The Reluctant Spy (16 page)

Katherine was in her office when she fielded my call. “You should go home,” I said.

“We haven't really had any orders yet,” she said. By then, the CIA police, the so-called Security Protective Officers, or SPOs, were going office to office, herding people toward the exits. It took me an hour in my car just to get out of the CIA compound and onto the George Washington Parkway headed toward Arlington. Then traffic just stopped. I pulled my car off the parkway, locked it up, and walked home. Katherine and I watched the TV news; we could see the Pentagon burning from the apartment. We walked around for several hours trying to donate blood, but the Red Cross people in the area were overwhelmed.
This isn't right. We shouldn't be here. We should be doing what we can do in the best place we can do it
.

We walked back to my car and managed to work our way back to headquarters. We weren't alone: Everyone, it seemed, was straggling back, prepared to work all night long. We were getting names from offices and agents all over the world, literally thousands of them, and people were needed to do traces. Name traces normally are grunt work, what interns or newbies do, but the volume was just so huge that everybody in the place was involved. I'd sleep for an hour or two under my desk, get up, and do more name traces. Katherine was doing the same thing.

Everyone was running out of food, so a couple of guys from the Counterterrorist Center got bolt cutters and cut the chains off the doors to the CIA cafeteria. We took all the food, cooked what needed cooking, then set everything out on tables in the hallways. People could work, sleep, eat, or graze as they saw fit. The next day,
Marriott, which operated the cafeteria, agreed to stay open 24/7 for as long as the agency wanted.

But fairly soon, headquarters was not a particularly popular venue. It wasn't a case of nerves over a potential al-Qaeda attack. No. Nearly everybody was volunteering to go to Afghanistan and take on bin Laden's barbarians and their Taliban enablers. Here was another example of Cofer Black's remarkable leadership. A couple of days after 9/11, he summoned everyone in the CTC up to his office for a pep talk and a reality check. I don't think his remarks were recorded, but one part went something like this: “You know, we have a big job ahead of us. We're at war, a different kind of war than we've ever fought before, whether the country realizes it yet or not. We're all going to have to do our part. And not all of us are going to make it back.”

You could have heard a pin drop. “I'm sorry to say this now, but we have to get used to the idea that some of us are going to die. But we have to do whatever we can to bring these people to justice. We owe it to three thousand of our dead compatriots. We have to do the right thing. And remember this, always: We're the good guys and we're going to win.” That combination of truth telling and his willingness to take risks set Cofer Black apart from others at the agency and inspired the rest of us to believe in him and want to follow his lead. He richly deserved every accolade thrown his way.

People with military experience—especially special operations training—were in high demand; I had none of that training or those skills, save what I learned in the short course at the Farm, but I kept badgering anyone who would listen, explaining that I had other attributes that would come in handy over there. “Look, I've got Arabic, which is what these al-Qaeda killers speak, and I'll go anywhere you want me to go.” The CIA guys who went in first, led by former U.S. marine Gary Schroen, who was planning to retire from the agency, were true heroes, the best of the best. Schroen came back, but Cofer was right: Some did not make it home alive—Mike Spann, for
instance, a heroic former marine who died in Afghanistan in the early stages of the war there. What Schroen, Spann, and others did starting in late September 2001 made possible the air strikes and U.S. ground forces that followed. Our nation owes them an enormous debt.

My persistent volunteering must have worn them down. Finally, in early January 2002, I got a call from Dan Praig, a mentor and the guy who originally hired me for the temporary assignment that included Athens. “How's your Arabic?” He knew the answer because I'd been telling him and anyone else who would listen that my Arabic was good. “My Arabic's terrific,” I said.

“Fine,” Dan said. “Can you go to Pakistan soon? We need someone to take charge of counterterrorism operations there.”

“Just tell me when, and I'll be gone.”

The next day, I was on a plane to Pakistan.

AS SOON AS I
arrived at our office in Pakistan, the guy I was replacing handed me the keys to a rental car and said, “It's all yours.” He had been dispatched to Pakistan from his assignment in a Spanish-speaking country, but this was an abrupt handoff even from someone on temporary duty. No briefing on his cases, just adios, amigo, and good luck. On my first day, the deputy to Bob Grenier, our senior officer in Pakistan, said he wanted me to come up with a standard operating procedure for doing counterterrorist raids. I'd recently completed a course in advanced counterterrorism operations at one of the CIA's training facilities in the States; now, Grenier's deputy was giving me the opportunity to put what I'd learned into practice in a place reportedly teeming with al-Qaeda operatives and wannabes.

My plan called for raids that would begin at precisely 0200 hours. At 2 a.m., the streets of Pakistani cities were empty, and the bad guys, we figured, would probably be sleeping, too. Each team would include people from the CIA, the FBI, and the Pakistani military. We were in charge; the FBI was always supposed to secure evidence at the crime scene and the Paks were there for the obvious reason: This was their country, after all. We'd identify the house where the bad guys were and use battering rams to break down doors. The Pakistanis would go in first and separate the men from the women and children. Then we'd go in with the FBI.

When Grenier got word from headquarters that Abu Zubaydah was in Pakistan, probably in Faisalabad, I knew we'd need help and asked the Counterterrorist Center at headquarters to provide it. We
did get some “special help,” but I cannot reveal the details because the information remains classified. My bright idea was to drive the streets of Faisalabad, hoping the special help would give us some clue to Abu Zubaydah's whereabouts; then, if we got lucky, he'd show himself and, of course, we'd recognize him from the photos we had of him.
Piece of cake: We spot him at the house he's using, reconnoiter, raid the place at night while the bad guys are sleeping, break down the door, and grab him. Yeah, that's how it'll happen
.

The fantasy of a CIA agent doesn't stand a chance of prevailing against the guile of a ruthless adversary. My bright idea was ridiculous: Only once in the two weeks did we get an inkling of where Abu Zubaydah might be, but the lead wasn't really actionable. He was very smart, moving around, covering his tracks in ways I can't discuss here, sticking to no discernible pattern. We used some fairly sophisticated methods in an effort to nail down his location. But we kept coming up empty.

That's when I told Grenier that we'd need more targeting help and a bigger team. I got Rick Romanski, the best in the business, and a group of CIA and FBI personnel large enough to get the job done.

AS I HAVE
recounted, Rick used the reports we were receiving to narrow down the field of potential spots being used as safe houses by Abu Zubaydah to fourteen—all of them, it seemed, in Faisalabad or one other city. I'd never even heard of Faisalabad until I got to Pakistan, even though it's a city of nine million people and promoted as the Birmingham of Pakistan because of its large textile industry.

I first went to Faisalabad with Amir, the Arab American agent who was part of our team, to buy a house for our people during the Abu Zubaydah operation. The city was quite a sight: Every structure seemed to be made of hardened mud or unpainted cinder or concrete block. There were no tall buildings, not one more than ten or fifteen stories. Signs of poverty were everywhere, including an odor of rotting garbage and fouled water that hit you like a punch in the face.
People got around on overcrowded buses, motor scooters, trucks, donkeys and camels, and rickshaws—whatever was available. The place gave me one of those not-in-Kansas-anymore feelings: This was a very long way from home. I felt very small and very lonely.

But then, there is always something that brings America to you regardless of where you are in the world, something that demonstrates our country's global reach. Amir and I were hungry, but we were worried about finding a decent place to eat. We turned a corner, first spotting an open garbage pit. But not one hundred feet away was a gleaming glass-and-steel structure with a logo we'd seen thousands of times. Saved by McDonald's.

“I want a Quarter Pounder with cheese, large fries, and a Coke Light,” I told the counter guy. Coke Light is what they call Diet Coke over there.

“Oh, why don't you try the Big Mac? It's better than the Quarter Pounder with cheese.”

“No thanks, I want the Quarter Pounder with cheese.”

“Oh, sir, the Big Mac has a very special sauce,” the Pakistani said. “It will be to your liking.”

“No, I want the Quarter Pounder with cheese.”

“Well, sir, but the special sauce, it is homemade.” I was beginning to get a vision of this verbal ping-pong—my repeating the order and his defense of the special sauce—continuing long into the evening. “Buddy, just give me the Quarter Pounder with cheese.”

He sighed. “Sir, we only have Big Macs.”

“Okay, a Big Mac will be fine. Don't forget the special sauce.” It wasn't our only McDonald's encounter of the night. We made our way back to the other Pakistani city, but we got lost in the tangle of streets leading from our hotel to the safe house we had purchased a few days earlier. We managed to find the hotel and a McDonald's only two blocks away. Why McDonald's? There was yet another McDonald's quite close to the location of our safe house.
Think of these last two as McDonald's numbers two and three of what had become a very long evening. We figured the manager of McDonald's number two could give us directions to McDonald's number three, after which we could crawl on all fours, if necessary, to the safe house. But the manager was new to the city. Instead of verbal guidance, he gave us a map—sort of. In fact, it was the children's menu with a cartoon map on the back, with pink stars designating all the McDonald's locations in the area. He gave us a couple of clues and we were on our way.

An hour later, we were back at McDonald's number two, begging the manager for more help. He pointed us in the right direction again and Amir took the wheel with a suggestion for his colleague riding shotgun: Write down every turn we make so we can distinguish later the hits from the misses. There were no signs anywhere, so I was reduced to writing down directions worthy of Inspector Clouseau.

“Make a right at the traffic cop, the one standing on a raised platform with the Pepsi sign on it.”

“Approach the big banyan tree and take a left.”

“Go straight past the orphanage.”

Finally, we got to McDonald's number three. From there, you could see the safe house, which we marked with a GPS before retracing our steps and doing it all over to ensure that our great success wasn't a fluke. It wasn't, but we both felt chastened and embarrassed by the experience.
Your tax dollars at work, good citizens. If we bring this level of tradecraft to the operation to capture Abu Zubaydah, we may wind up the laughingstock of global intelligence, as the guys who blew the takedown of one of Osama bin Laden's top terrorists
.

AS I SAID
earlier, the Pakistani police and military people were strong players, especially Khalid. Actually, Khalid's ostensible boss in this operation was Mohammed, who was viewed by his men as a weak and uninterested dandy and who made clear to one and all that he wasn't happy with this particular assignment.

I met Mohammed once, as a courtesy, and dealt with Khalid on everything else. We were under pressure from headquarters not to reveal the name of our target to Khalid and his top people. The higher-ups were understandably concerned about a leak, and even Khalid himself wasn't absolutely sure at first that he could assemble enough trustworthy people to lead the Pakistani units on fourteen different raids. He ended up bringing in a kind of super SWAT team whose men dressed all in black, including a T-shirt with the outline of a 9 mm handgun on the front. With that, Khalid certified that his leadership team was leakproof.

Even then, we got blowback from headquarters, telling us not to share Abu Zubaydah's name with our Pakistani colleagues. Bob Grenier got very angry, which can be fairly intimidating because he's so good at maintaining his cool. “This is ridiculous,” he said, when he learned that headquarters wanted us to stiff the Pakistanis. “These guys are prepared to shed blood for us. And it's the ultimate disrespect to tell them there's a dangerous guy and we want you to help us catch him but, by the way, we don't trust you enough to even tell you who it is. How insulting is that?” With Grenier's support, we told Khalid and his top officers that we had Abu Zubaydah in the crosshairs, or soon would.