ON AUGUST 21, 1997, the FBI’s Dan Coleman walked out of the United States Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, hunting for al-Qaeda.
Marine sentries guarded the doorway of the ugly brown building, three steps from a sidewalk teeming with street preachers and homeless children. Guided by Kenyan police through the gray streets, Coleman and two CIA colleagues drove through the heart of the biggest city in East Africa.
They arrived at the squalid home of Wahid el-Hage, a naturalized American citizen, born a Catholic in Lebanon, who had lived for years in Texas. He was not home that day. He was in Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden.
Coleman was following a solid lead: Junior al-Fadl had identified el-Hage as al-Qaeda’s African quartermaster. Inside his house, while the Kenyan police double-talked el-Hage’s American wife, Coleman seized diaries, business records, and a PowerBook. A CIA technician copied the computer’s hard drive. It held messages to and from key members of al-Qaeda in Nairobi. “The cell members in East Africa are in great danger,” one message said. “They should know that now they have become America’s primary target.”
The Kenyan police told el-Hage upon his return to Nairobi that his life was in danger. He and his family flew back to the United States. Within days, he was under interrogation by the FBI and the federal grand jury in New York. On September 23, 1997, he was asked about the last time he had seen bin Laden and what he knew about al-Qaeda’s plans to strike American military and diplomatic outposts. He was questioned about al-Qaeda’s operational status in the United States and seventeen other nations, including Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Afghanistan. He was grilled about the people whose names appeared in his notebooks.
One was a man who had been known to the FBI for almost five years: Ali Mohamed.
Ali Mohamed had volunteered his services to the FBI shortly after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. At first glance, he must have seemed like a godsend.
Mohamed was a fit, fair-skinned, clean-cut man of forty, a seventeen-year veteran of the Egyptian military, who had offered himself to both the CIA and the United States Army. The army said yes. He had taken a four-month training course for foreign officers at Fort Bragg, California, and he joined the army in 1986. He was only a supply sergeant. But he had given lectures on Islamic terrorism to Green Berets at the Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, and his superiors had commended him for his work.
He applied for a job at the FBI in 1990 and again in 1991, seeking work as an Arabic-language specialist who could conduct interviews, listen to wiretaps, and translate documents. At the time, the Bureau was not accepting Arabic-speakers, but the San Francisco office bit when Mohamed offered up well-concocted stories suggesting a criminal connection between Mexican smugglers and Palestinian terrorists. Though his application to become a full-time translator was still pending, he was on the books as an FBI informant by 1992.
In April 1993, Mohamed had driven to Vancouver to pick up a friend at the airport. But his colleague—a fellow Egyptian army veteran who had joined the jihad—had been detained after he was found to be in possession of two forged Saudi passports. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had questioned Mohamed as well. He explained that he was working for the FBI and he offered the telephone number of his Bureau contact in San Francisco. The Canadians released Mohamed after the agent vouched for him.
When Mohamed returned to California, he told the FBI an astonishing story. The Bureau’s agents did not comprehend him.
Mohamed had revealed that he had secretly joined the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization after his first training course at Fort Bragg. “I was introduced to al Qaeda—al Qaeda is the organization headed by Osama bin Laden—through my involvement with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad,” Mohamed later told a federal judge, recounting what he had told the FBI. He had “conducted military and basic explosives training for al Qaeda in Afghanistan,” as well as “intelligence training … how to create cell structures that could be used for operations.”
It was the first time that anyone at the FBI had ever heard of al-Qaeda or bin Laden.
The Bureau’s agents in San Francisco had not reported his revelations to Washington or New York. In the meantime, he had returned to work for al-Qaeda, helping to build the Nairobi cell. At bin Laden’s command, he had gone to Nairobi to stake out potential targets for a bombing. He took photographs of the U.S. Embassy and brought them to bin Laden in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. Bin Laden looked at the pictures and pointed to the ramp leading to an underground garage. He said that would be the best place to drive a truck laden with explosives.
The next time the FBI contacted Ali Mohamed, they had an ominous conversation. A defense lawyer preparing for the sedition trial of the Blind Sheikh notified the federal prosecutor, Andrew McCarthy, that he wanted Mohamed to testify at the trial. On McCarthy’s orders, the FBI’s Harlan Bell, one of the very few Arabic-speaking special agents in the Bureau, tracked down Mohamed by telephone in Nairobi and told him that they needed to talk. Mohamed flew back to California for a tense confrontation with Bell and McCarthy, in a conference room in Santa Barbara on December 9, 1994.
“He had been pitched to me as an engaging friendly by his handlers—FBI agents in Northern California with whom he was purportedly cooperating,” McCarthy recalled. “It quickly became clear who was picking whose pocket.” McCarthy came away from the conversation with a gut feeling that the Bureau was being conned by a terrorist; he thought “the FBI should be investigating him rather than allowing him to infiltrate.” But McCarthy did not have the information he needed to confirm his instinct, because the Bureau had withheld what it knew about its informant: “It was not until much later that I learned Mohamed had told FBI agents in California that bin Laden ran an organization called al Qaeda.”
The members of the FBI’s new Radical Fundamentalist Unit knew nothing about Ali Mohamed and al-Qaeda at the time. They usually had no idea what investigations their colleagues were pursuing. Nor did their supervisors really know what was going on in the field. The FBI had individual experts but no institutional knowledge. The FBI’s fifty-six field offices worked in isolation. Agents rarely talked to analysts. The terrorism task forces across the country rarely talked to headquarters. And the director still was not talking to the White House.
In early September 1997, two weeks after he left Nairobi, Dan Coleman confronted Ali Mohamed over a meal at a Sacramento restaurant. The Egyptian was working as a security guard for a California military contractor. While the two men talked, FBI agents searched Mohamed’s home and mirror-imaged his computer.
Their conversation was one-sided. Coleman’s interview notes record a barrage of taunts: “MOHAMED stated … that he loved bin Laden and believed in him. MOHAMED admitted that he had trained people in ‘war zones’ and added that war zones can be anywhere. MOHAMED indicated that he knew lots of people and was well trusted and could put people together with people that they need.”
A stronger warning came on February 23, 1998. Bin Laden and his new ally, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group, sent a proclamation from Afghanistan. The two men had joined forces, creating the first global terrorist group, and their words were published across the world.
“We issue the following fatwa to all Muslims,” they said. “To kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”
Using the fruits of Dan Coleman’s investigation in Nairobi, the federal prosecutor in charge of the New York grand jury, Patrick Fitzgerald, was preparing an indictment against bin Laden. Attorney General Janet Reno authorized the monitoring of al-Qaeda’s cell phones and satellite phones inside and outside the United States. But as the surveillance started picking up signs and signals of a gathering attack, the investigation began to sputter and stall.
The FBI kept hunting for al-Qaeda in Africa. The CIA was preparing to capture or kill bin Laden in Afghanistan. They had between them evidence of his next attack in hand: the el-Hage files and the wiretaps on four telephones in Nairobi revealed the identities of at least four men in an al-Qaeda bomb plot. But America’s leading counterterrorists were too busy making war on one another to perfect their plans.
The chief of the FBI’s national security division, John O’Neill, refused to share the el-Hage files with the Agency. After the CIA seized al-Qaeda records in a raid in Azerbaijan, the head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, Michael Scheuer, refused to share them with the FBI. The two men built walls mortared by mutual hatred. When O’Neill died in the second World Trade Center attack, Scheuer said his death was “the only good thing” that happened that day. “O’Neill poisoned relations between the FBI and the CIA,” Scheuer said. “He withheld information from the FBI’s partners in the intelligence community; he misled the congressional intelligence committees; and he disrupted anti-al-Qaeda operations overseas.”
The United States ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, remembered everything that happened when the bomb exploded in Nairobi on August 7, 1998.
“I thought to myself that the building was going to collapse, that I was going to tumble down all those stories, and that I was going to die, and every cell in my body was just steeled toward waiting for the fall,” she said.
She was covered with blood, but whether it was her own or the blood of others, she could not tell. “I saw the charred remains of what was once a human being,” she recalled. “I saw the back of the building completely ripped off, and utter destruction, and I knew that no one was going to take care of me.”
Two men in a pickup truck loaded with a ton of explosives had driven to the entrance of the embassy’s underground parking lot, just as bin Laden had instructed Ali Mohamed four years before. The explosion shattered the embassy from its façade to its back wall, and brought down a commercial office building next door. Twelve Americans and 212 Kenyans died. Nearly five thousand people were injured, many blinded and mutilated by flying glass.
The ambassador knew there was an al-Qaeda cell in Nairobi, and she strongly suspected bin Laden wanted to attack her embassy. “I had been told in Washington that we wanted to disrupt his activities, which seemed pretty sensible,” she said. Then an Egyptian had walked into the embassy and informed a CIA officer that the building would be bombed. “I was assured that the guy had done the same thing a number of times to other embassies in Africa,” the ambassador said. “He was considered a flake.” He was not. He was one of the bombers that struck the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, a few minutes after the Nairobi attack, killing eleven people and wounding eighty-five.
The first wave of FBI agents—more than 250 of them—started arriving in Nairobi overnight. The Bureau eventually deployed close to 900 people on the East Africa embassy bombings, the biggest overseas investigation in its history.
Ambassador Bushnell did not want them to appear as an occupying army. She had “tough negotiations about whether they would come with guns,” and she convinced the special agent in charge of the arriving force, Sheila W. Horan, one of the first women ever to hold power at the FBI, to make the agents wear street clothes, carry their weapons discreetly, and work with the Kenyan police. “It was the Kenyans who were knocking on doors, but nobody was particularly fooled,” the ambassador said. “The last thing I needed was to deal with lies about how people were being treated by the police and FBI.”
The first man to confess was Mohamed Odeh, a Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia, raised in Jordan, and educated in the Philippines. He had been arrested by the immigration police in the international airport in Karachi, Pakistan, carrying a crudely forged passport and bearing chemical traces of explosives on his body. It took a week before he was returned to Kenya and interviewed by the FBI. By then, the police had searched his residence in Nairobi, where they found sketches of the area surrounding the American embassy, along with budget ledgers for weapons and training.
Odeh sat down with the FBI’s John Anticev—the same agent who had handled the undercover investigation of the first World Trade Center bombing—at police headquarters in Nairobi on August 15. The suspect told the story of his life. He had pledged loyalty to bin Laden and al-Qaeda five years before, in Peshawar, Pakistan. He had been working on the Nairobi bomb plot for months.
“He stated that the reason he was talking to us now was because the people that he was with were pushing him and pushing him and pushing him and they’re all gone and he’s left here facing big problems,” Anticev recounted. Odeh thought the bombing was “a blunder. He didn’t like the fact that so many civilians and Kenyans were killed. He said that the bombing of Khobar Towers was a hundred times better and that the individual who drove the truck with the explosives should have got it into the building or died trying.”
It soon became clear that Odeh was denouncing his confederate—the second man to confess.
Mohamed al-Owhali had been riding shotgun in the truck that destroyed the embassy. He had panicked at the last moment. When a Kenyan security guard refused to raise the wooden bar at the entrance to the parking garage, al-Owhali jumped from the truck, tossed a stun grenade, and fled on foot. Badly wounded by the explosion, he had stopped at his hotel and then checked himself into a hospital. The hotel clerk alerted the Kenyan police, who found him at the hospital, searched him, pulled a detailed copy of the plans for the bombing from his pants pocket, and arrested him.
“He wanted to tell his entire story from the beginning to the end,” said the FBI’s Steve Gaudin, who began to take the suspect’s confession in a crowded Nairobi police station over the course of the next week. Gaudin had been on vacation at the New Jersey shore when called to duty in Nairobi. He had never worked an international terrorism case. He would work on nothing else for the next five years.
Al-Owhali was a wealthy twenty-one-year-old Saudi, born in Liverpool, England, educated not only in the Koran and the sharia religious laws, but in history and political science. He had left his family to join the jihad in Afghanistan two years before. “He had met with Mr. bin Laden several times and had expressed to him interest in missions that he would like to do,” the FBI agent said. “Mr. bin Laden told him: ‘Take your time. Your mission will come in time.’ ”
The interrogation went deep into the plans and the goals of al-Qaeda. “Al-Owhali explained to me that Osama bin Laden is at the very top of al-Qaeda but that he has several senior military leaders directly under him, and that bin Laden provides the political objectives to these military leaders,” Gaudin said. “These people would then provide the instructions down to the lower chains of command.” That summer, al-Owhali had learned that his mission was to serve as a suicide bomber.
“There were several reasons why the embassy in Nairobi was picked,” al-Owhali told Gaudin. “First, there was a large American presence at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi; the ambassador of the U.S. Embassy was a female, and if the bomb resulted in her being killed, it would further the publicity for the bombing. There were also a number of Christian missionaries at the embassy. And lastly … it was an easy target.”
Al-Owhali completed his confession by revealing bin Laden’s grandest ambitions: “There are targets in the U.S. that we could hit, but things aren’t ready yet, we don’t have everything prepared to do that yet,” he told Gaudin. “We have to have many attacks outside the United States and this will weaken the U.S. and make way for our ability to strike within the United States.”
The FBI relayed the confessions from Nairobi to Washington. For the first time, the United States had ironclad evidence that it was under attack by al-Qaeda.
On August 20, 1998, President Clinton retaliated with a barrage of cruise missiles. The targets were training camps outside Khost, Afghanistan, and a pharmaceutical factory outside Khartoum, Sudan. The CIA thought bin Laden was at the training camp; the intelligence was already stale. The Agency also had reported that the pharmaceutical plant was a chemical-weapons factory; the evidence proved unusually frail. The counterattack was perceived around the world as a fiasco, compounded by the president’s public confession that the FBI had caught him lying about his sex life. His humiliation was all but complete, his impeachment all but assured.
Louis Freeh arrived in Nairobi a few hours before the cruise missiles started spinning in their launching tubes. “He and I were to meet the following morning,” Ambassador Bushnell remembered. “That night, however, I received an urgent telephone call advising me the Director was coming over to see me immediately.” She got out of bed and threw on some clothes. “When Freeh arrived he was beside himself,” the ambassador said. “He had just learned that the U.S. was going to launch missile attacks and no one had given him prior warning. He wanted to know what I knew—which was less than he, at that point—and what my plan was.”
Freeh evidently feared that the missile attacks would spark an Islamic uprising in Kenya, where fewer than one in ten people were Muslims. He told the ambassador: “I assume that you’re going to evacuate. I’m removing all FBI personnel. I have five seats left on the plane coming in that I’ll give to you. You can decide whom you want to send out.” Then he dashed off.
Bushnell was astonished. She called her security officers to her home. “We looked at one another with both shock and bemusement,” she recounted. “Given the anger Kenyans were feeling toward al Qaeda, and the small number of Muslims in Nairobi, about the worst we would experience was the ire of people coming back from Friday prayers at a mosque some distance away. We decided to close the embassy at noon, advise people to stay home, and see what happened,” she said. “Nothing. Meanwhile, the FBI with all of their long guns, short guns and soft suits had high-tailed it.”
Freeh did not bring all his agents out of Africa. On August 27 and 28, a week after the cruise missile attacks, the FBI’s John Anticev and Steve Gaudin separately brought Odeh and al-Owhali to New York, under the formal procedures of criminal rendition. Without a suggestion of coercion or the hint of a threat, the FBI had obtained their full confessions along with crucial information about the global reach of al-Qaeda. Among other things, al-Owhali had provided a telephone number in Yemen that served as an international switchboard for bin Laden.
On November 4, 1998, an indictment unsealed in the United States Court House in the Southern District of New York charged bin Laden and twenty other members of al-Qaeda with carrying out the embassy bombings. Ten of the defendants wound up serving life sentences. El-Hage, Odeh, and al-Owhali were convicted on the evidence delivered by the FBI.
Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had tried to strengthen the indictments by compelling the duplicitous Ali Mohamed, the leading al-Qaeda operative in America, to talk. As Mohamed later confessed: “After the bombing in 1998, I made plans to go to Egypt and later to Afghanistan to meet bin Laden. Before I could leave, I was subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury in the Southern District of New York. I testified, told some lies.” He denied, under oath, that he had trained bin Laden and his men in the techniques of terrorism, intelligence, and counterintelligence.
Fitzgerald and the FBI agents who worked with him in New York all knew that Ali Mohamed was working for al-Qaeda. They decided to arrest him then and there. Two years later, he pleaded guilty in open court to serving as bin Laden’s first deep-penetration agent in America and a key conspirator in the embassy bombings. Then the United States made him vanish; no record of his imprisonment exists. He was an embarrassment to the FBI.
After all the trials in U.S. v. Bin Laden, eleven of the attackers were still at large—including the lead defendant.
Eleanor Hill, an experienced federal prosecutor serving as staff director for two congressional intelligence committees, asked an FBI agent in New York about the strategy against al-Qaeda. “It’s like telling the FBI after Pearl Harbor, ‘Go to Tokyo and arrest the emperor,’ ” he said. “The Southern District doesn’t have any cruise missiles.”
Fitzgerald did not want missiles. He wanted a bulldozer to tear down “the Wall.”
The Justice Department had erected the Wall to comply with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. For sixty years before that law, the FBI had wiretapped on orders from the attorney general, or at J. Edgar Hoover’s say-so. For the twenty years since, federal judges who met in secret—the FISA court—oversaw the FBI’s surveillance of suspected spies and terrorists. They legalized the warrantless bugs and taps Hoover once had used at will.
The FBI had been left to decide when to share intelligence with federal prosecutors. But it had mishandled that power more than once. In 1995, new guidelines ordered agents to get advance approval from the Justice Department. The rules were badly written and widely misread. The FBI’s leaders compounded and reinforced their misinterpretation. In the field, and at headquarters, FBI agents working intelligence cases thought they could not talk to outsiders—including other agents working criminal cases.
“Here were the ground rules,” Fitzgerald said. “We could talk to the FBI agents working the criminal case; we could talk to the New York City Police Department; we could talk to other Federal agencies in the Government, including the intelligence community; we could talk to citizens, foreign police, and foreign intelligence, including spies. We did that. We went overseas to talk to people. We could even talk to Al Qaeda.… But we had a group of people we were not allowed to talk to. And those were the FBI agents across the street in Manhattan working the parallel intelligence investigation. We could not talk to them.”
The Wall was a maze of misunderstandings, created in large measure by the breakdown in communications at Freeh’s FBI. Agents perceived walls where none existed. Their misconceptions had disastrous consequences for the struggle against suspected terrorists.
Louis Freeh reported to Congress that he had reorganized the FBI at the start of 1999. Counterterrorism and counterintelligence were the new top priorities. But his testimony was little more than empty words and wishful thinking.
“Did we have a war plan?” the FBI counterterrorism chief, Dale Watson, asked rhetorically. “Absolutely, we did not.” He tried to push the Bureau forward. It was like leaning on the great monolith of the Hoover Building and trying to move it off its foundations. He called it “the hardest thing we ever tried to do.”
Watson thought the Bureau’s work in Nairobi had been a breakthrough. The intelligence the agents had gathered had opened up two hundred leads against al-Qaeda. He wanted to focus the FBI on the mission.
On December 4, 1998, the headline on the President’s Daily Brief, the most secret intelligence document in the government of the United States, read: “Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” It was a secondhand report picked up by the CIA from the Egyptian intelligence service, but no one ever had seen anything like it. “Bin Ladin might implement plans to hijack US aircraft before the beginning of Ramadan on 20 December,” the warning read. “Two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport.” The imputed motive was freeing the imprisoned bombers of the World Trade Center and the American embassies in Africa.
Clinton’s terrorism czar, Richard Clarke, saw Watson as his best ally at the FBI. In his role as chief of the National Security Council’s counterterrorism group, he told Watson to alert the New York City police and the Federal Aviation Administration about the threat report. New York’s airports went to maximum security.
From that day forward, Watson tried to underscore the urgency of Clarke’s counterterrorism campaign throughout the FBI. He ordered every one of the Bureau’s fifty-six field offices to develop an understanding of the threat. But many if not most remained unaware. He summoned agents from across the country to meet with Clarke. They got the full treatment: Clarke’s portfolio was filled with portents of attacks; his standard briefing covered bacteria, viruses, and cyber warfare on top of more traditional acts of terrorism.
The meeting went down in the annals of the FBI as the “Terrorism for Dummies” seminar.
“There is a problem convincing people that there is a threat,” Clarke said. “There is disbelief and resistance. Most people don’t understand. C.E.O.’s of big corporations don’t even know what I’m talking about. They think I’m talking about a fourteen-year-old hacking into their Web sites. I’m talking about people shutting down a city’s electricity, shutting down 911 systems, shutting down telephone networks and transportation systems. You black out a city, people die. Black out lots of cities, lots of people die.” He now envisioned the deaths of hundreds or thousands of Americans at the hands of Islamic terrorists.
Clarke despaired of the FBI’s ability to defend the nation. He nonetheless trusted Dale Watson, the only constant connection between the FBI and the president’s closest aides. They shared reports on every conceivably credible terrorist threat.
The warnings became an alarm that rang throughout the days and nights of 1999. One said al-Qaeda had clandestine cells inside the United States. A second said terrorists were going to assassinate the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the director of Central Intelligence. A third said bin Laden was trying to obtain nuclear weapons. They came in a scalding and unceasing stream. No one knew which might be true.
Freeh decided in April 1999 that the best thing to do was to put Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. The Bureau offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest.
Throughout the year, America’s counterterrorism chiefs worked with their allies among intelligence services across the world on the extraordinary rendition of suspected members of al-Qaeda and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Elaborate plans to kidnap bin Laden in Afghanistan were disrupted by a military coup in Pakistan. Eighty-seven accused terrorists were secretly detained in places like Albania, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, and the United Arab Emirates. All were sent to prison in Cairo. At the end of November, the Jordanian intelligence service arrested sixteen men and accused them of being al-Qaeda members plotting to attack Americans. They found two American citizens among the suspects, a fact that riveted the FBI and the CIA. Both men had roots in California. One was a computer engineer in Los Angeles who had worked at a charity organization that was starting to look like an al-Qaeda front.
Then, on December 14, 1999, an alert United States Customs agent in Port Angeles, Washington, stopped a nervous twenty-three-year-old Algerian named Ahmed Ressam who was crossing over from Canada on the last ferry of the evening. He had explosives in his trunk and plans to blow them up at the Los Angeles International Airport. The case galvanized the government into an all-out millennium alert. Watson and the White House counterterrorism group met around the clock. They sought an extraordinary number of FISA wiretaps; Janet Reno authorized at least one warrantless search on her own authority.
Clarke convened two emergency cabinet meetings. At the second one, on December 22, Louis Freeh made a rare appearance at the White House. Among the group gathered in the subterranean Situation Room were the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The record reflects that Freeh talked about an array of wiretaps and investigations. The FBI was looking at people in Brooklyn who might have known Ahmed Ressam. It was working with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to check out suspects in Montreal. It was running down an uncorroborated report from a foreign intelligence service about threatened attacks in seven American cities. His rambling presentation was the high point of his cooperation with the White House in the 1990s.
On New Year’s Eve, the leaders of American counterterrorism filled the FBI’s new Strategic Information and Operations Center, a $20 million, forty-thousand-square-foot, thirty-five-room command post at headquarters that served as the bureau’s own situation room. Freeh and Watson stood watch through the night. Three A.M. came on the East Coast as midnight struck in California on New Year’s Day. The counterterrorism chiefs exhaled and had a drink.
But for the rest of Freeh’s days in office, the FBI suffered a series of wounds, many self-inflicted, that would scar the United States and American intelligence for years. “We had neither the will nor the resources to keep up the alert,” Freeh wrote. “That’s what really worried me: not December 31, 1999, but January 1, 2000, and beyond.”
On January 15, a twenty-four-year-old Saudi, Khalid al-Mihdhar, caught a United Airlines flight from Bangkok to Los Angeles. The CIA had tracked al-Mihdhar for ten days before the flight. The Agency had identified him as an al-Qaeda member, by tracing the telephone number in Yemen that the FBI had obtained from Nairobi, the phone that served as a global switchboard for jihad.
He had left Yemen and checked into a hotel in Dubai, where an intelligence officer copied his Saudi passport and its multiple-entry visa to the United States. He had flown to Malaysia and met a chemist known to the CIA. Remarkably, the Agency had photos of the meeting, a conclave of terrorists who had worked from the Mediterranean to the Pacific.
But the CIA did not tell the FBI that al-Mihdhar had a ticket to Los Angeles. Nor did the CIA report that his traveling companion was a known terrorist named Nawaf al-Hazmi. The internal CIA cable on them was stamped ACTION REQUIRED: NONE.
Their trail was lost before they cleared the airport immigration desk. The two men settled in San Diego. They used their true names on a rental agreement, their driver’s licenses, and their telephone numbers, listed in public directories. They spent many hours in the company of a gregarious fellow Saudi who was a longtime FBI counterterrorism informant. They soon started taking flying lessons. The informant never notified the FBI.
Throughout January and February, Richard Clarke worked with Dale Watson and his counterparts on twenty-nine proposals to expand the counterterrorism capabilities of the United States. The White House approved every one and asked Congress for $9 billion to support them. The big ideas for the FBI included setting up joint terrorism task forces at every one of the fifty-six field offices, increasing the number of Arabic-speakers, and reporting on wiretaps in real time instead of leaving thousands of hours of tapes unheard.
Watson took these ambitions and expanded them into an enormous initiative he called MAXCAP 2005. The FBI was going to become an intelligence service. Every field office would be staffed, trained, and equipped “to prevent and effectively respond to acts of terrorism.” The Bureau would collect, analyze, and report strategic, operational, and tactical intelligence. It would finally get online and create a computer system to connect its agents to the world and one another. Thus armed, the FBI would establish sound relationships with the American intelligence community, foreign spy services, state and local law enforcers, military and technology contractors, the Justice Department, and the White House in the war on terror.
Watson asked Congress for $381 million in new funds to hire and train roughly 1,900 new counterterrorism agents, analysts, and linguists. He got enough money for 76 people. He presented his strategy to all the FBI’s special agents in charge in the field. Almost all of them thought it was a pipe dream. He went to the Training Division, where three days of the sixteen-week course for new agents were devoted to national security, counter-terrorism, and counterintelligence. It would take time to change the traditional curriculum, the trainers told him.
In March and April, as the last year of the Clinton administration began to run out, Attorney General Reno ordered Freeh to fulfill his promises on counterterrorism and counterintelligence in a matter of months. “Implement a system to ensure the linkage and sharing of intelligence,” she commanded. “Share it internally and then share it securely with other agencies.” She implored him to “utilize intelligence information currently collected and contained in FBI files,” and to use that knowledge “to identify and protect against emerging national security threats.” Reno said she insisted upon these goals because “I kept finding evidence that we didn’t know we had. And I would talk to somebody, and they’d say, ‘Well, just wait till we get automated.’ ” At a minimum, she wanted some assurance that the FBI knew what it had in its own files.
The director swallowed his pride and hired IBM’s network operations chief, Bob Dies, to fix the FBI’s computers. The expert took a long look at the state of the Bureau’s technologies. The average American teenager had more computer power than most FBI agents. The field offices worked with the digital infrastructures of the 1970s. They could not perform a Google search or send e-mails outside their offices. “You guys aren’t on life support,” Dies told Freeh. “You’re dead.”
The Bureau’s information technology systems had to be overhauled. Freeh and Dies convinced Congress to let the FBI spend $380 million over the next three years to create Trilogy: new computers, servers, and software to let agents read documents, analyze evidence, and communicate with one another and the outside world. Five years, ten project directors, and fifteen IT managers later, the Trilogy program had to be reworked, redesigned, and rebuilt, and the software had to be scrapped. Roughly half the money had been wasted.
As Trilogy was conceived during the spring and summer of 2000, an entire sector of the Bureau began collapsing. Freeh had created a new Investigative Services Division, once known as the Office of Intelligence, to work alongside the Counterterrorism Division at the FBI. It was supposed to be devoted to strategic analysis. An internal audit soon showed that two-thirds of its personnel were unqualified. The new division was rejected and shunned; it worked in isolation and silence. It would last two years before it was disbanded at the nearly unanimous demand of the FBI’s assistant directors.
The director’s power and authority were fading in Washington and around the world. He was proud of the fact that he had traveled to sixty-eight countries and met, by his account, with more than two thousand foreign leaders in the name of the FBI. But he saw that he was losing face among the world’s security ministers, princes, and secret-police chiefs, a fact that he figured was a consequence of the international ridicule over the president’s sexual peccadilloes.
On the evening of April 6, 2000, Freeh flew to Pakistan to meet its military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf. That morning, a man had walked into the FBI’s Newark office with a warning of an al-Qaeda plot to hijack a 747. He said he was supposed to meet half a dozen men who were part of the plan, launched in Pakistan, and that a trained pilot was on the hijacking team. Though he took a lie detector test, the FBI was never sure if he was telling the truth. The next day, in a Lahore military cantonment built by the British officers of the Raj, Freeh presented General Musharraf with an ultimatum. He had a warrant for the arrest of Osama bin Laden, and he wanted the general to execute it immediately.
“Musharraf laughed,” Freeh reported. He refused to help.
That same week, about five hundred miles to the west in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda’s leaders were videotaping a highly threatening verbal assault on the United States. Bin Laden swore once again to take vengeance for the imprisonment of the Blind Sheikh and the embassy bombers. He wore a Yemeni dagger on his belt. That clue went unseen until the tape was broadcast five months later, when his plans were ripe.
In those months of silence from the world’s most wanted terrorist, some of the Bureau’s leaders thought the danger was subsiding. “FBI investigation and analysis indicates that the threat of terrorism in the United States is low,” the deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, Terry Turchie, testified to a House national security panel on July 26. He talked about the arrests of fringe groups who had sabotaged veal-processing plants in the name of animal rights, right-wing militiamen who were stockpiling explosives, and a cigarette-smuggling gang that sent money to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Bin Laden went unmentioned.
The Bureau had opened close to two hundred terrorism cases since the East Africa attacks two years before, the majority aimed at suspected members of al-Qaeda and their allies. Dozens went awry after Justice Department attorneys saw a pattern of mistakes and misrepresentations in the cases. At least one hundred applications for national security wiretaps filed by the FBI with the FISA court were legally defective. The cause, as the FBI’s inspector general later determined, was the Bureau’s continuing inability to grasp the rules of law that governed American intelligence. The judges issued new edicts intended to keep criminal cases against terrorists from being dismissed due to government misconduct.
Mary Jo White was doing everything in her power to keep those cases alive. She was the United States attorney in Manhattan, and she had worked on secret intelligence investigations with the FBI for two decades. White had overseen all of the nation’s major terrorism prosecutions for seven years, from the Blind Sheikh to the embassy bombings trial. She saw Nairobi as a harbinger.
She began her remarks in a public speech on September 27, 2000, by noting the previous night’s black-tie gala marking the twentieth anniversary of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, at the Windows on the World restaurant: “The celebration was held, very appropriately, at the World Trade Center.”
She said it was imperative for the FBI and the Justice Department to preserve the rule of law in the investigations, indictments, and trials of terrorists. “Even the least of these defendants—in terms of role and evidence—is capable of walking out of a courtroom and committing new terrorist acts,” she said. “They would likely do so with enhanced zeal and ruthlessness, and they would enjoy greater status in the terrorist world for having beaten the American system of justice.”
The United States would have to depend on the work of the FBI, she said. But she feared that nothing might stop the next assault on America. She warned that “we must and we do expect similar attacks in the future.”