On Friday, August 7, 1998, Molly Hardy was a CIA officer operating under cover in Nairobi, Kenya. Molly was from Georgia, and she had single-handedly raised a daughter as she traveled the world over a lengthy career. Molly was a finance officer, and a good one. Her job was handing out and keeping track of the money that CIA uses to pay its sources for the information that keeps America safe. She dealt largely in cash—in many different currencies and many different denominations. In August 1998 she was fifty-one and a grandmother, and she was looking forward to returning home to see her granddaughter.
For a number of weeks over the summer of 1998, intelligence sources had been picking up chatter among terrorists about a looming attack, about coming “good news.” But the talk was nonspecific about target, location, and timing. All of those missing details would become clear on the morning of August 7.
At ten thirty a.m. Molly, among many others at the embassy in Nairobi, heard gunfire and a small explosion from a grenade. It was the breach of the embassy security barrier by al Qa‘ida suicide bombers. The noise attracted employees to the windows—including Molly. Molly, sensing what was about to happen, warned others to stay away from the windows and to “get down.” As she did, a massive truck bomb exploded—destroying a large part of the embassy as well as much of an adjacent building. Over two hundred people were killed—including twelve Americans. More than four thousand were injured. Molly’s last words were heroic ones, saving the lives of many of her embassy colleagues. Molly was among CIA’s first casualties at the hands of Bin Ladin.
* * *
In Washington, eight thousand miles from Nairobi and Dar es Salaam—where there was a near-simultaneous attack against our embassy in Tanzania—it was the middle of the night. My wife, Mary Beth, and I, along with our three children, were fast asleep in our small three-bedroom house in Arlington, Virginia. It was the type of house a mid-level intelligence officer could afford. Our two older children, Sarah and Luke, had their own bedrooms, but Peter, our baby, was sleeping in a crib in the master bedroom. At the time I was the executive assistant to the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, and one of the requirements of my job was that I have a special STU-III secure telephone at home so I could discuss classified information at any time. Because our house was cramped, the secure phone was on the floor of the master bedroom, under Peter’s crib, and that night, as usual, it was also buried under a pile of laundry.
The ringing jolted me awake. I scrambled to find the phone and answer it before it woke Mary Beth or Peter. I failed on both counts, and Peter loudly expressed his displeasure. I had taken my share of calls in the middle of the night, but this one was not typical. The senior duty officer from the CIA Operations Center, the Agency’s most senior officer after hours, told me that a DOD (Department of Defense) satellite system had detected two enormous explosions in East Africa. He added that other reports, most important from the State Department Operations Center, had confirmed large explosions at the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and that these were quite clearly terrorist attacks. I told the officer to wake Director Tenet and tell him everything—one of only two times I woke him during my two years as his executive assistant (the other being when CIA-provided information led NATO to accidently bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade). I quickly showered, jumped in my car, and headed to work.
* * *
At this point in my career, I was an eighteen-year veteran of CIA, an organization that has three primary missions: collecting secrets clandestinely, conducting all-source analysis for the president and his senior advisors, and undertaking actions covertly to further US foreign policy objectives. No one who had known me as a young man would have even predicted that CIA would hire me. I did not get serious about education until I was a senior in high school. I lived at home during college, never traveled overseas, and did not speak a foreign language.
I majored in economics, and my aspiration was to go to graduate school, earn a PhD, and teach. But one of my professors had a different idea. “You ought to send a résumé to the CIA,” he said, stressing that the Agency hired economists and that it might be a good fit for me. My professor knew that economics is one of a handful of academic disciplines that teaches critical thinking—the number one skill needed to be a successful intelligence analyst.
To be honest, I had little understanding of CIA or what an economist would do there, and even less interest in joining its ranks. But on a lark I sent off an application and was surprised a few months later to be invited for a visit. I had never been to Washington, D.C., and after four austere years living at home while going to college, I figured it would be a treat to see the sights. I set off for our nation’s capital with no intent of accepting a job offer from CIA.
What I found when I arrived, however, was a group of amazingly talented people who were enormously dedicated to an important mission. I found an Agency that was helping the nation address a world of challenges, including an ongoing hostage crisis in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It needed young men and women to help unravel some enormously complex issues. It was enticing, but I told my recruiter that I really had my heart set on graduate school. “No problem,” he said. “Come here. Do a good job. We’ll eventually send you to grad school on our dime” (a promise on which the Agency would make good). I accepted an entry-level job paying fifteen thousand dollars a year and began my career as an intelligence analyst.
As an analyst I was fortunate to be involved in some important work early on. For example, I led a small team that statistically demonstrated—using a combination of information provided by intelligence sources and the Philippine government’s publicly released election results—that President Ferdinand Marcos had stolen the presidential election in 1986 from Corazón Aquino. Marcos had used a new technique—the systematic disenfranchisement of millions of voters in areas expected to vote in large numbers for Aquino. Our analysis showed that Marcos’s 54–46 victory would have been a victory for Aquino by a wide margin in a fair election. CIA’s findings played a role in the Reagan administration’s decision to distance itself from Marcos after the election, which helped lead to his fall from power only weeks later in the peaceful “People Power Revolution.” It was exhilarating to be a young analyst and to see my work have such impact. I was hooked. And then, in the early 1990s, I was involved in a larger team effort that uncovered the nascent North Korean nuclear weapons program, which remains a serious threat to this day. Our work included supporting the initial US diplomatic negotiations with the North Koreans on the issue—analysts providing real-time assistance to the US negotiating team.
Most of my time, however, was spent on East Asian economic issues—significant matters but not the stuff of spy novels. In 1996, however, an unexpected part-time assignment changed the course of my career. At the time, CIA Director John Deutch and his deputy, George Tenet, were fielding complaints from the secretary of the treasury, Robert Rubin, and his deputy, Larry Summers, about the intelligence community’s collection of information on economic matters. (This followed the French declaring persona non grata a senior Agency official in Paris for allegedly stealing information on French trade policy.) Rubin and Summers believed that much of the effort the intelligence community was expending to obtain economic data on other countries, as well as other nations’ plans for economic policy, was unnecessary and could become counterproductive to our diplomatic relationships with those countries. Tenet, whom I had met briefly on several occasions, asked me to lead an interagency team to examine the question.
The bottom line of my study was that Rubin and Summers were right. Much of what the intelligence community was collecting on economic issues was available through public means, or what is internally referred to as “open-source” information. Even though the study went against the status quo, it was well received, particularly by Tenet, who told me that he liked the rigor of the report and the clarity with which the results were conveyed. Not surprisingly, Rubin and Summers liked the answer as well, with Rubin writing a letter to Deutch complimenting the study.
Just eighteen months later, Director Deutch stepped down as DCI and was succeeded by Tenet. On December 11, 1997, I was at Arlington Hospital in Virginia waiting for Mary Beth to deliver our third child, Peter. A phone rang—not in the waiting room and not at the nurses’ station but in the delivery room. Mary Beth, in the initial stages of labor, did not look pleased. Neither did the attending nurse who answered, then handed me the phone, saying with some sarcasm, “It’s for you.” On the other end of the line was a friend, Greg Tarbell, who at the time was the daily intelligence briefer for Director Tenet and who would later become my chief of staff when I served as deputy director and acting director. Being resourceful, Tarbell had tracked down the phone number in the delivery room.
Tarbell said with some excitement, “I know you are busy, but I thought you’d want to know—Tenet told me this morning that he remembered the good work you did on that economic intelligence study and that he is considering asking you to be his new EA.” Being tapped to serve as the director’s executive assistant would be a significant career opportunity, but with my mind understandably elsewhere, I ended the call by simply saying, “That’s interesting.” Mary Beth asked, “Who was that?” I gave her the standard answer that an Agency officer provides to a questioning spouse, “Oh, it was nothing,” and I went back to my primary job of delivering ice chips on demand.
A few days after Peter’s birth, I was back at work. Tenet called me to his office to offer me the job. As I crossed the threshold of his long, rectangular office, he handed me a cigar from his private stash to offer congratulations on Peter’s arrival. Excited, I accepted the position on the spot.
Exciting, however, is not the word I would use to describe the first few weeks on the job. Overwhelming was more like it. I had never had a job anything like it before. It was 24/7 and totally consuming. I was the director’s only executive assistant at the time; now there are two or three, depending on the director. I was reluctant to get up from my desk to walk down to the cafeteria for lunch, or even to visit the men’s room, for fear that the stack of new e-mails in my inbox would double during even a brief absence. On top of this, I had, at first, no earthly clue what people were talking about. Tenet and his senior subordinates from across the agency often spoke or wrote in the kind of shorthand that only people who have worked an issue for a long time can understand. And there were so many cryptonyms (code words) to learn that my head was swimming. Furthermore, the breadth and scope of the issues coming at me were unlike anything I could have imagined.
After I had been on the job for a few weeks, Tenet said as I handed him a report, “Are you OK?” I fibbed and told him everything was fine. But as time went on I caught up to the pace of the work and also learned the lingo. I kept my head well above water, and I settled into one of the best jobs of my life.
One of the things that made the job special was the chance to work with Tenet, the most down-to-earth, approachable senior government official I have ever met. The son of Greek immigrants, who learned hard work busing tables in his father’s diner in Queens, Tenet has an everyman quality about him that makes him impossible to dislike. He is brilliant in an unthreatening way, and kings and cafeteria workers thought he was their best friend. And they were right. Ranging from slightly to very rumpled in appearance, Tenet set an informal mood in the office, where he would frequently burst out in Motown hits like Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” do spot-on imitations of foreign leaders (he did an incredible Yasser Arafat), or dribble a basketball in the hallways of the Agency. Tenet never took himself too seriously, a vital trait in a place where the work, which he attacked vigorously, was often a matter of life and death (literally).
I loved working for him. There were four main parts to the job—any one of which might have kept me fully occupied. First I was to review every piece of information coming into the director’s office—whether in a letter, memo, e-mail, cable, phone call, or personal visit—and make a snap decision on whether Tenet needed to know it or not and, if so, whether he needed to know it immediately or it could wait for that evening’s nightly “Read Book.” Information was flooding in every minute from many different sources. If I passed too much of it to the boss, he would be overwhelmed and unable to focus on the most critical matters. If I kept some critical bit of intelligence from the director, something could go badly wrong.
The second duty was to review and organize decisions that he needed to make—in the form of official brown folders from various parts of the organization asking the director for a formal judgment on a wide range of issues, informal questions to which someone needed an answer, and letters drafted by others for the director to sign and send. If I decided something was routine—if I was confident that I knew how Tenet thought about the issue—I could have a machine (called an autopen) sign it. I would then put a copy of what had gone out in the director’s name in his overnight reading materials. This autopen was to become the source of my first mistake as EA.
A senior Agency officer named Joan Dempsey—who had just finished a stint as Tenet’s chief of staff—handed me a letter that she said needed to be signed right away and sent to the secretary of defense. The subject, an intelligence community technical issue, was incomprehensible to me, but she assured me it was no big deal and I should simply have the guys down the hall crank up the machine and affix the “George J. Tenet” signature to the letter she had drafted. Trusting her judgment, I did just that and put a copy of the resulting letter in Tenet’s thick pile of materials to read at home that night, telling him in a note that I had sent the letter to the “SECDEF.” The next morning I got the letter back with Tenet’s distinctive scrawl all over it. At the top he had written, “Never ever, ever, ever…,” and the evers continued across the top of the page… down the right side, upside down across the bottom, and up the left-hand margin. After the final ever, he’d written, “autopen a letter to a cabinet member!”
Properly chagrined, I affixed a Post-it note to the letter: “Your instructions are not clear to me. Would you please clarify?” I put it in the night’s reading file. He accepted my riposte in good humor, which tells you a great deal about the kind of boss he was.
My third responsibility was to make sure that when Tenet was scheduled to have a meeting he had everything he needed in advance. This was perhaps the toughest part of the job, because some materials that came forward from lower levels of the Agency and intelligence community were poorly written, badly argued, confusing, or just too long. So I would have to rewrite a lot of stuff on the fly—particularly talking points for his use at White House meetings. Often I did a good job, but sometimes not. Once he read a page of talking points and, not thinking much of it, asked, “Who was the idiot who wrote this?” I raised my hand and said, “That would be me.”
The final part of the job was to do whatever else he asked of me. I was a messenger, a deliverer of good news and bad, a source of information on morale in the building, a traveling companion, the butt of many jokes, and the participant in much humor. Tenet once threatened to give me as a gift to a world leader who had a special interest in young men, going so far as to quickly leave a dinner with the leader while I was visiting the restroom. Luckily I jumped into the last car as the director’s motorcade left the presidential palace. On another occasion, in a large meeting in the director’s conference room, we were discussing a request from another foreign leader for six helicopters as “payment” for operational support that that country had just undertaken on behalf of the Agency. Tenet responded to the leader’s request by saying, “How about we give him three helicopters and Morell?” The room exploded in laughter.
But I had my moments. Tenet was in his office with his senior leadership team late one morning, just before leaving for a particularly important testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee—to explain how CIA had failed to predict India’s May 1988 test of a nuclear weapon. Tenet asked for one piece of advice from everyone and started around the room. I quickly calculated that I would be last, but I didn’t know if Tenet planned to ask me, since I was the most junior officer in the room. But when the circle ended with me, Tenet did ask, “Any thoughts?” I said, “Pull up your zipper!” I had noticed when we entered the room that his fly was down. The room broke into laughter, and Tenet said, “Finally, a fucking piece of advice that is actually useful.” Tenet had a way with colorful language.
* * *
The global array of problems that the director of central intelligence had to worry about was mind-boggling. At the start of each calendar year, the Agency’s director was obliged to appear before the Senate and House intelligence oversight committees and lay out what concerns him. In January 1998 Tenet did just that, and he had no shortage of things to discuss. Each of the five main areas of challenge he talked about was suddenly something on which I had to quickly come up to speed. At the top of his list of worries were transnational issues that threatened all Americans. Included in this category were the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, international terrorism, drug trafficking, information warfare (what we would call cyber warfare today), and, interestingly, the fallout from a financial crisis that had befallen Asia.
Close behind those worries was a second major category—the threat posed by major powers like Russia and China. The two traditional foes of the United States were on very different trajectories—Russia down and China up—and both were trying to navigate difficult political and economic transformations. Next was the threat from rogue nations like Iraq, North Korea, Libya, and Iran. Fourth on Tenet’s list were regional trouble spots like the Middle East, South Asia, and Bosnia. And finally he mentioned humanitarian emergencies caused by natural disasters, ethnic conflict, and foreign government mismanagement—any one of which could suddenly place heavy demands on US military and economic resources.
That was quite a list, and the director could not afford to ignore any part of it. But I can tell you there was one entry on that parade of threats that dominated his days and thus mine—and that was international terrorism. This was a revelation to me. Throughout my prior time at the Agency I had had little involvement in that arena, and the vast majority of my colleagues at Langley would have told you that counterterrorism—or “CT”—was not a front-burner issue. But Tenet didn’t see it that way. For years before 9/11, the terror threat was the single issue that would keep him up at night. He was focused on it, laser-like.
The counterterrorism arena had a dizzying array of bad guys—Lebanese Hezbollah, responsible for several mass attacks against the United States and for more American fatalities than any terrorist group prior to 9/11; Egyptian terrorist groups al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya and the Islamic Jihad, the latter responsible for the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981; Palestinian groups responsible for multiple attacks against Israel; and many others outside the Middle East—ranging from the Irish Republican Army in the United Kingdom to the Sendero Luminoso or “Shining Path” in Peru. But the one group on which Tenet was intensely focused—and the one that caught my attention as I read and listened—was a group called “al Qa‘ida,” under the leadership of a man named Usama bin Ladin.
* * *
Bin Ladin was born in 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the son of one of the kingdom’s richest men. Usama, meaning “lion,” attended King Abdulaziz University. While he took practical courses in construction engineering and business administration, undoubtedly under pressure from his family, his true passion was religion, studying the Koran and what it meant for how Muslims should live their lives. At school, Bin Ladin became close to members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic organization intent on imposing Koranic law throughout Muslim societies. He loved poetry, black stallions, and soccer. He was an avid follower of English football.
After college Bin Ladin was drawn to the war in Afghanistan. He felt a religious duty to support the Afghan freedom fighters, and he went to South Asia in the early 1980s. As he traveled back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan, his role was one of funding and organizing the flow of foreigners into Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. (Despite many stories over the years to the contrary, CIA never worked with Bin Ladin in the Agency’s own efforts to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the 1980s.) Bin Ladin’s time in South Asia convinced him that ideologically motivated insurgents can defeat a much better-equipped and -trained military force. It was the defining experience of his life.
Bin Ladin had two advantages as he moved through life—a piece of his family’s wealth, which helped him in his early years, and, even more important, charisma. His personality was magnetic. This was not an American-style appeal consisting of a dominant personality that could take over a room. It was an Arab-style charisma made of a soft-spoken, poetic voice and a gentleness of movement in the manner of the Prophet Muhammad.
* * *
CIA’s interest in Bin Ladin began during his time in Sudan, from 1991 to 1996, when he combined business ventures with jihad. Bin Ladin established terrorist training camps in Sudan and financed the travel of hundreds of Afghan War veterans to Sudan to attend those camps. In late 1992, Bin Ladin financed the bombing of a hotel in Aden, Yemen, housing US servicemen, and in 1996 he sent his operatives to Somalia to work as advisors to the warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid, responsible for the tragedy commonly referred to as “Black Hawk Down.” These were Bin Ladin’s opening salvos against the United States, but we learned of his role only years later. We also learned later that during this time Bin Ladin acquired what would be an enduring interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
Bin Ladin’s early activities create an interesting dichotomy. As far as most Americans are concerned, the fight against al Qa‘ida began in 1998 in East Africa or on 9/11. But from Bin Ladin’s perspective, he had been at war against the United States dating back to 1992.
CIA knew that Bin Ladin relocated to Afghanistan from Sudan in late 1996, taking many operatives with him. What we did not know at the time was whether Bin Ladin was just a financier of terrorists or the head of a terrorist organization himself. Because his name was popping up in the intelligence so much, CIA decided to find out. The Agency in 1996 created a special unit to follow Bin Ladin, called Alec Station. Unlike a typical CIA station, this one was based in the United States, within driving distance of CIA headquarters. (The code name Alec was taken from the unit chief’s oldest son.) Its initial objective was to find out who Bin Ladin really was.
By 1997, Alec Station had its answer. CIA had learned and had told policy-makers that Bin Ladin was the head of a terrorist organization whose goal was the establishment of a global caliphate. And we had learned and reported that, to Bin Ladin, the United States was the key to his goal—and therefore the prime target or, as al Qa‘ida referred to us, the “far enemy.” To achieve his caliphate he had to drive the United States out of the Middle East and then overthrow what he saw as the US-supported apostate leaders currently sitting atop the countries in that region, al Qa‘ida’s so-called near enemies.
Not only did the intelligence make that known, but so did Bin Ladin himself, publicly. He announced his intentions to attack the United States with great clarity. In at least five public statements between mid-1995 and early 1998, Bin Ladin professed his hatred for America and everything it represents. He directly announced his intent to force us to retreat from the Muslim world. And he stated his plan to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction, which he called a “religious duty.” In international relations, sometimes the best indicator of what someone is going to do is what he tells you he is going to do. And, since it is a religious obligation in Islam to warn your enemies in advance, there was reason to pay particular attention to what he had to say. While the intelligence community did so, Bin Ladin’s public statements generated little interest among the American media—even though some of his pronouncements were made directly to US news outlets.
To put teeth behind his rhetoric, Bin Ladin, under the protection of the Taliban, was increasing his capabilities. Al Qa‘ida built training camps in Afghanistan, attracting recruits from all over the world and turning out committed jihadists by the thousands. Bin Ladin built a document forgery capability and mechanisms to move money securely.
CIA was not just collecting information on Bin Ladin and his activities; it was actively trying to undermine him. Alec Station was working hard on a program to disrupt his finances, arrest the operatives he sent abroad, and bring him to justice. Thanks to Tenet, we were not sitting on our hands, but the rest of the Agency, with the exception of Alec Station, did not take al Qa‘ida as seriously as did its director.
Significantly, Alec Station, arguably one of the most important CIA operational units at the time, was led by an analyst. As a career analyst myself, I strongly believed that people from my career path could make enormous contributions. But I couldn’t get over that the leader of Alec Station—an officer by the name of Mike Scheuer—was not a trained operations officer and that few operations officers played a significant role in the unit.
Alec Station also did not get the support it needed to do its job. Part of this was due to Scheuer’s personality. He was a zealot. In the years before 9/11, I don’t think anyone knew more or cared as much about al Qa‘ida. His analytic assessments were always on the mark, but he also had a penchant for angering anyone who didn’t see things exactly as he did. Scheuer was constantly getting into fights with the FBI, the NSA, and his own bosses within the Directorate of Operations. (Mike got a chance to vent when he anonymously published a couple of books, but he eventually left the Agency bitter and questioning our commitment to the fight.) But I am convinced that the Agency did not give him enough support in part because Scheuer was an analyst. At the time there were strong divisions between the operational and analytic sides of CIA. When I started in 1980, the two organizations were on different sides of the building and their officers ate in different cafeterias. There was a strong “not invented here” culture in the Directorate of Operations. I believe the DO, as we called it, rejected Scheuer because he was not one of its own.
The lack of support also reflected the fact that not all levels of management understood the source of the passion Alec Station’s officers brought to the job. And not all CIA managers understood that because the threat had not yet manifested itself. They could not see it and feel it (this was also an issue in the broader government and in the country at large). One of the analysts in Alec Station was once counseled that she was spending too much of her career on Bin Ladin.
Scheuer frequently complained about the lack of support. For example, he believed he did not receive the backing he needed from the Agency’s geographic operational units (the “owners” of our overseas stations), from other agencies in the intelligence community, or from foreign intelligence services. And Scheuer believed that his superiors in CIA did not push those organizations hard enough to be more forthcoming. Some of this was hyperbole, but some of it reflected reality. Scheuer was a frequent visitor to my office after a meeting in the director’s suite and would share his frustrations with me. I wondered to myself if an operations officer, as chief of Alec, would have received more support. I thought so, and would occasionally share this view with Tenet.
Perhaps one of the best examples of this lack of support was the reaction of the leadership of the Directorate of Operations—headed at the time by a gruff Cold Warrior named Jack Downing—to a plan from Alec Station to capture Bin Ladin. The plan, put together in the fall of 1997 under the presidential authorities we had at the time to undermine and degrade terrorist groups, called for members of a particular Afghan tribe, codenamed TRODPINTS and with an undistinguished record of fighting, to ambush Bin Ladin, capture him alive (despite his being under constant heavy guard by highly trained gunmen), whisk him off, and hide him in a cave for up to a month until a US military aircraft could swoop in clandestinely and spirit him out of Afghanistan. The plan from Scheuer and his team, presented to Tenet in the spring of 1998, was imaginative and aggressive, but it had little chance of succeeding. This was an overly complicated paramilitary operation. The more moving parts in such an operation, the greater the risk of failure, and there were a lot of moving parts in the Alec Station plan. There was also an issue regarding collateral damage, as Bin Ladin seemed constantly surrounded by his wives and children. The Covert Action Review Group, the board of senior officers at the Agency that reviews all covert action proposals, gave the operation only a 30 percent chance of success. All in all, it was a poorly conceived plan.
But what struck me most about the Alec Station proposal was that it ever showed up in the director’s office. Not a single person in Scheuer’s chain of command thought his plan was wise. Typically the Directorate of Operations would protect its people and not let them see the boss unless everyone was supportive of whatever plan they had in mind. But in this case they brought Scheuer in, allowed him to do the briefing, then, once Scheuer left the room, told Tenet (correctly, in my view) that the plan was implausible.
I asked myself why Scheuer’s bosses would let him hang out there like that. The answer, it seemed to me, was that he was a mere analyst they did not respect and to whom they owed nothing. And yet they did not seem to respect Alec Station’s mission sufficiently to put one of their own in the job—until after the threat became real, after the East Africa bombings, when Scheuer was replaced with one of the best operations officers of his generation.
One of the consequences of the way Alec Station was managed in the early years was that we did not have al Qa‘ida penetrated with spies to the extent that we should have. While we knew a bit from spies on the periphery about the organization and its plans and intentions, we had few human sources—fewer than a handful—with access to the leadership of al Qa‘ida itself. This significantly lowered the chances that we would detect an attack in preparation and disrupt it. This was the fundamental responsibility of Alec Station, and its failure helped lead to the bombings of our embassies in East Africa; this failure did not even start to get remedied until the leadership of Alec Station changed and a career operations officer was placed in charge and until the East Africa bombings galvanized the rest of the Agency.
The bottom line is that Mike Scheuer should have been in Alec Station as the senior analyst—but he should not have been running the show. That job should have gone to an experienced operations officer from the very beginning. And the rest of the clandestine service should have been pushed harder to support the work of Alec Station. These were a failures on the part of Downing and his leadership team.
* * *
My drive to work on the morning the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed brought me to the office at five a.m. Tenet was already there. I gathered all the materials on the bombing, read them carefully, and highlighted key passages for the director, who was on and off the phone with a number of his colleagues around government. At eight a.m. we assembled the relevant players in the director’s conference room to go over what we knew, what we did not know, and what we needed to do. Tenet walked into the conference room, sat in his usual spot—in the middle of the table rather than at the head, a gesture that is respected by the workforce in the egalitarian CIA—and immediately asked the assembled representatives “Who did this?” Scheuer, sitting directly across from the director, responded almost instantaneously, “This is al Qa‘ida; no doubt about it.” Although we did not yet have a shred of intelligence linking al Qa‘ida to the attack, no one questioned Scheuer because everyone in the room knew he was right.
By Sunday evening, just two days after the bombing, we had intelligence from a human source that confirmed Scheuer’s instinct. That night we gathered in Tenet’s office, and I listened as he spoke on a secure telephone with President Clinton, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen, and other members of the National Security Council (NSC) in a conference call about the attacks. Tenet briefed them on the intelligence pointing strongly to Bin Ladin’s responsibility for the deaths of twelve Americans, including CIA’s Molly Hardy. The entire country, for the first time, was now aware of Bin Ladin and al Qa‘ida.
Tenet taught me an important lesson in leadership that evening. We were waiting for the talking points for the director’s call with the president, and they were late. I was becoming impatient, wondering aloud, “What the hell are they doing down there?” Tenet counseled me, saying, “Calm down. They are doing the best they can.” He went on to say that in a crisis situation, everyone is working all out and there is no need to push, that doing so would actually be counterproductive. “In the normal day-to-day situation—in the absence of a crisis—is when folks need a swift kick in the butt,” he said.
In the immediate aftermath of the embassy bombings, Tenet went to visit the troops in Alec Station to bolster their morale, and I went along. It wasn’t an unusual event for him. He regularly “went walkabout” and enjoyed popping in unannounced to offices all over the headquarters complex. He relished bantering with Agency officers of all ranks much more than he liked rubbing elbows with senior administration officials. But this occasion was not at all enjoyable.
After he made brief informal remarks, one of the analysts, a woman who was among those intensely loyal to Mike Scheuer, raised her hand and said, “Mr. Director, I hope you know that if you had let us proceed with the plan to capture Bin Ladin some months ago the attacks on the embassies would not have happened.” She was blaming Tenet for the attacks and the deaths of Americans. I found it to be a stunning, disrespectful, and inaccurate thing to say. Such an outburst was also highly unusual in Agency culture, but many of her coworkers seemed to agree with her fully. To his credit, Tenet did not respond harshly but simply said something about everyone having a right to his or her opinion. In fact, the plan to go after Bin Ladin had had a minimal chance of success, and we later learned through intelligence sources that the plots to blow up our embassies had been under way long before the proposed capture of Bin Ladin. And later, when the TRODPINTS were given the green light to go after Bin Ladin, they failed miserably to put together any workable plan.
Once we were certain that al Qa‘ida was responsible for the embassy attacks, President Clinton wanted to hit back hard. Al Qa‘ida training camps in Afghanistan were an obvious target, and we were fortunate enough to intercept an al Qa‘ida communication that told us Bin Ladin and other senior al Qa‘ida leaders were likely to be meeting at one of the group’s training camps near Khost, Afghanistan, a few days hence. That became target number one. But the president and others wanted to strike at least two targets, since two embassies had been hit, and he wanted to hit somewhere outside Afghanistan to demonstrate a willingness by the United States to go beyond the group’s sanctuary. From a list of other potential sites, a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, that was suspected of producing chemical weapons for al Qa‘ida was selected.
Early on the morning of August 20—the day of the US military response—Tenet was woken by a two a.m. phone call from President Clinton, who asked if he was comfortable with the plan. Tenet later told me that he advised the president that the attack on the training camp near Khost was a “no-brainer,” but that he was less convinced about the plan to hit the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant. Tenet told me that the president said something like, “That’s OK; I want al Qa‘ida, if they are going to attack us, to wonder a bit how I am going to respond.”
As it turned out, the US counterattacks—our opening shot in the new war against al Qa‘ida—were not a great success. The strike on the training camps killed only a handful of terrorists, as Bin Ladin and his al Qa‘ida leadership had left Khost a short while before seventy-five cruise missiles hit. While we were never able to prove it, I strongly suspect that someone tipped him off. The United States had sent General Joe Ralston, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to Pakistan to let its government know that US cruise missiles would soon be transiting Pakistani airspace en route to Afghanistan. There had been plenty of time for some sympathizer within the Pakistani government to warn Bin Ladin, and I suspect someone did.
The attack on the pharmaceutical plant was worse. As it turned out, the plant was not involved in the production of chemical weapons. The key intelligence that had driven the decision to attack the facility—that CIA had collected a soil sample outside the plant that contained a precursor for chemical weapons (O-ethyl methylphosphonothioic acid, or EMPTA)—was shaky at best. And we were wrong in our assessment that the owner of the factory was a person associated with Bin Ladin. He was not.
Rather than viewing the failed attack on the al Qa‘ida training camp as a near miss, I am convinced that Bin Ladin and his associates saw it and the strike on the pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum as victories. First of all, Bin Ladin had narrowly escaped—garnering even more status among extremists as a result—and second, he was convinced that we had embarrassed ourselves in the eyes of the world by blowing up what critics of the strike called an “aspirin factory.” There is no doubt that this had an emboldening effect.
One of the key consequences of the East Africa bombings was an even more determined director of central intelligence. On the flight home from a December 1998 meeting with our British counterparts in London—during which the discussion had been dominated by the threat from al Qa‘ida—Tenet took out a pad of legal paper and handwrote the first draft of a letter to the leadership of CIA and the leaders of all the agencies of the intelligence community. (At the time, in addition to leading his own agency, the CIA director also provided leadership for all the agencies of the intelligence community. In April 2005 the position of director of national intelligence took over that role as a result of the passage and signing of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act in late 2004.) Tenet wrote furiously for forty-five minutes, and when he finished, he ripped the pages from the pad and handed them to me. He simply said, “Here.” As I read what he had written, I was struck by the language. The director made clear that we should consider ourselves at war with al Qa‘ida and that no effort or resource should be spared in prosecuting the war.
For CIA, the “we are at war” memo, as it was called, became an early 1999 directive to the Agency’s operational arm to review CIA strategy against al Qa‘ida and to suggest enhancements. There was a similar memo for the rest of the intelligence community. Then, in the spring of 1999, as the intelligence grew that Bin Ladin was planning another operation and as our efforts to locate the al Qa‘ida leader and remove him from the battlefield were going nowhere, Tenet asked for a new strategy—one not constrained by resources or authorities. In response the Counterterrorism Center in the fall of 1999 produced what was called “the Plan.” The Plan involved a major shift in resources to the al Qa‘ida problem and greater integration of the Agency with the rest of the intelligence community, particularly the NSA. This work had some real successes, namely the disruption of a number of attacks during the pre-millennium period, both inside the United States and overseas (Tenet had told President Clinton to expect five to fifteen attacks). But these successes did not get us any closer to Bin Ladin.
In the aftermath of the embassy bombings, increased attention was also given at the White House to the Bin Ladin problem. New covert action authorities—called Memorandum of Notifications (MONs), additions to an overall 1986 presidential finding on counterterrorism—were approved to give CIA increased authority to go after Bin Ladin.
A common misconception is that the Central Intelligence Agency conducts covert action on its own authority. This is not true. Covert action can be proposed by the Agency or initiated by the most senior national security officials at the White House. But only with White House approval can CIA put together an actual plan. The policy objective for the plan comes from the White House, and the Agency builds a program designed to meet that objective, producing either a draft finding or a draft MON—essentially a set of authorities giving approval to the Agency to conduct specific activities. That draft is vetted within the Agency and throughout the interagency, including by the Department of Justice; it is approved by both the principals and the deputies of the National Security Council, and it is formally approved by the president via his signature. In keeping with its legal obligations, CIA then notifies the leadership of Congress, the Senate and House intelligence committees, and the two defense appropriations subcommittees from which CIA gets its funding. While Congress is technically only “notified,” in reality it can withhold money from the operation and therefore prevent it from getting off the ground. As a participant in this process, I can tell you that it would be very wrong to assume that there is any “rubber-stamping” during any part of it.
People might wonder, with all those steps required—how does anything stay secret? And the answer is that, for the most part, things do not. Most covert actions leak. But, contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not Congress that leaks (there are exceptions). It is generally the White House—as officials there want, for political reasons, to show the American people that it is doing something about a particular national security threat—or officials in executive branch agencies who leak secrets to try to get a leg up in a policy debate.
In the aftermath of the East Africa bombings, President Clinton signed a number of new MONs related to Bin Ladin. Prior to the East Africa bombings, CIA had been permitted only to capture Bin Ladin, and the use of lethal force had been expressly prohibited. The draft of this new MON allowed CIA, using its Afghan surrogates, to kill Bin Ladin if it judged that capture was not feasible during an operation. It was a significant step—essentially allowing CIA to kill a terrorist. The Clinton administration’s position, which has remained consistent throughout both the Bush and Obama administrations, was that under the Law of Armed Conflict, killing a person who poses an imminent threat to the United States and who cannot be captured is self-defense, not an assassination.
Sandy Berger, the national security advisor, sent the draft MON to President Clinton on the morning of Christmas eve, 1998. The White House had told us that the president would sign the MON that day, and it fell to me to wait around the office until he did so. My job was to obtain confirmation that the president had signed the document, so that our headquarters officers could send the president’s instructions out to the field. Everyone else in the front office had gone home or was on annual leave, but there I was sitting by the phone waiting. Mary Beth was home with her parents and brother, who were visiting, along with the three kids, all under the age of six at the time, waiting for Daddy and Santa, not necessarily in that order. They were all frustrated by my absence, but I could not tell them that I was waiting for an order from President Clinton to kill Bin Ladin.
Late on the afternoon of Christmas eve, the president walked into the White House Situation Room, read the document, and signed it. The White House Situation Room called me, and I, in turn, called the director, the Agency’s general counsel, and our director of congressional affairs to inform them. I asked the latter to inform the relevant members of Congress, which he did that evening and the next day. I then sent word to the Counterterrorism Center, so that it could relay instructions to our officers in the field, where it was already the early-morning hours of Christmas day. I got in my car and went home to Christmas eve celebrations, feeling that we were hitting back now more than at any time in al Qa‘ida’s history.
But the truth was that we were still not fully engaged. There was much more that could have been done on the military and paramilitary fronts. Certainly more covert actions would be signed and more pressure would be put on Bin Ladin and his host the Taliban, but the United States still was not doing everything it could to go after al Qa‘ida or to defend against the kind of attacks we were worried about. Even a focused, determined, and popular president, as Bill Clinton was, faced constraints on how far he could go. An attack against two embassies—with twelve Americans killed, including Molly—was not enough to bring the American people to the point where they would support all-out action. That would have to wait for two and a half more years.