Brooklyn cell. Thin-lipped, close-cropped hair, a sculpted face. Eyelids pulled partly down over a set of dead eyes. The photo was grainy, but it still captured a sinister feeling.

“That’s one scary-looking dude,” Scott said.

I remember several names under the photo. One of them was “Atta.”

The significance wouldn’t become clear to me until much later. At that point, it was just a menacing face set within the Brooklyn cell.

I was just satisfied that Scott was impressed with LIWA’s work. *** ************ ******* **** *********** ** **** **** **** ****** *** **** ** **** ******* ** **** ******** **** **** ** ** **** ****** ******* *** ** **** ** ******** ******* **** *** ********** ******** ** ******** * ******** ** ****** ** ******* **** ****** **** *** *** ** ******* *** ********** ******** ** *** ********* ** ******** ** *** *** ** ********* ** ******* ************** ** ****** we were aiming for the electronic records used to track individuals being trained in terrorist tactics.

In my Bagram office, I sat back in my chair, staring at the bulleted points I had made on my computer screen, the memories of that time coming back in waves. The bureaucratic resistance we had faced was positively epic—even for the military.

Senior DIA officers—men and women who never left the air-conditioned environs of the DIA Analysis Center in Clarendon—wanted Able Danger to become exclusively an analytical operation, and there were several attempts to take Able Danger away from us and give it to the director of Intelligence and its Office of Transnational Counterterrorism. They would focus only on the analysis of the data and would rarely produce actionable information.

Other problems persisted. Several agencies treat their intelligence information as if it were proprietary in nature. This was typical of DoD. Intelligence agencies do not like to share their data with the operations side of the organization despite the fact that it is all U.S. government. Senior bureaucrats like to believe the data is exclusive to their command—owned outright. Sharing it might enable some sister organization to be successful. Imagine that. An intelligence service being successful in its mission because it had data from another agency. Cooperation and sharing—even if it resulted in successful identification of threats before they do harm to the United States? Nonsense. That wouldn’t be cricket.

In early 2000, after an Able Danger briefing to DIA deputy director Jerry Clark, he told the DIA officers who were at the briefing to drag their feet and slow down the process of providing people and data to our effort. He didn’t see the need to “share” DIA’s best resources. *** also refused to provide SOCOM access to its database. My deputy worked her magic and was finally able to convince *** to give us a copy, which we then sent on to SOCOM.

It got worse. After refusing to provide us with all of DIA’s information, DIA finally gave us the data—raw data, everything it had collected—20 terabytes of data on a bowling-ball-sized hard drive known as the Military Intelligence Database (MIDB). However, it came in an unusable format. It appeared that DIA techs had purposely tried to “scramble” it to make it unusable. Fortunately, an experienced programmer on the Able Danger team was able to create an algorithm that corrected the problem.

Behind some of the resistance, in my view, was sheer denial within DoD that al Qaeda was even a threat to the United States. A senior DoD black-operations program manager once told me that I was wasting my time, that al Qaeda wasn’t really a danger because the United States was such a lucrative fund-raising center for it through Muslim charities. Its leaders would never be so stupid as to attack us and risk cutting off that funding.

Right.

Later in 2000, a huge roadblock was thrown up—by our own government. Scott called me.

“You will not believe what is going on here.”

“What?” I had assumed that things were going well.

“The SOCOM lawyers are telling us there is a whole group of folks we can’t look at because they are here legally in the United States or they are affiliated with folks who are here legally. They are ‘U.S. persons,’ they say.”

“That’s loony,” I said. “Clearly, they’re on our radar because they’re linked with terrorist organizations. That makes them a valid target.”

“I agree with you,” said Scott, “but the lawyers won’t budge on it.”

I broke out President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333. It restricted the use and retention of information on U.S. persons for intelligence-collection purposes, but it clearly had an exception for information on individuals suspected of criminal activity, affiliated with, or suspected of being a part of a terrorist organization.

I tried talking to the DIA lawyers, but they didn’t want to get involved. This was a SOCOM project and they wouldn’t touch the controversy.

On my next trip to Tampa, I saw the chart I had brought them; there were yellow Post-it notes over most of the photographs on the Brooklyn cell. The SOCOM lawyers had determined they were off-limits to the Able Danger effort. Not to be looked at or evaluated as potential targets.

Shortly after that, the Army got cold feet because of the “U.S. persons” issue, determined that it wasn’t in compliance with DoD intelligence oversight policies, and shut down all army support, pulling LIWA out of the project.

Not to be deterred, Schoomaker directed the establishment of a replica of the LIWA technology and the project was revived and expanded.

In the meantime, SOCOM still wasn’t allowing any action to be taken on the suspected terrorists with the Post-it Notes on their photographs. I decided that if we couldn’t use the data on those individuals, then maybe the FBI could since these guys were operating in the United States. I set up a meeting between SOCOM and the Washington field office of the FBI, where I had some contacts, but, at the last minute, SOCOM canceled it. I tried again—and again. Each time, I would get a call from my baffled FBI friends wanting to know where the hell SOCOM was.

I called Scott. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Why aren’t you guys showing up for these meetings?”

It turned out, he told me, that SOCOM had been advised by their lawyers not to go. He told me that SOCOM lawyers had forced them not to show up for the FBI meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger were portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States on green cards or valid entry visas.

Never mind that they were freakin’ terrorists.

The first week of October 2000, while sorting through data and looking for al Qaeda centers of gravity, a surprising location showed up on the radar: Yemen.

During an update to General Schoomaker, just prior to his retirement, one of the analysts assigned to the project told the general that al Qaeda’s activities were the second highest in Yemen. This was significant. Schoomaker noted it and suggested that the intel be forwarded to Central Command to make them knowledgeable of the threat.

The threat information on Yemen was passed to the CENTCOM representative assigned to Able Danger, but the information was never passed on, and Lt. Commander Kirk Lippold sailed his ship into the Port of Aden with no knowledge of what had been discovered about al Qaeda half a world away in a SCIF in Garland, Texas. On October 12, 2000, he and his crew fought valiantly to save their ship after al-Qaeda militants in Yemen bombed his destroyer, the USS
Cole,
in a suicide attack that killed seventeen U.S. servicemen.

After General Schoomaker retired in October 2000, his successor, air force General Charles Holland, didn’t seem to understand the Able Danger concept. From Schoomaker’s retirement on, Able Danger struggled to survive. Holland ordered Able Danger to terminate its activities sometime in late January 2001, and directed that it become a SOCOM J2/intelligence analysis project. It was rolled into the Special Operations Joint Intelligence Center and was consumed in the dark waters of the river of bureaucracy.

Ironically, it was clear that higher-ups wanted projects like this. When I was with Vice Adm. Tom Wilson, then director of DIA, briefing General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in early 2001 on a parallel clandestine operation, I explained to him that the Internet tools, techniques, and procedures we were using derived from Able Danger. Shelton nodded and said he remembered Able Danger and approved our new project immediately.

“The people of this country think we are doing things like this,” he told us. “We
should
be doing things like this.”

Shortly after the meeting with General Shelton, my work with Able Danger ended. Maj. Gen. Rod Isler came in the winter of 2000 to replace Maj. Gen. Bob Harding who, as deputy director for operations overseeing Defense HUMINT, was one of Able Danger’s few supporters at DIA.

Isler, who didn’t want anything to go wrong on his watch, though, was no fan of Able Danger or other projects that I was working on. Every operation Stratus Ivy was running was high risk/high gain—and all too high risk for him. Isler ordered me to “cease all support” to Able Danger.

The old arguments about DIA being more for analysis than operations came up again.

“It’s not your job to provide direct support to SOCOM or chase terrorists,” Isler told me. By this point, we were practically shouting at each other. “You shouldn’t be involved in operations.” I was as close to hitting an officer as I had ever been.

“Sir, if we don’t do this, who will?” I argued. “The objective of Able Danger is to penetrate al Qaeda leaders to the point where we know what they’re doing so well we can prevent attacks. That was the ultimate objective.”

“Well, it’s not your job,” he said.

I was stunned. “Sir, if it’s not our job, whose job is it?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated, “but it’s not yours.”

I stormed out of his fourteenth floor office in disgust. It was the beginning of the end of Stratus Ivy, and I knew it. Shortly after that, one of his deputies started making preparations to move me to Latin America, where I had no background or interest—anyway, salsa makes me break out in hives.

Then the September 11 attacks happened. It was devastating: To know we were right, and the critics were wrong.…

Shortly after that, Eileen Preisser, who had run a good portion of the Information Dominance Center at LIWA, called me to have coffee and told me she had something to show me. Eileen was the brilliant scientist who put together the core technologies at LIWA and had managed the effort that had identified Atta. Over coffee at a bagel shop in Springfield, she showed me one of the charts produced by LIWA back in January 2000 that Scott and I had looked at. She pointed out the Brooklyn cell.

“Look,” she said.

I was confused at first. What was I supposed to be looking for?

“Look,” she repeated, gesturing to the photographs in the cell.

I was getting annoyed. “What’s your point?” I said.

She was even more emphatic.
“Look at the chart,”
she said.

OK. OK,
I thought.
I’ll look at the chart again.

It took a while, but I found him. Mohamed Atta. The same sculpted face and strange eyes that had been plastered across every television in America. It was the man I had seen more than a year before when Scott and I had stared down at him in the SOCOM conference room.

Mohamed Atta. Mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Hijacker in control of American Airlines Flight 11 that was the first plane to strike the World Trade Center.

I had a sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach. We had been on the right track. Hell, we were even on the right
train.
Despite that, because of the bureaucracy, we had been stopped. Otherwise, we might have played a role in stopping the 9/11 attacks.

I asked Eileen what she planned to do with the information.

“I don’t know,” she said grimly, “but I plan to do something.”

I knew she would. She was a woman of action.