The squadron of Navy SEALs had been back with their families for only three weeks from their umpteenth deployment to Afghanistan since December 2001 when they received the call to hurry back to JSOC’s off-site training facility near Fort Bragg for an exercise. As they waited for a briefing in a conference room, they were surprised to see JSOC commander Vice Admiral William H. McRaven walk in.
“This isn’t an exercise, is it?” one of the commandos piped up.
For more than six months, the president’s cabinet had met secretly to decide what to do about the possibility that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden might be hiding in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Just a week earlier, Obama had made the risky decision to send in a team that was so secret that its cover name, the Naval Special Warfare Development Group—DevGru for short—sounded just like that of any other paper-pushing office in Top Secret America. The cabinet members debated various options and were divided over what to do, given that the best estimate the terrorist leader was actually there was 45 to 55 percent. Defense Secretary Gates, who remembered the failed 1980 rescue attempt of U.S. hostages in Iran, was not in favor. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was firmly supportive of authorizing the mission. Marine General James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, advocated a missile strike that would risk no American lives. Panetta was cautiously in favor of inserting a small commando team.
To help him decide, Obama had finally asked the CIA analyst in charge of the Osama bin Laden team whether he thought bin Laden was in the compound, knowing the analyst could not be certain but also that this one person had a better sense of the likelihood than anyone else. “Yes, I do,” the analyst replied.
The intelligence trail that led to HVT #1 had not begun with the thousands of analysts working in Top Secret America whose job was to sift through a dragnet of information on people who may or may not have acted suspiciously, or even with one of the names on the more limited list of known terrorists kept by the National Counterterrorism Center. It began with a tiny team of experienced CIA analysts who had been tracking bin Laden for nearly ten years; who had collected and who remembered every scrap of information about his background, his family, his habits, his voice intonations, and his physical appearance, and about every person he may have trusted.
Working at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, they had started with a nom de guerre for one of bin Laden’s couriers that had come up during an agency interrogation of a detainee. That nickname led them to a real name, which led them to a cell phone number, which led them in August 2010—with the help of colleagues and equipment from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office—to a town thirty miles northeast of the capital, Islamabad. Electronic intercepts, satellites, drones, surveillance planes, 3-D models, tools that measure vibrations and can see through foliage, all were deployed to determine the inhabitants and to visually dissect the compound, which had been expertly designed to mask views of the inside from a distance.
Among senior JSOC operators, the consensus was that a raid would ensure that they could kill or capture bin Laden if he were there. The risk of civilian casualties would be far fewer than with a bomb or missile attack, although the risk to the team would obviously be greater. They had executed hundreds of similar raids in Afghanistan and Iraq over the years, and this one seemed much less dangerous than a lot of those, since there wasn’t going to be an armed mob waiting for them, as there was sometimes. Just as important to the commandos, who had lost so many comrades and who had been awarded so many Purple Hearts as survivors, a raid and contact at close quarters would send an important message: that the United States was willing to risk American lives to get him.
Obama and his team decided not to tell the government of Pakistan, which in some ways had become a foreign version of Top Secret America’s bloat, a place that sucked so much money from Washington with so little accountability that U.S. officials had actually lost track of how much they had spent there. The best estimate was $21 billion in less than a decade, a sum quoted by Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who had chaired a White House policy review of Pakistan in 2009. Besides, if the troops needed to go in and get out without capturing or killing bin Laden, the administration wanted to be able to deny that anything had taken place. These requirements amounted to a covert action, so the CIA was put in charge. It was agreed that Panetta would be in charge of decisions made at the cabinet level, while McRaven would be in charge of everything that happened below that, which meant the entire operation. And below McRaven, the entire burden lay on the shoulders of the SEALs and pilots, who would ultimately have to use their experience and judgment.
To limit the number of people who knew about the plans, the decision about the chain of command did not go through the normal plethora of White House, CIA, State Department, and military lawyers. To keep decisions rolling, and to minimize bureaucratic jealousies that might result in a leak, the circle of participants was minuscule until the operation was nearly ready to proceed. Admiral Eric Olson, McRaven’s boss, was told just a month before and only then because McRaven insisted. General David Petraeus, commander of the Central Command, was informed less than a week earlier, and the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, who had replaced Ambassador Anne Patterson in October 2010, got the word just four days prior. The government of Pakistan was informed only afterward.
In the division of labor that had developed over a decade of war, the SEALs had always worked in Afghanistan, while the army’s Delta Force operated predominantly in Iraq. In this operation, planners decided to keep the force extra small, without the overhead security provided by the AC-130s that normally accompany raid parties. Surprise and speed would be key—the team had forty minutes to get in and get out—so they opted for a stealth version of a Black Hawk troop-carrying helicopter flown by the 160th Night Stalkers. The plan called for one helicopter to land in an animal pen inside the compound and another elsewhere in the yard. One assault force would enter the main building from a first-floor door, while the other would be set down on the roof and enter the third floor, where analysts believed bin Laden was living.
Those planning the raid knew from surveillance that there were more than a dozen children and a few women inside, so they rehearsed how to get them safely out of the way. They practiced what to do if a helicopter crashed, or if Pakistani authorities or an unruly crowd arrived and wanted to get into a firefight. What they feared most was an attack by the Pakistani military. The team chief was instructed to announce over a bullhorn, if confronted, that he and his men were U.S. forces engaged in a mission, and to instruct the Pakistani commander to immediately call his headquarters, which by then would be on the line with its U.S. counterparts. The last thing anyone wanted was an armed international incident, with U.S. and Pakistani forces shooting at each other. A group of senior U.S. officials would be monitoring the event from the embassy in Islamabad, and from the White House and CIA headquarters, as it unfolded.
The mission was set for Sunday, May 1, Pakistan time. In Washington, it was April 30, the night of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the main media social event of the year. The SEAL team joked about how funny it would be if the president announced the raid as part of his humorous monologue, only to have the entire press corps blow it off as a joke.1 The more serious question, though, was what would happen if none of the national security invitees showed up at the dinner. Wouldn’t that draw attention?
The date was dictated by nature. On that night, there would be no moon to illuminate the helicopters or the raid party. The date was altered by nature, too. It was too cloudy on the chosen night, so they rescheduled for the next night, May 2. If they couldn’t go then, it would be another month before it would be safe for a night raid, and everyone was worried that, by then, with a greater number of people in the know, even this secret would not hold.
On the flight, the stealth helicopters went undetected. But one encountered mechanical problems due to the unexpected heat as it tried to land in the animal pen. To avoid rolling, which causes most serious injuries, the pilot dug his nose down into the earth. The SEALs jumped out, along with Cairo, the Belgian Malinois shepherd whose job was to sniff out bodies—dead or alive—that might be hidden in the building.
The first movement the team encountered was a man, who turned out to be the courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, running from the main building to a second structure to get his weapon. He was shot as he came outside with it. Some twenty-four SEALs were inside the compound walls, seventeen of them shooters who ran into the main building, knowing it might be booby-trapped to immediately explode. But no explosion occurred. Bin Laden’s son, his son’s wife, and another male were killed inside. On the first floor, the SEALs herded a dozen children into a corner and kept them there until the raid was over. On the second floor, commandos similarly restrained two men and another half-dozen or so women and children.
As three or four SEALs continued up the stairs to the third floor, one of them saw a head poke out from around the corner. “Motherfucker, it’s him,” one of them thought, as he recounted to teammates later. They rushed the room, only to find two women in long robes, their hands obscured from view, standing in front of bin Laden. One lunged at the nearest commando. She was shot in the leg, as was the second woman. This was followed immediately by a shot to bin Laden’s forehead and another to his chest, a classic kill by a veteran SEAL in his midforties who had been fighting in Afghanistan, off and on, for more than nine years. It was over in seconds. A pistol and an AK-47 rifle sat untouched on a nearby ledge.
The women were given first aid and left behind with the children. It took fifteen minutes to rig the downed helicopter with enough explosives to destroy its frame and incinerate its unique stealth skin. In the meantime, SEALs inside the house were loading into bags the biggest surprise of the evening: a trove of CDs, thumb drives, and computers that would be sent immediately to the National Military Exploitation Center in Fairfax County for unlocking, downloading, and analysis. They were shocked at how much there was: 2.4 terabytes of data, they later learned.
Bin Laden’s body was flown to Bagram, Afghanistan, transferred to a twin-rotor Osprey helicopter, and flown to the USS Carl Vinson, waiting in the northern Arabian Sea.
After a decade of scraping together clues about the government’s secret activities, on May 2, 2011, I discovered a treasure trove of them in one place. A source pointed me to a building in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh. I had started the long drive from Washington early the previous evening and stopped at a Days Inn next to the Pennsylvania Turnpike at night. As I climbed into bed, my BlackBerry began buzzing: Osama bin Laden was dead.
“Congrats!” I texted to a half-dozen people I knew who had spent a decade chasing him. Some were out of government, still recuperating from the relentless grind their lives had become. “For the first time since I left, I wish I was there!” a former CIA official typed back at 11:36 p.m.
Bin Laden’s death was not the end of terrorism or even al-Qaeda. But it was a bold punctuation mark, the period at the end of a decade-long story. As his body was pushed into the sea off a U.S. aircraft carrier, a chapter in the nation’s history slid in after it. An era in which the fear of bin Laden’s theatrical brand of terrorism turned rational people irrational also sank to the ocean’s bottom along with the cleansed and weighted corpse. We hope.
With his death and the demise of so many other al-Qaeda leaders, it was no longer rational to think that the terrorist network could continue to thrive. Having devoted so much time and money to looking for al-Qaeda in the United States, it was no longer rational to act as if terrorism was a greater threat to Americans than the violent crimes that kill and traumatize more than a million people each year. After so many false starts and dead ends, it wasn’t rational, either, to think that finding terrorists was easy—nor was it clearheaded to keep spending billions of dollars on unproven, broad-brush monitoring that swept up innocent people in its wake. It wasn’t rational in a time of economic disintegration to continue to pay for so many private contracts so numerous that nobody could keep proper track of them, and whose effectiveness no one could assess. There were still secrets to be kept, but one of the biggest that didn’t need keeping from the American public was the truth about Top Secret America.
Top Secret America had been born of fear and panic ten years earlier, yet the nation’s leaders still were unable to have a fact-based dialog with the public, free of fear-mongering, about terrorism and the withering, criminal organization named al-Qaeda that brought it to our shores. “I think we need to keep a very cool head,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates told me months before bin Laden’s death. “There’s a lot of talk about the growth of radicalization. Yes, there has been growth. But between September eleventh, 2001, and December thirty-first, 2009, we had forty-six cases prosecuted… and about a hundred twenty-five people involved. So I would say the numbers of extremists are very small. Let’s stay calm.”
The next morning I continued up I-76 and got off at the Cranberry exit. Turning left onto a small side street off the main thoroughfare, I passed a FedEx office, a Bravo Cucina Italiana restaurant, and a Red Roof Inn, then arrived at my destination.
There, I was asked to leave my computer and cell phone outside the operations room, which my host entered by scanning his retina at the door and then keying in a pass code. Inside, three analysts were hunched over, staring intently at computer screens. A large server sat on the other side of an interior window, churning through millions of files of data.
Rick Wallace, director of special operations, pulled up a chair so I could sit next to him and view his screen. Thin, with wire-rimmed glasses and unruly hair, he looked like the frazzled computer nerd in a television crime series, the one who breaks the code to find the bad guy for the cool squad of detectives. “Okay, watch this,” he said.
Wallace began opening his saved document files. The first one was from TRW, the megadefense contractor now owned by Northrop Grumman, for the SBL IFX Project, a space-based laser designed to shoot down missiles. On the cover sheet of the document, it said the material had to be kept “in areas protected by cipher locks” and then “inside a locked container.” But here it was, right before my eyes.
He pulled up another file he had stored for himself called Pentagon Secret Backbone. It was a detailed diagram of the Defense Department’s Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, SIPRNET, in which all documents and emails classified secret were kept. It revealed all the vulnerable spots where a thief or spy might try to penetrate the system.2 He pulled up details of First Lady Michelle Obama’s convoy route for a 2009 event and the location of various U.S. Secret Service safe houses. He accessed tax returns from a senior JSOC officer; the personnel roster for the army’s 1st Signal Brigade, which listed hundreds of troops by name, Social Security number, and security clearance; and a list of the names of the army’s 3rd Special Forces Group troops. This one included the names of their children, too.
He had a January 2010 top secret Intelligence Summary of Afghanistan, laying out who was cooperating with whom; and a National Security Agency handbook, marked “For Official Use Only,” and another document consisting of 21,000 names from the army’s promotion list, with every kind of data a foreign spy might need in order to find new recruits.
Wallace had classified records from every component of the Department of Homeland Security. The Transportation and Security Administration, he explained, was the worst at losing control of its documents. Sensitive TSA material he pulled up detailed the places on an airplane that were routinely not searched. Another listed ways to defeat airport screening procedures. There were dozens of other secret documents he was able to access with a few clicks.
Wallace was not doing anything illegal. He wasn’t hacking into anyone’s computer. He hadn’t stolen anyone’s pass code. No one had slipped him something he should not have had. And yet here was document after document of classified, sensitive, very personal information about government secret activities and individuals’ lives.
Wallace doesn’t have a top secret clearance. He’s not a counterterrorism or law enforcement official. In fact, he doesn’t work for the government at all. He is employed by Tiversa, a small Pennsylvania firm. It sells a service to protect the data of individuals and companies and to help them find information about themselves already floating around in cyberspace without their permission, often because a client’s child has installed peer-to-peer file-sharing software to share music and videos. Most parents and file-sharing users are unaware that the software automatically opens the door for strangers to come in and browse through every other file on the computer and any other computers linked to it, which usually meant the parents’. It is like leaving the back door to your house wide open so the twenty million people throughout the world who have similar software can walk in, make themselves at home in every room, and steal whatever they want.
Tiversa calculates that the people worldwide who know about this trick are conducting 1.7 billion searches every day through other people’s data, including some searches that are run automatically, twenty-four hours a day, against all open doors. They are looking for more than the latest hit song. Some of them are foreign governments. Some are probably WikiLeaks activists. Some are scam artists and criminals, others simply voyeurs.
As Tiversa scanned the Web to find leaks of corporate and personal data for its clients, its technicians were “catching dolphins in the tuna nets,” as Wallace described it, stumbling upon these classified documents. In following the trail of these leaked files, Tiversa can often identify who, or what computer, has grabbed other people’s sensitive information. In 2009, the company found a file of blueprints and avionics for the presidential helicopter, Marine One, being traded on the Gnutella file-sharing network. It traced the trades to a computer in Iran. In 2007, it found more than two hundred classified documents in just a few hours of searching the networks. These included a document from a contractor working in Iraq that detailed the radio frequency the military was using to defeat improvised explosive devices. More recently, company sleuths said they had traced the footsteps of WikiLeaks. Wallace believed the organization had found some of the documents it has been publicly posting using the same methodology.
When Wallace or someone else in the company calls a government agency to tell them about the documents they have found floating around, he said that much of the time the person on the other end verbally shrugs it off, leaving Wallace and his colleagues disappointed in their government’s understanding of the security threat from such simple, common software.
Tiversa was not just a fascinating discovery. It makes an essential point about the shifting ground we stand on. As the government works tirelessly to expand the blanket of secrecy over everything having to do with terrorism and intelligence (except when it is politically useful, as in the now-disproven details of Saddam Hussein’s mobile biolabs or, more benignly, Osama bin Laden’s killing), the wider culture is stampeding into a new, anything-goes era of flash mobs, tweet-olutionaries, Facebook communities, file sharing, YouTube intelligence and surveillance, hacktivists, WikiLeaks, and twenty-four-hour-a-day Internet media. There are a thousand other ways technology spreads information cheaply across the globe, reordering political power in the process.
Even our reporting on Top Secret America fit into this category. Arkin had put together his massive database using information in the public domain, a good portion of it on job boards and obscure government websites. When Kat Downs, the Washington Post’s digital designer, and Ryan O’Neil, the programmer, had figured out how to code it and display it online, we showed officials from twelve intelligence agencies the list of organizations and private companies doing top secret work. Most officials were stunned. Some agencies didn’t have such a list themselves. And many had no clue that there was so much information on their cherished secrets out in the world.
In this era of involuntary transparency, there was evidence everywhere that the more a nation comes to rely on secrecy to maintain its form of government and its relations with other countries, the more vulnerable it is to political turmoil once those secrets are revealed. This became apparent throughout the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where people living under corrupt and autocratic regimes are able to share the truth about their governments. Through the stories and pictures of repression and brutality that citizens so quickly learned to distribute to their countrymen and the outside world via the Internet, revolutions have been born. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, the West Bank and Gaza, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mexico, and elsewhere, the power of the truth to change history and the frailty of governments based on secrets are being demonstrated on a daily basis.
Top Secret America’s obsessive reliance on secrecy has made the United States vulnerable, too. In its most benign form, too much secret information gums up the very system it was created to serve. In its most dangerous form, secrecy is allowing the people in the know, those with security clearances, to hide their own malfeasance, or to unintentionally chip away at democracy—the very system Top Secret America is there to protect, one built on individual privacy and rights.
Ten years after the attacks of 9/11, more secret projects, more secret organizations, more secret authorities, more secret decision making, more watchlists, and more databases are not the answer to every problem. In fact, more has become too much. The number of secrets has become so enormous that the people in charge of keeping them can’t possibly succeed. That is one lesson from the WikiLeaks disclosures. The leaked State Department cables were allegedly first available to a disgruntled army private with a history of instability because the government wasn’t giving even a basic level of protection to those documents, and because his colleagues allowed him to bring a rewritable CD-ROM with Lady Gaga’s music into work, not realizing it could act as the black bag into which a quarter of a million sensitive diplomatic cables could be dumped and carted away.
In the government-wide security and counterintelligence investigation that has followed the WikiLeaks disclosures, government experts have learned that most federal agencies have little understanding of how to protect their sensitive information, according to people involved in the review. They don’t know what information is unprotected, who can access secret data who shouldn’t be able to, or who has already done so and how much they have stolen. Many agencies know exactly where their computer systems are leaking but haven’t installed the proper patches in three years, either because managers don’t fully understand the importance of fixing the problem or because the agencies don’t have technicians knowledgeable enough to do it, according to the review. And even if they began now to address these issues, it’s too late: no one expects the leaks to stop or the hundreds of government computer systems to ever become secure enough. Besides, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted in 2010, “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.”
Or, as a report by the American Bar Association and the government’s Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive noted: “There is a shadow race between those trying to keep information secret and those seeking that information—and the seekers are rapidly gaining the upper hand…. The nature and scale of this challenge calls for a careful assessment of the U.S. government’s traditional approach to counterintelligence and its dependence on secrecy as the key to gaining and maintaining a competitive advantage.”
The smarter and safer route is to design policies and construct foreign relationships based on operating forthrightly, in a way that won’t embarrass us or harm anything of value when it is revealed. That would cover 99 percent of the matter in the political universe and allow for the likelihood that few secrets can truly be kept. That leaves the other 1 percent of information that truly deserves protection, like the Osama bin Laden operation.
One afternoon I sat in the living room of a top counterintelligence official, a person who has spent a lifetime thinking about how adversaries can put the United States at a disadvantage. We played a game about secrets. Start with a world in which there are none, and then put into a box the things that must truly be kept secret. What would those things be?
The definition of top secret was written for a completely different era, he pointed out, when the emerging missile and nuclear technology seemed so precious and unique that letting it out would, in fact, cause “exceptionally grave harm” to our national security. But we could not think of a case in the last ten years in which some secret had leaked out that had actually caused grave harm. Certainly some intelligence sources had dried up; and some foreign informants may even have been killed or otherwise silenced. But since the cold war, the world had become so technologically advanced that loss of any particular technology that would have had a severe impact on U.S. capabilities back then would these days likely just prompt a new round of innovation to replace it; and nothing, in fact, would be irreparably harmed. The same was true for relations between countries. Although countries might stop cooperating temporarily (usually for public relations more than anything else), globalization and the presence of transnational threats like terrorism and drug smuggling had prompted even provisional allies to stick together where it mattered most. That is certainly the lesson from the unauthorized disclosures of the CIA’s covert prisons that so angered allies in Europe—for just a while. So into the imaginary box went nuclear codes and weapons production, bioweapons pathogens and other lethal, unique technologies, and high-level sources who were irreplaceable—but not much else.
But that is not the way things were going. In fact, more information was being classified every day. At the same time, though, the managers of Top Secret America, who range in age from forty-five to sixty-five years old and therefore may not be conversant with the simplest technologies of the information era, still did not realize the seepage that was eroding the foundation of their world every day. The most glaring example was the colossal intelligence failure of 2011. It wasn’t another terrorist plot the government had failed to unearth. It was something much harder to have missed: the Arab Spring, the dynamic political change sweeping across the Middle East and carrying with it predictable instability. Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and Palestine—these were the same countries that U.S. intelligence agencies were supposed to be watching closely for terrorist rumblings and for political instability that could make it easier for al-Qaeda to operate. The government’s utter failure to notice the revolutionary wave swelling in one country after another had left the United States scrambling to figure out how to help push the forces of change toward democracy and away from theocracy of the Islamic fundamentalist variety.
It felt like a repeat of the other giant surprise: the collapse of the Soviet Union back in the day when a paler, less technologically sophisticated version of Top Secret America existed. Had those managers in their forties, fifties, and sixties not been so intent on throwing layer upon layer of inexperienced analysts at the same terrorism problem, and had a true leader of the intelligence agencies actually been managing the kind of intelligence that was being collected in such a way that every agency didn’t run after the same narrow terrorist targets, then the intelligence operatives following Tunisia might have noticed that leaders there were being disparaged in an enormous flood of public tweets, chats, and website traffic and that those newly emboldened voices were promoting dramatic change. Or they would have noted the huge increase in the number of young Egyptians watching their soul mates to the east on their iPhones, BlackBerrys, and laptops. They might even have picked up on the uptick in iPhone sales before that. Instead, what was hiding in plain sight took the intelligence community completely by surprise, again. As the Muslim Brotherhood moved to capitalize on the social and political void in Egypt, the most strategically important U.S. ally in the evolving Middle East, Washington’s gigantic intelligence apparatus did nothing to warn policymakers, who were then completely unprepared to promote a palatable alternative. Top Secret America had become so focused on undoing one terrorist at a time that no one was seeing the big, strategic picture, and that was because, at the bottom of it all, it had grown so big and so unwieldy and no one, still, was actually in charge.
Secrets aren’t just hard to keep; they can also become toxic to the system they try to protect. As Top Secret America spread to state and local government, state troopers, county sheriffs, and city police, eager to become part of the response to a grave national security threat, sought to learn more about terrorism, which they were also now being empowered to fight. They sought trainers, experts in terrorist ideology and practices, to teach them more about the Islamic communities in which allegiance to radical imams often took hold. Billions of dollars had been poured into the Department of Homeland Security, but very little of it went to training all those frontline foot soldiers who would be counted upon to recognize a potential threat, or even to develop a rudimentary knowledge of the cultural background so many terrorists shared. Without help from the Department of Homeland Security, local law enforcement departments and agencies found their own teachers. One of them was Ramon Montijo.
He has taught classes on terrorism and Islam to law enforcement officers all over the country. “Alabama, Colorado, Vermont,” said Montijo, a former Army Special Forces sergeant and Los Angeles Police Department investigator who is now a private security consultant. “California, Texas, and Missouri,” he continued.
What he tells them is always the same, he said: most Muslims in the United States want to impose Sharia law here. “They want to make this world Islamic. The Islamic flag will fly over the White House—not on my watch!” he said. “My job is to wake up the public, and first, the first responders.”
As is increasingly the case, the first responders will be sheriffs and state troopers. These aren’t FBI agents, who have years of on-the-job and classroom training. Instead, they are often people like Lacy Craig, the police dispatcher who became an intelligence analyst at Idaho’s fusion center, or the detectives in Minnesota, Michigan, and Arkansas who can talk at length about the lineage of gangs or the signs of a crystal meth addict. Now each of them is a go-to person on terrorism as well.
Into this training vacuum come self-described experts whose grasp of the facts is considered wildly inaccurate, even harmful, by the FBI and others in the intelligence community. Like Montijo, Walid Shoebat, who describes himself as a onetime Muslim terrorist and convert to Christianity, also lectures to local police. He, too, believes that most Muslims seek to impose Sharia law in the United States. To prevent this, he said in an interview, he warns officers that “you need to look at the entire pool of Muslims in a community.” When Shoebat spoke to the first annual South Dakota Fusion Center Conference in Sioux Falls in June 2010, he told his audience of police officers, sheriff’s deputies, firefighters, and first responders to monitor Muslim student groups and local mosques and, if possible, to tap their phones. “You can find out a lot of information that way,” he said.
The next year, 2011, he was invited back. “You’ve been infiltrated at all levels,” Shoebat warned the audience. “Are all Muslims who interpret for the U.S. military terrorists? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean you play Russian roulette.” Shoebat’s trip and honorarium were paid for by a grant from the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Rapid City Journal, which covered his visit.
“The critiques and evaluations that came back highly recommended that he come back again,” South Dakota’s director of Homeland Security, Jim Carpenter, told the newspaper. “We acted on those, and that’s why he came back.”
Shoebat and Montijo aren’t the only people sharing such fear-inducing expertise with local law enforcement officers. In the neoconservative Center for Security Policy’s publication Shariah: The Threat to America, its authors describe a “stealth jihad” that must be thwarted before it’s too late. Among the book’s multiple authors are such notables as former CIA director R. James Woolsey and former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and JSOC commander Lieutenant General William G. Boykin, along with the center’s director, Frank Gaffney Jr., a former Reagan administration official. They write that most mosques in the United States already have been radicalized, that most Muslim social organizations are fronts for violent jihadists, and that Muslims who practice Sharia law are actively but stealthily trying to impose it on this country.
Gaffney said his team has spoken widely, including to many law enforcement forums. “Members of our team have been involved in training programs for several years now, many of which have been focused on local law enforcement intelligence, homeland security, state police, National Guard units, and the like,” Gaffney said. “We’re seeing a considerable ramping up of interest in getting this kind of training.” Gaffney asserts that the three hundred campus chapters of the Muslim Student Association are really practicing stealth jihad, as is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which is probably the most vocal antidiscrimination organization. “Here we are, some nine years after 9/11, and people are only now, whether they’re police chiefs, or whether they’re FBI agents, or whether they’re military intelligence, or other intelligence officers, beginning to be exposed to this kind of information,” Gaffney told me. He says not all Muslims are the enemy but that many are. “Muslims who attend mosques that aren’t owned and operated by the Saudis are, by and large, I think, not a problem, at least not yet.”
Gaffney’s views are ridiculed by many experts on terrorism and Islam. Philip Mudd is one of them. For three decades, Mudd drove the CIA’s effort to stop al-Qaeda and other international terrorists. For four years after that he worked with the FBI to do the same. He has read the interrogation transcripts of captured terrorists. He’s studied the research on what makes so many young men turn violent. He’s even interviewed young terrorists sitting in Middle Eastern prisons. He disagrees completely with the ideas that people like Gaffney and Boykin, who describes himself as a fundamentalist Christian activist, hold and are trying to spread. “I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the phenomenon we face,” Mudd said. Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park Bomber, “who assassinated someone under the guise of Christianity, was not a Christian; he’s a murderer…. This is nonsense. It’s nonsense wrapped around rubbish…. I don’t buy that this is about Islam, I just don’t buy it.”
Inculcating the counterterrorism effort with the idea that Islam itself is responsible for violent extremism “is extremely dangerous,” Mudd added. “Our ability to absorb these [American Muslim] kids feeds into our capability to prevent terrorism. The more we go down a road to saying, when there’s an attack, let’s go firebomb a mosque, the more we feed a sense that after someone takes an oath to America he’s still not a real American. This’ll kill us.”
DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said the department does not maintain a list of terrorism experts; nor does it intend to start one. Who were they, she asked rhetorically, to tell local authorities which instructors were good and which were not, and to drive the bad ones out of business? But after being questioned about these problems, she said the department is working on guidelines for local authorities wrestling with the topic. At the moment, Muslims were the target of these ill-informed experts. But, according to DHS and FBI documents we obtained, the FBI and local homeland security officials already had become more interested in certain groups; African Americans once in prison, because jailhouse conversions to Islam could be a growing threat; animal and environmental rights activists because some of them had committed violent acts; recent immigrants and U.S. residents from Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, North Africa, and elsewhere because they could be a pipeline for their terrorist countrymen. Local law enforcement groups were also passing around warnings about peaceful demonstrators, sent to them from state intelligence fusion centers. Other groups, especially antiwar protesters, appeared often in the pages of these Law Enforcement Sensitive bulletins.
Given all the new war-inspired surveillance technology and databases that Top Secret America’s private contractors had developed, it is inconceivable that authorities would not start using them for broader purposes. What would happen if the next president elected to lead the United States believed that there was nothing wrong with using these systems to examine peaceful, lawful political protest groups more carefully, just in case?
“You know, the Constitution defends all of us against unreasonable search and seizure,” said former NSA director Hayden, who engaged in the questionable practice of wiretapping in the United States without proper legal warrants after 9/11. “What constitutes reasonableness depends upon the threat.”
John Rizzo, the dapper CIA general counsel, had watched the latest president take office with a bit of apprehension. Having personally signed off on all the agency’s most controversial covert programs—harsh interrogations, renditions, and secret prisons—he took note when candidate Obama blasted those measures. His guard went up when he heard Obama’s team would be conducting a review of every covert action still on the books.
But then Rizzo got a message from the new team, even before Inauguration Day. “His people were signaling to us, I think partly to try to assure us that they weren’t going to come in and dismantle the place, that they were going to be just as tough as, if not tougher than, the Bush people.”
Swiftly, Obama declassified Bush-era directives on interrogations and then banned the harsh techniques. He announced that he would close the military prison at Guantánamo, but he backed off on this under political pressure. He promised to try alleged terrorists in criminal courts but backed down on that too. The covert action review proceeded as planned.
When it was finished, the new administration had “changed virtually nothing,” said Rizzo. “Things continued. Authorities were continued that were originally granted by President Bush beginning shortly after 9/11. Those were all picked up, reviewed, and endorsed by the Obama administration.”
Like that of his predecessor, Obama’s Justice Department has also aggressively used the state secrets privilege to quash court challenges to clandestine government actions. The privilege is a rule that permits the executive branch to withhold evidence in a court case when it believes national security would be harmed by its public release. From January 2001 to January 2009, the government invoked the state secrets privilege in more than one hundred cases, which is more than five times the number of cases invoked in all previous administrations, according to a study by the Georgetown Law Center on National Security and the Law. The Obama administration also initiated more leak investigations against national security whistle-blowers and journalists than had the Bush administration, hoping, at the very least, to scare government employees with security clearances into not speaking with reporters.
And the growth of Top Secret America continued, too. In the first month of the administration, four new intelligence and Special Operations organizations that had already been in the works were activated.3 But by the end of 2009, some thirty-nine new or reorganized counterterrorism organizations came into being. This included seven new counterterrorism and intelligence task forces overseas and ten Special Operations and military intelligence units that were created or substantially reorganized. The next year, 2010, was just as busy: Obama’s Top Secret America added twenty-four new organizations and a dozen new task forces and military units, although the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were winding down.
Some contractors were bracing for harder times, but by now their relationship with government felt like a long, comfortable marriage. A divorce was unthinkable. Each side identified itself as one half of a couple. The video shown by the Defense Intelligence Agency to a ballroom full of contractors in Phoenix described the relationship in Hollywood terms. The government-contractor couple was like “Fred and Ginger,” “Ben and Jerry,” “Sonny and Cher,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” the video cooed.
In many companies, profits and expansion continued. CACI, one of the most important players, recorded $36.4 million in profits in the third quarter of fiscal 2011. It hired four hundred new employees and was looking for another four hundred. Analysts attributed its success to the swelling cybersecurity and intelligence markets and to its lucrative contracts with the army for intelligence and information warfare services.
The outcome of American military and covert actions around the globe was still uncertain, but by the tenth anniversary of 9/11, another big attack on the United States seemed improbable. Even in the capital region, where fear had taken hold after 9/11, ordinary Americans were feeling safer than they had in years. The air force’s Combat Air Patrols weren’t running night sorties much anymore. Color-coded alerts had disappeared, along with police checkpoints and roadblocks on Capitol Hill. No one talked about stocking up on gas masks or building safe rooms. None of the people with top secret clearances were quietly arranging to move their families out of the area or buy hot-air balloons or kayaks for a quick escape, as they had a decade earlier. In fact, the city was booming with business investment, nightlife, and touring high school students whose parents were no longer afraid to let them visit the White House, the most obvious terrorist target.
All this was good news, and yet President Obama had not altered the size or even begun to attack the inefficiency of Top Secret America. In fact, he made sure it continued to receive more and more taxpayer money, despite an enormous federal deficit and an ever-growing $14 trillion national debt that threatened to undermine the nation’s financial security.
The only small indication that something might budge was a vague announcement on February 10, 2011, by James R. Clapper Jr., who had been promoted to director of national intelligence. “We all understand that we’re going to be in for some belt-tightening. And given, you know, the funding that we have been given over the last ten years since 9/11, that’s probably appropriate.” The details of the reduction hadn’t been worked out, he said. But as soon as they were, they would be classified.