A STEADY ROAR OF rage at the FBI reverberated after the shock of the September 11, 2001, attacks. The anger culminated in a debate at the highest levels of the government over dismantling the Bureau and building a new intelligence service in its place.
“We can’t continue in this country with an intelligence agency with the record the FBI has,” said Thomas Kean, the Republican chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, known as the 9/11 Commission. “You have a record of an agency that’s failed, and it’s failed again and again and again.”
The collapse of the counterterrorism and counterintelligence divisions of the FBI had been a long time coming. The anguish and frustration of the Bureau’s best agents had grown unbearable during Louis Freeh’s last months in office. Computers and information systems failed. Leadership in Washington failed. Communications between Freeh, two attorneys general, and two presidents failed almost completely. FBI agents who served the cause of national security had fought against their superiors and the system they served. They almost won.
“Some connected the dots,” said the FBI’s Gabrielle Burger, who worked counterterrorism and counterintelligence for a decade. “Their voices were a whisper.”
One of those voices belonged to Catherine Kiser, a secret intelligence stalwart who had devoted a quarter of a century of her life to the FBI. She was one of its great successes, and she witnessed two of its greatest disasters. Born in 1950, raised in the Bronx, the daughter of a New York City police officer, she went to work teaching second-graders at a public school, only to be laid off when the city almost went bankrupt in 1975. Wondering what to do with her life, she met a second cousin at a family funeral. He was a federal narcotics agent, and he told her that the FBI was hiring women. It took two years, but in 1978, she became the seventy-eighth female special agent in the history of the Bureau.
Six years into her career, in 1984, after struggles with skeptical and sexist superiors, she started working spy cases. The FBI had been a man’s world—usually men of Irish or Italian heritage schooled by Jesuits and raised in a closed culture of police and priests. Kiser had the background but more foresight; her mind was open. She would become one of the more influential women at the FBI.
She was among the first FBI agents stationed at the new National Counterintelligence Center at the CIA in 1996. Over the next four years, she led scores of seminars about spying; she was in high demand at the FBI’s Training Academy, where she schooled new agents on the laws governing counterintelligence and counterterrorism.
Kiser was the sole FBI liaison agent stationed at the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2002. The NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, was the center of America’s electronic-eavesdropping and data-mining powers, tapping into the world’s telephones and computers, circling the earth with spy satellites, and monitoring secret portals at telecommunications companies. Kiser knew the rules when agents wanted national security warrants from the FISA court to spy on foreign enemies. She served as a human switchboard, one of the only people in America who could connect FBI agents with Fort Meade. On her desk sat an array of computers, including her kludge of an FBI laptop, a frail connection to headquarters, and telephones that never seemed to stop ringing.
After working counterintelligence for sixteen years, she had developed a finely honed sixth sense: suspicion. It served her well one morning in January 2001 when she received a call from FBI headquarters. The man on the phone was a stranger to her.
He said: “Hello, Cathy. This is Bob Hanssen. How are you?”
She replied: “Fine. And who are you?”
Hanssen curtly introduced himself as a newly appointed member of the FBI’s senior executive service. He was brusque, bordering on rude; Hanssen did not like women in authority. He instructed Kiser to set up some meetings with “high-profile people at NSA who can tell me about NSA’s computer infrastructure.” Kiser turned him down on instinct, first on the telephone, then face-to-face at headquarters a few days later.
After twenty-two years of spying for Moscow, Hanssen had finally become the target of an espionage investigation that dated back to the Cold War. The FBI had suspected the wrong man: a CIA officer who had bitterly protested his innocence. The confrontation had become a running battle between the Bureau and the Agency. In a last-ditch effort to resolve the investigation, the FBI had paid a retired Russian spy a multimillion-dollar finder’s fee for stealing a file on the case from the KGB’s intelligence archives. It came wrapped in the same garbage bag that Hanssen had used to seal the FBI documents he smuggled to the Russians. It held not only his fingerprints but a fourteen-year-old tape of him talking with his KGB contact.
The voice, with its Chicago accent, was unmistakable: it was Hanssen.
Two days before the incriminating tape arrived, he had delivered to the Russians close to one thousand pages of documents. They included the names of FBI counterintelligence sources throughout the United States, Canada, and England; they held data the Bureau had delivered to the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Agency. He had downloaded all of it from the Bureau’s Automated Case Support system; it was child’s play for him. “Any clerk in the Bureau could come up with stuff on that system,” Hanssen said during the debriefings after his arrest on February 18, 2001. “What I did is criminal, but it’s criminal negligence … what they’ve done on that system.”
Kiser had to help assess the damage Hanssen had done to the NSA; it was a harrowing task. “People lined up outside my office with frightened, shocked looks on their faces,” she said. “NSA employees had been in meetings with this man during the normal course of business. They had known him for years. The FBI and the intelligence community were in a state of shock and disbelief … It was out of control.”
The Hanssen case broke four weeks into the presidency of George W. Bush. It was, at the time, the worst embarrassment in the recent history of the FBI. The case sapped what was left of Louis Freeh’s spirit. He decided to resign, effective June 1, 2001, with more than two years left in his decade-long appointment. He gave no advance notice to the new attorney general, John Ashcroft, who had been mortified by the news of the Hanssen affair on his first day in office.
Freeh left while the FBI was fighting to resolve the facts behind the latest attack by al-Qaeda. Two suicide bombers had piloted a small boat filled with five hundred pounds of high explosive alongside the USS Cole, which was refueling in Yemen en route to the Persian Gulf. The blast blew a forty-five-foot hole in the $800 million navy destroyer, killing seventeen navy personnel and wounding more than forty. The best among the FBI agents on the case had been schooled and steeled in Nairobi. But the investigation in Yemen was far harder: the government, the army, and the police were closer in their sympathies to al-Qaeda than America. Six suspects were in custody in Yemen, but the FBI could not confirm their links to al-Qaeda. The FBI needed the CIA to make the case. But their confrontation over Hanssen had escalated the tensions between them to the highest levels since the end of the Cold War.
Kiser was still trying to sort through her damage report in the Hanssen case when she took another urgent call on August 17, 2001. FBI special agent Harry Samit was on the line from Minneapolis. She recognized his name; she had taught him in a counterterrorism training course. Samit, a former navy aviator based at the FBI’s Minneapolis field office, was in a high state of tension. The day before, he had confronted an Algerian with a French passport and an expired visa named Zacarias Moussaoui. Samit had been acting on a tip from a fellow navy pilot who ran a flight school: Moussaoui was studying how to handle a 747, but he did not care about takeoffs or landings. The Algerian had $3,000 in his money belt, a three-inch folding dagger in his pocket, and an aggressive attitude when Samit and an immigration agent arrested him on a visa charge. He angrily insisted that he had to get back to flight school.
“He’s a bad dude,” Samit said to Kiser. “I have a very bad feeling about him.”
He wanted a FISA warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to search Moussaoui’s laptop computer. But he could not get the request past the lawyers at headquarters without hard evidence that the suspect was a terrorist.
“We need a link to al-Qaeda,” he said.
She went running down the hall looking for help and finding little; it was 4:30 P.M. on a Friday in August. Over the next three weeks, she contacted everyone she knew at the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, relaying Samit’s warnings. “I was trying and trying and trying to get something,” she said. “They weren’t making the link. There was a breakdown in communication.” It was one among many. Five weeks before, an FBI special agent in Phoenix, Ken Williams, had sent a report to the FBI’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit and the Osama bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorism Division. Williams and a fellow agent, a newly hired Arabic-speaking ex-cop named George Piro, had gathered evidence that al-Qaeda had a network of adherents at American flight schools. Williams urged a nationwide investigation. He was unsurprised when headquarters took no action; thirteen years of experience had taught him that counterintelligence and counterterrorism were “bastard stepchildren” at the FBI. He said: “I knew that this was going to be at the bottom of the pile.”
Samit never heard about the Phoenix memo. Almost no one did. It was one among some sixty-eight thousand counterterrorism leads awaiting action at headquarters. The Bin Laden Unit alone had taken in more than three thousand leads in the past few months; counterterrorism director Dale Watson had two analysts looking at them. The fact that terrorists were taking flying lessons went unnoticed.
Samit pleaded with the headquarters supervisors at ITOS, the International Terrorism Operations Section, which oversaw the Radical Fundamentalist and bin Laden squads. He reported over the next week that Moussaoui was “preparing for a terrorist attack.” He got nowhere. Samit’s immediate superior in Minneapolis, FBI special agent Greg Jones, begged headquarters to listen. He said he wanted to keep the suspect from “flying an airplane into the World Trade Center.”
Samit later called the conduct of FBI headquarters in the summer of 2001 “criminal negligence.” Kiser said she would be haunted all her life by the thought that “those idiots at ITOS didn’t let anybody know.”
She received a despondent e-mail from Samit on the afternoon of Monday, September 10, 2001. He reported that ITOS had rejected his request for a search warrant. He was instructed that “FBI does not have a dog in this fight,” and he was told to let the immigration service handle the case. “At this point I am so desperate to get into his computer, I’ll take anything,” he wrote to Kiser. “I am not optimistic. Thanks for your help and assistance. Take care, Harry.”
Kiser responded almost immediately, at 3:45 P.M. “You fought the good fight. God help us all if the next terrorist incident involves the same type of plane. Take care, Cathy.”
The Bureau had gone through the summer of 2001 without a leader. Five weeks passed after Freeh’s formal resignation before President Bush announced Robert Mueller’s nomination in the Rose Garden of the White House on July 5. “The next ten years will bring more forms of crime, new threats of terror from beyond our borders and within them,” the president had said. “The Bureau must secure its rightful place as the premier counterespionage and counterterrorist organization in the United States.”
The Senate took two months to confirm Mueller. On August 2, the day he won a unanimous vote of approval, he underwent prostate cancer surgery. Another month passed before he took office on Tuesday, September 4. That same day, the National Security Council’s Richard Clarke warned his superior, Condoleezza Rice, that an attack by al-Qaeda could come without warning in the not-too-distant future. He went unheeded. He did not alert Mueller. He said: “I didn’t think the FBI would know whether or not there was anything going on in the United States by al Qaeda.”
The new director’s first week at the FBI was a blur of briefings on everything from the wreckage left by Robert Hanssen to the procedures for evacuating Washington in the event of a nuclear attack. On the morning of September 11, Mueller was being brought up to date on the Cole investigation. Like almost everyone else in America, he saw the disasters on television. Al-Qaeda had turned airplanes into guided missiles.
Within three hours, the FBI’s counterterrorism director had telephoned Clarke in the White House Situation Room. “We got the passenger manifests from the airlines,” Dale Watson said. “We recognize some names, Dick. They’re al-Qaeda.” Clarke replied: “How the fuck did they get on board?” The question would take two years to answer.
For the next three years, Mueller would rise before dawn, read through the overnight reports of threats and portents, arrive at headquarters for a 7:00 A.M. counterterrorism briefing, confer with the attorney general at 7:30, travel in an armored limousine to the White House, and talk to the president at 8:30. The subject was almost always the same. As Bush recounted in his memoir, “I told Bob that I wanted the Bureau to adopt a wartime mentality … Bob affirmed: ‘That’s our new mission, preventing attacks.’ ”
Mueller was now in charge of the biggest investigation in the history of civilization. Within forty-eight hours, he had four thousand special agents running down leads in the United States, twenty legal attachés working with foreign law enforcement agencies overseas, thrice-daily conference calls with all fifty-six field offices, hundreds of legal subpoenas, and at least thirty emergency search warrants approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. All the FBI could do was reconstruct a global crime scene and regroup for the next attack.
Mueller clearly did not yet command and control what the FBI knew about the threat. On September 14, he said publicly: “The fact that there were a number of individuals that happened to have received training at flight schools here is news, quite obviously. If we had understood that to be the case, we would have—perhaps one could have averted this.”
That day, Congress authorized the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against the terrorists. The FBI was about to become one of those forces.
Waves of fear lashed at the foundations of the United States. Every ringing telephone in Washington sounded like an air raid alert. The specter of terrorist assaults with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons surged every day and broke and rose again each night. The CIA was convinced they were coming, at the command of al-Qaeda’s leaders, safe in their Afghan redoubts. The president wanted a shield to hold back the tide and a sword to beat back the invaders. He sent a paramilitary team to Afghanistan; American missile strikes and bombing raids were imminent.
Bush went to FBI headquarters to unveil a Most Wanted Terrorist list with twenty-two names. “Round up the evildoers,” he told the agents assembled at the Hoover Building. “Our war is against evil.”
His vice president, Dick Cheney, knew where the weaponry was kept. He had served four years as secretary of defense under Bush’s father and as White House chief of staff under Ford. The attacks transformed him into the imperial commander of American national security.
Under Cheney’s direction, the United States moved to restore the powers of secret intelligence that had flourished for fifty-five years under J. Edgar Hoover. In public speeches, the president, the vice president, and the attorney general renewed the spirit of the Red raids. In top secret orders, they revived the techniques of surveillance that the FBI had used in the war on communism.
The FBI arrested more than 1,200 people within eight weeks of the attacks. Most were foreigners and Muslims. None, so far as could be determined, was a member of al-Qaeda. Some were beaten and abused during “their continued detention in harsh conditions of confinement,” as the Justice Department’s inspector general later reported. Hundreds were imprisoned for months under a “hold until cleared” policy imposed on the FBI by Attorney General Ashcroft. The policy was neither written nor debated. No one told Mueller about it. One of Ashcroft’s terrorism lawyers, aware that innocent people were imprisoned, wrote that the FBI director would “want to know that the field isn’t getting the job done … we are all getting screwed up because the Bureau’s SACs [special agents in charge] haven’t been told explicitly they must clear, or produce evidence to hold, these people and given a deadline to do it.” Mueller learned about the policy and the problems it created six months later.
Ashcroft also ordered the indefinite detention of at least seventy people, including about twenty American citizens, under the Material Witness statute, a federal law generally used in immigration proceedings. Thirty were never brought before a tribunal. Four were eventually convicted of supporting terrorism. Two were designated enemy combatants.
Ashcroft defended the nationwide dragnet in a speech to American mayors. The FBI, he said, had been called on to combat “a multinational network of evil.” He was explicit about the detention of suspected terrorists. “Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, it is said, would arrest mobsters for spitting on the sidewalk,” he said. The FBI would use “the same aggressive arrest and detention tactics in the war on terror. Let the terrorists among us be warned: If you overstay your visa—even by one day—we will arrest you. If you violate a local law, you will be put in jail and kept in custody as long as possible. We will use every available statute. We will seek every prosecutorial advantage. We will use all our weapons.”
The attorney general also spelled out some of the authorities the FBI would use under the Patriot Act, which passed the Senate that same day: capturing e-mail addresses, tapping cell phones, opening voice-mails, culling credit card and bank account numbers from the Internet. All of this would be done under law, he said, with subpoenas and search warrants.
But the Patriot Act was not enough for the White House. On October 4, Bush commanded the National Security Agency to work with the FBI in a secret program code-named Stellar Wind.
The program was ingenious. In time, Mueller would decide that it also was illegal.
The director of the National Security Agency, General Michael V. Hayden, had told tens of thousands of his officers in a video message: “We are going to keep America free by making Americans feel safe again.” Immediately after the September 11 attacks, Hayden said, he had “turned on the spigot of NSA reporting to FBI in, frankly, an unprecedented way.” He and his chief of signals intelligence, Maureen Baginski, had been sending the FBI a torrent of raw data—names, telephone numbers, and e-mail addresses mined from millions of communications entering and leaving America. The intent was a hot pursuit of anyone in the United States who might be linked to al-Qaeda, under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The action was legal but illogical, Hayden said. “We found that we were giving them too much data in too raw form”; as a result, hundreds of FBI agents spent much of the fall of 2001 chasing thousands of false leads. “It’s the nature of intelligence that many tips lead nowhere,” he said, “but you have to go down some blind alleys to find the tips that pay off.”
The president and the vice president wanted the FBI to execute searches in secret, avoiding the strictures of the legal and constitutional standards set by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The answer was Stellar Wind. The NSA would eavesdrop freely against Americans and aliens in the United States without probable cause or search warrants. It would mine and assay the electronic records of millions of telephone conversations—both callers and receivers—and the subject lines of e-mails, including names and Internet addresses. Then it would send the refined intelligence to the Bureau for action.
Stellar Wind resurrected Cold War tactics with twenty-first-century technology. It let the FBI work with the NSA outside of the limits of the law. As Cheney knew from his days at the White House in the wake of Watergate, the NSA and the FBI had worked that way up until 1972, when the Supreme Court unanimously outlawed warrantless wiretaps.
Stellar Wind blew past the Supreme Court on the authority of a dubious opinion sent to the White House the week that the Patriot Act became law. It came from John Yoo, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who had clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Yoo wrote that the Constitution’s protections against warrantless searches and seizures did not apply to military operations in the United States. The NSA was a military agency; Congress had authorized Bush to use military force; therefore he had the power to use the NSA against anyone anywhere in America.
The president was “free from the constraints of the Fourth Amendment,” Yoo wrote. So the FBI would be free as well.
Mueller was caught between the president’s command and the law of the land. He knew it was foolhardy to flout the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, an irascible Texan named Royce Lamberth who had presided over secret surveillance warrants for seven years. The judge had once destroyed the career of a senior FBI counterintelligence agent who he believed had deliberately deceived him. (“We sent a message to the FBI: You’ve got to tell the truth,” the judge said later. “What we found in the history of our country is you can’t trust these people.”)
Mueller already had won Lamberth’s trust; the judge had approved hundreds of national security surveillances, without formal hearings, at the director’s personal request. Now the president had ordered the FBI to abuse that trust, ignore the court, and abjure its authority. Very gingerly, without disclosing the underlying existence of Stellar Wind, Mueller worked out a way to signal that some of the warrants he sought were based on intelligence gleaned from the NSA. The chief judge said he and his successor made arrangements with Mueller whereby surveillances were approved “based on the oral briefing with the director of the FBI.” The arrangement, unprecedented and precarious, held for almost two years.
But the frictions at the FBI grew with the fear of a new al-Qaeda attack. Mueller tried to smooth over the tension among the counterterrorism commanders in Washington. He maintained that he worked in harmony with the CIA and Tenet. “The thought of regularly sharing Bureau information is something that J. Edgar Hoover would likely have resisted,” Mueller said, “and he may well be turning around in his grave to understand the extent to which, since September 11th, there has been the interchange of information between ourselves and the CIA.”
The Bureau’s working relationships with the rest of the government remained a constant struggle. The attorney general was appalled when the FBI failed to find a mad scientist sending letters filled with anthrax spores to television newsrooms, newspapers, and United States senators. The FBI focused for four years on the wrong man. The Bureau was drowning in false leads; its networks were crashing; its desktop computers still required twelve clicks to save a document.
The FBI had no connectivity with the rest of American intelligence. Headquarters could not receive reports from the NSA or the CIA classified at the top secret level—and almost everything was classified top secret. Fresh intelligence could not be integrated into the FBI’s databases.
The pressures on the Bureau’s top people were inhuman. Counterterrorism directors held on for a year at best before burning out. Mueller’s chiefs of staff lasted a little longer; his information technology executives even less.
As the war on terror went worldwide, the most dangerous personnel crisis Mueller faced was in the field. The fight between the FBI and their counterterrorism counterparts burned through America’s chain of command, a slow fuse that ran from the CIA’s secret prisons all the way to the White House.
Mueller began to assign the first of more than one thousand FBI agents to the theaters of war in November and December 2001. Their assignments were to collect intelligence and interrogate prisoners. The FBI’s interrogation policies were set in stone: no brutality, no violence, and no intimidation.
Some FBI agents went to military posts in Afghanistan, some to the United States Navy base at Guantánamo Bay. A handful of FBI agents joined secret capture-or-kill missions with the CIA against al-Qaeda suspects. On March 28, 2002, they took their first prize captive: a Palestinian working for al-Qaeda in Faisalabad, Pakistan. He was gravely wounded in a firefight; the raid had struck a safe house where a group of militants had gathered. Strapped to a gurney, he was flown to the CIA’s newly created secret prison—a “black site” in a warehouse at the Udon Thani air force base in the far northeast of Thailand, near the border of Laos.
“The other day we hauled in a guy named Abu Zubaydah,” President Bush said at a Republican fund-raiser in Greenwich, Connecticut, on April 9. “He’s one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States. He’s not plotting and planning anymore. He’s where he belongs.” Relying on the CIA’s subsequent reports, the president later called the prisoner al-Qaeda’s number-three man and bin Laden’s chief of operations.
The first Americans to question Abu Zubaydah were two of the FBI’s eight Arabic-speaking agents: Steve Gaudin, a veteran of the Nairobi bombing, and Ali Soufan, who had led the Cole investigation in Yemen. Soufan was thirty years old, a native of Lebanon with a master’s degree in international relations from Villanova University, and he had joined the FBI on something of a whim in 1997. He had won fame within the closed world of American counterterrorism for his knowledge as an investigator and his finesse as an interrogator. Major General Michael Dunleavy, the military commander at Guantánamo, where Soufan conducted interrogations and won confessions, called him “a national treasure.”
Soufan approached the wounded prisoner at the black site with a soft voice and a storehouse of foreknowledge. “I asked him his name,” Soufan later testified. “He replied with his alias. I then asked him: ‘How about if I call you Hani?’ That was the name his mother nicknamed him as a child. He looked at me in shock, said okay, and we started talking.”
Within the course of two days, the prisoner identified a photograph of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the al-Qaeda attacks. It was the FBI’s biggest breakthrough to date. “Before this,” Soufan testified, “we had no idea of KSM’s role in 9/11 or his importance in the al Qaeda leadership structure.”
The CIA officer at the black site relayed the report to his headquarters. The CIA’s director, George Tenet, was unhappy to learn that the FBI was leading the questioning. He ordered a CIA counterterrorism team to take over in Thailand. “We were removed,” Soufan said. “Harsh techniques were introduced”—at first, stripping the prisoner of his clothes and depriving him of sleep for forty-eight hours at a time—and “Abu Zubaydah shut down and stopped talking.” Then the FBI took over again. The prisoner revealed that he had run logistics and travel for al-Qaeda and gave up information that led to the May 8 arrest of Jose Padilla, a Chicago street-gang hoodlum who had converted to Islam in prison, consorted with al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and had dreams of setting off a radioactive dirty bomb in Washington.
The CIA falsely claimed credit for the arrest and wrested back control of the interrogation. Its officers blasted the prisoner with noise, froze him with cold, and buried him in a mock coffin. Soufan and Gaudin protested. The CIA officers told them the techniques had been approved at the highest levels of the American government.
Soufan said he contacted FBI headquarters to report that he was witnessing “borderline torture.” He refused to take part. The Bureau’s counterterrorism chief, Pasquale D’Amuro, pulled both agents from Thailand around the end of May. But he did not raise the issue with Mueller for at least two months. The director learned about it after the line had been crossed.
On August 1, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel granted the CIA’s request to begin water-boarding Abu Zubaydah. The technique, tantamount to torture, was designed to elicit confessions through the threat of imminent death by drowning. That same day John Yoo, now a deputy to Attorney General Ashcroft, advised the White House that the laws against torture did not apply to American interrogators. The president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, and the director of Central Intelligence approved.
The FBI did not. “We don’t do that,” D’Amuro said to Mueller some weeks later. D’Amuro had overseen the investigation and prosecution of the East Africa embassy bombings. He knew that terrorists would talk to the FBI. He also believed that prisoners would say anything to stop the torture, and that their inventions would send the FBI chasing phantoms. And he was convinced that the secret torture would come out one way or another: FBI agents would have to testify about it in court. Their credibility, and criminal cases against terrorists, would be destroyed if they took part in torture, or condoned it. He wanted to be able to say the FBI’s hands were clean.
Both men understood that they might someday face their own interrogation, under television lights in a chamber of Congress, or in a courtroom under oath.
Mueller was caught again between the rule of law and the requisites of secrecy. He agreed with D’Amuro in principle. But he also kept his silence. He put nothing in writing. The argument about whether the FBI could countenance torture went on.
The CIA water-boarded Abu Zubaydah eighty-three times in August and kept him awake for a week or more on end. It did not work. A great deal of what the CIA reported from the black site turned out to be false. The prisoner was not bin Laden’s chief of operations. He was not a terrorist mastermind. He had told the FBI everything he knew. He told the CIA things he did not know.
“You said things to make them stop, and those things were actually untrue, is that correct?” he was asked five years later in a tribunal at Guantánamo.
“Yes,” he replied. “They told me, ‘Sorry, we discover that you are not Number Three, not a partner, not even a fighter.’ ”
The techniques of torture continued in Afghanistan and Cuba, and FBI agents again bore witness.
In mid-September Soufan talked to an al-Qaeda prisoner named Ramzi Binalshibh, who was chained naked to the floor in a CIA black prison at the Bagram air base outside Kabul. He said he was starting to obtain “valuable actionable intelligence” before CIA officers ordered him to stop talking forty-five minutes later. On September 17, they flew their prisoner to a second black site in Morocco, then on to Poland; under extreme duress he described plots to crash airplanes into Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf in London. He was also diagnosed as a schizophrenic.
Soufan went on to Guantánamo, one among more than four hundred FBI agents who served at the navy base over the course of the next two years. Half of them would report abuses by interrogators.
Among the prisoners Soufan questioned was an al-Qaeda operative named Mohammed al-Qahtani, captured by Pakistani forces as he fled Afghanistan. The FBI had identified him with fingerprints as the twentieth hijacker, the one who never made his flight: arriving in the United States at the Orlando Airport, speaking no English, without a return ticket, he had been detained by customs and immigration agents, fingerprinted, photographed, and deported back to Dubai shortly before the attacks.
Soufan tried to get al-Qahtani to talk over the course of a month at Guantánamo, where the prisoner was placed in the navy brig, in a freezing cell where the lights burned through the night. But Soufan could not break him with words.
Army officers demanded “a piece of al-Qahtani” and “told the FBI to step aside” in October. They questioned him for twenty-hour stretches, leashed him and made him perform dog tricks, stripped him naked and paraded him, froze him to the point of hypothermia, wrapped him from the neck up in duct tape, confronted him with snarling dogs, and ordered him to pray to an idol shrine.
By October 22, 2002, FBI agents at Guantánamo had started a running file that they later labeled “War Crimes.”
An e-mail from Cuba, which circulated at the top of the Counterterrorism Division in November, alerted top officials to what the agents were seeing and hearing. “Those who employ these techniques may be indicted, prosecuted, and possibly convicted,” Spike Bowman, the chief of the FBI’s national security law unit, advised his colleagues at headquarters. “We can’t control what the military is doing,” he wrote. “But we need to stand well clear of it, and we need to get as much information as possible to … Mueller as soon as possible.”
No one got the information to Mueller.
The FBI agents at Guantánamo continued to report what their counterparts were doing. The gist of their reports went from the lawyers at the FBI to the highest levels of the Justice Department. But Mueller’s closest aides shielded him from an increasingly fierce battle—“ongoing, longstanding, trench warfare,” in the words of Ashcroft’s chief of staff—at Justice, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House. The argument over interrogation, intelligence, torture, and the law went on for more than a year.
Ali Soufan resolved it in his own way. He left the FBI in 2005—a rare event in American government, a resignation of conscience over a matter of honor.
Mueller was embroiled in another ferocious argument over the rule of law and the role of the FBI as the interrogation fight festered. Vice President Cheney had wanted to send the American military to a Muslim enclave in Lackawanna, a dead-end upstate New York town by the Canadian border. The troops were going to seize six suspected al-Qaeda supporters—all of them Americans—charge them as enemy combatants, and send them to Guantánamo forever.
The fear was that the suspects in Lackawanna were ticking time bombs, a sleeper cell of secret al-Qaeda agents in America. All had family roots in Yemen. All had traveled to Afghanistan. But Mueller convinced the White House to let the FBI round them up rather than sending in the army.
The investigation had fused the powers of the FBI, the CIA, and the National Security Agency. They came together in a flash on a remote road in Yemen on November 3, 2002, when a Predator drone aircraft armed with a Hellfire missile destroyed a pickup truck carrying two wanted terrorists among its passengers. One was a member of al-Qaeda implicated in the bombing of the Cole; he had been traced by a combination of Soufan’s investigation, NSA data mining, and CIA surveillance. Another was Kamal Derwish, who had lived in Lackawanna, consorted with the arrested suspects, and counseled them to go to Afghanistan. He was the subject of a sealed indictment in the case. His sentence was final: the first American targeted and killed by Americans in the war on terror.
As President Bush made the case for a wider war against Iraq in his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, he called the six men in Lackawanna an al-Qaeda cell. The FBI would conclude that this was not true. No evidence ever surfaced that they had planned an attack. They were not sleeper agents. They were malleable young men who meekly cooperated with the government. They drew relatively light sentences of seven years. Three of them entered the federal witness protection program and testified on behalf of the United States at Guantánamo tribunals.
The case set off an intense debate at headquarters that went on after the suspects pleaded guilty. If the FBI had been thinking like an intelligence service, it could have worked with one or more of the Lackawanna suspects to penetrate al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Should the Bureau have recruited them as spies instead of arresting them?
Mueller had no way to resolve such questions. The Bureau still had no capacity to use intelligence as a weapon of national security. It was consumed by reacting to the events of the day, the hour, and the minute. It could not see over the horizon. It was hard for Mueller and his deputies to see beyond the edges of their own desks. Mueller was trying to double the number of counterterrorism agents and intelligence analysts at the FBI, but the machinery ground with unbearable inertia.
By the time the United States started the war against Iraq on March 19, 2003, Mueller and his new counterterrorism director, Larry Medford, the third man to hold the post in fourteen months, were being battered with hundreds of daily threat reports flowing out of the Middle East. They were blindsided by breakdowns in Mueller’s carefully cultivated arrangements with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court over the FBI’s role in the secret Stellar Wind program. The White House had just ordered the Bureau to investigate the threat posed by tens of thousands of Iraqis living in the United States. The congressional 9/11 Commission was about to hold its first public hearings, and it seemed certain that the director would be called to account for the FBI’s failures, past and present. The pressures of the endlessly ringing telephones and the demands to stop the next attack and the wartime mentality commanded by the president were shattering for some agents. On April 29, after being awakened by a call at 4:30 A.M., the chief of the Counterterrorism Division’s Iran unit took his life with his own gun.
On May 1, President Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq were over and America’s mission had been accomplished. Mueller thought he might have a moment to breathe and think. He made a decision intended, in his words, at “transforming the Bureau into an intelligence agency.”
Mueller created an Office of Intelligence at the FBI out of thin air and hired the chief of signals intelligence at the National Security Agency as its director. She was the most powerful woman in the American intelligence community. Almost no one at the FBI had ever heard of her.
Maureen Baginski was a career NSA officer who had started out as a Russian analyst and risen to command authority. At the turn of the century, when the NSA found itself unable to keep pace with the explosion of encrypted information on the Internet, and the agency’s supercomputers sputtered and crashed, General Hayden had put Baginski in charge of fixing things. Her SIGINT directorate was the biggest single component of the United States espionage establishment; she commanded a budget that rivaled the FBI’s $4 billion and a workforce bigger than the FBI’s nearly eleven thousand agents. She also had run Stellar Wind since its inception.
Mueller made her his right hand. She would be by his side at every crucial meeting. He gave her an office down the hall from his and told her to go to work. But at the start she had no staff and no money; it took her a year to assemble a staff of fifty, the size of a large marine platoon. And in that time she won little support from the field. She pushed her message out to the special agents in charge across America: they were now part of a twenty-first-century intelligence service. Every field office was to create and run its own intelligence group and report to headquarters on the threats they faced. They were dubious.
Baginski almost instantly became known to the men of the FBI as the Vision Lady. She reported back to Mueller that it would take years to realize the transformation. They were in a marathon, she said, not a race for the swift or the short-winded.
Mueller also moved to create a full-scale FBI field office in Baghdad. Before the war began, he had signed an order establishing the FBI’s role in Iraq as an intelligence mission intended to capture enemy leaders, exploit secret documents, and to uncover potential threats to the United States. The original plan was to send seventy agents at a time. More than 1,500 FBI agents, analysts, and evidence technicians would wind up working in Iraq.
At first, life was good. The city was secure in May and June. Thousands of Iraqi intelligence files were stacked in American command posts. The FBI’s special agent in charge, serving on a three-month rotation, held rank equivalent to that of a three-star general. He had a desk in the bath house by the swimming pool at Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace, in the Green Zone held by American forces.
Within weeks, the mission took a bad turn. The FBI was ordered to work with the interim interior minister of Iraq to rebuild law enforcement in the nation. The minister was Bernard Kerik, the New York police commissioner at the time of the 9/11 attacks and a long-standing friend to the Bureau. Money was no object for him. Bricks of shrink-wrapped hundred-dollar bills were available for everything from informant networks to computer systems.
But Kerik left Baghdad after ninety days, on September 2, 2003, mission unaccomplished. The only things he left behind were 50,000 Glock pistols in a warehouse. Bush named him the new leader of the Department of Homeland Security; an FBI investigation derailed the nomination and led to Kerik’s indictment and imprisonment for fraud.
The FBI’s training of the Iraqi police was interrupted by a series of immediate emergencies. Car bombs were going off everywhere. The FBI combed through the wreckage of the Jordanian embassy and the United Nations headquarters and the Red Cross in Baghdad. The American military had to call on the Bureau to collect evidence from a growing number of crime scenes—suicide attacks, roadside bombs, and sniper assaults on military checkpoints and police stations—as its control of the occupied city began to slip.
Days after Kerik departed, the FBI’s agents were assigned to interrogate prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the biggest prison in Baghdad. They took thousands of fingerprints and conducted hundreds of interviews in the last three months of 2003. Agents were eager to find detainees who had served as Iraqi intelligence officers or had traveled to the United States. But they were loath to work inside the chaotic main building at Abu Ghraib, preferring to talk to detainees in tents or trailers. Nor did they work at night, when the compound was mortared by insurgents. So they started to hear the rumors of the torture and the deaths inside the prison only in November and December 2003. Not until January 21, 2004, did they learn firsthand from an army captain that there were videotapes of beatings and rapes. A senior FBI agent in Baghdad, Edward Lueckenhoff, relayed the news to headquarters. It was the first time anyone in Washington had heard about the evidence that would surface more than three months later, tarnishing the honor of the United States around the world.
Three of Mueller’s senior counterterrorism aides weighed the report and decided to do nothing. It was out of their jurisdiction and above their pay grades. They did not want to wreck the FBI’s relationships with the military and the CIA in Iraq. Something more important was about to happen. The FBI was about to get the first crack at High Value Detainee Number One.
Saddam Hussein and George Piro sat down for the first of their twenty-five conversations inside the razor-wired walls of Camp Cropper, the American military’s brightly lit prison at the edge of Baghdad International Airport, shortly after 7:00 A.M. on February 7, 2004.
Piro had started his career at the FBI looking for al-Qaeda in Phoenix, Arizona, five years before. He was now one among a dozen native Arabic-speakers at the Bureau, and on his second tour in Baghdad. He had been born and raised in Beirut, and his voice had a distinctive Lebanese lilt that Saddam liked. They were soon on a first-name basis.
Piro was born around the time that Saddam first took power in Iraq. He was thirty-four years old, a tall, thin man with a bright-eyed intensity. He had been a police officer in Turlock, California, a town one hundred miles east of San Francisco, a home for decades to a community of Assyrian Christians from the Middle East. His parents had moved there in 1982, when he was twelve, to escape the war tearing through Beirut.
Piro had been preparing for six weeks to question Saddam. His interview reports show that the rapport he established and the rigor of his inquiries produced revelations that riveted the White House. Saddam said he had used the telephone only twice and rarely slept in the same bed two nights running since the first American war against Iraq began in 1991. He despised Osama bin Laden as a Sunni Muslim zealot. He was now prepared to die at the hands of his captors.
Six days into the debriefing, Piro questioned Saddam intensely and repeatedly about the elusive Iraqi chemical and biological arsenal that was President Bush’s justification for the American invasion.
Where were the weapons of mass destruction? he asked. Did they exist at all? They did not, Saddam said. It had been a long-running bluff, a deception intended to keep the Iranians, the Israelis, and the Americans at bay.
“We destroyed them. We told you,” he told Piro on February 13, 2004. “By God, if I had such weapons, I would have used them in the fight against the United States.” He was telling the truth.
The FBI—not for the first time—had produced evidence that undermined a presidency. “No one was more shocked and angry than I,” Bush wrote in his memoirs. “I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.”