CIA’s counterterrorism analysts filed into my office in early 2013 for a prep session for a Deputies Committee, a meeting of all the number twos from the key national security departments and agencies in the government. It was a regular occurrence during my time as deputy director. During a discussion, one of the analysts handed me a single sheet of paper. He said, “This is the way we think about the threat posed by al Qa‘ida to the homeland.” It was a spectrum—a terrorist threat spectrum. At the left end was “No Threat.” “That is a good place to be,” said the analyst. At the right end was “Terrorists with Weapons of Mass Destruction.” “That is not a good place to be,” added another analyst. “You got that right,” I answered.
Ignoring my intervention, the original analyst continued, pointing out that just to the left of the WMD point on the spectrum is where al Qa‘ida was on 9/11—the ability to carry out simultaneous, catastrophic attacks that kill thousands. Slightly to left of that is the ability to carry out single significant attacks that can kill hundreds. Further to the left on the spectrum and just to the right of “No Threat” are the lone wolves—the individuals who have no connection with an al Qa‘ida group but are motivated by the group’s ideology. The Boston Marathon bombing fit this category to a tee.
I took the chart to the Deputies Meeting and shared it with my colleagues. I told them, “Here is a great way to think about the threat from al Qa‘ida and to measure how we are doing over time against the group and its allies.” They agreed. It was clear to everyone, of course, that terrorists with WMD was the worst nightmare for all of us. But outcomes well short of that could still be horrific. We could not afford to become complacent. The lives of American citizens and the citizens of our allies depended on us.
* * *
Bin Ladin welcomed the US intervention in Iraq. He believed that US soldiers in Iraq fit perfectly into his narrative. He believed that the Soviet Union, by invading Afghanistan and by investing much money and many young men, had significantly weakened itself as a nation. And he believed that jihadists, by driving the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, had dealt a body blow to its prestige and played a major role in its destruction. And now he wanted to do the same thing to America—draw us into Afghanistan and Iraq, watch us expend significant resources, and drive us out of the Middle East, hopefully destroying in the process the country that, in his mind, was doing more than any other to undermine and ultimately destroy Islam.
Bin Ladin himself, however, was far from Iraq. In the run-up to the Iraq War and in the initial months of the war, he was hiding in the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan. We never figured out exactly where he was hiding in those early years. In 2005 he moved to a newly built compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he would stay for the next six years. His focus during this period was on continuing al Qa‘ida’s attacks against the West and dealing with the rapid and significant changes his organization was undergoing. In the space of only five years, al Qa‘ida moved down, then up, and back down the analysts’ threat spectrum. It was a remarkable journey—one demonstrating both the group’s vulnerability and its resilience.
The history of this period teaches what I believe is the most fundamental lesson of the world of counterterrorism—al Qa‘ida has nine lives. When the West and its allies keep pressure on al Qa‘ida, when it has to worry about its own security more than it can about its operations, al Qa‘ida loses capability. When that pressure is not there, when it is free to operate, its capabilities grow. It is a pattern that has played out over and over again, wherever al Qa‘ida has operated.
* * *
After being forced out of Afghanistan at the end of 2001, some of Bin Ladin’s senior subordinates settled in the remote area of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, but most took up residence in prearranged safe houses in the settled areas of Pakistan, and they regrouped quickly. At the same time, many key operatives made the decision to leave South Asia and return to their countries of origin. Both groups now posed a threat—those left in South Asia and those spread around the globe. This second group began the spread of al Qa‘ida’s ideology outside of South Asia. The war in Iraq did not start this spread, but it reinforced it.
By late 2001 the prestige of being the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks had propelled Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) into a new job—the role of external operations chief for al Qa‘ida. Working from the safe houses in Pakistan, KSM quickly began planning new operations against the West. In a short time KSM had several plots under way, including Richard Reid’s attempt to use a shoe bomb in December 2001 to bring down an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami, and the successful assault in April 2002 against a Jewish synagogue in Tunisia, which killed nineteen. KSM was also planning to use operatives recruited in Saudi Arabia to hijack aircraft and crash them into London’s Heathrow airport, employ terrorists from Southeast Asia to conduct a similar aircraft attack against skyscrapers in California, and send a team of Pakistanis to smuggle explosives into New York to target gas stations, railroad tracks, and bridges. In addition to these plots, KSM was working to carry out simultaneous attacks in Karachi, Pakistan—against the US consulate, Western travelers at the airport, and Westerners residing in the Karachi area. KSM, bursting with confidence as a result of 9/11, was being extraordinarily aggressive. We would later learn that he also personally decapitated Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in a demonstration of brutality that is hard to fathom. I believe that KSM is the personification of evil.
By a coincidence, I was back in the presidential briefing seat the day after Pearl was murdered. I was filling in for my successor, who’d wanted to take a day off. When I met Tenet to conduct the final prep session for the briefing, he asked if I was going to show the president the video of Pearl’s decapitation, which al Qa‘ida had posted on the Internet. I said, “I have it with me, but there is no way I am going to show it to the president.” Tenet and I ran into Condi Rice as we entered the West Wing and she too asked about the video. Now I was wondering if I had made the wrong call in deciding not to show it to Bush. The answer became very clear when, in the middle of the discussion about Pearl’s murder, Rice told the president, “Michael has the video, if you want to see it.” The president snapped, “Why in the hell would I want to watch that?” I felt vindicated, and I had not lost my sense of what to share with the president and what not to share.
Those operatives emerging from South Asia in the chaotic post-9/11 environment not only worked to support KSM’s plots, they did their own plotting against local targets—some with great success. Indonesian-born Riduan bin Isomuddin—best known among his extremist colleagues as “Hambali”—left Afghanistan and became the operational leader of the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiya. He helped plan the October 2002 bombings in Bali that killed more than two hundred people, and facilitated the financing for the bombing of the Marriott hotel in Jakarta in August 2003.
‘Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who’d helped lead the successful attack against the USS Cole in the Port of Aden, Yemen, in October 2000, also fled Afghanistan after 9/11 and returned to the Gulf, this time working out of the United Arab Emirates. From there he planned a successful attack on the French tanker MV Limburg off the coast of Yemen in October 2002. At the time of his arrest in November 2002, he was working on a number of plots, including attacking a US housing compound in Saudi Arabia, flying a plane into a US warship in Port Rashid, UAE, and striking oil tankers in the Strait of Gibraltar.
In short, the immediate post-9/11 period saw what was probably the most significant plotting in al Qa‘ida’s history—despite its having lost its Afghan sanctuary. The scope of the plotting demonstrated the strength of the organization that Bin Ladin had built—in particular, the plans the group had made to resettle in the cities of Pakistan, if necessary. It was a reflection of the sense of confidence that al Qa‘ida had. And it was a reflection of the additional funding flowing to al Qa‘ida in the aftermath of 9/11, largely from private donors in Arab countries. Nothing boosts funding for a terrorist group like a successful attack.
What did all these operatives have in common? Three things. One, they were as committed to “the cause” and to jihad against the West, in particular the United States, as was Bin Ladin himself. Many had previously fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets and had seen many of their friends die in a fight that they eventually won. Two, they wanted to enjoy the success that KSM enjoyed. They wanted to lead a great victory against their enemy. KSM’s rapid rise to the top rungs of al Qa‘ida after 9/11 created strong incentives for others to mimic his career path. And three, they brought capability to the table. Not all terrorists are smart and skilled. In fact, many are not. But these operatives were. They were the best and deadliest of their generation of terrorists—battle-hardened from fighting in Afghanistan. These operatives were very dangerous.
* * *
This was one of the Agency’s most active periods against al Qa‘ida, a period when we put great pressure on the group. And, with new post-9/11 resources and authorities, as well as the Pakistani government’s new commitment to being a partner against al Qa‘ida, our work paid off. Operating largely with our intelligence, the Pakistanis began arresting senior al Qa‘ida operatives—one after another. Zayn al-‘Abidin Abu Zubaydah was the first to be captured, in March 2002. Abu Zubaydah, a leading al Qa‘ida facilitator, had earlier helped Bin Ladin move his men from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996. He’d assisted Ahmad Rashid’s travel and attempted entry into the United States for the millennium-related attack on Los Angeles International Airport. He’d run al Qa‘ida’s document forgery operation as well as a number of the group’s training camps in Afghanistan, including one attended by some of the 9/11 hijackers. And Abu Zubaydah had helped smuggle Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi and over fifty fighters out of Pakistan after 9/11 so they could make their way to Iraq. They would become the main extremist element in Iraq, killing hundreds of US and coalition soldiers during the Iraq War and later evolving to become the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) that has gained so much ground in Syria and Iraq.
Zubaydah’s arrest was followed by others—of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a key facilitator in the 9/11 attacks, in Karachi in September 2002, and of KSM in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March 2003. The Pakistanis and we were so successful that most of the remaining al Qa‘ida leadership and its operatives pulled up stakes and moved a second time. Some of the most senior figures moved from Pakistan’s settled areas to Iran, where they were put under house arrest. Most, however, moved to the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (or “FATA”), an area of western Pakistan adjacent to the border with Afghanistan.
The FATA is extremely remote. It is small—roughly the size of Massachusetts—but it is extremely mountainous, with rural villages dotting the valleys. If you count the sides of the mountains as part of the area of the FATA, it grows to the size of Texas (I had a twelve-by-twenty-four-inch topographic map of the FATA hanging on the wall in my office, and the many mountain ranges stood out from the surface of the map by an inch). The FATA is semiautonomous, and its residents are fiercely independent. They barely think of themselves as part of the Pakistani state. It is a dangerous place for the Pakistani military and intelligence officers to venture, and it is exceptionally dangerous for US personnel to operate there.
Because the FATA was new to al Qa‘ida, it had a hard time finding a home there, and the group’s capabilities took a significant turn during this period. Without many of the group’s senior operatives, without a local network of support, and without a financial pipeline, its skills and therefore the threat it posed to the United States diminished. But this would not last for long.
* * *
My year of briefing the president and my time serving as the number three in the Directorate of Intelligence’s front office earned me a new assignment. In the summer of 2003 I became CIA’s senior focal point for liaison with the analytic community in the United Kingdom. The relationship was a simple one: our objective and that of the British was to share our analysis with each other to see where we agreed and where we did not, and, if we did not, to find out why. This process strengthened the analysis that both of us provided to our senior policy-makers.
I dealt largely with the UK’s Cabinet Office Assessments staff. The analysts there wrote two to four assessments a week for the prime minister and other senior ministers involved in national security. In preparing the assessments, the analysts relied on information they obtained from UK government agencies, from allies such as CIA and the NSA, and from open sources. They were particularly reliant on reporting from the UK’s three intelligence collection agencies—the country’s internal intelligence service, the Security Service (MI5), the nation’s external intelligence service, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), and the UK’s counterpart to the NSA, the General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
The analysts at the Cabinet Office had to present their assessments once a week to the country’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). The JIC—an institution in the British government since 1936—is comprised of both senior leaders from the country’s intelligence agencies and British policy-makers from the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, and the Cabinet Office. The JIC could approve a paper with or without changes, send a paper back for more work, or kill it outright. The JIC was the door that the analysts had to pass through to get their assessments to the prime minister. We did not have anything like it in the United States.
My time as our representative to the British analytic community, from the summer of 2003 to early 2006, was dominated by two issues—Iraq, namely our failure to find weapons of mass destruction and the rapidly deteriorating security and political situation there, and al Qa‘ida, both the immediate threat that the group posed and where it was going over the longer term.
As I began this assignment, we were still on a hair trigger regarding the threat from terrorists, because, even though al Qa‘ida was now struggling in the FATA, the memories of 9/11 and of the degree of attack plotting in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 were still fresh.
While this intensity of focus is necessary for success against real threats, it can also lead to some false positives. Perhaps none was wilder than a perceived threat that arose in late 2003. A part of the intelligence community, not normally involved in analysis, believed that it had uncovered a fiendishly clever way for the al Qa‘ida leadership to communicate with its operatives abroad. (I am not permitted to explain the method of communication, as it remains highly classified.)
But our terrorism analysts weren’t buying it—there was very little evidence to support the existence of this communication method, it was something we had never seen before, and it seemed beyond al Qa‘ida’s capabilities. Many of the IC’s senior leadership didn’t believe it either, but this was the kind of theory that could not easily be dismissed. What if this analysis was right?
The findings were briefed to the National Security Council staff, the Department of Homeland Security, and others. Some of the information appeared to be very specific, suggesting threats to particular flights on particular days right around the Christmas holiday.
There wasn’t time to investigate the claims enough to achieve complete certainty. If they were dismissed and a number of transatlantic flights were successfully attacked, the US government would rightly be vilified for ignoring the threat. So the Homeland Security Council ordered the cancellation of some transoceanic British Airways and Air France flights.
The whole matter up until that time was a closely held secret. Several days before Christmas the number two on the analytic side of the Agency called me and walked me through the story. He wanted to make sure that if the Brits raised this with me, I would know what they were talking about. British analysts, like CIA analysts, were not at all convinced about the methodology or conclusions of the theory.
Still the administration went ahead with mitigation steps. The flight cancellations caused some serious disruptions and widespread concern beyond a few specific flights. Just after Christmas my family and our friends the Hynds were in London for the holidays. The Hynds had flown British Airways, and when it came time for them to return home they asked me if it was safe for them to fly. I was stuck in the middle of a classic ethical problem. As an intelligence officer, you cannot selectively provide warnings or advice. You cannot provide advice to friends that is different from the guidance that the government is providing to the general public. And in this case there was a big difference between what our government had to do for the sake of prudence and what most analysts, including me, believed—that the threat reporting was bogus. So in response to the question I mumbled something like, “Well, there are a lot of people working to make those flights safe.”
In the end the Hynds departed as planned on British Airways. Joe, Shannon, and their four daughters were surprised to see US jet fighters escort them on their entry into US airspace and through their safe landing at Dulles Airport. When Shannon called my wife with the news, I said, “See, people were working to keep them safe.”
A few months later I learned of the shaky provenance of the original warning and that the analysis had turned out to be highly questionable. In fact, this turned out to be just plain poor analysis as well as poor oversight of that analysis. But the incident amply illustrates the mind-set at the time and the fact that when it came to the terrorist threat, the attitude was “You can’t be too cautious.”
What was very real as my time as the representative to the British analytic community proceeded was the growth and rebuilding of al Qa‘ida in the FATA region of Pakistan. Along with Iraq, the rebirth of al Qa‘ida was at the top of the priority list for us and the British. Al Qa‘ida had made its intentions to target Western Europe clear. In the US we tend to look at 9/11 as a singularly American event—but in fact more Brits died in the Twin Towers than in any other single terrorist attack in British history. Our British colleagues were certain that Bin Ladin was not done with them.
As al Qa‘ida spent more time in the FATA, it started building close ties with local militant groups, some of which were Afghan and had crossed the border to avoid the NATO troops in Afghanistan. As al Qa‘ida settled in, the group’s rebuilding began.
Because of the great difficulties of working in the region—and the time it took for the US to figure out how to do so—al Qa‘ida regained its footing. The pressure was off al Qa‘ida during much of this period, and it took advantage of that. And by mid-2005 the group was strong enough to conduct sophisticated operations in the West, and by mid-2006 it had regained enough capability to again conduct large 9/11-style attacks against the US homeland. The rebound was surprising and quick for a group that was continuously on the move and had lost most of its senior leadership.
* * *
In my assignment as CIA’s representative to British analysts, I participated in a number of conversations between Agency analysts from our Counterterrorism Center in which we shared our growing concerns with the British. Perhaps the most important such conversation happened during a fall 2003 visit from the deputy director of the analytic side of the Center, Philip Mudd. Mudd has a well-deserved reputation for being direct and pointed, with little interest in caveats. His message was profound—we were seeing the resurgence of al Qa‘ida, and if steps were not taken, it would soon rebuild the capabilities it had had on 9/11. Mudd brought along analysts to walk through the details—al Qa‘ida was coalescing in certain cities in the FATA, ingratiating itself with local militants, receiving ample funding again, and once more training operatives for attacks. It was a stark warning.
In March 2004, ten bombs aboard commuter trains in Madrid exploded (three other trains had bombs aboard as well, but they did not detonate). With 191 people killed and over eighteen hundred wounded, it was the worst terrorist attack in Spanish history—and it occurred just three days before Spain’s general elections. Because the attacks were well coordinated and nearly simultaneous, the assumption of much of the world was that this had been the work of al Qa‘ida. But the Spanish investigation and our own intelligence could turn up nothing linking the attack to Bin Ladin and his leadership in the FATA. The attackers had been a group of Moroccans, Syrians, and Algerians, whose only association with al Qa‘ida was that they had been motivated by Bin Ladin’s message. It was the first significant al Qa‘ida–inspired attack. We, and our British friends, now had to worry about plots hatched not only by Bin Ladin and his associates but also by others who admired but had never met him.
Porter Goss, who became CIA director in the fall of 2004, was so worried that we did not have a good enough window into what was happening in the FATA that he ordered a surge of resources against al Qa‘ida, the largest since 9/11. We essentially flooded the zone to maximize our chances of collecting valuable intelligence on al Qa‘ida’s resurgence.
In early July 2005, I was in London. It was a cool morning and I was at a meeting of UK analysts at the British Ministry of Defence. Shortly before nine a.m., someone walked into the room and simply said, “There have been multiple explosions in London.” At that point everyone got up and left. The meeting was over. The traffic on the streets was horrendous as cars and people flowed away from what I would soon learn was where three suicide bombs had exploded aboard London Underground trains. A short while later a fourth bomb would explode on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square. Altogether, fifty-two people were killed and nearly eight hundred injured.
The first thing I did was pick up the phone and call Mary Beth, who was in Florida with the kids for a summer visit with her parents. It was about five a.m. in Naples when I woke her. “Turn on the TV,” I said. “I’m all right. Love you. Gotta go.” Then I hung up. The rest of the day was spent discussing with the British our early assessments of the attacks.
Finally, late that night, I decided to get some sleep. I could have walked, but that evening, because I was physically and emotionally exhausted, I elected to take the bus. What struck me when I boarded was how absolutely normal all the passengers were acting. This was just twelve hours after a suicide bomber had blown up an identical vehicle fewer than two and a half miles away. Yet the bus was full, and no one seemed nervous. No one was eyeing the other passengers suspiciously. This was the legendary British “Keep Calm and Carry On” attitude at work—borne of surviving the Blitz by Hitler and hundreds of IRA bombings over the years.
A couple of days later, I made an appointment to see my main contact on the Cabinet Office Assessments Staff. He did not seem thrilled to see me. Apparently every intelligence service on the planet had lined up, trying to get briefings on what the British had discovered so far about the attacks, so that they could impress their headquarters back home. He and his colleagues were too busy analyzing intelligence to be conducting briefings. Sensing his unease, I tried to put his concerns to rest. “I’m not here for a briefing,” I said. “I simply came to express my condolences.” This was a small but heartfelt gesture. I remembered well George Tenet telling President Bush during the PDB briefing on September 13, 2001, that on the previous day Sir Richard Dearlove, chief of MI6, and several top British intelligence officials had flown to the United States for just an evening in order to pay their respects to the US intelligence community. That gesture had touched us all deeply and, in my own small way, I wanted to offer similar support. With that explanation the mood in the room changed dramatically, and my contact graciously gave me an hour of his time.
As I worked with British analysts in the days and weeks that followed, I was struck by the relative absence of finger-pointing in the UK. British authorities were quick to do their police and intelligence work, but British politicians and the British media did not seem to share the zeal of their American counterparts in similar circumstances to find someone (other than the terrorists) to blame. This seemed to be part of their normal makeup. From the start the Brits did an excellent job of conducting an investigation into the terrorist cells that had perpetrated the attack, but they did not rush into the second-guessing game. It wasn’t until October 2010 that they initiated an independent inquiry into the attacks. Called a “coroner’s inquest,” it eventually made some recommendations in May 2011 for process improvement but fell well short of the finger-pointing that we saw in America after events ranging from 9/11 to the attack on US interests in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
The British assessment—and our own—made very clear that the 7/7 attacks in London had been the work of Bin Ladin and al Qa‘ida. This was not a Madrid situation. This was a group trained in the FATA and our concerns about al Qa‘ida’s growing strength had had their first manifestation on the battlefield.
* * *
While the issues on which I worked with the British most closely were very serious ones—Iraq and al Qa‘ida—my time in the job did have some unique perks. The most significant was an invitation from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth for Mary Beth and me to attend a reception at Buckingham Palace. Interestingly, there was no phone number on the invitation for an RSVP. When I inquired about how to tell the palace that we would be honored to attend, I was told that “there is no need to RSVP as no one says no to an invitation from the queen.” When I relayed this to Mary Beth, she noted that this is not adequately explained in Miss Manners.
The next issue was what to wear. The invitation stated I was to wear “evening dress”—that is, a black tuxedo with tails along with a white tie and white vest. So off to the rental shop I went. The invitation also noted that Mary Beth should wear a full-length gown with gloves above the elbows for a sleeveless gown or regular gloves for a long-sleeve gown. The invite also made clear a black dress was definitely not acceptable—because black is reserved for mourning. Since black was the only color in Mary Beth’s limited repertoire of long gowns, she had to improvise by also renting her dress—at a uniquely named shop in London called One Night Stand.
At the rental shop, Mary Beth was met by two lovely women who kept about eighty different gowns in a whole range of sizes. Chief gown renter Joanna welcomed Mary Beth, looked her up and down, snatched a lovely crimson beaded gown from a rack and said, “Right, dear, try this one.” Mary Beth barely had it on before Joanna was draping a faux diamond choker around her neck and wrapping a crimson shawl around her shoulders. It was an instant rental. Mary Beth asked how much the dress would cost to purchase, and she almost choked when she heard the answer. It was more than our car cost. These were high-end gowns.
Dressed to the hilt, we arrived at the appointed hour at the palace. Our taxi drove us through layers of security and we found ourselves walking up the red-carpeted Grand Entrance. Mary Beth had been on a tourist visit to the palace but this time, she said, the feeling was completely different—with bejeweled guests arriving and with the Queen’s Guard standing at attention in their dress uniforms. The palace itself was opulence defined: sixty-foot ceilings, gilded molding, and master works of art seemingly everywhere (we passed a Rembrandt at one point). It was jaw-dropping.
After drinks and dinner, we were directed to the Picture Gallery, where we were told we should wait for the queen to greet us. Eventually, three of the Queen’s Guard marched through the room, stomping large and dangerous-looking staffs on the floor to signify the arrival of the royals. First to appear was Sophie, the Countess of Wessex (the wife of the queen’s youngest son). Sophie, the warm-up act, was lovely and outgoing and was wearing a tiara with a huge aquamarine stone as a focal point. Sophie was followed by the queen, looking appropriately regal. She was joined by her husband, Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and by Prince Charles and Camilla, the latter of whom stole the show. Camilla was warm, gracious, and outgoing, and she insisted on shaking everyone’s hand, gushing about what a great time she had just had in America. Mary Beth instantly became a fan for life.
With that, the party—along with our fairy-tale evening—was over. It was really amazing to come out the front door of the palace and view, from inside the gates, the gold statue of the winged goddess Nike. Mary Beth said, “The queen sure has a great view from her bedroom.” I started thinking about al Qa‘ida again.
* * *
My time as the representative to the British analytic community served to deepen my belief, forged in the crucible of 9/11, that the fight against terrorists was the place to be. So I was thrilled in the fall of 2005 when I was offered a chance to serve as the deputy director of CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. But before I could undertake that mission, the bureaucracy of Washington got in the way.
In late 2005, Philip Zelikow, counselor to Secretary of State Condi Rice, asked to meet with me. After we’d chatted for a while about the lessons learned from the Iraq intelligence failure, Zelikow said to me, “The secretary would like to have you serve as the head of INR [the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research]. Are you interested?” That would be a significant move up the ladder for me—it was a presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed position—and it would give me a seat at the table as head of one of the agencies of the intelligence community. I asked for a day or two to think it over.
After reflection, however, I picked up the phone and told Zelikow that I had already committed to a lower-level position as the deputy director of CTC and that it would be inappropriate to back out. I also told him that combating terrorism was where my heart was.
The very next afternoon, General Mike Hayden, the principal deputy director of national intelligence and a future director of CIA, phoned me. Hayden was, and is, someone I respect immensely.
“Michael,” he said, “I want you to know that when you got that job offer on behalf of Secretary Rice, it was not just the secretary asking—it was John Negroponte [the DNI] and me asking you as well.” I was now in a fix. The job I really wanted was in CTC, but the two most important men in the US intelligence community—technically the superiors of the director of CIA—wanted me to go to the State Department.
So I called the head of the analytic directorate at CIA—my boss in my assignment at the time—and asked what he thought I should do. “Let me get back to you,” he said. Although I knew nothing about it at the time, soon CIA’s deputy director, a Navy vice admiral and SEAL by the name of Bert Calland, had picked up the phone and attempted to chew out General Hayden for having the temerity to talk to a CIA officer about a job without first going to Director Goss or him.
This all happened during a period when there was enormous tension between CIA and the newly created DNI apparatus that had been placed above it. For years the head of CIA had also been the head of the entire intelligence community, and now that had changed. Outside of CIA, the view was that the Agency had appropriately been knocked down a peg. Inside CIA, the view was that DNI was demanding changes that were either duplicative of what CIA was already doing or were actually putting the country at some risk. There were many issues to be worked out, and there was a fight over almost every one of them.
But in any case, Calland’s move was not a smart one bureaucratically. Hayden told the admiral that, as the DNI’s number two, he could talk to me anytime he wanted about anything he wanted. For some reason, however, the CIA senior leadership decided that it was annoyed at me for what had transpired.
OK, I figured—I guess I am going to the State Department. I relayed my decision to Zelikow, who invited me to meet with Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick—whom I did not know and who wanted to meet me before the nomination process began.
My interview with Zoellick went extremely well, as we discussed different parts of the globe and differing approaches to analysis. The discussions with the staff from the Office of Presidential Personnel were another matter. These were going very well until I offered up a possible problem. At one point I told the staff that I had been interviewed by Senate Select Committee on Intelligence staff regarding the flawed intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq. I explained that during sessions with the staff I’d said that I believed that members of the vice president’s staff had overstepped their boundaries by trying to inappropriately influence the analysis on the question of al Qa‘ida’s relationship to Iraq. I could tell immediately that this was going to be an issue from the administration’s point of view—possibly even bringing an end to the process.
A couple of days later I got a call from Zelikow, who simply said, “Michael, this isn’t going to work.” My career at the State Department was over before it had begun. And unfortunately, the job I really wanted in CTC had by that time been given to someone else. And I was now persona non grata at CIA. The view among Goss’s aides—not of Goss himself—was that I had been disloyal in agreeing to accept the State Department job. I ended up taking another job outside CIA, at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a new organization staffed with people from across the intelligence community. With a name guaranteed to sow confusion across government, NCTC is quite distinct from CIA’s CTC. I served as the head of analysis for NCTC, trying to ensure that nothing got lost in the seam between domestic intelligence and foreign intelligence with regard to terrorism. It was a good job—but nothing like the ones I had just missed out on.
* * *
After only four months at NCTC, though, I returned to CIA. Mike Hayden replaced Porter Goss in late May 2006, just weeks after Dusty Foggo, the Agency’s number three, resigned and was later indicted and arrested on fraud charges. Hayden asked me to come back to CIA and replace Foggo.
Hayden was exactly what CIA needed at that moment, and I wanted to be part of his team. Hayden is one the smartest individuals with whom I have ever worked. In grade school his football coach, the legendary owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Dan Rooney, made Hayden the quarterback simply because he was smarter than everyone else. Hayden was also a great briefer—one of the best I have seen. He is a master at explaining complex issues in extremely simple ways, often using sports metaphors to drive home a point. One of his common rhetorical refrains was that US law sets the boundaries of what the Agency can do and, while the country wants its premier intelligence agency to stay within those bounds, it also wants it to get chalk on its cleats—that is, to use all the space the law allows to protect the country. It was both a way to encourage proper risk-taking within the Agency and a way to be clear with the American people about what we would do and what we would not do.
An outstanding leader, Hayden focused CIA on both strategic and tactical objectives. I learned a great deal from him about how to get your arms around a big Agency by dividing what you want to accomplish into manageable chunks. He took the most important issues—substantive ones like Iran and North Korea and management challenges like leadership training and developing language skills—and ordered regular updates. These programmatic reviews held people’s feet to the fire, which resulted in progress.
* * *
So in July 2006 I became a member of CIA’s senior leadership team, at a time when the al Qa‘ida threat from Pakistan was returning to levels not seen since 9/11. As number three in the Agency’s chain of command, I was tasked largely with keeping the administrative trains running. This side of the business was new to me, and I learned a great deal about information technology, federal budgets, security, and the like. I stayed abreast of substantive developments—on both the analytic and operational sides of the Agency. I made sure I received a daily intelligence briefing—which was the first time the number three at the Agency had ever asked for one—and I attended as many of the daily CT meetings as I could.
The Agency had a serious morale problem. Goss had given his key aides—most of whom he had brought with him from the House Intelligence Committee—too much authority, and they mismanaged the place. Several senior officers were forced out and many retired, with many more contemplating it. Officers like me took rotations in other government agencies. The years between George Tenet’s and Mike Hayden’s tenures were the worst during my three decades of service. Goss’s aides did the damage, but Goss himself bears responsibility for choosing these aides and then giving them too much authority. I’m convinced that had he chosen a different team he would have had a successful tenure in the job. Hayden moved quickly to turn the situation around and did so, using a combination of tactics—frequent written notes to the workforce, regular “all-hands” meetings in which he talked about the key issues facing the Agency and what we were doing about them, and visits to work units both in Washington and overseas.
It was an exceptionally important thing to do, particularly at a time when our biggest threat was on the rebound. Al Qa‘ida’s resurgence would become clearest in August 2006, when we discovered that a group of al Qa‘ida operatives were plotting to blow up somewhere between ten and fifteen airliners flying between London and the United States. The plan was to smuggle different parts of an explosive on board in bottles of everyday liquids and mixed with innocent-appearing substances such as Tang. If successful, the plot might have been worse than 9/11, killing thousands. The economic impact would have been devastating.
Terrific intelligence and law enforcement work in multiple countries disrupted the plot. The British had the first lead. A British citizen of Pakistani descent had gone to the FATA for training, and the British had learned of his travel. When he returned he was put under surveillance and it soon became clear that he and more than a dozen others were plotting something of significance using liquids in bottles. We learned that another British citizen was in Pakistan working closely with the al Qa‘ida leadership on the plot, and it was CIA analysts remembering the details of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s mid-1990s plan to bring down multiple airliners over the Pacific Ocean who connected the final dots. In that plot, the terrorists also had planned to hide explosives in everyday containers. Arrests were made in Pakistan and the United Kingdom, and the plot was disrupted. The plan showed the 9/11-style ingenuity of al Qa‘ida as well as its ability to place operatives in the UK ready to act. It was a close call and it spoke loudly of al Qa‘ida’s resurgence.
A few months later CIA’s counterterrorism analysts put the work of the previous several months together in a paper that warned policy-makers that al Qa‘ida in the FATA was again capable of conducting devastating attacks. The mood in the building was one of frustration that the group had rebounded. Discussions in meetings were punctuated with remarks like “They are back” and “We are going to get hit again.”
In the early summer of 2007 the US intelligence community followed CIA’s lead and produced a National Intelligence Estimate on the threat from al Qa‘ida. Its conclusions were just as sobering as those of CIA’s paper. The NIE said that the al Qa‘ida leadership in Pakistan was in the process of planning high-impact attacks on the US homeland—attacks that would produce mass casualties, dramatic destruction, and significant economic fallout. The NIE added that al Qa‘ida had regenerated key elements of its homeland attack capability. The group’s safe haven in the FATA, the development of capable operational lieutenants, and a senior leadership now less concerned about its own security meant more time focused on planning and more capability to carry out an attack, according to the intelligence community analysts who had written the NIE.
Together the two papers were a major warning to the Bush administration and to Congress. Al Qa‘ida was back and extremely dangerous. It was clear that Washington’s approach up to that point—occasional CT operations against the al Qa‘ida leadership—was not working and that we had to get more aggressive.
The publication of both reports led to a policy process that, while it may have taken too much time, did lead President Bush to take action in August 2008. The number of CT operations went up sharply, and the leadership of al Qa‘ida was removed from the battlefield with regularity—this after the United States had failed to remove a single al Qa‘ida leader from the battlefield in 2007. (“0 for 07” was how Mike Hayden had put it.) The pressure was back on—and in a very significant way.
The months that followed the president’s decision were filled with events that confirmed the correctness of his new policy. Al Qa‘ida attacked the Marriott hotel in Islamabad on September 20, 2008, killing more than fifty and wounding nearly three hundred people. And the Marriott attack was followed in 2009 by an attempted attack on the New York City subway system that was foiled by the excellent work of the intelligence community and the FBI.
One of the myths about the more aggressive CT operations against the al Qa‘ida leadership is that they began when President Obama came to office. This is inaccurate. President Bush started them six months before leaving office, and President Obama kept them going—both for good reason. The United States was facing the most significant threat environment since 9/11. The country was at risk.
* * *
The annual CIA holiday party—held in the lobby of our main headquarters building—is the party in town. Senior US government officials and ambassadors and intelligence officers from many countries attend. If you are in the national security business, it is the place to be. People arrive early and stay late. And Leon Panetta’s first holiday party, in December 2009, was something special—Italian food of all kinds and the wines to go with it. The smell of garlic filled the hall. People talked about the food for weeks. It helped to cement our ties to many of our foreign partners. The party was fully consistent with the coffee cup that Panetta used every day in his office. On one side it read “C.I.A.” On the other, “California Italian American.”
Near the end of the party, Director Panetta’s talented chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, took me aside and told me that Steve Kappes, the Agency’s deputy director, was planning to step down in the spring and that I—the head of analysis—was at the top of the director’s short list of potential successors. Kappes—a legend in the clandestine service and a national hero for helping to convince Muammar Qadhafi to give up his weapons of mass destruction—had served as deputy for four years and thought it was time to move on. Bash said, “I’m rooting for you.” A couple of months later I found myself in Panetta’s office being interviewed for the job. It was much more of a chat than an interview—about the issues, about working together, about the people we would be managing together. He told me that I was at the top of his list but that he wanted to talk with a few other people as well. Then radio silence for several weeks. I was wondering what was going on.
Panetta had gotten off to a rough start with the Agency by referring to the practice of waterboarding as torture in his confirmation hearing, leading some insiders to worry that the new administration would demonize them for doing things approved by the last administration. However, as time went on he became beloved within CIA. He was seen as having clout with the White House, using his ties to Vice President Biden and to Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, to win a bureaucratic turf battle with Director for National Intelligence Denny Blair over who has final approval for naming chiefs of stations overseas. Panetta was also seen as caring deeply about the men and women of CIA, having brought us through the crisis of the attack on our base in Khost in 2009, when seven Americans, one Jordanian, and one Afghan were killed in a suicide bombing perpetrated by someone we had believed was working for us.
Most of all, though, Panetta was seen as a normal guy, full of fun and with a great sense of humor. He told jokes—most of them slightly off-color—he laughed at the jokes of others, and he made fun of himself. His speeches to employees would be filled with jokes—most of them not put there by the speechwriters. He figuratively put his arms around CIA, and the Agency returned the gesture.
At one event, in front of hundreds of people, Panetta announced that he was going to tell a joke that his speechwriters had suggested he not tell. He said, “I have decided to ignore their advice.” He went on: “There was a farmer that was really protective of his three daughters. In fact, he always met their boyfriends at the front door with a shotgun. At five thirty on Friday night, there was a knock at the door. The farmer answered it with his gun. The young man at the door said, ‘Hello, my name is Eddie, I’m here for Betty, we’re going for spaghetti. Is she ready?’ The farmer paused, then said, ‘OK, she’s ready.’ Another half hour passed and there was a second knock. The farmer answered it with his gun in hand again. The guy at the door said, ‘Hello, my name is Joe, I’m here for Flo, we’re going to the show. She ready to go?’ The farmer paused again and said, ‘Yeah, she’s ready.’ A half hour later there was another knock. The farmer went to the door with his shotgun. The guy at the door said, ‘Hello, my name is Chuck, I’m here for Puck’—and the farmer shot him.” If almost anyone else in the room had told the same story, the political correctness police would have pounced. But there is a twinkle in Leon’s eye and a warmth to his spirit that causes people to instead think, “That was really cute.”
Panetta and I became friends—even before I became his deputy. We shared a love of the game of golf, in particular his two-putt rule—the second putt is automatically good no matter how far from the pin the first putt ends up—a rule that keeps the score down and the game moving along. It is not a rule appreciated by purists. On those rare occasions when Panetta did not go home to his beloved Carmel Valley ranch for the weekend, he would go to noon mass, followed by golf, and then dinner at our home.
Once, when invited to watch his San Francisco 49ers in the NFC Championship Game that started at six thirty p.m., he called at three p.m. and asked, “Do you mind if I come early to watch the AFC Championship Game as well?” When I hung up and told Mary Beth, “Leon is coming early.” She responded, “Let’s get the place straightened up—fast—and I am so happy that he feels comfortable enough here to ask us to come early.”
Panetta would not only watch sports at our home, he would share his strongly held political views with my children and their friends. The kids would gather around the table after dinner and ask Panetta questions. It was like a graduate school seminar. Mary Beth and I listened carefully as well to his candid and commonsense approach to politics, policy, and people. Panetta’s main message around the dinner table was “People of different political ideologies can—indeed, have to—come together to find an agreed-upon approach to the tough problems facing our nation.” He told the kids, “My time in Congress was characterized by a willingness to compromise, by a willingness to fight it out during the day and get a drink and a steak together in the evening.” He said he was deeply frustrated by today’s gridlock and he told the kids, “I fear for the future of the republic.” I found his message sobering.
As he was leaving one Sunday evening in the early spring of 2010, he paused on my front porch as I walked him out and said, “Oh, I forgot, let’s go ahead and announce tomorrow that you will succeed Steve as deputy.” On May 7, 2010, I was sworn in as the twenty-fourth deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
* * *
A typical day for me as deputy director started at 4:45 a.m. I would pull on my gym clothes, grab a suit and tie for the day, and jump into my armored SUV to be driven to work—just a few short miles away. There I would work out, shower, dress, and be at my desk by six a.m., catching up on any overnight e-mails from overseas.
At six fifteen a.m. my intelligence briefer would show up at my office door. This was the best meeting of my day. As I had done a decade earlier, the briefer would spend most of the night putting together a thick notebook of hundreds of pages of analytic pieces and raw intelligence to review. It was my way of keeping up with what was going on in the world and what we were saying about it. It also enabled me to press the analysts for more insights. Through conversation with my briefer and my chief of staff and executive assistants—who would join me for the briefing—I would come up with a number of questions each day that I would ask the analysts to answer, preferably within twenty-four hours.
When Leon Panetta was director, I had to finish my daily intelligence briefing by seven thirty a.m. so I could join him for his briefing. He liked to have me there, along with his chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, and his head of analysis, my replacement as the director of intelligence, so we could discuss the issues with him from both an analytic and an operational perspective. I often left the director’s briefing with a list of to-do items.
Under both Panetta and his successor, David Petraeus, the director’s intelligence briefing was followed by a morning meeting with the entire Agency leadership team. The director would brief the key issues that had come up in his meetings the day before, let us know about important meetings he was having that day, and ask any number of questions. We then went around the room with the individual senior leaders briefing us on one issue or another. It was a great way to keep the director and me informed of what was going on and a great way for the director to drive his agenda.
The rest of my day was largely broken into three pieces. The first involved attending deputies’ meetings at the White House (often multiple meetings a day), being pre-briefed by Agency experts before going to those meetings, and then giving those experts a summary of what transpired at the meeting after I returned. The second involved completing all the paperwork that came into my office. I tried to finish as much of this as I could before I left for the day, but invariably I ended up taking home a good two to three hours of work each night. And the third involved internal meetings that were focused on solving immediate problems or trying to push the Agency forward in the future.
As the deputy director of CIA I found myself handling a mind-boggling array of threats and challenges daily, not to mention helping to run an Agency that is roughly the size of a large Fortune 500 company. The substantive issues on my plate included our support for the war effort in Afghanistan, the evolution of the Arab Spring, and the behavior of Iran and North Korea, just to name a few. But by far the issue that dominated my time as deputy, just as it had dominated my time as George Tenet’s executive assistant fifteen years before, was international terrorism. At least half of my thick morning briefing book was filled with terrorism-related issues—every day. And at least a third of my meetings “downtown” related to terrorism.
This issue also dominated the time of my colleagues in the executive branch, whose work was guided and overseen by the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council, of which I was a member. We met frequently to deal with issues related to terrorism, led by White House counterterrorism and homeland security advisor John Brennan.
I saw my counterparts in these CT meetings more than I saw my own family. On the intelligence side, the key players besides me were Chris Inglis, the deputy director of the NSA, and Mike Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. On the operations side, the key players were me, Sean Joyce, the deputy director of the FBI, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs—first James “Hoss” Cartwright and then Admiral Sandy Winnefeld—and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike Vickers. It always struck me that CIA was the only agency that routinely found itself on both the intelligence and operational sides of the terrorism problem, underscoring the importance of CIA on the issue.
Vickers and I became close friends. Along with Brennan, Vickers and I were probably more focused on al Qa‘ida than anyone else at senior levels of the US government. Earlier in his career, Vickers had served in the Special Forces and as a CIA operations officer. He had been deeply involved in CIA’s support to the Afghan rebels fighting to drive the Soviet Union out of their country. In the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, his character is the brilliant young CIA weapons analyst who plays multiple games of speed chess in the parks of Washington, D.C. My kids thought I was cool because I knew a guy Hollywood made movies about.
* * *
One of the main issues with which the deputies grappled was that of US drone operations. These operations have been the single most effective tool in the last five years for protecting the United States from terrorists. There is no doubt in my mind that these strikes have prevented another attack on the scale of 9/11. They have decimated al Qa‘ida’s core leadership in South Asia. Multiple al Qa‘ida leaders there have been removed from the battlefield, and the group is having a hard time attracting new recruits, raising money, and plotting. The strikes have also weakened the leadership of al Qa‘ida in Yemen and they have disrupted attacks against the United States by the group there.
Perhaps the best evidence of the effectiveness of the strikes are Bin Ladin’s own thoughts on the subject. In documents recovered from his residence after the 2011 US raid that killed him, we learned that Bin Ladin considered drone strikes the most effective US weapon against his group. We also learned that he obsessed with discovering how drone operations worked and what countermeasures might defeat them.
Discussions about the law were always an important part of any deputies’ meeting, particularly those on drones. Collateral damage is permitted under the laws of war. When done right, drone strikes are incredibly precise and collateral damage is minimal, and every effort is made to prevent such damage. Collateral damage is not zero, but it is close to zero, as these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and the missiles they carry are among the most precise weapons in the history of warfare.
What to make, then, of the claims of significant collateral damage? They are highly exaggerated. The claims flow from propaganda on the part of al Qa‘ida and other groups that want the strikes to stop. They are also a result of counting as US collateral damage the women and children killed by air force strikes by the countries where the United States operates drones. And they stem from human nature—a reporter visits a mother and father of a deceased terrorist, who honestly believe that their son is innocent and would never join an extremist organization. The parents tell the reporter that, and his death gets marked as collateral damage.
When I was deputy director, a superb American reporter contacted the government to say that she was going to write a story about the significance of the collateral damage from drone strikes. She pointed out that her company, a leading U.S. media outlet, had helped pay for a compilation of a comprehensive list of drone strikes and their outcomes. She had dates and locations of individual strikes over an extended period of time and the number of women and children killed in a number of the strikes. She said the number of innocents killed was much higher than the estimates that she was hearing from US officials and asked for a comment.
Because CIA tries to carefully monitor the truth about what damage is actually caused by US drone operations, I was tasked by my superiors in the administration to invite her to my office to talk about the data. I requested that she send her list of alleged US strikes to us ahead of time. I had each of the strikes on her list investigated.
When I sat down with her, I went through the entire list. It had three categories: (1) US strikes on her list that had occurred but had killed no women and children while her list said they had, (2) US strikes on her list that in reality were strikes by the local military, and (3) US strikes that simply had not happened and for which there was no local military action either. By far, the largest category was the first. I would tell her, “Your data says there were six people killed in this particular strike, including three children. I can tell you that there was a US strike on that day but that only two adult males were killed.” The only other thing I wanted to do—but could not do—was show her the US government’s video of each strike, so she could see with her own eyes the number and type of people killed. It turned out that there were no women and children killed in any of the strikes on her list.
I spent well over an hour with the reporter—going over every alleged strike on her list—and at the end she decided to walk away from the story, as she no longer believed that the study was credible. In fact, I believe she walked out of my office concerned that the data were deliberately misleading. She was a reporter who was most interested in getting the facts right, and she impressed me greatly that day.
In deciding to allow me to have this conversation with the reporter, the government recognized that we had a classic dilemma. The public hears bad things about the accuracy of these strikes. We say, “They are very accurate, trust us.” The response is “Show us some proof and we will believe you.” But we can’t because of the sensitivities involved. It is not surprising that this argument is unconvincing. While such media interactions like the one I had can help, what we have to rely on is that the congressional oversight process works as it should. For a long time, congressional committees have played an important role in overseeing drone strikes. As the public’s representatives, they must assure themselves that these activities are much more carefully administered than critics suggest, and they must say so to the American people. And they have done so on multiple occasions with regard to US drone strikes.
Collateral damage is not the only drone issue that many commentators get wrong. Another is the very nature of the weapon system itself. Some call it unique in that the individual firing the weapon is so far away from the target, which makes it impersonal, more like a computer game than a war. The often unstated implication is that because it is impersonal one is somehow more likely to use it than a traditional weapon system. But drones are far from unique. There are many such weapon systems in the US inventory. What is the difference between a drone pilot and a sniper looking through a scope and pulling a trigger a mile across the battlefield? What is the difference between a drone operator and a B-2 pilot dropping ordnance from fifty thousand feet? What is the difference between a drone pilot and an Aegis ship’s weapons specialist who pushes the button that causes a cruise missile to travel hundreds of miles to a specific target on the globe? There is much hype about drones—almost none of it bearing any resemblance to reality.
Some very reasonable questions include: Don’t drone strikes actually create more terrorists? Don’t they radicalize the friends and relatives of those killed by drones? Don’t they radicalize others who deeply believe, despite the facts, that many civilians, including women and children, are being killed in drone strikes? Don’t they put on the battlefield more terrorists than they take off? Perhaps—we just don’t know. What leads people to choose violence in the pursuit of their political and religious ideals is complicated. But even if the critics of drones are right and they create more terrorists than they kill, what is the alternative? You must deal with the immediate threat in front of you—the terrorist who is planning to attack the United States and kill our citizens—even as you work to deal over the longer term with the issues that created that threat in the first place.
Here is another way to think about this particular aspect of the drone issue. Counterterrorism operations using weapons fired from drones target individuals the United States believes pose a direct and imminent threat to Americans—either overseas or in the homeland. Are we better off as a country dealing with that threat by using unmanned aerial vehicles where no US servicemen or servicewomen are put in peril, or by putting US boots on the ground and therefore at risk? I think the answer is an easy one.
* * *
This chapter has been a story of al Qa‘ida’s vulnerability and resilience. What is the source of this seemingly inconsistent duality? There are two. First, terrorists are very easy to remove from the battlefield, but stopping the recruitment of new terrorists is a nearly impossible task. And second, terrorism is not a capital-intensive enterprise. To be successful, one needs leadership, operatives, some money, and secure operating space. Those things are very easy to take away—and also very easy to retrieve.
* * *
The digging of the tunnel began in the bathroom of a women’s mosque in Yemen. Al Qa‘ida operatives methodically dug toward a nearby maximum-security prison where nearly two dozen of their colleagues were being held. They dug for two months. The tunnel, roughly 150 yards in length, ended underneath a prison cell block.
On February 5, 2006, twenty-three al Qa‘ida operatives escaped through the tunnel. The escapees included Nasir al-Wuhayshi, who today leads al Qa‘ida’s number one franchise, al Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). He is also now the number two to Ayman al-Zawahiri in the overall al Qa‘ida organization; if Zawahiri were to depart the scene, Wuhayshi would be in charge. Another escapee from the prison was Jamal Badawi, who had led the al Qa‘ida cell that attacked the USS Cole. The Yemenis were embarrassed, and the United States was furious.
Prior to the jailbreak, AQAP had been effectively defeated in Yemen. Following a flourishing after 9/11, US and Yemeni military action had ended the threat from AQAP. Now, just weeks after the jailbreak, AQAP was back in business. And just twenty-five months later, it again posed a major threat. In March 2008, AQAP fired mortars at the US embassy in Sanaa but hit a nearby girls’ school instead. And then, in September 2008, AQAP militants dressed as police officers stormed the US embassy with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. Twelve people were killed, including one American. The explosive marks are still visible on the walls of the embassy.
One prison break made all the difference. It was a perfect example of the thin line between the vulnerability and the resilience of al Qa‘ida.